The Vulnerable Subject

Beyond Rationalism in International Relations

A. Beattie, K. Schick, A. Beattie, K. Schick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349332953, 9780230293465
• eBook ISBN: 9781137292148
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops a concept of vulnerability in International Relations that allows for a profound rethinking of a core concept of international politics: means-ends rationality. It explores traditions that proffer a more complex and relational account of vulnerability.

1

Introduction

Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick

Rationalism against vulnerability

Enlightenment thought is marked by a thoroughgoing rationalism: a belief that the accumulation of particular kinds of knowledge can help to create a world marked by predictability, order and stability. Rationalism also pervades mainstream International Relations (IR) theory: both its realist and normative variants seek ‘useful knowledge’ (Geuss, 2005, p. 3) with which to pursue their desired ends of survival and power (realism) or morality and justice (international ethics). Neither approach to global politics allows room for vulnerability, which is perceived as a problem to be solved through rational security policy or rational moral judgement. Although there is an acknowledgement in international ethics that suffering and vulnerability are distributed differently throughout the world, the response to them is one of abstract moral reasoning that takes little account of experience or emotion and leaves no space for contingency in ethical deliberation or outcome. Even in normative political theory, moral judgement is resolutely invulnerable, to borrow from Kimberly Hutchings’ chapter (Chapter 2) in this volume: vulnerability has no place in a moral rationalist conception of global order.

The denial of vulnerability other than as a ‘problem’ to be solved by recourse to a particular type of knowledge (requiring ‘more facts’ (Morgenthau, 1946, p. 215)) and a particular type of reasoning (abstract and forward-looking) is at the heart of rationalism’s profound shortcoming in response to suffering and vulnerability in global politics. This is a quintessentially Western liberal world view that holds fast to the notion of a global order marked by ‘universality, stability [and] predictability’ (Beattie, this volume). However, the refusal to allow space for vulnerability when making decisions that profoundly shape people’s lives constitutes a radically impoverished approach to decision-making. As we shall see, the chapters in this volume highlight two shortcomings in particular: first, a neglect of what Adorno terms the ‘non-identical’ – that which cannot be subsumed into a narrow instrumental rationality, including emotion, relationality, community and history; and second, a radical privileging of white Western approaches to global ethics and security that not only neglects but actively oppresses alternative voices and perspectives.

This Introduction has four sections. The first section gestures briefly towards contemporary writings that trace the thoroughgoing rejection of vulnerability in Western political theory. Martha Nussbaum draws on Greek Tragedy and Aristotle to challenge the robust embrace of invulnerable judgement in Platonic and Enlightenment thought, calling for an increased awareness of tragedy, contingency and fragility in international ethics to counter the hubristic certainty of modern rationalism. Margrit Shildrick (2000) goes further, arguing that the forgetting of vulnerability pervasive in Ancient and Enlightenment traditions has fostered a radical silencing and exclusion of that which challenges the status quo. This silencing extends to vulnerable subjects themselves, in part because of the affront they present to simple stories about morality and order.

The second section maintains that the marginalisation of vulnerability in political theory is pervasive in mainstream IR theory as well: realism and international ethics alike have inherited a robust rationalism from the Enlightenment tradition that values the pursuit of particular kinds of knowledge (measurable and useful) wielded for particular ends (order and/or universal morality). Over the past decade, contemporary scholars have drawn on the writings of classical realist thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Neibhur to challenge the refusal of contingency and vulnerability in structural realist and normative traditions, arguing that an awareness of tragedy can prompt a more transformative engagement with the political. However, as we argue in the third section, if an acknowledgement of vulnerability is to have emancipatory effects, it must go beyond an increased awareness of tragic choices and the contingency of strategic and moral judgement. Although an awareness of tragedy leads to a useful critique of rationalist thought, it all too often stops there, prompting tragic resignation rather than political engagement. If we are to take vulnerability seriously as political agents, we must embark on an agonistic – and profoundly political – journey towards a deeper understanding of both our own and others’ vulnerability. We have a responsibility not only to the excluded and powerless but also to ourselves to reflect critically on the ways in which our moral and political judgements are flawed – and all too often guided by unexamined moral hierarchies – and the ways in which these flawed judgements compound others’ vulnerability.

Overall, this volume argues that emancipatory politics begins with a journey beyond instrumental rationality towards a broader conception of what it is to be human that allows space for emotion, community and critique. Such a journey must be more than an exercise in increased awareness; it must be accompanied by concrete political action to counter systematic marginalisation of those deemed Other and that which challenges deeply held beliefs about global politics. Having laid out the major themes of the volume in the first three sections, in the fourth section we sketch brief chapter outlines that demonstrate the ways in which these themes are played out across the volume.

Rationalism against vulnerability in Western political thought

The modern turn in Western political thought in the age of the Enlightenment has facilitated the dominance of rationalism in IR in the twentieth century and beyond. Enlightenment thought prioritised the accumulation of ‘useful knowledge’ (Geuss, 2005, p. 3) that could be wielded by decision-makers to create societies marked by order, justice and peace. The pursuit of instrumental reason, in turn, prompted a particular way of engaging with vulnerability and suffering in global politics, seeing them as problems to be solved or eliminated rather than engaged with in any meaningful sense.

The dominance of moral rationalism in international ethics stems from the modern turn in the history of ideas. Scholars such as Kant, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza shaped the development of a world view in which an epistemological emphasis on the atomised reasoning individual became an ontological vision of human beings as sufficient-unto-themselves. Kant called on individuals to awaken from their self-imposed slumber and to exercise their own reason without relying on external guidance, arguing that humans are rational beings capable of making moral choices. Descartes echoed this call, developing a methodology based on the premise that one needs to doubt one’s position in the natural world in order to understand one’s place in it. These ideas underpinned an emerging rationalist tradition that maintained that the scientific method could help philosophers to better understand the events and structures of the social world. It was hoped that this enhanced understanding, in turn, would generate a series of political structures to facilitate stability, order and predictability within society and within the quotidian lives of its citizens.

Enlightenment rationality, then, sought order and moral agreement within modern societies in order to engage with the ongoing challenge of human vulnerability. However, in practice, Enlightenment thinkers focused so strongly on rationalist solutions that they lost sight of an understanding of the kinds of vulnerabilities that made those solutions necessary and important in the first place. Martha Nussbaum (2001) helps to illuminate the relationship between vulnerability and political philosophy through the ages. She argues that human vulnerability, or the fragility of the embodied state, links a variety of institutional designs throughout history but that these designs too often erase consideration of vulnerability in the pursuit of universal solutions.¹ Nussbaum demonstrates that the move towards self-sufficiency and universal truth was evident in Ancient thought (and especially Platonic thought) before it was echoed in the modern turn. However, she maintains that Ancient thought evinces an awareness of the inevitable contingency of the actual world that has been lost in most modern thought. She draws on Greek tragedy and the writings of Aristotle to argue that despite concerted attempts to better understand the nature of the human experience, contingency abounds and it is impossible to predict the outcomes of human agency. In doing so, Nussbaum provides an Ancient counterpoint to modern rationalism: she highlights the fragile nature of goodness within the quotidian and the need to surrender control while accepting responsibility for intended and unintended consequences. This tragic account of the political challenges modern and contemporary engagements with vulnerability that seek to deny, rather than acknowledge, the contingencies of being human.

Margrit Shildrick (2000) radicalises Nussbaum’s insights by arguing that a forgetting of vulnerability, qua Nussbaum, has become a violent silencing and Othering of the vulnerable. An intellectual conviction that individual reason can solve problems of human vulnerability is sustainable only through a campaign to suppress the sources of vulnerability – everything that draws attention to the limits of the individual-rational Enlightenment project. Rather than trying to minimise and deal with a vulnerability that is essential and unavoidable, modern thought attempts to suppress and destroy vulnerability – and with it ‘the vulnerable’ – in order to construct a rationalist utopia to which some belong and others do not. Shildrick maintains that the suppression of vulnerability is true of both Enlightenment and Ancient traditions of thought. In the Enlightenment tradition, feminine attributes, including emotional responses and relationships of care, are associated with vulnerability and are marginalised. In Aristotle’s writings, too, the female body is deemed weak and unvirtuous and denigrated within mainstream society. However, the marginalisation of vulnerability goes far beyond the historical domination of male over female. Shildrick argues that societies erect a sort of cordon sanitaire around anything that challenges the stability of the status quo, including disability, disfigurement and abnormality. In Ancient societies, for example, disfigured and deformed bodies were abandoned to die of exposure. In contemporary societies, gay and lesbian communities have been excluded in the wake of the HIV/AIDs epidemic and vigilance is needed to ensure their entry into the political mainstream. Shildrick’s exploration of vulnerability highlights a relentless Othering of those who challenge assumptions of a normality that marginalises difference and diversity within the political. This marginalisation, in turn, fosters a homogeneity and sameness within the daily practice of politics.

Judith Butler’s acute awareness of these patterns of inclusion, exclusion and normalisation informs her important recent writings on vulnerability in global politics. Butler emphasises the ways in which some lives count as more human and more grievable than others. She argues that there is a ‘primary human vulnerability to other humans’ (Butler, 2004, p. 28) that is particularly apparent in relations of violence and that we all share. However, although we are all vulnerable, this vulnerability is not equally distributed throughout the globe. She points out that ‘[c]ertain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as grievable’ (Butler, 2004, p. 32). In the context of the recent (and ongoing) war on terror, action to avenge the loss of US citizens’ lives on 11 September 2001 found ‘fast and furious support’, while the lives of others, including Afghanis and Iraqis, were disqualified as ungrievable, failing to count as human and thus doubly negated in violent thought and deed. Butler’s response to vulnerability in the context of global violence is one of critical reflection and political risk-taking, a call echoed by many of the contributions to this edited volume and explored in the third section of the Introduction. She maintains that rather than acting swiftly to shut down the vulnerability of those that count as human (and, in the process, ignoring the vulnerability of those that do not), the exposure of vulnerability through political violence provides a point of contact with those whose lives are shaped by suffering and an opportunity to think differently: ‘to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways’ (Butler, 2004, p. xii).

Rationalism against vulnerability in international political theory

The modern turn within political thought sought to reduce vulnerability through the exercise of reason in the political sphere. However, as we saw in the previous section, the pursuit of order and moral agreement in modern ethics allows no space for contingency or for acknowledging the vulnerability of judgement and, further, it silences, excludes and visits violence upon those deemed Other in order to preserve and defend the status quo. The marginalisation of vulnerability in modern political thought has close echoes in the discipline of IR, which are evident in both realist and normative strands of IR theory. Perhaps most obviously, a desire for control and predictability in world politics is central to realist thought and precludes engagement with vulnerability other than as a weakness to be shut down. However, an intolerance of contingency and the marginalisation of that which challenges the status quo are also endemic in normative international theory (see especially Hutchings, this volume). Neither tradition allows space for uncertainty or contingency in political judgement, nor do they allow room for Other voices to challenge the reification of order and predictability (realism) or particular paths to morality (international ethics).

The tradition of structural realism is a direct descendant of modern rationalist thought and remains firmly committed to a vision of high-power politics in which state survival is of foremost importance. Despite their differences, John Mearsheimer (2001), John K. Ikenberry (2000) and Stephen Walt (1990) prioritise the goals of control, stability and predictability through the pursuit of power, economic acumen and prestige. Although the tradition of structural realism depends on vulnerability and insecurity in order to justify its project, its state-centricity, emphasis on anarchy in international politics and elevation of state survival as the pre-eminent goal allow no room for meaningful engagement with vulnerability at the level of political judgement or lived experience. Instead, like the modern turn to moral rationalism, structural realism leads to decisions that fail to take into account the human dimensions of international politics – including emotion, history and community – and fails to allow other voices to challenge the reification of state survival and security as outweighing all other considerations in high politics.

While the scientific tradition of structural realism fails to consider vulnerability in any meaningful sense, the more nuanced tradition of classical realism proffered by thinkers such as Hans J. Morgenthau (1946) and Reinhold Neibuhr (2001) is acutely aware of human frailty and contingency. These thinkers maintain that although individual agents are capable of moral reasoning, a desire for morality cannot be exercised at a communal level where the harsh realities of power politics mean that security goals must take precedence. Morgenthau argues that even where political actors seek to make ‘good’ choices, this laudable desire clashes with the inescapable reality of living in an imperfect world, where political choices have unexpected and often negative consequences. Under these circumstances, seeking to make the ‘least evil’ choice is the best that actors can hope for (Morgenthau, 1946, p. 202). This dissonance between desire and actuality is tragedy: ‘[s]uspended between his spiritual destiny which he cannot fulfill and his animal nature in which he cannot remain, [man] is forever condemned to experience the contrast between the longings of his mind, and his actual condition as his personal, eminently human tragedy’ (Morgenthau, 1946, p. 221).

Morgenthau maintains that normative IR scholarship is blind to the tragedy of international politics. Even in the 1940s, he had noted that the moral rationalist pursuit of ‘more facts’ with which to solve the problems of international politics (Morgenthau, 1946, p. 215) and the deeply embedded optimism with which these are pursued are central to the ‘disease’ of liberal political thought (Morgenthau, 1946, p. 6), which obscures the harsh realities of power politics. The moral rationalist pursuit of ‘more facts’ in international political theory has only increased in the intervening decades. Nicholas Rengger points to a normative shift in international political thought in the 1970s, prompted by debates surrounding the Vietnam War and by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 (Rengger, 2000). However, these debates shifted the development of in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part II
• Index