Rationalism

10 Key excerpts on "Rationalism"

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  Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century

  • Christopher Hill(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 Rationality in Foreign Policy Rationality is a central problem in social science, and it has figured prominently in the study of politics. Any attempt to understand or prescribe action has to reckon with the concept since it is the ideal type for both individuals and national systems. Indeed, the very idea of making ‘decisions’ and ‘policies’ is a modern notion indelibly associated with the attempt to exert rational control over events – as opposed to allowing destiny, God’s will, chance or arbitrary power to determine one’s lot. This said, it is a matter of debate as to how far human beings are capable of behaving rationally, how rationality is defined in the first place and whether what we deem rational behaviour is in any case so desirable. These issues have produced standoffs such as that between the profession of economics, where the idea of rationality has been of central importance, and other social scientists. For many of the latter the concept looks like a straitjacket imposed on the rich diversity of human motives and interactions, and one which assumes a greater degree of calculation (often quantitative) in the business of choosing futures than is possible or desirable. This debate is alive within political science, where rational choice approaches have made considerable inroads while encountering stiff resistance. Many are allergic to the idea that politics is best explained in terms of interactions between individuals – however self-interested – calculating the degree to which their preferences will be served by a given outcome – in short, through game theory and its variants (Nicholson, 1996, pp. 138–40). Rationality in Policy-Making Within IR the same issues are at stake, but with some particular compli-cations (Kahler, 1999, pp. 285–6). In the first place, the classical rational actor model is too often blurred with realism, the historically dominant way of thinking about foreign policy and international politics.

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  Concepts in World Politics

  • Felix Berenskoetter, Felix Berenskoetter, Author, Felix Berenskötter(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The chapter unfolds as follows: I first introduce the notion of rationality as it is used in contemporary IR and provide a first explanation of its popularity. I show that, when it comes to the categories of concepts covered in this book, rationality clearly belongs to the group of “fundamental human claims”. While in its “thin” variant it contains claims about traits only, in “thick” variants it also carries ideas about actors’ goals. I then distinguish the concepts of rationality and reason and trace their relationship from Hobbes and Kant to today’s distinction between mainstream positivist and idealist IR theory. This reveals how the concept’s meanings and roles have never been fixed but instead evolved over time; most notably, they have been affected profoundly by Enlightenment philosophy and by the evolution of economic thought. In the fifth part of the chapter, I present the most important critiques that have been levied against reliance on the concept of rationality. I reveal how the concept benefits by being able to travel across theoretical contexts in IR, while losing some traction and becoming problematized beyond the modern–postmodern divide. The constructivist and post-structuralist critiques of rationality presented in part five also serve to locate the concept in a socio-political context by showing how it helps naturalize political order. The concluding section summarizes how the importance and resilience of the concept of rationality in our discipline is in fact based on its in-built tensions: the appeal of rationality owes to its being associated with reason, and its alter ego as a normative concept has helped prevent its being discarded via empirical refutation.

  What is Rationality?

  In contemporary IR, we are most familiar with the concept of rationality appearing as a descriptive assumption about human nature, that is, as a way of characterizing the reality of how actors behave in the world of international politics. These actors can be individual human beings, but to the extent that IR theory treats collectives like, for example, states as if they were individuals, the assumption is also applied to these collectives.1 As noted, many theories – though far from all – build on the assumption that states and other agents of international politics generally act “rationally”.

  The assumption of rationality consists of two basic elements: it holds, first, that human beings will attempt to achieve their goals – they are goal-oriented – and, second, that they will try to use the most efficient means to achieve their goals. This includes the ideas that human beings can define their goals and rank them, that is, that they can determine their own interests in any situation which requires a decision, and that they will pursue the interests which they have identified as their own in a way that maximizes the benefits and minimizes the costs of doing so. Thus, human beings are portrayed as self-interested and efficiency-oriented goal-seekers. Since rationality is either given or not – there are no gradations – it introduces a binary between the rational (which, as we will see, is usually considered normatively desirable) and the irrational (which is not).

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  Understanding Security

  • Mike Bourne(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  If faced with another nation that has not defined their interest restrictively and rationally, politics is to take the form of ‘armed diplomacy’ to convince other leaders that their interests have nothing to fear and that their ‘illegitimate interests have nothing to gain in the face of armed might rationally employed’ (Morgenthau, 1952: 978). Waltz utilized a narrower view of rationality derived from microeco-nomics, which asserts not that wise state leaders should seek to act ration-ally, as Morgenthau did, but that states are inherently rational. Structural realism’s materialist and objectivist view of states and power, and thus of security, reduces rational calculation to material cost–benefit analysis. Such a narrow Rationalism had come to dominate strategic thought in the ‘golden age’ of strategic studies but was amplified by structural realism’s emphasis on a third image (structural) explanation (see Chapter 1). It is rationality that intervenes between structural pressure and political action: the rational calculation of relative power is ‘a reliable but invisible transmission belt connecting objective [material] change to adaptive behaviour’ (Friedberg, 1988, cited in Rose, 1998: 158). Holding rationality as constant rather than variable is what permits structural realism to argue that variations in states’ behaviour derive only from variations in the distribution of material capa-bilities (Keohane, 1986). In doing so, however, the politics of international security is diminished since behaviour and outcomes stem not from wise choices but from more or less automatic responses (Ashley, 1984). This has prompted even other realists, like Gray (1999: 164), to characterize struc-tural realism as ‘reductionist nonsense’. Indeed, a further characteristic of the distinction between classical realism and structural realism is that the former emphasizes praxis, while the latter focuses more on the limits of political and security action.

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  Rationalism in Politics

  • Peter J. Steinberger(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  §37. From such a perspective, we can see that a rationalist conception of politics informed by post-Kantian metaphysics would have, like Rationalism in general, both a descriptive and an aspirational aspect. Descriptively, such a view might well accept, indeed embrace, many of the most important insights of rhetorical, agonistic, and realist theories regarding the nuts and bolts of political struggle while nonetheless insisting that such struggle is invariably, and at its core, grounded in the simple but virtually ubiquitous practice of asking whether one proposed policy is indeed better than another and seeking to answer that question by adducing good reasons based on a structure of evidence-based argumentation – a practice to be found, variously, on the campaign trail, in the halls of the legislative assembly, among the deliberations of senior councilors, within the offices of bureaucratic administration, at the bar of the appellate court, and so on. With respect to aspiration, political Rationalism would understand that posing and answering any such question – and implementing the results – will inevitably be challenged by those elements of interest and strategy, conflict and power, rhetoric and technique that theorists such as Zerilli, Mouffe, Geuss, and many others have analyzed to telling effect. The difference is that the rationalist would neither cele- brate nor prescribe nor give pride of place to those factors but, rather, 148 Rationalism in Politics understand them as important and persistent features of political life that help explain why the formative, definitive, and ever-present aspir- ations of political reason are almost never perfectly realized, features that are themselves, at the same time, hostage to the demands of rational analysis.

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  The Hidden History of Realism

  A Genealogy of Power Politics

  • S. Molloy(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  of the concept of interest expressed as power that creates the possibility of theorization. 30 Already, the reality and the theory of international politics are being expressed in terms of the theorist’s ability to create a constrained model of the international sphere. The virtuality of this knowledge is implicitly recognized by Morgenthau in his use of the phrase “appear as an intelligible rational vacuum.” In a piece of theoretical leger de main, Morgenthau separates political Realism from political reality (its supposed raison d’etre) by introducing the contingencies of history as a deviation from the “rational course” of international politics (following one of his earliest influences, Max Weber). Democracy in particu- lar is singled out as an impairment of rational foreign policy, as the need to garner support from the populace (characterized by their emotions) inhibits rational diplomatic action. This rational action requires a distinction between the desirable and the possible. In essence, this is a conservative position in that Morgenthau privileges the possible (i.e., the present state of affairs) over the desirable. This is a further narrowing of Morgenthau’s theoretical horizons and serves to further limit his Realism to the descriptive realm. There is also an implicitly static moral position inherent in this evocation of the preservation of the status quo as the rational purpose of international politics. The deviations from “rational” (i.e., conservative) foreign policy in the modern world are such that Morgenthau proposes investigation into the possibility of creating a “counter-theory of irrational politics, a kind of pathology of international politics.” 31 This psychopathological theory of IR would have at its core the analysis of the refusal of the modern political elite to recognize the flaws in their theoretical understanding and the substitution of the abstract a priori model for empirical reality.

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  Political Theory and Partisan Politics

  • Edward Bryan Portis, Adolf G. Gundersen, Ruth Lessl Shively, Edward Bryan Portis, Adolf G. Gundersen, Ruth Lessl Shively(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Rationality in Liberal Politics Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. The topic we are addressing is, in its generic form, one of the oldest and one of the most continuous issues of political theory and political prac- tice: What is the role of reason in politics? Is politics, rightly understood and rightly practiced, an activity in which the cognitive powers play an important role? Or is it an arena in which the participants deploy only their will, unconstrained by rationality in any way or form? The an- swers given have ranged from one extreme to the other—from those who see the only legitimate form of society as one in which reason reigns supreme to those who deny reason any possible or legitimate political function at all. My purposes here are twofold: first, to play the role of Lockean “underlaborer,” adding some clarity to the issues at stake by clearing away some of the conceptual underbrush; and second, to stake out what I regard to be the most salutary and defensible answer to the question within the context of liberal democracy. First, the underbrush. In order to get a clear fix on the issues and on what is at stake, it is important to pay some careful attention to the definition(s) of the two key terms of the equation: reason and politics. Each of these concepts has been assigned a multiplicity of meanings. Many of these definitions are conceptually and normatively tenden- tious, sometimes intentionally so. As a consequence, what is offered as an answer to the question about the proper role of reason in politics may sometimes be little more than exercise in tautology, masking itself as an empirical claim. My first suggestion in my capacity as underlaborer is that we should try to dispense as much as possible with substantively loaded defini- tions of the term “politics.” If politics be defined either by reference to claims about ordinary usage or by stipulation as “a form of conflict,” a conceptual value-slope is created that works—without necessity of 73

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  Grand Theories and Ideologies in the Social Sciences

  • H. Wiarda(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In this context, true rationality occurs when actors, be they individuals or nation-states, make choices based on expected utility. Simply put, RCT posits that choices will be made that bring the greatest return and the least cost. Background of Rational Choice Theory RCT has a multitude of definitions that tend to confuse the issue. I will address these and then attempt to develop one, consistent set of definitions for use throughout this chapter. Anthony Downs described politics in the following way: “Parties are analogous to entrepreneurs in a profit-seeking economy. So as to attain their pri- vate ends, they formulate whatever policies they believe will gain the most votes, just as entrepreneurs produce whatever products they believe will gain the most profits for the same reason.” 2 Political par- ties, in this case, are like any other business. They seek out the largest number of customers by offering the best available product. Political parties’ “customers” are voters and their “business” is being elected. The party with the best policies—in the minds of the voters—will win the election. George Tsebelis, on the other hand, stated that: “Rationality . . . is nothing more than an optimal correspondence between ends and means.” 3 David Collier and Deborah Norden offer: “Rational choice analysis may be understood as a broad label for approaches which assume that actors make choices in light of an assessment of costs and benefits.” 4 Ian Green and Donald Shapiro offer that rational choice “explains politics by assuming that both voters and politicians are ratio- nal maximizers of interest or utility.” 5 Rational choice will be defined in this chapter as the following: “political decisions made using expected utility maximization under conditions of imperfect information in which gains are maximized and costs minimized.” It is important to note that this is a general definition and will not account for every possible variation or devia- tion.

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  Undoing the Demos

  Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

  • Wendy Brown(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Zone Books

    (Publisher)

  118 UNDOING THE DEMOS programming of liberal governmentality” — it changes the way the lib-eral state reasons, self-represents, and governs and it also changes the state-economy relation. But these changes mark something apart from the political rationality of neoliberalism. Political rationality does not originate or emanate from the state, although it circulates through the state, organizes it, and conditions its actions. Political rationality also differs from a normative form of reason, although the former emanates from and is suffused with the latter. Neoliberalism might have remained only a form of reason generated by Ordoliberalism and the Chicago School, without ever becoming a political rationality. Indeed, this seemed its likely fate at midcentury, although Foucault (and Daniel Stedman Jones, in his history of neo-liberal thought) insist that postwar Germany was already organized by it. 5 Political rationality could be said to signify the becoming actual of a specific normative form of reason; it designates such a form as both a historical force generating and relating specific kinds of subject, soci-ety, and state and as establishing an order of truth by which conduct is both governed and measured. Foucault’s formulation of political rationality would appear to draw on the early Frankfurt School, which in turn drew on the work of Max Weber. Weber famously distinguishes two types of ratio-nal action: value rational ( wertrational ) and instrumentally rational ( zweckrational ). 6 The rationality in the first does not pertain to the rational quality of the value itself, but to the “self-conscious formula-tion of the ultimate values governing the action” — their being chosen through the actor’s deliberation, rather than derived from authority, tradition, or affect. Thus, value-rational action permits us to choose a value such as peace, equality, or wealth accumulation.

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  International Politics

  Power and Purpose in Global Affairs

  • D'Anieri, Paul D'Anieri(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Firms, for example, are primarily driven not by international security motives but by the profit motive. Focusing on multiple actors leads to a view of politics that, instead of being simple, stark, and conflictual, is complex, multifaceted, and often characterized by collaboration. Scholars Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye call this school of thought complex interdependence theory. 22 This perspective can cut across levels of analysis, but because it focuses on nongovernmental actors, much of its focus is at the substate level. A third liberal school of thought attacks the realist notion that all states are unitary rational actors. That assumption, in realist theory, implies that a state’s form of government does not affect its behavior. The democratic peace theory asserts just the opposite—that the characteristics of governments are crucial to understanding international relations. Some kinds of states—liberal democracies—are able to escape the conflictual dynamics of anarchy. This theory operates at the state level. Democratic peace theory is among the most influential schools of thought today, especially in the United States. As illustrated in Table 3.3, these are three very different theories. However, they are all essentially “liberal” in their belief that cooperation and order are possible in international affairs. International politics, in the liberal view, concerns the struggles to find solutions to the problems of anarchy. Liberalism is not simply naïve. It does not see collaboration as simple or unproblematic, but neither do liberals share the realist view that cooperation is inherently limited. None of these approaches rejects power politics as completely irrelevant. Instead, they argue that the world is contingent . Sometimes states compete for power, and this drives international politics. But some goals require collaboration, so states often join to pursue mutual goals. Additionally, actors other than states are concerned with a vast array of goals.

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  Pragmatism in International Relations

  • Harry Bauer, Elisabetta Brighi(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Pragmatism and the theory of international relations 1 Ten points to ponder about pragmatism Some critical reflections on knowledge generation in the social sciences Friedrich Kratochwil Readers of the contemporary literature in International Relations (IR) fre- quently find calls for a pragmatic reorientation in theorizing the field. Some scholars, for instance, advocate a more pragmatic version of constructivism (Haas and Haas infra) and a greater concern with the relevance of academic knowledge to our political life (Bernstein et al. 2000). Others interpret the increasingly scholastic debates as a ‘flight from reality’ (Shapiro 2005) and call for a more decisive ‘pragmatic turn’ (Bohman 2002; Owen 2002). It is no accident that the former argument is made predominantly by students of foreign policy and diplomacy (see for instance Neumann infra). They tradi- tionally have been ill at ease with the project of a general ‘theory’ of inter- national politics, particularly after the dissolution of the bipolarity that gave some prima facie legitimacy to ‘systemic’ approaches. 1 Similarly, in the case of European integration, Ulrich Krotz has called attention to some sig- nificant practices underpinning Europeanization that cannot be studied within the simple dichotomy of interstate or intersocietal interactions, but the ‘parapublic’ processes and activities, exemplified by Franco-German exchanges, partnerships, prizes and multilevel contacts, have been largely missed by the conventional Europeanization literature (Krotz 2007). The more principled calls for a pragmatic approach, however, come from some IR specialists who have participated in previous ‘great debates’. Here the present anthology, as well as the recent contributions by Peter J. Katzenstein and Rudra Sil (Analytic Eclecticism, forthcoming), or my Tartu lecture (Kratochwil 2007a) resulting in a symposium, could be mentioned.

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