World of Our Making

Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138136878
• eBook ISBN: 9781135875473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

World of our Making is a major contribution to contemporary social science. Now reissued in this volume, Onuf's seminal text is key reading for anyone who wishes to study modern international relations.

Onuf understands all of international relations to be a matter of rules and rule in foreign behaviour. The author draws together the rules of international relations, explains their source, and elaborates on their implications through a vast array of interdisciplinary thinkers such as Kenneth Arrow, J.L. Austin, Max Black, Michael Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Lawrence Kohlberg, Harold Lasswell, Talcott Parsons, Jean Piaget, J.G.A. Pocock, John Roemer, John Scarle and Sheldon Wolin.

PART 1: RULES

What, in short, we wish to do is dispense with ‘things’. To ‘depresentify’ them.… To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.

Michel Foucault

The Archeology of Knowledge

(1972: 47–48, emphasis in original)

1

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Language—I want to say—is a refinement, im Anfang war die Tat (‘in the beginning was the deed’).

Ludwig Wittgenstein

(1976: 420; compare 1972; par. 402)

One must begin somewhere. Perhaps there is no beginning, and the search will lead in circles. Most International Relations scholars have not begun far enough back or, switching metaphors, gone deep enough to say. Instead they share in the common judgment of social scientists that one begins on the ground, with data (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 1). Already dug into the ground are foundations, “‘foundations of knowledge’—truths that are certain because of their causes rather than because of the arguments given for them …” (Rorty 1979: 157; see generally pp. 155–164; Connolly 1986: 116–126). These foundations are ancient and durable. They were laid in Classical Greece, and they are used today to erect conceptual frameworks and construct theories.

If this is the language of construction, constructivism it is not; constructivism goes further. The ground itself is but the rubble of construction. Truths as we take them to be are inextricable from the arguments offered for them. One may begin with facts, “things” as they are, thereby taking for granted the argument for their facticity. One may begin with words, ideas, arguments, taking for granted the facts to which they refer. Constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken—These are all that facts are.

Social scientists freely assume that they build on firm ground and strong foundations because these are deeded to them by their disciplines. Social theory, which I take to be that loose array of codificatory paradigms sprouting in the debris of failed proto-theories and decrepit disciplines, necessarily challenges these assumptions. Consequently social theorists cannot avoid the question of where one begins. I see my own effort to reconstruct International Relations as a contribution to social theory. As such it too must attend to the subject of beginnings, which is a philosophical question.

If I begin this chapter with a philosophical question, moving on to social theory has its pitfalls, as my recourse to Wittgenstein’s work on rules will show. I conclude the chapter by associating myself with a codificatory paradigm called structuration theory. Rules are central to this scheme, but less has been said about them than is needed for a social theory that begins where I begin.

IN THE BEGINNING

I begin with Goethe’s aphorism, which for Wittgenstein seemed to express a philosophical position: In the beginning was the deed.¹ I call this position constructivism. In simplest terms, people and societies construct, or constitute, each other. Inasmuch as I take the terms “construct” and “constitute” to be synonymous, I could just as well call the position their use reflects constitutivism but for the evident awkwardness of the term.²

As a philosophical position, constructivism is by no means mine alone. It has a considerable following in contemporary philosophy and social theory, and it comes in variations and degrees. Among philosophers Nelson Goodman is a constructivist perhaps to the furthest degree. In Jerome Bruner’s apt summary of Goodman’s position, “no one ‘world’ is more real than others. None is ontologically privileged as the unique real world” (1986: 96). Goodman’s concern is not merely the world as social reality.

The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is the remaking (1978: 6, emphasis in original).

Goodman’s position is nominalist; he has called himself a constructive nominalist (1984): 50–53). Long unfashionable, nominalism holds that things exist only insofar as they are named as such. The world is what we take it to be. Long ascendant is the antithesis to this position, realism (Goodman has also called himself an “irrealist”), which holds that the world exists independent of ourselves and the things within it await our naming. The rise of science licensed realism but, from G. W. Leibniz, did not prevent realists from contemplating the existence of “possible worlds”—worlds that do not, as far as we know, really exist, but which would if anything in this world happens other than it does. David Lewis has recently (1986) pointed out how many philosophical problems are made more tractable simply by granting the “plurality of worlds.” Lewis’ position does not grant existential standing to plural worlds. My position, and Goodman’s, as I understand it, does.

Goodman’s constructive nominalism is perhaps not quite as radical as some passages from his work (such as the one I quoted) might suggest. He has never denied the existence of some independent phenomenal world. He has asserted that we can never know all the features of that world independent of discourse about it. Even if some features of the real world are independent, we can not, in our discourse dependency, know which ones they are (Goodman 1984: 41). We construct worlds we know in a world we do not.³

Nor is Goodman’s position wanting of antecedents. Not Leibniz, but Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant are his philosophical progenitors. While constructivism accepts the Cartesian duality of mind and matter, the distinctive feature of this position is its Kantian pedigree: It “began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind,.…” (Goodman 1978: x, compare Putnam 1981: 60–64). Yet it claims too much to say, with Bruner, that Kant “fully developed” constructivism (1986: 96). Indeed, Kant’s most famous use of the term “constitutive” refers to logically necessitated relations of givens, expressed in quantities, and not the construction of worlds through “analogies of experience.” “The general principle of the analogies is: All appearances are, as regards their existence, subject a priori to rules determining their relation to one another in one time” (Kant 1933: 208). Kant’s term for those rules is “regulative.”⁴ More justly, John Rawls (1980) found Kant’s moral theory to be constructivist, though in a weaker sense.⁵

Nevertheless, Kant’s influence on later versions of constructivism is considerable. More than anyone else Kant propelled Philosophy toward its “epistemological turn,” which, in codifying the Cartesian dualism of mind and world, gave philosophers primary responsibility for the former and left the latter to social theorists. The “linguistic turn” of twentieth-century Philosophy effectuated a rapprochement of sorts between Philosophy and social theory.⁶ This was manifested in an unending burst of interest in cognition, “the architecture of the human mind-brain” (Goldman 1986: 1), but the result was a kind of epistemological imperialism. Through the medium of language, mind subordinated world. The triumph of epistemology resonates with the Greco-Christian presentiment so powerfully expressed in the New Testament of the Bible: In the beginning was the word.

My dictionary says that “logos,” the word, is “the rational principle that governs and develops the universe,” and “the divine word or reason incarnate in Jesus Christ” (Random House 1967: 843). The triumph of epistemology finds the “rational principle” a permanent home in the mind, and in so doing satisfies several presumptions, namely, that humans as language users are uniquely affiliated with the divine, that cognitive activity is pulled toward reason, that the mind finds, or makes, the order in the world. Given Western culture’s penchant for word-world dualism and, under Kantian auspices, grant of priority to the former, Goodman’s constructivism breaches commonsense realism—the belief that there is one real world “out there”—with a perverse plausibility.

Constructivism also challenges empiricist and realist assumptions of working science.⁷ Constructivist philosophers of science like Bas C. van Fraasen (1981) are given to argue, in Richard N. Boyd’s words (1984: 52), that “the world that scientists study, in some robust sense, must be defined or constituted or ‘constructed’ from the theoretical tradition in which the scientific community in question works.” This sounds as radical as some of Goodman’s rhetoric. Yet we can take it to mean that the world science knows is in degree a social construction. Although methods are “theory-dependent,” and theory is mind-made, neither theories, methods, nor data are simply made up in, or by, the mind. This brand of constructivism does not deny the existence of phenomena (van Fraasen would save them—“phenomena are saved when they are exhibited as fragments of a larger unity”). Instead it acknowledges “the limits of observation, which are not incapacitating but also are not negligible” (van Fraasen 1984: 256).

We should not be surprised that Thomas S. Kuhn is seen as a constructivist of this genre. The discussion of paradigms to be found in the introduction to this book, which aspires to honor the sense of Kuhn’s work while extending it, points to a socially made content to all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, without repudiating the material reality to which knowledge relates. Thus the proportion of social and material content to knowledge varies in different domains of knowledge. The different proportions and the different ways their interaction plays out are the very basis for the proliferation of paradigms across the realm of human knowledge and their succession through time.

The constructivism I prefer follows along these lines. It does not draw a sharp distinction between material and social realities—the material and the social contaminate each other, but variably—and it does not grant sovereignty to either the material or the social by defining the other out of existence. It does find socially made content dominant in and for the individual without denying the independent, “natural” reality of individuals as materially situated biological beings. To say that people and societies construct each other is not to imply that this is done wholly out of mind, as Goodman would seem to have suggested.

Constructivism marks a place to begin, however provisionally. Poststructuralism offers a more radical position. All grounds are groundless, all foundations specious. For Jacques Derrida, no position is radical enough because it is a position. “Every stance that Derrida articulates has its ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ aspects; every position that he adopts is immediately rendered nugatory” (Megill 1985: 266). Under the circumstance, never begin, always withhold or subvert, and say, as Derrida has said, that what one does say is always prefatory to what cannot be said (pp. 271–272).

Derrida cannot begin without adopting a logocentric stance, a position from which to begin. Just this stance hobbles Western philosophy from its Greek origins (Derrida 1976: 10–18, 30–44). In Derrida’s use, the term “logocentrism” is difficult to specify straightforwardly, for any such specification would be an enactment of logocentrism. Nevertheless, I quote Richard K. Ashley’s interpretation both for being faithful to Derrida’s meaning (as if one could say this without seriously breaching Derrida’s intent, whatever that might be) and for relevance to International Relations. The “logocentric disposition” is

the expectation that all practice must secure recognition and power by appeal to some identical consciousness, principle of interpretation, or necessary subjectivity—some central and originary premise necessary to the making and interpretation of history—which is itself regarded as unproblematic, extra-historical and, hence, in need of no critical accounting. This true and central subject of historical narrative of course has no one necessary form. It might be identified with the possessive individual, the rational state, the national community, the scientific man, the consciousness of the proletariat, the fall of the family, the feminine voice, the general will, immanent imperatives of mankind, the West, structuralism’s Kantian “consciousness without a knowing subject,” the universal pragmatics of Habermas’s “ideal speech situation,” God, king, phallus, or womb. What matters is that this subject, this viewpoint, this principle of interpretation and practice is conceived as existing in itself, as a foundation or origin of history’s making, not as a contingent effect of political practice within history (1988: 93–94).

I believe that poststructuralists are substantially correct in emphasizing the logocentric content of the many dualities long dominating Western thought. On the one side are mind, subject, consciousness, rationality, standing outside history or having the word. On the other are matter, object, not knowing or understanding, being caught in history or having fallen from grace. I would either abandon most of these dual constructions or render them so differently as to expose, or even nullify, the deference demanded by difference. (Here I play with a well-known theme of Derrida’s, helpfully presented by Norris 1982: 24–32, 46–48.)

Furthermore, I believe that the constructivism I offer in these pages successfully overcomes these dualities by treating people and society as each the product of the other’s construction. Readers may find this reminiscent of the Hegelian solution to the duality of thesis and antithesis in the dialectical movement called synthesis. Post-structuralists are no more content with “the ‘ternary rhythm’ of Hegelian philosophy” than they are with the characteristic dualities of Western thought (Megill 1985: 273, quoting from an as yet untranslated text of Derrida’s). Instead, “slouching onto the scene comes the Derridean four,” as Allan Megill has rather colorfully put it, “a disreputable upsetting four, one that absolutely refuses to behave. The possibility of a fourth movement of the dialectic destroys the whole dialectic machine.… The fourth movement is the deconstructive movement” (pp. 273–274; see also Nelson 1983: 183–184 on the “Sophistic counter-tradition of four-thinking”).

Throughout this book I locate instances of a recurring threefold division of whatever social construction I am alluding to at that moment. Either I have invented this pattern in an obsessive but hardly original act of logocentrism, or it results from some general property of social construction. Obviously I prefer to think I have stumbled on the latter; poststructuralists (and who else?) will think this is a transparent rationalization of a logocentric drive. Whatever the case, my penchant for threes places me as far from the countertradition of “four-thinking” as it does from the West’s dominant tradition of binary thinking.

I do not wish to imply that people do not construct and then depend on dualities. Our dominant tradition is the best possible evidence of the extent to which they do. Obviously I do too, and I do so expressly in this work. Nor do I wish to imply that poststructuralists have nothing apposite to say to a constructivist. On the contrary, I find Michel Foucault’s genealogical inquiries telling reconstructions of what I would call regimes of rule, Foucault himself “the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” (1977: 150; for an especially concise and effective discussion, see Connolly 1983: 231–238).

What cannot be reconciled with constructivism is deconstruction, at least when that practice is carried very far. If it may be said that “Foucault deconstructs the modern subject,” it is no different to say: “He constructs genealogies of modern formations which engender the subject, . .” (Connolly 1983: 234). Compare this with Derrida: “The very concept of constitution itself must be deconstructed” (Derrida quoted in Translator’s Preface, 1976: li). My goal is reconstruction. With that goal comes logocentrism.

The logocentrism I concede is this: The act of construction, the co-constitution of people and society, makes history. As such, it is “the theme and central subject of historical narrative…” (repeating Ashley’s words, 1988: 93). Even though I conceive of this “viewpoint” as “the foundation or origin of history’s making,” social construction is nevertheless “a contingent effect of political practices within history” (pp. 93–94). I can have it both ways because I do not accept Ashley’s totalizing duality—that we are either outside history or within it. We are always within our constructions, even as we choose to stand apart from them, condemn them, reconstruct them.

Deconstruction privileges words in a war on words. It is logocentric in its own narrow way. The importance then of Goethe’s aphorism, In the beginning was the deed, is that it denies priority to either the word or the world (compare Redner 1982: 56–58, 67–75). A “deed” is intelligible only as jointly a social construction and natural event, produced by mind yet phenomenal in its own right. What is revolutionary about such a position is that it turns philosophy back to ontology, thereby enabling a rapprochement of philosophy and social theory that privileges neither at the expense of the other (compare Aronson 1984). At least in the English-speaking world, I feel safe in saying, this “ontological turn” (my term) is more Wittgenstein’s doing than anyone else’s.

WITTGENSTEIN’S PLACE

Wittgenstein has had an enormous infl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: Rules
• Chapter 1: Constructivism
• Chapter 2: Law and Language
• Chapter 3: Cognition, Judgment, Culture
• Chapter 4: The Problem of Order
• PART 2: Rule
• Chapter 5: The Presumption of Anarchy
• Chapter 6: Political Society
• Chapter 7: World Politics
• Chapter 8: Rationality and Resources
• Synoptic Table
• References
• Index