Theory as Ideology in International Relations: The Politics of Knowledge 9780367074944, 9780429021008

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Theory as Ideology in International Relations

Are theoretical tools nothing but political weapons? How can the two be distinguished from each other? What is the ideological role of theories like liberalism, neoliberalism or democratic theory? And how can we study the theories of actors from outside the academic world? This book examines these and related questions at the nexus of theory and ideology in International Relations. The current crisis of politics made it abundantly clear that theory is not merely an impartial and neutral academic tool but instead is implicated in political struggles. However, it is also clear that it is insufficient to view theory merely as a political weapon. This book brings together contributions from a number of different scholarly perspectives to engage with these problems. The contributors, drawn from various fields of International Relations and Political Science, cast new light on the ever-problematic relationship between theory and ideology. They analyse the ideological underpinnings of existing academic theories and examine the theories of non-academic actors such as staff members of international organisations, Ecovillagers and liberal politicians. This edited volume is a must-read for all those interested in the contemporary political crisis and its relation to theories of International Relations. Benjamin Martill is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he conducts research and teaching on the politics of European foreign and security policy. He is co-editor (with Uta Staiger) of the volume Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (2018) and his work has featured in Security Studies, International Politics, the Journal of Political Ideologies and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. He has previously worked at the London School of Economics, University College London, Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Oxford. Sebastian Schindler is Assistant Professor at Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany. His research interests include theories of International Relations, international organisations, theories of practice and critical theories. He holds a doctoral degree from Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and has published articles in leading journals of the field, including International Studies Quarterly, International Theory and Politische Vierteljahresschrift. In 2014, he won Millennium – Journal of International Studies’ F.S. Northedge Essay Competition, with an article on contested agency in the United Nations. In 2019, a special issue on ‘Rethinking Agency in International Relations’, which he co-edited with Benjamin Braun and Tobias Wille, appeared in the Journal of International Relations and Development. The focus of his current research lies on the problem of post-truth politics.

Worlding Beyond the West Series Editors: Arlene B. Tickner Universidad del Rosario, Colombia

David Blaney Macalester College, USA

Inanna Hamati-Ataya Cambridge University, UK Historically, the International Relations (IR) discipline has established its boundaries, issues, and theories based upon Western experience and traditions of thought. This series explores the role of geocultural factors, institutions, and academic practices in creating the concepts, epistemologies, and methodologies through which IR knowledge is produced. This entails identifying alternatives for thinking about the “international” that are more in tune with local concerns and traditions outside the West. But it also implies provincializing Western IR and empirically studying the practice of producing IR knowledge at multiple sites within the so-called ‘West’. China and International Theory The Balance of Relationships Chih-yu Shih et al. Unravelling Liberal Interventionism Local Critiques of Statebuilding in Kosovo Edited by Gëzim Visoka and Vjosa Musliu Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework Writing in Darkness K. Melchor Quick Hall NGOs, Knowledge Production and Global Humanist Advocacy The Limits of Expertise Alistair Markland Theory as Ideology in International Relations The Politics of Knowledge Edited by Benjamin Martill and Sebastian Schindler International Relations from the Global South Worlds of Difference Edited by Arlene B. Tickner and Karen Smith For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Worlding-Beyond-the-West/book-series/WBW

Theory as Ideology in International Relations The Politics of Knowledge

Edited by Benjamin Martill and Sebastian Schindler

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Benjamin Martill and Sebastian Schindler; individual chapters, the contributors The right of to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-07494-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02100-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. (Robert W. Cox)

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: theory as ideology in International Relations

ix xiii 1

B E N J A M I N M ART I L L AND S E BAS T I AN S CHI NDL ER

PART I

Understanding theory and ideology 1 Theory vs. ideology: validity criteria for knowledge claims and normative conditions of critique

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19

H A RT M U T B E H R

2 Ideology as decontestation

34

B E N J A M I N H E RBORT H

3 Theory, ideology and IR’s quest for scientific credibility

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K ATA R Z Y N A K ACZ MARS KA

4 ‘I see something you don’t see’: Niklas Luhmann’s social theory between observation and meta-critique

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F L O R I A N E D E L MANN

PART II

Contemporary theories as ideologies 5 The costs of the democratic turn in political theory A L B E N A A Z M ANOVA

97 99

viii Contents 6 The spirits we cite: how democratic war theory reproduces what it opposes

118

VA L E R I E WA L DOW

7 From theory to practice: the paradox of neoliberal hegemony in twenty-first-century world politics

140

P H I L I P G . C ERNY

8 Liberalism and the Cold War: the international thought of Jo Grimond

165

B E N J A M I N MART I L L

PART III

Theorisation outside academia 9 Ideologies of international organisation: exploring the trading zones between theory and practice

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L E O N I E H O LT HAUS AND JE NS S T E F F E K

10 From allegations of ideology to conflicts over forms of life: Or, why political scientists don’t talk about Ecovillages

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P H I L I P WA L L ME I E R

11 Microanalysis as ideology critique: the critical potential of ‘zooming in’ on everyday social practices

228

S E B A S T I A N S CHI NDL E R

Conclusion: from the politics of knowledge to knowledge of politics

240

B E AT E J A H N

Index

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Contributors

Albena Azmanova is Reader in Political and Social Theory at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. She is author of Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (2020) and The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment (2012) as well as of numerous edited books and journal publications on issues ranging from judgement and justice to the transformation of capitalism and the rise of new ideologies. She is educated in Bulgaria, France and the United States and has held academic positions at Sciences Po Paris, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. Hartmut Behr is Professor of International Politics at Newcastle University, UK. His research specialises in political theory, the sociology of knowledge of IR, the politics of difference, political violence and critical European studies. His most recent monograph publications include A History of International Political Theory (2010) and Politics of Difference: Epistemologies of Peace (2014) as well as book chapters and articles on the themes mentioned that appear, among others, in the European Journal of International Relations, Geopolitics, Review of International Studies, International Political Economy, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the Journal for International Political Theory, Ethics & International Affairs and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. He holds a PhD from the University of Cologne and has taught and done research at Virginia Tech and the universities of Tokyo, Pittsburgh, Jena and Ottawa. Philip G. Cerny is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Global Affairs at the University of Manchester and Rutgers University-Newark. He was educated at Kenyon College (Ohio), Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Manchester (PhD 1976). He previously taught at the Universities of York and Leeds and has been a visiting scholar or professor at Harvard University, Sciences Po (Paris), Dartmouth College, New York University and the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle’s Foreign Policy (1980), The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the State (1990) and Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (2010).

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Florian Edelmann works and lives as an independent researcher, activist and artisan baker in Southern Germany. He previously held positions at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, UK, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Having read politics, international relations, sociology and law at Regensburg, Mexico City, Aberystwyth, and Florence, he holds a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. His research focuses on social and political theory, social movements, the history of protest and dissent and contentious politics. Benjamin Herborth is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His research interests include social and political theories in and of international relations, critical theory, world society studies, the politics of security and reconstructive methodology. Cutting across these research interests is the belief that the field of International Relations, having a strong tradition of reifying both political spaces and political subjects, provides an excellent site for theorising both. Recent publications have appeared in journals such as Review of International Studies, International Theory, International Studies Review, and the Journal of International Relations and Development. In 2017, Cambridge University Press published Uses of the West: Security and the Politics of Global Order (edited with Gunther Hellmann). Leonie Holthaus is Senior Research Fellow at Technische Universität Darmstadt. She completed her PhD in 2015 with a thesis on the functionalist approach in international theory. She was a visiting scholar at Aberystwyth University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Queensland. Her research interests include international relations theory, sociology of knowledge and democracy promotion. Her articles have appeared, inter alia, in Democratization, European Journal of International Relations, The International History Review, Review of International Studies, Middle East Critique, Voluntas and Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen. Beate Jahn is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and President of the European International Studies Association (EISA). She also served as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR). Her work includes Moral und Politik (1993), The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature (2000), Classical Theory in International Relations (2006) and Liberal Internationalism (2013). Katarzyna Kaczmarska is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Before joining the School, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at Aberystwyth University (2016–2019). Her research interests centre on knowledge construction among scholars and practitioners of international politics and the ways in which the socio-political context influences academic knowledge-making and use. She has published in International Studies Review, Problems of Post-Communism

Contributors

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and the Journal of International Relations and Development. Her book Making Global Knowledge in Local Contexts: The Politics of International Relations and Policy Advice in Russia is forthcoming with Routledge. Benjamin Martill is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, where he conducts research and teaching on the politics of European foreign and security policy. He is co-editor (with Uta Staiger) of the volume Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (2018) and his work has featured in Security Studies, International Politics, the Journal of Political Ideologies, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. He has previously worked at the London School of Economics, University College London, Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Oxford. Sebastian Schindler is Assistant Professor at Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany. His research interests include theories of International Relations, international organisations, theories of practice and critical theories. He holds a doctoral degree from Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and has published articles in leading journals of the field, including International Studies Quarterly, International Theory and Politische Vierteljahresschrift. In 2014, he won Millennium – Journal of International Studies’ F.S. Northedge Essay Competition, with an article on contested agency in the United Nations. In 2019, a special issue on ‘Rethinking Agency in International Relations’, which he co-edited with Benjamin Braun and Tobias Wille, appeared in Journal of International Relations and Development. The focus of his current research lies on the problem of post-truth politics. Jens Steffek is Professor of Transnational Governance at Technische Universität Darmstadt and Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg. He holds an MA degree in Political Science from the University of Munich (1998) and a doctorate from the European University Institute (2002). Before coming to Darmstadt, he worked at the University of Bremen, Jacobs University and the Robert-SchumanCentre for Advanced Studies. He was visiting professor at the University of Pavia, LUISS Guido Carli (Rome) and the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg as well as a visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge, the University of Montréal and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). His research interests include international relations (in particular, the study of international organisations), international law and international political theory. Valerie Waldow is Lecturer at Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg. Here she has given courses in international relations, political theory and peace and conflict studies. She was doctoral fellow at Walther-Rathenau-Kolleg/ Moses Mendelssohn Centre Potsdam from 2010 to 2013 and visiting scholar at the Peace Research Institute Oslo as part of the project Liberal Peace and

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Contributors the Ethics of Peacebuilding in 2009. She has received scholarships from the Norwegian Research Council/E.ON Stipendienfonds, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg. Her research interests include democratic theory, international political theory and rationalities of international interventions and governance as well as prospects for critique in international relations.

Philip Wallmeier is a researcher and educator in the fields of political science, economics and philosophy in Frankfurt, Germany. From 2013 to 2019, he worked as a research associate at the research centre “the formation of normative orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. Prior to Frankfurt, he studied philosophy, economics and political science at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), University College London (UK) and the Higher School of Economics (Russia). His research interests include rule and resistance in global politics, critical theories of globalisation, qualitative research methods, environmental politics and didactics of social sciences.

Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in an encounter at the International Studies Association (ISA) conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2016. Our friend Tobias Wille brought us together because he felt that we shared a common theoretical interest, in spite of our different methodological backgrounds. He was indeed correct. In that encounter in Atlanta, we searched for a formula to encapsulate our common interest. ‘Theory in practice’? ‘Theory and ideology’? We finally settled for ‘theory as ideology’. We made this choice not because we were convinced that all theory is nothing but ideology, but rather because we felt that a focus on theory as ideology promised to yield important insights. We are grateful to a number of friends and scholars who provided encouragement and valuable comments along the way. Christian Bueger and Benjamin Tallis were kind enough to support our proposal for a European Workshop in International Studies (EWIS) at Cardiff University, where the contributors met initially, and where the idea of a book was first mooted. Inanna Hamati-Ataya initially suggested the Worlding Beyond the West series as an outlet and has supported the project every step of the way with encouragement and advice. We are grateful to her and to David Blaney and Arlene Tickner for taking the book in their series, where it has found a welcoming home. Beate Jahn gave us help and support right from the beginning and was kind enough to write a concluding chapter bringing together insights from all the contributors. Hartmut Behr and Kim Hutchings helped the project reach new audiences by discussing panels at conferences in Barcelona, Spain, and San Francisco, California. We also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful and constructive comments on the proposal and the initial chapters as well as Rob Sorsby and Jessica Holmes at Routledge who guided us carefully through the publication process. In preparing the manuscript for submission, the help of two research assistants at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich – Olivia Müller-Elmau and Julia Mollerus – was invaluable, and the text bears the imprint of their diligent efforts. We are also greateful to Ramachandran Vijayaragavan for his careful editing of the finished product. And, of course, we want to thank all our authors – not only because the book would be nothing without them, but also because engaging with their arguments was worth every minute of our time.

xiv Acknowledgements Finally, we are grateful to our partners, Katy and Julia, for their support and for keeping us grounded during the process. Benjamin Martill, Edinburgh Sebastian Schindler, Munich 26 November 2019

Introduction Theory as ideology in International Relations Benjamin Martill and Sebastian Schindler

Introduction Are theoretical tools nothing but political weapons? How can the two be distinguished from each other? What is the ideological role of certain theories like liberalism, neoliberalism or democratic theory? And how can we study the theories of actors from outside the academic world? In recent years, questions such as these – which concern the relationship between theory and ideology – have become more pressing and increasingly important. Indeed, recent political developments have challenged the separation of theoretical knowledge from political ideology in at least two ways. On the one hand, shifting patterns of political contestation have moved conceptions of international order to the forefront of partisan divisions, both within and between different societies around the world. On the other hand, scholarship – including critical scholarship – is becoming increasingly implicated in political debates that question the value of expertise and knowledge for political decision-making. These challenges, associated with the current crisis of politics, question the neutrality and impartiality of academic theories. The open ideological use of theories questions not only their impartiality but also their analytical purchase. Academic theories of International Relations (IR) are meant to help us grasp and understand, in one way or another, what goes on in the world of politics. However, if political actors themselves begin to use, whether implicitly or explicitly, theoretical tools as political weapons, this questions our capacity to understand the reality of political conflict. After all, how should one account for a political conflict with tools that are themselves implicated in this very conflict and used by one party in the dispute to attack and discredit the other? A turn to the study of theory-as-ideology offers a way out of this dilemma. The solution to the problem of partiality is then not simply a more impartial theory but instead a theory that helps us understand the partiality of theory. Reflexivity is needed to increase analytical purchase (Hamati-Ataya 2013; Jahn 2017). This book lays emphasis on the promise and purchase of studying theories as ideologies. Let us emphasise from the beginning that such an approach does not mean or imply a complete erasure of the distinction between theory and ideology. Quite to the contrary, a theory-as-ideology approach is premised on such a distinction. A distinction is one aspect of any attempt to study the relation between two elements (cf. Wendt 1987) – in our case, theory and ideology. A focus on

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theory-as-ideology is itself a specific theoretical choice. It hence can and should itself be questioned, as any other theoretical choice, about its ideological role in the world. Indeed, several contributions to this volume do precisely that, asking critical questions about the ideological functions of critical theory. Robert Cox, who famously claimed that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ (1981, 128, emphasis in original), knew very well that this claim applied also to his own theory. Yet at the same time, theory is never merely ideological. In the quest for knowledge, we always do step outside, aiming at achieving an ‘objectivity’ that is not reducible to purely subjective perspective (Fluck 2010, 2014, 2017). Knowledge is neither merely subjective nor purely objective, and indeed one could say that ideological thinking begins precisely when one of these two partial views is adopted (Schindler 2020). A theory-as-ideology research agenda implies hence an acknowledgement of the tension between these two terms. It implies enquiry into what constitutes the difference between theory and ideology, as well as into how precisely contemporary theories are ideological. It implies, in particular, enquiry into the concrete role that theories play in the world of politics (Martill 2017). In this chapter, we outline a theory-as-ideology research agenda. We will first explain why we think that the pursuit of such an agenda is particularly necessary and urgent today. Then we conduct a brief review of the literature on theory and ideology in International Relations (IR), laying out recent and older resources for enquiring into theory as ideology. Finally, we set out the three key tasks on the theory-as-ideology research agenda and discuss how the contributions to this volume address them.

The crisis of politics and the politics of knowledge It has become a common refrain to speak of a crisis of global politics (e.g. Martill and Kahn 2018). Various factors are often cited as having contributed to the sense that politics is in a state of crisis, including the rise of populism and of populist rhetoric, the dislocating effects of social media on opinion formation, the spread of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment in a number of regions and the rise of non-Western powers and the corresponding challenge to liberal international order. While the changing nature of politics has been the focus of much scholarship, however, the consequences for the politics of knowledge have received somewhat less attention. Indeed, all the mentioned aspects of the crisis raise questions about the relationship between theory and ideology. In one way or another, both the status and the content of theoretical knowledge is directly implicated in contemporary political conflicts. In the following, we will specify two concrete ways in which this is the case. The first piece of evidence that speaks to the implication of IR theory in the current crisis of politics can be found in the emergence of new faultlines of political conflict. The backlash against globalisation is one example of such a faultline. Conflict between those who support and benefit from economic openness on the one hand, and those who fear the dislocation this brings on the other, has become

Introduction 3 increasingly salient in recent years and is leading to the restructuring of party systems the world over. The new politics of globalisation pits advocates of integrated markets, global governance, human rights and liberal values against their detractors across the globe (Azmanova 2011; Thérien and Nöel 2008). Whereas previous generations could be said to have fought over ‘domestic’ questions of redistribution, social justice and societal norms and values, the nature of the international itself has become implicated in contemporary political contestation. Debates within the academy, therefore, now increasingly map onto political faultlines. The debate between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism is played out in current political arguments over the merits of economic openness (Zürn and de Wilde 2016), while mainstream IR theoretical traditions of liberalism and realism are equally implicated in the political dispute over the nature of globalisation today (Siles-Brügge 2019; Schweller 2018). This constitutes a problem for theory, since theories that themselves have a clear political stance in the conflicts of our time (like cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, or liberalism and realism) will have difficulties to account for the emergence and effects of the conflicts themselves. Theories that stand on one side in a conflict cannot grasp the conflict as a whole (cf. Schindler 2014). Partial theories lack analytical purchase. This diagnosis applies not only to conflicts within states but also to disagreements between states. Both the United States and Russia have, for instance, come to articulate competing conceptions of international order in recent decades, with Vladimir Putin’s ‘new realism’ and insistence on the emergence of a ‘polycentric’ global order contrasting markedly with the United States’ continued efforts to expand the liberal project abroad (Sakwa 2015). China, too, has stepped up its rhetoric in recent years concerning the illegitimacy of the US-led international order, bringing Washington and Beijing into political conflict far more frequently (Wang 2015; Schweller and Pu 2011). These challengers of the existing order do not seek to challenge liberal conceptions of domestic order per se – since both Russia and China are essentially capitalist powers – but rather conceptions of international order which they feel disbenefit them, thereby implicating IR theoretical debates over the nature of this order in the ensuing political struggle. With the present return of Cold War thinking in the relationship between Russia and NATO (Pouliot 2010; Schindler and Wille 2015), we may and should ask – as IR scholars did during the Cold War (Ashley 1981, 1987) – how, for instance, realist thinking is implicated in straining political relationships, leading to allegations that the respective other is ‘merely’ pursuing power and military advantage. Apart from the described changes in the nature of political dispute, a second factor that warrants a problematisation of the ideological role of theory consists in the fact that academic study itself – and science in particular – is more openly, more explicitly, and more directly involved in political confrontations than before. This diagnosis is one core aspect associated with so-called post-truth politics (Michelsen and Tallis 2018; Wight 2018). American right-wing politicians, for instance, have increasingly turned science into an area of political dispute. One first crucial object of contestation was the teaching of the theory of evolution. Alt-right activists managed to introduce alternative accounts of the origins of life

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on the planet – so-called creationism – into curricula in American schools. Their success was founded not so much on direct ideological manipulation, but rather stemmed not least from their deployment of critical and constructivist accounts of knowledge. Wasn’t the most advanced theoretical view one that acknowledged the relativity and the limits of our knowledge? And why shouldn’t this view, associated with postmodern thinkers – but also critical theorists of knowledge like Feyerabend – be applied to all kinds of theoretical constructs? Indeed, the strategies that could be observed at work in discrediting the scientific account of evolution were soon applied also in other domains. So-called climate sceptics founded their arguments on the same kind of pseudo-scientific argumentation. A number of observers even concluded that the whole post-truth world is an outgrowth of academic criticism of knowledge – in the words of one of them, that postmodernism is ‘the godfather of post-truth’ (McIntyre 2018, 150; for many others, see Kakutani 2018; Sismondo 2017). The use of seemingly critical theories of knowledge production on the side of right-wing ideologues has led to growing concern among critical and reflexive theorists (cf. Crilley and Chatterje-Doody 2018; Hyvönen 2018; Marshall and Drieschova 2018; Michelsen 2018). This concern contributes to the growing sense of a broader ‘crisis of critique’ that haunts critical scholarship (Kurki 2011; Azmanova 2014; Fluck 2014, 2016; Koddenbrock 2015; Schmid 2018). Quite early on in the development of this concern Bruno Latour claimed that critique was ‘out of steam’ (2004). Prompted by the advance of climate scepticism, Latour argued that it seemed the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact – as we have learnt to combat so efficiently in the past – but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! (Latour 2004, 227, emphasis in original) In Latour’s perspective, the weapon of ideology critique was used by the wrong side and for the wrong purposes, and he concluded that a different approach to ‘good matters of fact’ was necessary, one that recognised the positive work inherent in establishing a fact. Whatever one may think of Latour’s conclusion, it is obvious that the problem he describes points to the need for increased reflexivity specifically about critical theoretical approaches to knowledge. Have they become manifestations of ideological thinking? Was this to be expected, given that all theoretical ideas ultimately cannot be separated from the sphere of politics? Or should we attempt to erect anew a clearer and more straightforward conceptual separation of theory from ideology? To sum up, there is a double need for increased reflexivity about the role of theory in the world. On the one hand, new political faultlines have brought into view the fact that basic conceptions of world politics are tools of political and ideological contention. On the other hand, the claim that knowledge is ideological has itself been used ever more by political actors. Both developments result

Introduction 5 in two interlinked challenges for IR theory as it presently stands: One is that it is not impartial in these political conflicts, and the other is that it is unable to gain sufficient analytical purchase when it comes to accounting for such disagreement. It is these challenges to IR theory which motivate our attempt to reinvigorate and strengthen the study of theory as ideology in IR. Our aim is to problematise the relationship between theory and ideology in IR and to show how a reflexive approach can help us to understand how our theories relate to broader political and social conflicts in the world today.

The theory/ideology nexus in International Relations The separation of theory from ideology has its roots in a positivist understanding of science, which is founded on a sharp separation of the knowing subject and the world (cf. Hamati-Ataya 2013; Jackson 2008, 2016). The divide has been reinforced by the belief that theories of International Relations (IR) do not travel well outside the discipline (Buzan and Little 2001, 20), that patterns of domestic political contestation do not map onto disagreements on international issues (e.g. Waltz 1954, 1979) and that the conduct of foreign policy has tended to be an elite-driven affair, the subject of which was both technical and highly opaque (Wagner 2006). Yet we are convinced that reflection on theory as ideology is an important component and part of any social research, and that this is a particularly urgent concern today. In the following, we take stock of some of the reasons of the neglect of enquiries into theory as ideology and then discuss sources for a reflexive approach. The neglect of theory as ideology The separation of subject and object is arguably a key element of theories described as positivist. In IR, this separation was formulated in decisive terms, notably by Kenneth Waltz in his influential Theory of International Politics (1979). Waltz describes it as a core task of any scientific theory to distance itself from the manifold and confusing details of the social world. For Waltz, academic knowledge is gained by abstracting from a complex and messy world – by moving ‘away from “reality”’ (Waltz 1979, 7). And while the Waltzian positivist understanding was questioned by some critical theorists (see notably Ashley 1984), it has been accepted by many of Waltz’s rationalist critics, who raised objections against the contents but not the epistemological basis of Waltz’s theory and who are influential in the discipline to this day. The pretentions to scientific enquiry which came, with Waltz, to dominate what was once termed ‘an American social science’ (Hoffmann 1977) precluded acknowledgement of the ideological status of theory, based as it was on a ‘dualist’ epistemology which posited a distinction between the observer and the (social) world under observation (Jackson 2008). From this perspective, theories are neutral tools (or, in some accounts, lenses) through which analysts can apprehend elements of the world around them. But this perspective does not leave much scope

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for the kind of reflexivity necessary to understand the ideological credentials of one’s own tools of analysis, nor, crucially, does it offer any guidance on how to proceed when these theoretical perspectives are themselves encountered in the empirical world they are supposed to be describing. As long as IR theories are understood as neutral tools of analysis, their role in the very politics they seek to explain will be difficult to grasp (Schindler 2014). Apart from the described basic problem with ‘positivist’ social science, which precludes the study of theory as ideology, specific disciplinary developments within IR have also hindered a focus on the role of ideologies. Thus, realist and behaviourist assumptions about the nature of the state as a unitary actor – and the national interest as a fixed category – have kept discussion of key inputs into the foreign policy process, including political parties and other domestic actors with distinct ideologies, at bay. Realism, specifically in its Waltzian ‘neo-realist’ variant, also acknowledges little space for ideology in explaining state behaviour; states which pursue goals that are inimical to the national interest do not survive long, and by definition those that have survived have been socialised not to act in accordance with ideological whims (or so the realist logic goes). Meanwhile, many of these assumptions were subsequently reproduced in state-centric variants of liberal and constructivist theory (e.g. Nye 1988; Wendt 1992) even after realism ceased to be the dominant theoretical paradigm in the discipline, and this goes some way to explaining why it is that the study of ideology and IR has taken so long to emerge (e.g. Cantir and Kaarbo 2012, 14; Martill 2017, 237; Rathbun 2004, 6). Moreover, from the early days of the discipline, the assumption that international politics bore no logical relation to established political positions at the domestic level held strong. Martin Wight famously argued in his 1960 paper ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ that the international domain – the ‘realm of recurrence and repetition’ – was not suited for the kind of theorising which characterised the domestic domain (Wight 1960). On this view, distinct logics applied to the international domain, which not only made it unsuitable for normative theorising but also distinguished it from patterns of thought linked to existing political positions. Waltz had made a similar claim in his earlier text Man, the State, and War, in which he argued the onset of the First World War showed that political actors of all stripes exhibited a tendency, ultimately, to fall behind the national interest at times of crisis, the suggestion being that the demands of survival in an anarchic system will prevail over professed ideological concerns (Waltz 1954). In their various iterations, these views are suggestive of a profound scepticism in the discipline about the relevance of categories – including ideology – which are thought to be redundant in strategic calculations. Resources for a reflexive approach Against the described background, it is no surprise that a key starting point for enquiries into theory as ideology in IR can be found precisely in the problematisation of (neo-)realism as ideology. Early critics of ideology in IR focussed

Introduction 7 precisely on theoretical arguments which posit that only strategic calculations count in inter-state relations. The idea that states find themselves in an anarchic ‘state of nature’, like individuals in Thomas Hobbes’s thought experiment (what Hedley Bull termed the ‘domestic analogy’, cf. Bull 1966, 35), was considered early on as part and parcel of the ideological worldview that shaped the actual conduct of international relations (Ashley 1981, 1987; Jahn 1999). This criticism is an aspect also of a seminal Millennium article by Robert Cox (1981) that received much attention in the discipline. The article is widely read and cited as an example of the origins of critical theory in IR, in both its explicitly Marxian/ Gramscian account of world politics and – perhaps more important – its emphasis on the relativity of knowledge and the politics of knowledge, which informed subsequent critiques of ‘problem-solving theory’ (cf. Hutchings 2007; Hobson 2007). In Cox’s view, all theory is ideological, not merely neorealist IR theory. Theory is never only concerned with objective knowledge. Instead, theory always expresses a particular perspective. It is always partial and cannot be otherwise. For Cox, this insight did not imply that there was no purpose, or no sense, in striving for objectivity. In fact, Cox himself sought to achieve what he termed a ‘perspective on perspectives’ (1981, 128). Precisely by acknowledging the perspective inherent in a theory, Cox believed to be able to transcend this very perspective. Yet, nonetheless, this transcendence would never, for Cox, result in an ahistorical viewpoint from which to judge for all eternity. As he reasoned, the more a theory claimed to be universal and ahistorical, the more it concealed its actual historical rootedness, and the more important it was to ‘examine it as ideology’ (1981, 128). Since the publication of Cox’s piece, there has emerged a voluminous literature, from a critical perspective, on the politics of theory construction itself. A number of these works have been explicitly Marxist in nature. Justin Rosenberg notably labelled realism the ‘conservative ideology of the exercise of modern state power’ in his book, The Empire of Civil Society (1994, 30), since these views served the interests of the dominant capitalist classes. Stephen Gill (1995) offered a critique of neoliberalism along similar lines, emphasising the ideological credentials of liberal IR theory and the elite interests served by this mode of thinking. Other scholars have taken a more linguistic avenue of critique: Ashley’s searing critiques of Waltz’s neorealist theory became part of what was later labelled the ‘linguistic turn’, which focussed on how discourses constitute the world we live in (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989). Crucially, many contributors to this turn understood IR theories as an important part of these discourses – the theories were, as Rob Walker famously put it, more interesting as ‘phenomena to be explained than as explanations’ (Walker 1993, 6). Since the 1990s, the concern about theory as ideology has spread to many subfields of IR. These subfields include areas focussed on specific empirical domains – critical security studies (C.A.S.E. 2006), critical terrorism studies (Jackson et al. 2007), critical development studies (Ziai 2014), to name three examples. They were inspired by broader theoretical streams such as poststructuralism (Campbell 1998), intellectual history (Behr and Heath 2009; Bell 2002), feminism and

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postcolonial theory (cf. Hutchings 2007) and Frankfurt School critical theory. The latter field offers a particularly rich discussion, not least given the prevalence of work in this vein seeking – on the basis of Mannheim’s thought in particular – to expose the ideological underpinnings of a number of international concepts and traditions, including realism and the state of nature (Jahn 1999), liberal internationalism (Jahn 2009, 2013) and (Habermasian) critical theory itself (Jahn 1998). The idea that theories are linked to political ideologies has also played an important role in constructivist theory. For example, Alexander Wendt describes specific theoretical conceptions of anarchy as reifications. The realist conception of a Hobbesian state of nature constitutes, according to Wendt, only one specific version of anarchy that itself has performative effects: It is, Wendt claims, a selffulfilling prophecy that helps bring about the world it seeks to explain (Wendt 1992, 1999). While it makes sense to distinguish the constructivist from the critical variant of studying theory-as-ideology, they both share a reflexive concern: a concern about the particular perspective that is contained in a theory (Hamati-Ataya 2013, 674–680). This concern is expressed in the notion of ‘double hermeneutic’ – the idea that any science of the social world adds to the efforts of the members of the social world who – like the scientists – seek to explain and interpret what happens around them (Giddens 1984; Guzzini 2000). Wendt explicitly ascribes to every social agent ‘a theoretical understanding (however inaccurate) of its activities’ and the capacity ‘to reflexively monitor and potentially adapt its behavior’ (1987, 359). It is only a small step from this constructivist insight to the problematisation of theory-as-ideology. Arguably the themes of Cox’s analysis resonate in the disciplinary mainstream, too, especially in work on the politics of foreign policy. Within neoclassical realism and foreign policy analysis (FPA) the study of ideology and party politics – and the mechanisms linking these factors to international outcomes – has become commonplace (e.g. Bell 2002; Cassels 1996; Haas 2003; Hudson and Vore 1995, 217; Hunt 1987; Khong 2008; Martill 2017; Rathbun 2004, 6; Walt 1987). Much has been written on the role of ideology in the Cold War (Gaddis 1997; Haas 2005, 2007; Kramer 1999; Rosecrance and Stein 1993) and in motivating changes in the international economic order (e.g. Blyth 1997; Pechová 2012; Schäfer 2016; Vail 2014, 2015). These works, whilst foregrounding ideology, did not seek to make claims about the politics of theory construction itself, nor to speak to the ideological status of theory. However, a number of works within this field have sought to link concepts, categories and theories from IR to the content of political ideologies, and in doing so have moved much closer to the critical theoretical perspective on ideology. Ceadel (1987), for instance, argued early on that the views of political actors could be understood only through their correspondence to existing IR theoretical categories. A number of scholars have since examined questions at the theory/ideology nexus, including the ideological status of IR conceptual categories (Wisotzki 2002; Rathbun 2004, 2012a, 2012b; Thérien 2015; Whitehead 2015), the translation of scholarly categories into political programmes (Geis and Wagner 2011; Hayes and James 2014; Ish-Shalom 2006a, 2006b), the politics of divergent foreign policy worldviews (Gries 2014; Hofmann 2013, 2017; Martill

Introduction 9 2018, 2019; Rathbun 2011; Thérien and Nöel 2008) and the political positioning of IR scholars (Rathbun 2012c). The foundations of IR as a discipline, then, have worked against efforts to compare and contrast theoretical and ideological knowledge claims, a product both of the scientific pretentions of IR as it evolved as a separate discipline and of the claim that ‘the international’ was a field in which distinct political logics applied. Critical works of various stripes have done much in recent decades to deconstruct some of these assumptions, and our enquiry in this volume may be read as a contribution to this tradition, albeit one that focuses more specifically on the nexus of theory and ideology than previous works have done. In the next section, we lay out the three core tasks of the theory-as-ideology research agenda developed in this book.

Theory-as-ideology: a research agenda All social science requires study of theory-as-ideology. Without an interrogation of the ideological role of its theories in the world, social science risks becoming an uncritical and unreflexive enterprise, unaware of the fact that it constitutes part of the world it examines. However, the study of theory-as-ideology does not constitute an independent purpose that should be pursued merely for its own sake. Such an enquiry is itself a useful and indeed necessary aspect of the more general scientific quest to gain knowledge of the social world. Indeed, we would maintain that, from a theory-as-ideology perspective, the quest for reflexivity goes hand in hand with the quest for objective knowledge (Fluck 2016, 2017). Through the reflexive study of how theories shape the world they seek to explain, we can hope to gain a better understanding of both the world and our role in it. We can hope to achieve what Cox termed a ‘perspective on perspectives’ (1981, 128). This, then, is the key purpose and promise of a theory-as-ideology research agenda. In this volume, we break down the theory-as-ideology approach into three core tasks: conceptual reflection on the distinction between theory and ideology, enquiry into the ideological character of concrete theories, including critical theories, and examination of the role of theorisation outside academia. These three tasks correspond to the three parts of our book, and we use the following discussion to introduce the volume. The first task involves reflection on the conceptual distinction between theory and ideology and study of the relationship between the two concepts. Beginning this section, Chapter 1 by Hartmut Behr argues that that there is value in searching for and establishing criteria that allow us to distinguish between different knowledge claims as either ideological or theoretical. Behr bases this argument on an engagement with the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Morgenthau and Eric Voegelin. Chapter 2 by Benjamin Herborth offers a critical account of efforts to establish an objective distinction between theory and ideology. Herborth examines the use of the concept of ideology in different traditions of thought and comes to the conclusion that the term ‘ideology’ serves to decontest knowledge claims, that is, to take them out of political debate and immunise

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them from critique. Katarzyna Kaczmarska, in Chapter 3, examines the politics of labelling knowledge claims ‘theoretical’ and ‘ideological’ within the discipline itself, drawing on interviews with a number of scholars to show how the designation of ‘theory’ is used within IR for the purposes of distinction and exclusion. Chapter 4, the final chapter in this section, by Florian Edelmann, engages with the Luhmannian critique that Habermas’s critical concept of ideology is itself ideological. From Luhmann’s perspective, the key question that distinguishes theory and ideology is whether (or not) it privileges the knowledge of the social theorist over that of ‘lay’ members of society. The second task involves working to expose the ideological character of theory itself, including critical theory. Indeed, the first and second chapters in this section are concerned precisely with the problem of how critical theories themselves turn ideological. Chapter 5 by Albena Azmanova is concerned with the ideological problems of critique in a purportedly democratic spirit. Azmanova focuses on Habermas’s critical social theory and his turn to communicative rationality and argues that this ‘democratic’ turn in Habermas’s thought represents a shift from the critique of ideology to ideology construction, a move which reifies the institutions of democratic citizenship and undermines the emancipatory potential of critical theory. Chapter 6 by Valerie Waldow examines critical accounts of the democratic peace literature that posit a (concealed) role for this body of thought in justifying democratic wars. Waldow argues that this critique itself must be understood as ideological, since it is premised on acceptance of a specific concept of democracy that hinders the original purpose of critique rather than furthering it. Chapter 7, by Philip Cerny, provides a critical analysis of what he sees as the most powerful ideological theory of our time, namely neoliberalism. Distinguishing between different variants of that theory, he discerns the main ideological pillars of neoliberal order, arguing that neoliberalism has become hegemonic in practice as a result of globalisation and the resulting fragmentation of political economy. Chapter 8, by Benjamin Martill, examines the thought of British Liberal politician Jo Grimond as a means of studying the theory/ideology nexus of Cold War liberalism. A close reading of Grimond’s political thinking allows Martill to discern the origins of contemporary liberal IR theory in the concrete political confrontations of an earlier time. The third task is to examine theorising outside the academy, in terms of both its specific form and content and the means by which knowledge is translated between the academy and the public and political realms. In Chapter 9, the first chapter in this section, Leonie Holthaus and Jens Steffek examine the ‘trading zones’ between theory and practice in relation to international organisations in the era of welfare internationalism. They are interested in showing how theoretical knowledge travels – or is translated – from one sphere to the other, and they show that the border between the spheres is more porous than often assumed. Focusing on the empirical example of ‘Ecovillages’, Chapter 10 by Philip Wallmeier reflects on what it means that non-academic theorists in ‘intentional communities’ are convinced that academic knowledge is ideological – and vice versa, that academic

Introduction 11 theorists tend to treat the knowledge of the Ecovillagers as ideological. Wallmeier reconstructs these mutual allegations of ideology as a conflict over forms of life. Sebastian Schindler, in Chapter 11, examines how microanalyses of concrete social practices and situations can help us understand the ideological aspects of academic knowledge claims. Schindler shows how ‘zooming in’ on the concrete, non-academic theories inter alia of Bedouin women, Maori rebels and eighteenthcentury diplomats and princes can be used to criticise academic theories, targeting variously their translations, cultural limitations, conceptual inadequacies and problematic effects. These, then, are three concrete tasks animating theory-as-ideology as an intellectual programme and motivating the contributions to this volume. Each of the tasks examines a different facet of the complex relationship between theory and ideology and thus contributes to the broader aim of the theory-as-ideology research programme to further our understanding of the politics of knowledge in IR theory. What unites this programme is problematisation of the assumption that IR theory is an entirely neutral endeavour separate from politico-ideological argumentation. Nonetheless, and crucially, the study of theory-as-ideology is not premised on the opposite assumption that theory is nothing but ideology and that one can simply eradicate the difference between the two notions without any loss. In her concluding remarks, Beate Jahn terms this condition the ‘theory-asideology’ paradox. If we acknowledge the ‘double hermeneutic’ – that is, that our theoretical knowledge of the social world is at the same time the knowledge of participants in this world – then we can understand that the relationship between theory and ideology is not easily resolvable one way or the other. On the one hand, it lies in the nature of theoretical enquiry to step outside, to seek out an impartial and neutral point from which to observe society. This is not in and of itself problematic; it rather lies in the nature of all theoretical (critical) thinking. On the other hand, this quest to step outside does not mean that we actually do get outside; all our knowledge remains rooted in time and space. In our view, it is of crucial importance to acknowledge this basic condition of all theoretical thinking, and one core task of a theory-as-ideology approach is precisely to draw attention to it. All true theory is distinct from ideology, and all true theory is ideology. This fundamental paradox is, on the one hand, unacknowledged by positivist science. On the other hand, a critical and reflexive programme founded only on the latter of the two premises equally risks leaving unacknowledged the paradox. Both ways of leaving the paradox unacknowledged actually constitute deficiencies – or, we might even say, ideologies! For this reason, our book contains approaches that do both – that seek distinctions as well as translations, that separate as well as equate. This is what we understand as the main purpose of a ‘theory-as-ideology’ research programme in a discipline that, on the one hand, too often forgets that it is part not only of society but also of societal struggles – and on the other, too often ignores that its inevitable implication in societal struggles doesn’t necessitate the conclusion that theoretical truth can be abandoned.

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Thérien, Jean-Philippe (2015): The United Nations ideology: From ideas to global policies, in: Journal of Political Ideologies 20 (3), pp. 221–243. Thérien, Jean-Philippe and Nöel, Alain (2008): Left and right in global politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vail, Marc (2014): Varieties of liberalism: Keynesian responses to the great recession in France and Germany, in: Governance 27 (1), pp. 63–85. Vail, Marc (2015): Between one-nation toryism and neoliberalism: The dilemmas of British conservatism and Britain’s evolving place in Europe, in: Journal of Common Market Studies 53 (1), pp. 106–122. Wagner, Wolfgang (2006): The democratic control of military power Europe, in: Journal of European Public Policy 13 (2), pp. 200–216. Walker, Rob (1993): Inside/outside: International Relations as political theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walt, Stephen (1987): The origins of alliances, London: Cornell University Press. Waltz, Kenneth (1954): Man, the state, and war: A theoretical analysis, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill. Waltz, Kenneth (1979): Theory of international politics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Wang, Fei-Ling (2015): From Tianxia to Westphalia: The evolving Chinese conception of sovereignty and world order, in: Ikenberry, John, Jisi, Wang and Feng, Zhu (eds.), America, China, and the struggle for world order, London: Springer, pp. 43–68. Wendt, Alexander (1987): The agent-structure problem in International Relations theory, in: International Organization 41 (3), pp. 335–370. Wendt, Alexander (1992): Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics, in: International Organization 46 (2), pp. 391–425. Wendt, Alexander (1999): Social theory of international politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Laurence (2015): International democracy promotion as a political ideology: Upsurge and retreat, in: Journal of Political Ideologies 20 (1), pp. 10–26. Wight, Colin (2018): Post-truth, postmodernism and alternative facts, in: New Perspectives 26 (3), pp. 17–30. Wight, Martin (1960): Why is there no international theory?, in: International Relations 2 (1), pp. 35–48. Wisotzki, Simone (2002): Die Nuklearwaffenpolitik Großbritanniens und Frankreichs. Eine konstruktivistische Analyse, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Ziai, Aram (2014): Post-Development-Ansätze. Konsequenzen für die Entwicklungstheorie, in: Politische Vierteljahressschrift Sonderheft 48, pp. 405–434. Zürn, Michael and de Wilde, Pieter (2016): Debating globalization: Cosmopolitanism and communitarianism as political ideologies, in: Journal of Political Ideologies 21 (3), pp. 280–301.

Part I

Understanding theory and ideology

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Theory vs. ideology Validity criteria for knowledge claims and normative conditions of critique Hartmut Behr

Introduction I identify two phenomena that suggest a rethinking of criteria, which allow and enable us to assess the validity of knowledge claims and to invalidate certain claims respectively: One is political, the other is academic. Both phenomena demand a yardstick for such evaluation which this chapter attempts to develop. We live politically in times where knowledge and knowledge claims have become actively blurred and distorted through political leaders and movements who are said to be populist. Whatever populism means,1 the distortion of knowledge criteria through strategic lying and the manipulation of reality and reality perception belongs to the usual means of the likes of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and so on. And populist movements across Europe are rising as recent elections in Austria, Italy, Sweden, Germany, and last, but not least, Brexit demonstrate, as well as the haunting of the political discourse by the far right wing and strongest opposition party in the current German Bundestag, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Against getting used to the   language of the ‘post-factual’ and ‘alternative truth’ – which indicate totalitarian political tendencies2 – this chapter attempts to develop criteria for the assessment of knowledge claims. Such criteria which are epistemological in nature would allow us to refuse certain claims as unsubstantiated, distorting and distorted, and propagandistic, and other claims as valid, while invalid claims need to be ceaselessly deconstructed and revealed in their invalidity. The second reason to reflect upon validity criteria of knowledge is what Colin Wight calls ‘disengaged pluralism’ (2015). While pluralism is principally desirable and I do not make any argument against methodological or epistemological pluralism in the social sciences (on the contrary), the uncritical acceptance of knowledge claims in academia and their relativistic side-by-side is nevertheless problematic. The idea here is not necessarily to refuse certain claims (as with regards to politics), but to elucidate, to conduct a self-reflexive discourse and to make transparent their different epistemological nature and composition. Part of such an attempt is also caused by my scepticism with the widespread exercise of critique, especially in what is called ‘critical International Relations (IR)’, often for its own sake as part of an academic cottage industry, without clarification of

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the assumptions which underpin the critique and without normative (re-)direction. Then critique is likely to become idiosyncratic, jargonish and instrumental without being aware of its own conditions (Behr 2017). School-thinking and silos subsequently prevail over an intersubjective academic discourse about common problems and concerns (Behr and Williams 2017). This chapter is thus an attempt to respond to these briefly outlined problems and to elaborate and recapture validity criteria for knowledge and knowledge claims. The main distinction which I introduce for such an elaboration and recapturing is the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’, referring back to Hannah Arendt from her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). I will then suggest three critical conditions of knowledge claims, discussing briefly theoretical commitments in Hans Morgenthau, Herbert Marcuse and Eric Voegelin, suggesting their triangulation which will serve as epistemological yardstick for knowledge criteria, discussed in the Conclusions under the rubric of ‘keeping the epistemological tension’ when and where they are linked back to the initial distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’. Such validity criteria do not intend, to be clear, to tell us and prescribe one particular way to conduct politics or to analyse politics, however, they rule out certain ways to conduct and to analyse politics. They thus suggest the critical engagement with and the elimination of certain claims to knowledge, not the proposition of definite statements.

Further exposition of the problem and argument We know the concept of Standortgebundenheit (or context-bound and contextgenerated knowledge) from Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and Morgenthau’s theorising of international politics (amongst others Behr and Devereux 2017); IR folk, however, may be more familiar with Robert Cox’s reminder that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ or with the notion of ‘situated knowledge’ from feminist theory (Cox 1981; for situated knowledge, see Haraway 1988). They are very similar in their epistemological argument about the positionality of knowledge. Because of positionality, so a Coxian and feminist tradition in IR argue, theory and knowledge would always be ideological and ideologically motivated. As important as these reminders are – as they emphasise the interpretivist, hermeneutic nature of social sciences3 – I intend to argue that we nevertheless see a massive problem in equating theory with ideology. This is because such equation obscures an important difference of the nature of knowledge claims that becomes discernible precisely through the differentiation of theory and ideology. Especially in times of populism and academic silos, this difference seems crucial as it can teach us about the nature of knowledge claims, the language in which they are framed and the consequences for political action. Thus, as much as I agree with the observation of positionality,4 I argue that the term ‘ideology’ should be reserved for the denomination of a distinct kind of knowledge claims and knowledge production. If we sacrifice such a distinction, knowledge claims withdraw from judgement and we may end up in infinite relativism.5 Ultimately, one might end up in the unfortunate position to have become

Theory vs. ideology 21 unable to judge the epistemological difference between, for instance, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Aristotle’s Politics. The term of ideology should thus be reserved for the identification of particular ‘knowledge’ claims while acknowledging and emphasising the importance of positionality, however, not calling this ideology, but ‘positionality’ or Standortgebundenheit. Such differentiation argues for a pejorative understanding of ‘ideology’, and it introduces normative criteria for the rejection and defence respectively of certain claims to knowledge.

Theory vs ideology Following Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951; see also Baehr 2010), we can develop a set of criteria, summarised in Table 1.1, for the distinction between theory and ideology as two different types of knowledge to identify their epistemological nature and their implications for political action.6 Arendt elaborated these criteria from her empirical and conceptual studies of National Socialism and Stalinism as totalitarian forms of thinking and acting which are based on (what she calls) ‘ideology’. ‘Ideologies’ could be characterised according to the following criteria opposed to ‘theory’ as a contrasting type of knowledge production and knowledge claims. Arendt understands totalitarianism as a new form of government which is based on all those criteria listed under ideology. Political activism would trump contemplation and reflection and call for action instead; ideologues would also dismiss discourse and debate and replace deliberative politics through propaganda and simplifications; the better argument is substituted through belief in certain assumptions and propositions which propagate truth claims rather than being open for the pluralist deliberation of ambiguous and eventually unanswerable questions. In On Violence (1969), Arendt admits, however, that even the rudest form of totalitarian government, which is for her undoubtedly National Socialism, depends on some form of deliberation and consent. We can thus conclude that the contrasting juxtaposition of ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’ describes indeed a spectrum with tendencies of more or less ideological and/or more theoretical knowledge production, knowledge claims and political practices rather than fixed types. In other words, in the realities of politics and intellectual history we do not find clearly and unambiguously either ideological or theoretical claims, doctrines and political action, but always tendencies and emphases (even if these are strong and overwhelming) towards the one or the other. Table 1.1 Criteria for distinguishing theory and ideology as different knowledge types Theory

Ideology

Contemplation and reflection Discourse and debate Questions and argumentation

Activism Propaganda/simplification Belief systems, unquestionable propositions, assumptions, essentialisms Truth claims, answers to everything, anti-pluralism

Openness to and acceptance of unanswerable, ambiguous questions and issues

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If we applied these criteria to the ‘theory’ discourse in the social sciences and in IR, not all ‘theories’ that are being conceived and taught as such appear as ‘theory’, but as ‘ideology’.7 At least, however, they open-up a debate on the question of whether, or not, specific doctrines and narratives correspond more to ‘theory’ or ‘ideology’.8 This is an important yardstick. However, even if following the possibility to scrutinise social science tenets according to their ‘theory’ or ‘ideology’character, the question (re-)emerges of how to deal with the persisting problem of positionality alluded to earlier. I suggest here that a reflection upon normative conditions of critique which links knowledge back to intrinsic conditions of humans’ relation to the political and social world can contribute to the elucidation and (self-)awareness of promoting certain knowledge claims (which are nolens volens always critical with some other claims). And depending on the degree to which knowledge accommodates for these normative conditions of critique, both can be related back to the Arendtian distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’. This creates finally a set of criteria for valid knowledge (claims) which is (are) valid precisely as it (they) provide(s) for intrinsic conditions of the political and of human’s ontological and epistemological relation to the world.

Three conditions of critique The triangulation of perspectivity, negation and noesis In order to develop normative conditions of critique, I suggest the triangulation of three philosophical notions. These are the notions of perspectivity, which I discuss following the argument of Standortgebundenheit after Morgenthau and Mannheim, of negation, following Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, and noesis, following the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Perspectivity (further discussed in the section ‘On the perspectivity of knowledge claims’) leads to the time-space-contingency of political knowledge and to the socio-political embeddedness of political theory and action. The notion of negation (further discussed in the section ‘On the dialectical negation of knowledge claims’) leads, too, to a theoretical and practical proposition. This proposition holds that there is always another, a next viewpoint and thus no absolute certainty about, and finality of, one’s own theoretical view and practice. Consequently, this proposition leads to the necessity of an inherent and permanent critique towards own theories and practices. In its further consequence, it reasons an intrinsic awareness of the refutability and fallibility of one’s theoretical view and political practice. This might be because of concrete historical alternatives to actual political and social developments or because of counter-arguments to own positions; however, this proposition also includes the normative moment that the theoretician and the politician should always procure and anticipate alternatives. While both propositions of perspectivity/time-space-contingency and of selfcriticality/self-refutability have primarily a deconstructive function of knowledge claims, the notion of noesis (further discussed in the section ‘On the integration of

Theory vs. ideology 23 perspectivity and negation through noesis’) delivers normative standards for rearticulating and reconstructing political knowledge and order after its deconstruction. This points to the necessity of a re-articulating and reconstructive moment in theory and practice that need a (new) normative direction after refuting and deconstruction for two reasons: First, to direct critique itself because critique is not an end in itself, but needs to serve an intellectual or practical purpose to be meaningful. Second, for the development of theoretical and practical alternatives and visions. Re-articulation after critique is important as we must rebuilt what has been deconstructed before. Critique that is bare of this normative dimension is half-hearted and not helpful. We just need to think of education here: Deconstructing a student paper without giving the student advice for improvement and without being able to explain the marking criteria and our expectations for each mark group is not only not helpful but also makes us look like wisenheimers. Politically speaking, we need to rebuild (alternative or improved) agency/counter-agency after critiquing, otherwise critique is only half-helpful. And for such rebuilding, we need to be normative, as contested as this normativity may be – but this is what we then can and need to argue about. The notion of noesis seems to provide the normativity and language that is needed to cast the direction of reconstruction and re-articulation as it articulates politics without defining the content of politics which would violate the two previous notions of self-criticality/self-refutability and contingency (for further discussion, see Behr 2017, 2019). The triangulation of perspectivity, negation and noesis thus describes a mutually constitutive and reciprocally qualifying interrelation in which, first, noesis as normative reorientation of critique is qualified and controlled by the critical notions of perspectivity (including contingency) and negation (including selfcriticality and self-refutability), which, however, and second, provides such reorientation accounting for the perspectivist and self-critical/self-refutable conditions of knowledge as it does not fix or prescribe an ontological-political or epistemological status quo or telos.9 Noesis normatively delineates an existential spectrum, and most important also the awareness of such a spectrum, of our ontological and epistemological relation as tension to the world as pluralist, interpretivist (and as such perspectivist) and indefinite. Because noesis includes the awareness of, and reflection upon, such a spectrum (called ‘apperception’), it also alerts us of positions which occupy the border area and end poles of the existential spectrum and thus foreclose its openness through definite, essentialising and fixed proclamations about politics. On the perspectivity of knowledge claims Perspectivity is inherent in each and every knowledge production and knowledge claim. The following discussion draws mainly on Morgenthau’s reception of the notion of Standortgebundenheit from Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge.10 There are several threads throughout his oeuvre where Morgenthau points out that all theory and political action is contingent upon factors the occurrences of which we had no knowledge of and consequences which we could not foresee.

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Morgenthau refers to the German term standortgebunden to describe the spatial and temporal conditionality of political and social theory and knowledge. The adjective standortgebunden, and the noun Standortgebundenheit, are from sociologist Karl Mannheim and are key concepts of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1936, 1984). It describes the idea that political theory and action always depend upon the historic and cultural environment in which they have been formulated and in which they are supposed to operate. These terms thus endorse a perspectivist understanding of an object revealing characteristics of itself only in relation to perspectives applied. Accordingly, all social and political knowledge is historically and spatially contingent. In addition to his statements from The Concept of the Political and in The Intellectual and Political Functions of a Theory of International Relations, we find in the Third of Morgenthau’s ‘Six Principles of Political Realism’ no fewer than three paragraphs which explain this position.11 Morgenthau’s epistemological position of Standortgebundenheit coincides with his criticism of the rationalist and positivist ideas of historical progress, techniques of social engineering and the rationality of the ‘Age of Reason’ which would all require a universal standpoint of knowledge from which to derive these ideas and respective strategies for their realisation.12 We thus recognise the critical stance of perspectivism towards three prominent theories of knowledge: First, it is critical about a rationalist approach to overcome the confinements of human knowledge through the construction of knowledge of the external world out of principles possessed by the mind itself.13 Second, this notion is also adverse to an empiricism which would base knowledge about the political world on sensually conceived impressions and which would rely in its assertions about the world on (ostensibly) mind-independent data bruta, that is, methodologically on positivist quantifications and measurements of social and political phenomena, built on the hope that through inductive logic there may be some day some kind of spill-over from data collection to knowledge (see also the discussions in Holt et al. 1960, 152). And third, the notion of perspectivity, because it recognises the mind-independent, however, spatio-temporally qualified status of things real, ‘[which] strips mind of its pretensions, but not of its value or greatness . . . [This notion] dethrones the mind, [and at the same time] recognizes mind as chief in the world’ (Alexander 1960, 186). We here recognise an anti-idealist position against the belief in a ‘world in which there exist only minds’ (Holt et al. 1960, 154, 155). These insights resonate with Cox’s position and the concept of situated knowledge.14 ‘Situated knowledge’ was a term coined by Donna Haraway in 1988 from a feminist perspective in critical response to positivist knowledge claims and the possibility of objective knowledge. She argues that the idea of objective knowledge is based upon a fallacy which assumes the primary validity and reliability of the human senses. Situated knowledge must, therefore, focus on the forms of local and culturally situated ontologies and epistemologies (Haraway 1988, 581). This has been exemplified by the experience of Susanne Hoeber Rudolph who highlighted the impervious dominance of liberal, and especially Lockean

Theory vs. ideology 25 universalist, approaches within the methodological frameworks of American social science and the resulting tensions when conducting research in different cultures. Recalling a 1957 study she undertook with Lloyd Rudolph and Indian graduate students which involved fieldwork in the Thanjavur district in South India, Hoeber Rudolph describes the bewilderment of researchers at the varying interpretations of interview conditions. Instead of one-to-one interviews in which a dialogue between researcher and participant would ensue, the latter was always accompanied by extended family members, and answers were the product of deliberation between them. Thus, it appeared the individual was not the ‘unit of opinion’ and that the ‘singular, private, and personal were alien to the life worlds of Indian towns and villages’ (2005, 5). On the dialectical negation of knowledge claims The second notion which shall be introduced as a component of conditions of critique is the idea of dialectic negation as we know it from Frankfurt School theory. I will draw mainly on Marcuse’s work since this principle communicates most clearly from his writings, particularly from his Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. According to the anti-metaphysical stance of critical theory, that is, according to one of the main differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory (see here esp. Horkheimer 1999 [1937]), dialectic negation is targeted against any speculation and assumption about an essence and telos of history, society and politics. Against such speculation, critical theorists stress the study of historical experience and empirical historical enquiry into genealogical shifts and breaks of social and political developments. In the Introduction to his One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse describes critical theory as the attempt to elaborate historical alternatives to actual pathways of societal developments.15 This takes us to the core of critical theory and its notion of dialectic negation. To find out those historical alternatives and possibilities of its realisation, including reasons for why certain pathways of historical development have dominated over others, historical enquiry is linked to the ideas of emancipation and liberation. The awareness and elaboration of historical alternatives and potentialities underlines humans’ potential role as creator of social, political and economic conditions. This road to permanent and always possible negation and alternatives takes us to the notion of ‘dialectic’. Marcuse writes: Materialist theory thus transcends the given state of fact and moves towards a different potentiality, proceeding from immediate appearance to the essence that appears in it. But here appearance and essence become members of a real antithesis arising from the particular historical structure of the social process of life. The essence of man and of things appears within that structure; what men and things could genuinely be appears in ‘bad’, ‘perverted’ form. At the same time, however, appears the possibility of negating this perversion and realizing in history that which could be. This antagonistic character of the historical process as it is today turns the opposition of essence and

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Hartmut Behr appearance into a dialectical relationship and this relationship into an object of the dialectic. (Marcuse 1968, 67)

As we can see here, the idea of dialectic negation relates to not only materialistic, historical events, thus to ‘historical materialism’, but also the awareness and consciousness of the theoretician. The theoretician not only studies historical ‘realities’ and ‘potentialities’ but also needs to be aware of, and to build in his or her analysis, a dialectic of the argument. The relation between ‘thesis’ and ‘anti-thesis’ and their permanent forward-drive is of both materialistic and intellectual character. This means that we as researchers and political agents need to be always aware of the potential and actual negation of our own argument and action and should even develop and push their limits, finally their own negation. In ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer, too, briefly reflects upon the role of the theorist: ‘(The person of the theoretician) exercises an aggressive critique not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo, but against distracting, conformist, or Utopian tendencies within his own household’ (Horkheimer 1999, 214). However, critical theory goes further and argues that the theoretician is in a position to experience historical potentialities that had never been realised. The question is, how? This envisioning seems possible only through a proactive dialectic forward development of the own theoretical argument and analysis that negates itself as soon as it is made.16 And indeed, this seems to be the idea when Marcuse writes, ‘Reality is overcome by being comprehended as the mere possibility of another reality’ (1968, 83). We can record that the notion of dialectic negation provokes the theoretician, finally everyone, to be aware of the permanent negation of politics and history and of the likewise permanent self-criticality of and counter-possibility of one’s own argument. On the integration of perspectivity and negation through noesis The conditionality and time-space-contingency of political knowledge (and agency) as well as the idea of negation need to be complemented with, and framed within, the notion of noesis, that is, the apperceiving reflectivity of both perspectivity and negation on its own structures, reason and modes of production. While Standortgebundenheit and negation rest on a temporal, deconstructing ontology, suggesting unstable and permanent transformations of society and politics rather than identity and structures of social relations and political order, we need to ask the subsequent question of a normative frame for perspectivity and negation.17 If knowledge is perspectivist and negated (or self-refuted), that is, of deconstructing quality, what then provides the orientation for re-articulating and practicing political order? Voegelin’s notion of noesis provides a fruitful answer, casting apperceiving reflection upon perspectivism and negation. It thus triangulates perspectivism and negation. Voegelin elaborates this notion of noesis going back to Plato and his dialogue Sophistes where Plato distinguishes knowledge from opinion (doxa), with

Theory vs. ideology 27 knowledge as the superior and true from of wisdom compared to arbitrary and opinionated rhetoric. Noesis is thus an intellectual operation that critically reflects upon, and creates an awareness of, the degree to which political order, its institutions and its symbols correspond to humanity, the latter being imagined as an anthropological constitution. Thus, noesis is a device of political judgement that is aware (called ‘apperception’ by Voegelin) of, and judges whether, or not, political action and policies violate or apprehend humanity. But how and as what is humanity imagined? Voegelin refers here to an intellectual figure in neo-Aristotelian theory. This figure is called by Voegelin the ‘divine ground of existence’,18 and which perceives human existence and politics as tension between existential questions that are neither tangible nor answerable; sometimes they appear not even as effable. Such intangibilities and ineffabilities are not a deficiency of a dark age or of a not yet fully developed consciousness. They are rather indicating the fundamental human condition of intellectual and practical limitations; that is, there will always be unanswerable questions of human and political life and subsequently uncontrollable and non-manageable political conditions and consequences. According to Voegelin, this is to be respected (apperceived) and not to be violated by knowledge claims and political practices that pretend to have respective answers. This is Voegelin’s main argument – in agreement with Arendt’s aforementioned definitions – for a critical analysis of politics that would become ideological when and if promoting knowledge claims that pretend to have final, ultimate answers as to the meaning of politics and history and which pursue policies that are based on such claims (see hereto the excellent analysis of Voegelin in 1999 [1938]). ‘The refusal to apperceive’, Voegelin notes, ‘has become . . . the central concept for the understanding of ideological aberrations and deformations’ (2006, 122). Subsequently, it is crucial to be aware of the tension of human beings’ existence as living and participating in a spectrum of intangibilities and ineffabilities and to not attempt to dissolve this tension by claiming final answers and acting upon them. But, again, how does noesis relate to perspectivity and negation? Fundamentally, noesis helps us to articulate a principle for the normative formulation of politics subsequent to perspectivist and dialectic analysis and critique. But while noesis provides normative direction, this direction needs again to be qualified by perspectivity/contingency and negation. Noesis does not revoke, suspend or undermine perspectivity and negation, but accommodates for it. But the noetic articulation of politics needs itself a mechanism of critique which consists of perspectivity and negation. This demand is built in this normative articulation itself. The re-articulating normativity of noesis, in conjunction and triangulated with the deconstructive work of perspectivism and negation, cast and embed the conditions of critique and knowledge (claims) as an epistemological tension. This tension not only disproves of ultimate and final knowledge claims and action with case-hardened consequences as anathematic to the human condition of politics but also demands its cultivation and maintenance for knowledge proper.19

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To sum up, critique, to be meaningful, needs to be aware of and directed by (three conditions in reciprocal triangulation): First, awareness of the perspectivity of the own critique as well as of the standpoint that is criticised; second, the awareness of the negation/refutability of the own critique as well as of the standpoint that is criticised; third, the awareness of the need to re-articulate a framework for ‘better’, alternative theory and agency while this re-articulation must not contradict or obstruct the two preceding principles of perspectivity and negation/ refutability. The principle for this re-articulation is provided by noesis. How can we relate these criteria back to the differentiation between theory and practice from the beginning? I turn now to these concluding thoughts.

Conclusions: keeping the epistemological tension In conclusion, perspectivity, negation and noesis lead to the overarching criterion for critique and knowledge to cultivate and maintain an irreducible tension between individual and general as well as between knowable and unknowable claims. The criticiser must be aware of the context-specific and dialectical character of his or her knowledge (claims), as well as those of the critiqued. At the same time, he or she needs to point to a new direction for the emancipation and improvement of the critiqued without, however, violating the intrinsic conditions of his or her knowledge (claims) as perspectivist and refutable. This tension underlies every meaningful critique. Likewise, this tension must be maintained and not distorted or dissolved. This tension can now be applied to the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’ from the beginning of this chapter, relating this distinction to the observation of whether, or not, knowledge claims maintain an epistemological tension, typical for ‘theory’, but rather untypical for ‘ideology’ that destroys and dissolves this tension. We can assess doctrines according to the question of whether, or not, they maintain this tension. Specifically, whether, or not, such tension is maintained or violated can be scrutinised through the application of Arendt’s four criteria to distinguish theory and/from ideology. We receive a spectrum whose endpoints are demarcated by 1 2 3 4

Contemplation/reflection and/or (call to) activism. Discourse/debate and/or propaganda/simplification/assumptions. Questions/argumentation and/or belief systems/unquestionable propositions/ essentialisms. Openness to/acceptance of unanswerable, ambiguous questions and issues and/or truth claims/answers to everything.

In addition, we can discuss and determine the location of doctrines on this spectrum. They then tend more to knowledge claims and modes of knowledge production proper or to ideology and distortion. The latter shows in calls to action and political activism (consisting for example in a final and ultimate political agenda derived from philosophies of history that assume a certain telos), propaganda

Theory vs. ideology 29 (that manifests primarily in essentialising and simplifying language), irreducible assumptions (on which ‘knowledge’ claims are built and that serve as their beginning) and finally in claims of truth based on the self-proclaimed prerogative to have answers to every problem. To sum up, the link between Arendt’s four criteria for the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’ and the three notions of perspectivity, negation and noesis can be formulated as follows: While noesis provides the awareness of, and reflection upon, perspectivity and negation, the latter two require, and actualise themselves in, contemplation, discourse, argumentation and the openness and acceptance of unanswerable and ambiguous questions. Or put differently: Perspectivity (and contingency) and negation (including selfcritique and dialectic self-refutability) are anathematic to activism, propaganda, unquestionable propositions and essentialism, and truth claims. What do we finally get from this? Nothing less, so my answer, than a yardstick to assess means of knowledge production and knowledge claims as valid or invalid (i.e. as intrinsic and providing for, or as violating and alien to, human intellect and politics). Such a yardstick is important for different reasons: First, they are important for pedagogical and research reasons instructing students and exploring international politics about different modes of knowledge, their assessment and validity. Second, they are politically significant in our times where populist strategies seem to be the dominant mode of speech and action in democratic and less democratic systems and an opinion on Facebook or Twitter seems to enjoy in the wider public, according to the motto of a ‘disengaged pluralism’, the same credibility and significance for political positions as evidenced, scientific knowledge. When validity criteria of knowledge and for the assessment of knowledge claims become obstructed, the restoration of such criteria is crucial in order to discuss political, social and economic problems with the complexity, evidence and considerateness needed. Finally, one can refer to Walter Lippmann, who famously stated that liberty can neither be achieved nor defended if a people does not have the means by which to detect lies; however, we need the means to detect lies and distortions and to term them as such.

Notes 1 This is conceptually a yet unclear and much debated question; see Arditi (2007), Berezin (2009) and Müller (2016). 2 See Behr (2017). The relation between critical knowledge (production) and democratic politics has been seminally emphasised by the generation of scholars, who personally witnessed totalitarian movements in the twentieth century. Most important here are, amongst others, Arendt (1951), Marcuse (2002), Morgenthau (1946) and Voegelin (1999); see also Orwell (2009 [1945]). 3 Positionality is one of the main features and characteristics of interpretivist social science; see Bevir (2010). 4 Indeed, positionality is inevitable. The hermeneutic circle of social sciences is not a deficit, but rather a condition of human life and its study. Put differently, and with Alfred Schütz, we always deal with constructions, with constructions of a first and second order: The former of society, the latter of those who study society while the second order constructions are nothing but constructions of those of first order. ‘Reality’ is

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Hartmut Behr hence always mediated twice. Some people talk indeed of a double hermeneutic circle. See Schütz (1962, 1972), Giddens (1984) and Behr (2014). Against which (amongst others) Cox warns us in his sensitive, but, as he becomes reduced to the positionality-dogma, often ignored argument. See his important differentiation between degrees of ideology in theories according to their concealing of, or reflectivity on, their own perspective. Of course, not all knowledge claims which are not ‘ideological’ are not in the strict sense ‘theoretical’, thus theory serves here as a common nominator for non-ideological knowledge and knowledge claims. In IR, see also the critique of Cynthia Weber who calls IR theory ‘ideologies’, apart from post-structuralism. However, she does not, as for example, also David Campbell, apply the criteria to assess and judge other tenets to post-structuralism itself, that is, to this very movement they represent. Their critique and assessment is thus ambivalent at best, hypocritical at worst; see Weber (2014) and Campbell (1998). In IR, such debate would, for instance, relate to important writings which have engaged the theory/ideology problematic, as from Stanley Hoffmann, Miles Kahler, Rob Walker, Steve Smith or Richard Ashley (in the Anglophone context) as well as the pejorative distinction of Robert Keohane in ‘rational’ (i.e. ‘right’) and ‘reflective’ (i.e. improper, subversive) theories; see Smith (2003), Kahler (1990), Walker (1993), Ashley (1987), Keohane (1983) and Hoffmann (1977). It may briefly be mentioned here that noesis does not envision a process by which perspectivity and negation are or become reversed, nullified or in a Hegelian meaning aufgehoben, but their triangulation means that each notion remains fully intact and is in itself an (but only one of three) irreducible and intrinsic condition(s) of knowledge and critique (in a Habermasian sense of gleichurspruenglich). The reasons why I do not refer to Mannheim directly is that in Morgenthau, this principle is framed in much clearer language and practically tangible, whereas Mannheim, especially in the English translations, is sometimes convolute and quirky. See in his Politics Among Nations from the 1954 edition onward; for a deeper discussion of this commitment to contingency in Morgenthau’s writings, see also Williams (2004) and Behr and Rösch (2012). Further to his published oeuvre – such as Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), The State of Political Science (1962) or his The Concept of the Political (2012) – we have additional evidence from his 1952 lecture ‘Philosophy of International Relations’, particularly that of 31 January as well as from letters between Morgenthau and GottfriedKarl Kindermann from the 1960s; see Hans J. Morgenthau Archive, Law Library, Library of Congress Washington, Box 33; see also Behr (2016). See for this realist epistemological position Feldman (1999): ‘The application of the general idea of context dependence to knowledge attributions is straightforward. What it takes for a knowledge . . . to be true can vary from context to context’; also Feldman (2001) and DeRose (2009). Both commitments, however, can be found in Morgenthau’s and Mannheim’s writings some 30 and 50 years earlier. I note with some bewilderment that neither is referenced in the post-structural IR literature. On the opposite, Morgenthau is occasionally even read – though totally misunderstood – as a positivist (see George 1994; Tickner 1988). It seems, that just like other schools in IR, post-structural, critical IR has established a self-referential reference industry and canonised set pieces of knowledge which include and exclude certain literatures, individuals and languages, even though against possible enrichments and gains for theory development if it were opening up to reading intellectual history with a less dogmatic and ‘ideological’ (exactly in the sense as developed here) eye. The tragic of post-structuralism, in contrast to, for example, structural realism where one observes the same school-building and inclusion/exclusion stigmata, is ‘only’ that post-structural, critical IR contradicts and betrays its own (at least) founding principles which have been formulated precisely against such exclusion; see paradigmatically Ashley and Walker (1990).

Theory vs. ideology 31 15 See One-Dimensional Man, Introduction; also see Negations (1968, 71). One could here go back to the wider context of neo-Marxist and neo-Hegelian theory, however, for elaborating the principle of negation for the argument here, it shall suffice to reflect upon Marcuse and Horkheimer. 16 This aspect of negation in Marcuse is very similar with and reminds us of the ideas of ‘aporia’ and ‘erasure’ in Jacques Derrida which suggest that a word as soon as and exactly when and while it is spoken evokes its own negation (‘erasure’) in this very moment. This applies to words as well as to all other forms of reality mediation due to their intrinsic disunity; Derrida writes: ‘There is no culture or cultural identity without this difference within itself’ (Derrida 1992, 9, 10); or: ‘[The] identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself; a culture is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is different from itself’ (Derrida and Caputo 1997, 13); also Derrida (1993). 17 ‘Referent object’ means that, although perspectivity and negation are deconstructive exercises, they emerge from a normative background, need to be guided normatively, and also inherently include a normative reference and framework themselves as each deconstruction is itself, but also begins, a new normative project (even if this is immediately to be erased as soon as it emerges, as argued earlier). For a discussion of this normativity, see Blair (2007); early on this already Loytard (1979) as well as Derrida himself (Kearney 1984). 18 In his German writings, Voegelin terms this Spannung zum Grund; see ‘Anamnesis’, ‘Was ist politische Realitaet?’ [‘What Is Political Reality?’] in Voegelin (2002). 19 Voegelin’s argument that politics is framed and conditioned by an intellectual and existential tension which must be maintained, cultivated and not be dissolved by ultimate knowledge claims and/or extremist politics is in my understanding similar to Derrida’s figure of ‘not yet be’ (i.e. his notions of ‘survenir’ and ‘avenir’; see for a more detailed discussion of these notions in Behr 2014, esp. 108–112). For an interesting dialogue between Voegelin and Derrida which to unfold would go beyond this chapter, see ‘The Paradoxes of Participatory Reality’, by Lee Trepanier, [online] https://voegelinview. com/derrida-and-paradoxes-of-participation-pt-1/ [accessed 20.07.2018].

References Alexander, Samuel (1960): The basis of realism, in: Chisholm, Roderick (ed.), Realism and the background of phenomenology, Illinois: Free Press of Glencoe, pp. 186–222. Arditi, Benjamin (2007): Politics on the edge of liberalism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arendt, Hannah (1951): The origins of totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah (1969): On violence, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. Ashley, Richard (1987): The geopolitical space: Toward a critical social theory of international politics, in: Alternatives 12 (4), pp. 403–434. Ashley, Richard and Walker, Rob (1990): Introduction: Speaking the language of exile: Dissident thought in international studies, in: International Studies Quarterly 34 (3), pp. 259–268. Baehr, Peter (2010): Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism, and the social sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Behr, Hartmut (2014): Politics of difference: Epistemologies of peace, Oxon: Routledge. Behr, Hartmut (2016): Scientific man vs. power politics: A pamphlet and its author between two academic cultures, in: Ethics and International Affairs 30 (1), pp. 33–38. Behr, Hartmut (2017): Conditions of critique and the non-irreversibility of politics, in: Journal of International Political Theory 13 (1), pp. 122–140.

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Behr, Hartmut (2019): Towards a political concept of reversibility in International Relations: Bridging political philosophy and policy studies, in: European Journal of International Relations 25 (4), pp. 1212–1235. Behr, Hartmut and Devereux, Liam (2017): The melodrama of modernity in Karl Mannheims political thought, in: Kettler, David and Meja, Volker (eds.), The Anthem companion to Karl Mannheim, London: Anthem Press, pp. 117–135. Behr, Hartmut and Rösch, Felix (2012): Introduction, in: Behr, Hartmut and Rösch, Felix (eds.), Hans J. Morgenthau: The concept of the political, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–82. Behr, Hartmut and Williams, Michael (2017): Interlocuting classical realism and critical theory: Negotiating ‘divides’ in International Relations theory, in: Journal of International Political Theory 13 (1), pp. 3–17. Berezin, Mabel (2009): Illiberal politics in neoliberal times: Culture, security and populism in the new Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bevir, Mark (ed.) (2010): Interpretative political science, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Blair, Jonathan (2007): Recovering the political in the work of Jacques Derrida, in: Telos 141 (Winter), pp. 149–165. Campbell, David (1998): Why fight: Humanitarianism, principles, and poststructuralism, in: Millennium 27 (3), pp. 497–521. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298980270031001. Cox, Robert (1981): Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory, in: Millennium 10 (2), pp. 126–155. DeRose, Keith (2009): The case for contextualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1992): The other heading: Reflection on today’s Europe, translated by Brault, Pascale-Anne and Naas, Michael, Bloomington: Indiana State University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1993): Aporias, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Caputo, John (eds.) (1997): Deconstruction in a nutshell: A conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York City: Fordham University Press. Feldman, Richard (1999): Contextualism and skepticism, in: Philosophical Perspectives 13 (S13), pp. 91–114. Feldman, Richard (2001): Skeptical problems, contextualist solutions, in: Philosophical Studies 103 (61), pp. 61–85. George, Jim (1994): Discourses of global politics: A critical (re)introduction to International Relations, Boulder: Lynne Baker. Giddens, Anthony (1984): The constitution of society, Oakland: University of California Press. Haraway, Donna (1988): Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives, in: Feminist Studies 14 (3), pp. 575–599. Hoeber Rudolph, Susanne (2005): The imperialism of categories: Situating knowledge in a globalizing world, in: Perspectives on Politics 3 (1), pp. 5–14. Hoffmann, Stanley (1977): An American social science: International Relations, in: Daedalus 106 (3), pp. 41–60. Holt, Edwin et al. (1960): Introduction to the new realism, in: Chisholm, Roderick (ed.), Realism and the background of phenomenology, Glencoe: Free Press, pp. 151–185. Horkheimer, Max (1999 [1937]): Traditional and critical theory, in: O’Connell, Matthew J. (ed.), Critical theory: Selected essays, New York: Continuum Press, pp. 188–243. Kahler, Miles (1990): Inventing International Relations theory after 1945, in: Doyle, Michael and Ikenberry, John (eds.), New thinking in International Relations, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 20–53.

Theory vs. ideology 33 Kearney, Richard (1984): Dialogue with Jacques Derrida, in: Kearney, Richard (ed.), Dialogue with contemporary continental thinkers: The phenomenological heritage, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 105–126. Keohane, Robert (1983): Theory of world politics: Structural realism and beyond, in: Finifter, Ada (ed.), Political science: The state of discipline, Washington: The American Political Science Association, pp. 503–540. Loytard, Jean-François (1979): La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Minuit. Mannheim, Karl (1936): Ideology and utopia, London: Routledge. Mannheim, Karl (1984): Die Methoden der Wissenssoziologie, in: Lenk, Kurt (ed.), Ideologiekritik und Wissenssoziologie, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 203–212. Marcuse, Herbert (1968): Negations: Essays in critical theory, London: The Penguin Press. Marcuse, Herbert (2002): One dimensional man, London: Routledge. Morgenthau, Hans (1946): Scientific man vs. power politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgenthau, Hans (1962 [1955]): Reflections on the state of political science, in: The Review of Politics 17 (4), pp. 431–460. Morgenthau, Hans (2012): The concept of the political, translated by Vidal, Maeva, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Müller, Werner (2016): What is populism?, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Orwell, George (2009 [1945]): Animal farm, Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Schütz, Alfred (1962): The problem of social reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 207–259. Schütz, Alfred (1972): The phenomenology of the social world, translated by Lehnert, Frederick and Walsh, George, London: Heinemann. Smith, Steve (2003): International Relations and International Relations: The links between theory and practice in world politics, in: Journal of International Relations and Development 6 (3), pp. 233–239. Tickner, Arlene (1988): Hans Morgenthau’s principles of political realism: A feminist reformulation, in: Millennium 17 (3), pp. 429–440. Voegelin, Eric (1999): The political religions: The collected works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Voegelin, Eric (2002): What is political reality?, in: Walsh, David (ed.), Anamnesis: On the theory of history and politics: The collected works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 6, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Voegelin, Eric (2006): Autobiographical reflections: The collected works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 36, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Walker, Rob (1993): Inside/outside: International Relations as political theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Cynthia (2014): International Relations theory: A critical introduction, Oxon: Routledge. Wight, Colin (2015): Theorizing International Relations: Emergence, organises complexity and integrative pluralism, in: Kavalski, Emilian (ed.), World politics at the edge of chaos: Reflection and complexity and global life, New York: Sunny, pp. 53–78. Williams, Michael C. (2004): Why ideas matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, classical realism, and the moral construction of power politics, in: International Organization 58 (4), pp. 633–665.

2

Ideology as decontestation Benjamin Herborth

Introduction1 Truth is in trouble. Hence the need to theorise ideology? The trouble with truth and the renewed interest in ideology seem to be, once again, expressive of a general sentiment of crisis and disquietude. Comically ill-fitting occupants of the White House, democratic rollbacks, populist upsurges and Brexit votes in Europe, a new confidence of authoritarian rulers apparently acting out of the playbook of rightfully forgotten Cold War B-movies, hypertrophic economies of attention and excitement playing out on petty-bourgeois encapsulation technologies oddly referred to as social media, reality TV and Justin Bieber all add up to the apparent common-sense acceptability of the idea that things are generally not going well. The dramatic air of discontinuity underlying such self-observations is characteristic of pundit-like gestures, which attempt to sweepingly make sense of it all. They find their most immediate limitation not in the blissful alternative of a more optimistic outlook, but in the superficially nostalgic rendition of the recent past as a somehow happier place. Bringing into view the degree of misery and violence outside the self-centred gaze of Western self-absorption may serve as a reminder of such limitations, and it may be no coincidence that post- and de-colonial modes of self-observation are gaining currency at the same time, serving as a reminder of how noticing that things, broadly, have recently taken a turn for the worse tacitly presupposes a position of privilege from which the past can be haloed as a better place. In any case, engaging with matters of truth, politics and ideology is not merely a conceptual exercise. It is also, consciously or not, an intervention into ongoing processes of self-reflection in societies like ours – contributing, as it were, to the ‘self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires’ (Marx 1979 [1843], 363). It contributes, in other words, to making sense of our attempts to make sense of ourselves. In this chapter, I attempt to do so not by adding to the multitude of interpretive offerings, but by tracing the practical grammar underlying one important mode of self-observation, namely ideology. This is to say that I will focus on uses of ideology and their practical consequences. It is an immediate consequence of such a conceptual move that rather than focusing just on ideology, it is necessary to focus on ideology in terms

Ideology as decontestation 35 of a distinction: Ideology and that which is not ideology. While the antonyms of ideology may vary depending on context, the predominantly pejorative use of ideology in political language suggests that to mark a position as ideological is to mark it as having a troubled relationship with truth. Ideology is more than the parochial truth of a filter bubble. It is the result of a socially organised deception. Ideology critique, not exclusively in its well-known Marxist variety, but as an element of contemporary political language, thus always points not only to truth behind the deception, but also to the social forces animating the deception in the first place. To theorise ideology-in-use, therefore, is, at least partly, to theorise a concept-of-social-forces in use. This may begin to explain what could otherwise seem like an unnecessarily complicated detour. If truth is in trouble, why not theorise truth? Why would there be a need to unpack ideology? The relation between truth, theorisation and politics is a paradoxical one. Truth is in trouble as soon as it is subjected to theorisation. And ideology may be the form through which we commonly attempt to evade such a paradox. In that sense, to theorise ideology also speaks to the relationship between politics and truth – and does so from a social-theoretical perspective, which insists on political claims being political. This means, to begin with, that different political claims encounter one another in an open and indeterminate field of contestation. Truth with a capital T has the performative effect of restructuring such a horizontal field, the encounter of position and opposition into a vertical alignment organised hierarchically in terms of ascribed truth values. Truth with a capital T, in other words, has the potential to reshuffle the rules of the political game, and it can do so in accordance with rules typically akin to different social contexts, in which hierarchicalisations of this type have been common-sensically in place (e.g. science or religion, but also particular views of morality or jurisprudence). To the extent that it calls such hierarchicalisations in question and raises question about the truth of the truth claims engendering such a reorganisation of the political field, the performative understanding of ideology proposed here implies a critique of a heterodetermination of politics – be it in terms of science, religion, nationalist fervour, epistemic defence reactions of white male privilege or neoclassical economic theory.2 The chapter will start off with the emergence of the concept of ideology in the context of French enlightenment discourse. Sidestepping the typical emphasis on the articulation of ideology as a positive science, I highlight its transformative effect on the way in which claims – about politics, morals, society – can be validated. No longer in terms of religion. But in terms of science. The displacement involves a dual move of destabilisation and restabilisation, the latter effecting a decontestation of the newly established source of epistemic validity. This is a figure, which seems to repeat itself in later uses of ideology. I thus proceed with a reconstruction of the use of ideology in the early works of Marx and Engels, in particular, in the German Ideology where the fallout of German idealism on the Hegelian left is discarded in a spectacularly polemical fashion for its failure to grasp the political and practical import of its own utopian abstractions. Idealism is situated as co-evolving parasitically with bourgeois society and capitalism, and

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materialism is posited as an alternative source of epistemic validation, struggling subsequently against its own reification. The intellectual history will then serve as a backdrop against which the truth-theory-ideology conundrum expresses itself today in a variety of forms of decontestation and depoliticisation. In a nutshell, I will propose that ideology is what allows you to know for certain that people who disagree with you must be in the wrong. The crux of ideology, then, lies in its practical consequences. This is to say that in order to unpack ideology, in International Relations and elsewhere, we need to focus on its performative quality. We can understand what ideology is by understanding what it does. However, the performativity of ideology cannot be understood in isolation, by singling out formal aspects of an ideological speech act or by excavating a practical grammar underlying all things ideological. The performativity of ideology is always situated, embedded in social struggles, historical experiences and political hopes. Within such contexts, I propose, the performative effect of ideology is to remove particular aspects, crucial to and constitutive of one’s own position, from an open and indeterminate field of contestation.

How ideology became ideological Conceptual histories of ideology typically highlight the transformation of ideology from a positive science approach coming out of the French Enlightenment tradition to an increasingly politicised concept throughout the Napoleonic Wars and, later, in debates on the Hegelian left as well as within Marxism and critical theory. The credit for having coined the term goes to Antoine Louis Claude Comte Destutt de Tracy, a French philosopher and aristocrat at a time when these two occupations had only just begun to appear as contradictions (1754–1836). According to Michael Silverstein, Destutt de Tracy invented the term, in that naturalizing move of the French Enlightenment rendition of Locke (or, to be sure, Condillocke) that sought to understand human ‘nature’. Ideology was proposed as that special branch of zoology that recognizes the condition of humans, we animals who have ideas as the content of what we should call our minds. (Silverstein 1992, 311) The positive science of ideology took a turn against itself, however, when it encountered politics. Having advocated reason, but also laissez-faire economics, a bit too vigorously, Destutt de Tracy fell into Napoleon’s disfavour, thus ushering in a new use of the term, the pejorative connotations of which resonated paradoxically well among the Hegelian left and, in particular, Karl Marx. The latter would take direct issue with Destutt de Tracy, referring to him with characteristic bite (in the first volume of Capital, see Marx 1968 [1867], 677) as a fischblütiger Bourgeoisdoktrinär (a ‘fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire’). That particular indictment may seem almost unsurprising, given that it came in the light of Destutt de Tracy positing an inverse relation between the wealth of a nation and

Ideology as decontestation 37 the well-being of its people. Before turning to the specificities of Marx’s use of ideology, however, the initial semantic shift, from a positive science of ideas to political invective, deserves attention. Emmet Kennedy recounts the consequential clash between Napoleon and his earlier supporters as follows: After conversing with the ‘ideologists’ of the National Institute about the relationship of signs or words to ideas, after sharing or pretending to share their liberalism, he nastily called them by the name ‘ideologues’ when he consolidated his power in the early months of Year VIII of the French Republic. This opportunistic betrayal arose from the association of this ‘science of ideas,’ whose founders had sat in many of the representative assemblies since 1789, with a political liberalism of the 1789–1792 vintage, updated by the anticlerical republicanism of the Directory and abstracted into a political science by Sieyès, Talleyrand, Merlin de Douai, Baudin des Ardennes, and Dupont de Nemours. It was their republicanism which Napoleon came to distrust and upon which he eventually declared open war by purging the Tribunate in January 1802 and suppressing the dangerous ‘ideological’ Section of Moral and Political Sciences of the National Institute in January 1803. (Kennedy 1979, 354) Kennedy proceeds to highlight that despite its sober scientific outlook, the new science of ideology, in Destutt de Tracy’s version in particular, came with an explicit political agenda. What is crucial here, however, is not the political commitment of individual writers, such as Destutt de Tracy’s embrace of a progressive republican stance on political matters of the day, but rather the displacement of a presupposed hierarchy in the knowledge of moral and political affairs. Taken at surface value, the new concept of hierarchy would seem to be almost trivially unproblematic. On the basis of a sensationalist conception of ideas inherited from Locke and Condillac, one could simply go out and systematically study those ideas. In fact, as Kennedy (1979, 355) notes, contemporary collaborators found Destutt de Tracy’s conception of ideology too broad to the point of it losing any distinctive value. On the basis of this very semantic inflation, Destutt de Tracy intervened directly to contest over the proper hierarchy of faculties and disciplines. Taking issue with Bacon and the French encyclopedists, doing away definitively with the privileged position of theology and ‘placing Ideology squarely in its seat as the new queen’ (Kennedy 1979, 356). Hence, contrary to the common view of a stark discontinuity in the use of ‘ideology’, we can identify, at the very centre of the positive, rational conception of ideology as a science of ideas, an engagement at the level of truth politics.3 It is through rational enquiry, not through theology, that the honorific ‘true’ is bestowed upon a claim. The positive science of ideology thus militates explicitly against conventionally taken for granted forms of epistemic authorisation – and it invests the highest political hopes in the displacement it aspires to accomplish. Ideology thus does not exhaust itself in its critical function, it does not only strive to replace a tacit presupposition as to what makes knowledge (of inter alia moral

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and political matters) valid with a transparent rational account. It also exempts the newly inaugurated position at the top of the hierarchy of faculties and disciplines from further critique, for it is this very position that is expected to bring about social betterment. Destabilisation and fortification, contestation and decontestation go hand in hand.4 It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that Napoleon, struggling to decontest his claim to rule, had little patience with attempts to put political organisation on a depersonalised, rational and scientific footing. When Napoleon sweepingly denigrates ‘windbags and ideologues who have always fought the existing authority’,5 he seems to engage in a fairly conventional form of authoritarian antiintellectualism. More interestingly, though, Napoleon begins to embrace Christianity, the main critical target of ideology as a positive science of ideas, as a crucial factor in maintaining and stabilising social order. In a warning note to Prussian authorities, Napoleon has the following to say about the Idéologues: I have some in Paris. They are dreamers and dangerous dreamers; they are all disguised materialists and not too disguised. Gentlemen, philosophers torment themselves to create systems; they will search in vain for a better one than Christianity, which in reconciling man with himself assures both public order and the peace of states. Your ideologues destroy all illusions, and the age of illusions is for individuals as for peoples the age of happiness.6 Both from the point of view of its defenders and from the point of view of its most forceful critic, the new science of ideology was thus already steeped deeply in a politics of truth. What is at stake here is not the particular objects of enquiry that a positive science of ideology had set out to study, nor was it (exclusively) contestation over particular ideas regarding social and political organisation. What is at stake, rather, is the question of where political ideas may get their truth value from. With Napoleon’s defence of the integrative value of Christianity, it is easy to see why Young Hegelians would take issue. At the same time, however, the isolation of the ideational in the positive science of ideology sets the stage for a materialist critique, which refuses to take consciousness as the terminus a quo and instead enquires into the social formation of (bourgeois) consciousness as a by-product of the production of bourgeois-capitalist society.

How ideology became critical Ironically, the critique of ideology inspired by Marx has subsequently emerged not only as the core point of reference in future attempts to theorise ideology. It has also superseded the original concept of ideology in the wake of Destutt de Tracy in terms of the ambitious link it forged between science, truth and politics. At the same time, however, Marx subverts the conventional (i.e. bourgeois, ideological) conception of science. In an influential comment on Marx’s understanding of ideology, Alfred Schmidt (1960, 59) insists that Marx’s fundamentally critical move of situating theory in history must be applied to the theory itself. The emphasis on

Ideology as decontestation 39 ‘revolutionary praxis’ is thus to be read as a specific theoretical-political intervention at a specific point of time, which cannot be translated uncritically into later historical epochs. Consequently, critics who discard Marx as tied to a time long gone commit the fallacy of presupposing the very ahistoricity that Marx had set out to criticise. The challenge would then be to situate Marx’s alternative understanding of science and social research in relation to both his concept of ideology and its relation to the particular ‘struggles and desires’ of the present time. As Wendy Brown (2001, 67) has noted, Marx operates, quite conventionally, with an ‘ancient distinction between appearance and reality in human affairs, and endorses as well their respective correspondence to surface and depth, popular opinion and philosophical truth, accessibility and relative opacity’. It follows that an account of social research, which identifies the surface level of things grasped by conventional notions of empirics with the things themselves, necessarily colludes in the production of ideology. Contrary to such a mindless empiricism, which – having reified consciousness and the mind in its tacit theoretical presuppositions – ends up fetishising the deceptive appearance of things, Marxian social research would valorise the ‘labour of the concept’ – die Arbeit am Begriff. At the same time, Marx builds confidently on a wide array of findings from the emerging sciences, thus pushing back the ‘spiritualist metaphysics’ of (not only German) idealism. Both the empiricist and the speculative trap, argues Schmidt (1960, 60, my translation) lead ‘in their sociological role toward ideology, a false consciousness, which inhibits the transformation of the world. Through these two dialectically interwoven motives, transformation of the world and critique of ideology, the methodological structure of Marx’s materialism can be traced’. An effect of the linked emphasis on ideology critique and social transformation within a coherent account of the production of transformative knowledge, Marx forces himself to introduce ideology as a form of non-correspondence with reality. However, the particular form of non-correspondence must be more sophisticated than in the ‘mindless empiricism’ quickly discarded early on. Schmidt discusses the following types: Assume someone says ‘seven plus five equals thirteen’, that is a calculation error. If a teenager states a wrong age at the cinema box office, that is a conscious lie. If someone claims, wealth had its sources in the intelligence and the diligence of property owners, and poverty had its sources in the inanity and laziness of those not owning property, he expresses an ideology. (Schmidt 1960, 61) The defining feature of ideology here is that it is not going to vanish when we confront those holding ideological views with the ‘correct answer’. Ideology must be distinguished from error and conscious lie in terms of its situatedness within the process of social production. Ideology is productive of and reproduced by the very appearance, which masks social forces governing the process of social production. It is this appearance that is destroyed by materialist enlightenment

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and science (Schmidt 1960, 61). How could such a spectacularly ambitious programme be cashed in? The first step is a scathing critique of philosophical idealism, not only in its liberal, bourgeois and statist varieties, but also in particular among the Hegelian left. Considering Hegelian philosophy pretty much the only thing up to worldhistorical speed in hopelessly backward Germany, this is where Marx’s critique initially launches itself. The sharply polemical critique of contemporary philosophical radicals such as Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner is framed in terms of a strict reversal of perspective. ‘In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven’ (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 26). Notably, the reversal is framed in (anti-) theological terms, thus already highlighting the family resemblance between idealism and (Christian) religion as predominant expressions of ideology. As opposed to thin air in heaven, materialism then claims to be grounded in something more tangible: That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 26) The notion of ideology is thus brought in by shifting from disrupting a religious imaginary – from heaven to earth – towards embracing an almost physical account of the ‘real life process’. Ideology not only stands in opposition or contradiction to such a layer of real reality but also is merely reactive. A reflex cannot be helped; an echo resonates, naturally, as a delayed, and typically distorted, reflection. While sympathetic commentators have rightfully highlighted the many passages in which Marx subverts a narrowly materialist conception of truth and ideology, it is precisely through this narrow conception that we can trace, in a nutshell, the (self-subversive) performative effect of a strictly materialist articulation of ideology.7 In her critical discussion of such a narrowly materialist conception, Wendy Brown takes no prisoners. She follows through on the metaphor of a camera obscura, figuring centrally in a crucial passage in German Ideology: ‘If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process’. Brown takes the biological metaphor seriously. She emphasises: [I]deology is not merely comparable to visual process but is itself about ways of seeing. More exactly, it involves a systematic perceptual distortion of the world: it entails not seeing what is objectively there to be seen, because to consciousness that objective thereness appears upside down. (Brown 2001, 79)

Ideology as decontestation 41 The radical reversal of perspective is thus to be taken as literally as possible. It is not a shift of perspective, but rather a process initially considered to have a cogent analogy in the biology of seeing. At the same time, politics is at stake: Ideology is defined by the systematic inversion and dissimulation of reality – both its dynamics and its effects – consequent to inequality. Marx’s science of critique promises to correct this inversion just as precisely as the brain corrects the retina’s inverted image. Brown concludes: Thus, the figure of the camera obscura (and of the brain righting the image that the retina inverts) turns into a technical formula for the production of distortion in inegalitarian orders and for the mind’s correction of this distortion. In the case of vision, the brain is programmed to reverse the retina’s inversion; in the case of ideology, the brain requires the help of social science for the proper correction. Here, in an almost parodic insistence on the logical order of things, is the scientific foundation (ideological inversion akin to retinal inversion) of a scientific critique (systematic reversal and displacement of the inversion) of the science of power (systematic mystification of unequal social relations). (Brown 2001, 79) Brown’s reconstruction of Marx’s stance on power and ideology does not stop here. She is quick to add that, interestingly, Marx seems unable and unwilling to sustain such a crudely materialist view. She acknowledges how Marx is critically aware of the limits of equating sight and consciousness, which gain importance as soon as we zoom in on some of the most prominent candidates for ideology critique, such as Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand or Hegel’s philosophy of the state where ‘the idea of the state and the idea of freedom realize one another and “transcend” the unfreedom of civil society’ (Brown 2001, 79). What is at stake here is not the mere representation of objects, but the apprehension of social relations – more specifically, a specific form of the apprehension of social relations linked systematically to the exercise of power and domination. In order to be able to demonstrate this link, Marx needs to jump from individual sight and cognition, eerily close to the philosophy of cognition he had set out to criticise, to a higher level of aggregation. Class does the trick: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 46). Here, however, we encounter the clearest and most blatant claim to trans-historical validity. While class and class consciousness are clearly historical categories, apparently the hierarchy of classes and their corresponding ideas is not. Marx and Engels are initially able to make the paradox disappear by insisting on a trans-historically valid mode of producing such class hierarchies: The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,

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Benjamin Herborth generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’ (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 46)

Zooming in on explicitly political problems, such as the separation of powers, does, however, create further problems. The incipient theory of the state developed in texts such as Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or On the Jewish Question, the state emerges in response to contradictions of and conflict in civil society. As Brown poignantly remarks, Just as commodity fetishism and alienation cause man’s own deed to become an alien power opposed to him in civil society, so does the power of the state rest on the displacement (from civil society to the state) of irreconcilable conflicts in civil society. (Brown 2001, 85) As social forces thus produced, they become productive of social dynamics, which cannot be easily relegated to the surface level of ideological superstructures. On the contrary, even within Marx’s own account of the state, they figure as crucial presuppositions: ‘In short, Marx’s materialism ends up locating a crucial operation of power in the very realm he sought to debunk as pure mystification’ (Brown 2001, 85). There are, in short, good reasons to not get on board with materialism in its earliest and most relentless formulations. As Brown’s sympathetic reconstruction indicates, it does not even take the burgeoning secondary literature on historical materialism to get there, because Marx (perhaps more so than Engels) quickly moved beyond a materialism dangerously close to dogmatic closure. For the purpose of a discussion of the performative effects of ideology, however, these early formulations remain highly interesting, and particularly so in their most uncompromisingly naturalist moments. When Marx and Engels (1969 [1845/1846], 26) suggest that ‘the phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to

Ideology as decontestation 43 material premises’, they not only insist on the affirmation of a material base. They also engage in an explicit process of decentring, of rejecting the consciousness of the isolated individual as the natural starting point of social, moral and political enquiry. Far from being naturally there, consciousness is considered to be socially produced. It thus stands theoretically in need of explanation and politically in need of disruption: ‘Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence’ (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 26f.). What is more, Marx and Engels insist that there is no independent development at the dependent level of consciousness. Elements of ideology are merely by-products of the not-soheavenly everyday existence, the practical activity of ordinary people. Hence, they have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. (Marx and Engels 1969 [1845/1846], 27) Marx’s critique of ideology thus has an explicit target: A philosophy of consciousness that posits consciousness as the unmediated and naturally taken-for-granted starting point for all further enquiry. Such a philosophy of consciousness extends far beyond the narrow purview of theoretical philosophy. It is at the centre of classical political economy as well as idealist conceptions of state and society. It is predicated on a Cartesian dualism of mind and matter (res cogitans and res extensa), which contemporary social theory still struggles to overcome. The critical effect of Marx’s use of the concept of ideology is to unilaterally – perhaps excessively and one-sidedly – foreground the dependency of the idea of consciousness on the production process of capitalist society. And yet, as the next section will attempt to demonstrate, his lasting effect on the theorisation of ideology lies more in his inability to escape the twisted dynamic of disruption and destabilisation. As Brown notes: Marx aimed to discern power underneath the cloak of metaphysics – idealist philosophy and classical political economy – that had kept it from view, and at the same time recloaked power with his own materialist metaphysics and historical metanarrative. Marx’s brilliance as a critic was to track power where others saw contingency or fate, to supplant the magic of a history propelled by ideas with an articulation of the specific processes that have the capacity to move social relations and develop political forms. As is well known, however, in these dynamics of history – from class struggle to fetters on the mode of production – elements of a Hegelian logic of history persist, including notions of dialectics, contradictions, progress, and unitary forces

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Ironically, thus, the materialist critique turns against itself. This is the practical grammar of ideology at play. At the peak of materialism, after Marx, dialectics is suspended because the idea of materialism has been reified. Intellectual history has reserved a curious name for this particular phenomenon: Dialectical materialism.

How ideology struggles to become political In two radically different contexts, Destutt de Tracy’s positive science of ideology and Marx’s and Engels’s fervent attack on the leftover idealism of the German Ideology, the practical grammar of ideology has involved a tension between the destabilisation of an established mode of validating knowledge claims, its displacement with a new and different mode of validation and a subsequent process of restabilisation. Ideology starts as critique, but it ends up inviting more of it. What is more, it has the performative effect of removing from plausible contestation the mode and the criteria of validation it has ushered in. This is to say that the performative effect of the practical grammar of ideology observed thus far allows for the effective imagination of a hard and fast line between political claims which can be considered valid and those which cannot. Ideology can then be said to have a depoliticising effect to the extent that it replaces the clash of different political position with a hierarchical ordering of political claims according to extra-political standards. This is to say that ideology has political effects. It is also to say, however, that the political effects of ideology are more hidden and intricate than a merely constative use of the term (this position is ideological, that one isn’t) would seem to suggest. In order to indicate how this may be the case, I will turn to two of the probably most influential voices in favour of rehabilitating the concept of ideology in political theory, namely Michael Freeden and Ernesto Laclau, before I turn to uses of ideology in more immediately political contexts. Michael Freeden’s extensive work on the concept and uses of ideology comes close to the perspective developed here not only on account of its roots in ordinary language philosophy but also in that Freeden, too, highlights decontestation as a crucial and defining element of ideology. Initially concerned with exploring the distinction between political philosophy (in its ideal-typical variant) and ideology, which had conventionally played out to the disadvantage of the latter, Freeden (1998, 75) zooms in on the ways in which they cope with the problem of essential contestability. Crucially, Freeden argues, ideologies effect a reduction of complexity in language use: In parallel to philosophers and logicians, most linguists would challenge the attribution of a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified.

Ideology as decontestation 45 A word may be related to many meanings and to changing meanings. Ideologies, however, display precisely the converse features. They aim at cementing the word-concept relationship. By determining the meaning of a concept they can then attach a single meaning to a political term. Ultimately, ideologies are configurations of decontested meanings of political concepts, when such meanings are ascribed by methods at least partly foreign to those employed in currently predominant approaches of scientists, philosophers, linguists, or political theorists. Political philosophers, on the other hand, may claim not to decontest meanings at all when they are engaged in the clarification of concepts; and when they do engage in decontesting, they will attempt to do so by means which preserve accepted technical or moral standards of analysis. (Freeden 1998, 76) To Freeden, the performative effect of ideology is thus to render language-inuse increasingly unequivocal and unambiguous. Decontestation to Freeden thus means removing from the terrain of political contestation the potential struggle over the precise meaning of a concept that is essential to a particular ideology. This allows him to map out political ideologies from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy while allowing for historical variation and pluralism in what concepts are decontested and how such decontestation is achieved. Contrary to the conceptual artifices of ideal-typical political philosophy, Freeden insists, this is the normal mode of political communication, indeed the ‘archetype of political thinking’ (Freeden 2006, 21). While the content of political struggle is subject to historical variation, the underlying form is not. Any political view will engage in a particular form of contestation, but while the particular of any such view are elective, the existence of ideology is inevitable. We can only access the political world through decontesting the contested conceptual arrangements that enable us to make sense of the world, and do so – deliberately or unconsciously – by imposing specific meanings onto the indeterminate range of meanings that our conceptual clusters can hold. (Freeden 2006, 19) Freeden thus ends up with a conceptually open understanding of ideology, which allows for empirical mapping exercises from an ordinary language philosophy perspective. At the same time, however, Freeden exempts the form of ideology itself from such variation. In a more recent overview of his morphological approach, he thus affirms an understanding of politics that revolves around contestation but considers the ideological quest for semantic determinacy to impose necessary limits on any such contestation: The durability of such contests attests to the inherent ideological and conceptual pluralism revealed by morphological microstructure, and with it the flow and movement typical of political processes that negate the rigidity of

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Benjamin Herborth ideological boundaries – although ideological positions are limited from ranging across their full potential through inevitable decontestation practices. (Freeden 2013, 117)

While aptly highlighting the interplay between contestation and decontestation, Freeden thus remains at the descriptive level of the use of concepts that are considered crucial to particular ideologies. He does not zoom in on the modes of knowledge production, which authorise and render possible the distinction between the contestable and the uncontestable in the first place. Freeden thus moves interestingly close to Niklas Luhmann’s functionalist account of ideology, which emphasises the necessity of providing orientation in the light of communicative indeterminacy (Luhmann 1970). However, Luhmann goes further in exploring the underlying epistemological paradoxes. With Marx, he suggests, we get the idea that ideas themselves can be the subject of explanation. This raises the problem of how the explanation of something and the explanation of the explanation relate to one another. Sociology of knowledge perspectives such as Mannheim, he contends, typically don’t address the problem, but rather generalise it. Knowledge can always be traced back to the way in which it is situated in a particular social and historical context. The ubiquitous possibility of tracing back knowledge claims to their social preconditions leads, however, to an infinite regress. Thinking of ideology in terms of breaking through such paradoxes of indeterminacy then leads Luhmann to highlight their function in terms of providing orientation (see also Hofmann 2014). Luhmann, too, thus highlights semantic closure as a performative effect of ideology. However, from a functionalist point of view, it remains unclear again how the ways in which such semantic closure is achieved is subject to historical variation and contestation. Within post-Marxist debates such functionalist lines of arguments are viewed with suspicion. Moving beyond the static figure of ‘false consciousness’, which had to be, paradoxically, both necessary and susceptible to change, post-Marxists, most prominently Stuart Hall (1986, 1988) and Ernesto Laclau (2005, 2006), have built on a Gramscian understanding of hegemony that highlights the power politics of fabricating consensus. Hegemony is achieved, in a nutshell, by successfully passing off particular interests as universal. Rather than allowing for a political confrontation between opposing (class) interests, the ruling ones can be redescribed as always already working for the common good. Opposition to the particular interest turned common good then comes at the risk of exclusion from the community. While Stuart Hall (1986) has championed the poignant application of an understanding of ideology based on such presumptions in his analysis of Thatcherism as ideology, Ernesto Laclau has taken a more principled – and more problematic – approach. Laclau, too, rejects traditional Marxist understandings of ideology. He dismisses the idea of ‘false consciousness’ as discredited on account of its underlying essentialism and its impossible and elusive antonym of a ‘true consciousness’ into which then tacitly utopian hope could be invested. Views of ideologies as necessary elements of the production of social order are equally dismissed on account

Ideology as decontestation 47 of its underlying naturalism, which treats consciousness as the fractured mirror of objective social structures. Nonetheless, Laclau is reluctant to entirely abandon the notion of ideology. I think it can be maintained if its meaning is given, however, a particular twist. As we have seen, there is something essentially catachrestical in any precarious stabilisation of meaning. Any ‘closure’ is necessarily tropological. This means that those discursive forms that construct a horizon of all possible representation within a certain context, which establish the limits of what is ‘sayable’ are going to be necessarily figurative. They are, as Hans Blumenberg called them, ‘absolute metaphors’, a gigantic as if. This closing operation is what I would still call ideological which, in my vocabulary, as should be clear, has not the slightest pejorative connotation. (Laclau 2006, 114) Laclau, too, though in a slightly more complicated manner, emphasises semantic closure, that is, decontestation, as the defining element of ideology. However, Laclau, too, treats this particular function of ideology as necessary and constitutive of the political. He explicitly opposes partisan conceptions of ideology. In On Populist Reason (2005), Laclau repeats his defence of the centrality of ideology conceived of in terms of semantic closure, which makes politics possible in the first place. However, he also links the necessity of such a form of closure to a revised concept of populism, which figures centrally among the rules of the political game at large. Having totalised both the concept of ideology and populism as the necessary form of how politics is to be played, Laclau has thus moved into an excentrically post-Gramscian position from which he can defend populism as the normal modus operandi of politics in general and a populism from the left as the necessary antidote to neoliberal claims to hegemony and counter-mobilisations from the extreme right (see also Mouffe 2018, as well as Panizza 2005). Here, again, the structure and form of politics are exempted from contestation and historical change. As Jan-Werner Müller has noted, Laclau and Mouffe emulate a conventionally Heideggerian argument by stipulating a distinction between an ontic surface level, which is dynamic and subject to historical variation, and a deeper ontological structure, which is by conceptual fiat exempted from all of that. Paradoxically, in Laclau and Mouffe, it is precisely the inherently conflictual nature of ‘the political’ which is ontologised. Hence, their ontological reading of politics becomes coterminous with ‘the political’ as such (Müller 2016, 120).

Ideology as decontestation Across a multiplicity of uses, ideology remains a political concept and a politicised concept, even where it attempts to give itself the empiricist appearance of merely describing, mapping out ideas underlying various political positions and engaging in a positive science to that end. Conversely, when the concept of ideology is embraced as explicitly political and thus subject to ongoing contestation,

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it tends to produce blind spots of decontestation. Drawing a link between ideology and decontestation is far from being an original move. Decontestation, semantic closure and reduction of complexity have been highlighted from the points of view of ordinary language philosophy, early systems-theoretical functionalism and post-Marxist discourse theory. However, in each of these accounts, the immobilisation effect of ideology is discussed primarily in terms of political contestation broadly understood as the open-ended confrontation of position and opposition on a horizontal playing field. There is little to no emphasis to the vertical dimension of how that playing field is constituted in the first place. In less metaphorical terms, contestation is reduced to contestation of and over political positions, acknowledging at best that particular positions are socially produced. However, those very terms of social production, the modes of authorisation and validation of claims, positions and rules of the game are exempted from such contestation. In Frankfurt School parlance, this is to say that society itself remains out of conceptual – and thus political – grasp. Uses of ideology, even those that acknowledge the centrality of decontestation, articulate an at least implicit account of what constitutes and structures the field of contestation and decontestation. To the extent that these constitutive rules are exempted from contestation and decontestation, they are being depoliticised, rendered external to the grasp of politics. One of the upshots of the performative understanding of ideology suggested here is a better understanding of why making them graspable and understandable (both connotations of the German begreifbar) is so exceedingly difficult. In Destutt de Tracy and in the German Ideology, there are clear tendencies to shatter one regime of truth only to erect a new one. Regimes of truth, modes of validation/authorisation of political claims can be debunked, ousted, replaced, that is, subjected to various forms of political criticism – but more easily so at the price of exempting from contestation a new and yet unchallenged set of political rules. More recent uses of ideology struggle with problems of this kind and, one way or the other, seem to end up in a place where that is necessarily so. Some decontestation is necessary (Freeden), ideological reduction of complexity is necessary in order to get some orientation in modern and highly complex societies (Luhmann) and an agonistic set-up geared towards populism as the original form of politics seems equally necessary (Laclau/Mouffe). All of these conceptual and political problems are a by-product, however, of treating what I have referred to tentatively as horizontal and vertical lines of contestation and decontestation in fundamentally different terms: Politics, struggle, position/opposition for the horizontal line – and truth, theory, validity for the vertical line. Any account of what enables a field of contestation is thus implicitly understood as matter of theorisation, conceptualisation, and social-scientific enquiry – and thus opposed to practice and politics. Tracing the practical grammar of ideology allows us to recognise the arbitrariness of such a distinction. It thus rearticulates, in a philosophically pragmatic way, a core intuition of critical theory, namely that theory is always already practical. This has immediate repercussions for the understanding of critique. Decontestation, rendering critique unintelligible, that is, impossible or invisible within the

Ideology as decontestation 49 rules of the game, seems to be most powerful and most effective when it cannot be marked as such. For instance, this paradoxical constellation is apparent in the liberal ideology of having moved beyond ideology, and it translates itself into the everyday negotiation of the science question by means of downscaling fundamental theoretical choices to questions of method and research technique. Relatedly, beyond the conventional mode of hierarchicalisation and depoliticisation in terms of scientific truth claims (technocracy), there is a broad array of structurally homologous modes of depoliticisation in terms of positing an absolutist truth claim and discarding consequently the legitimacy of dissent. A performative view of ideology may help to trace such dynamics by opening them up to observation and critique.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented at the EWIS workshop on Theory as Ideology in Cardiff, Wales, at the Pan-European IR Conference in Barcelona, Spain, and at International Studies Association 2018 in San Francisco, California. For insightful comments and feedback, I would like to thank the participants in these events and, in particular, Julia Costa Lopez, Kimberly Hutchings, Beate Jahn, Benjamin Martill, Patrick Nitzschner and Sebastian Schindler. 2 This somewhat quirky list is meant to suggest that from the performativity perspective informing this chapter it becomes difficult to draw a hard and fast line between uses of ideology in the ‘world out there’ or the corresponding ‘in here’ of self-enclosed academic debates. It follows, both from a performativity perspective and from the broader tradition of critical theory, that thinking, science and academia are always already out there, in the world, and thus in need to confront their own politics. 3 Silverstein (1992, 312n1) notes that this is far from being an exclusively French affair. It is clear that contemporaneously with Destutt de Tracy’s introduction of the term idéologie in Paris, there was stimulated translation coinage of an equivalent in English, attestations from 1796 and 1797 appearing (reporting on the French discussion) with the authorially stipulated senses for ideology and ideological (see O.E.D., s.vv.). Apparently through a kind of de-locutionary quotation-translation of (pro-)Napoleonic usage c. 1813–1815, the derivational set ideology, ideologue, ideologist, ideological emerges with a fiercely negative and mocking connotation, leading to a sense of unpractical, speculative, idealist social philosophical thoughts and thinkers, whence by the 1830s and 1840s, the opposition of (negatively valued) ideas vs. historical and material facts is established in English, especially ideas associable – according to one 1827 citation of ideology – ‘with hot-brained boys and crazed enthusiasts’, that is, the negatively valued (mere) social-theoretic ideas of a group clearly indexed as not that of the speaker or writer. Thus, any ideologist, that is, proponent of the intendedly scientific field of ideology, has merely ideological beliefs, as opposed to ideas that correspond to material, historical and factual realities. 4 For a similar paradox with regard to the concept of revolution, see George Herbert Mead (1915). 5 Quoted in Kennedy (1979, 358), from A. Vandal, L’Avènement de Bonaparte (2 vols., Paris, 1902–1907), II, 451. 6 Quoted in Kennedy (1979, 359), from Talleyrand, Mémoires, ed. Duc de Broglie (5 vols., Paris, 1891), I, 452. 7 I focus, for the purpose of this chapter, on the latter because it has been particularly influential in the intellectual history of ideology, be it as a negative foil or as a ground for intellectual self-assertion from an underdog perspective, a motif, which interestingly occurs again in Ernesto Laclau’s re-articulation of populism.

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References Brown, Wendy (2001): Power without logic without Marx, in: Politics out of history, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 62–90. Freeden, Michael (1998): Ideologies and political theory: A conceptual approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeden, Michael (2006): Ideology and political theory, in: Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (1), pp. 3–22. Freeden, Michael (2013): The morphological analysis of ideology, in: Freeden, Michael and Stears, Marc (eds.), The Oxford handbook of political ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 115–137. Hall, Stuart (1986): The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees, in: Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2), pp. 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F01968599 8601000203. Hall, Stuart (1988): The toad in the garden: Thatcherism among the theorists, in: Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, pp. 35–57. Hofmann, Wilhelm (2014): Ideologien. Politische Konstruktionen in praktischer Absicht? Überlegungen zum konstruktivistischen Erbe der Ideologieforschung bei Karl Mannheim und Niklas Luhmann, in: Martinsen, Renate (ed.), Spurensuche. Konstruktivistische Theorien der Politik, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 117–135. Kennedy, Emmet (1979): ‘Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx, in: Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (3), pp. 353–368. Laclau, Ernesto (2005): On populist reason, London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto (2006): Ideology and post-Marxism, in: Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2), pp. 103–114. Luhmann, Niklas (1970): Wahrheit und Ideologie, in: Soziologische Aufklärung, Volume 1, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 54–65. Marx, Karl (1968 [1867]): Das Kapital, Bd. 1, in: Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels – Werke, Volume 23, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, Karl (1979 [1843]): Briefe aus den Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbüchern. Marx an Ruge, in: Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels – Werke, Volume 1, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, pp. 343–346. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1969 [1845/1846]): Die Deutsche Ideologie. Kritik der neuesten deutsche Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner und des deutschen Sozialismus und seinen verschiedenen Propheten, in: Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels – Werke 3, pp. 5–530 [all English translations are from www.marxists. org]. Mead, George (1915): Natural rights and the theory of the political institution, in: Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 12, pp. 141–155. Mouffe, Chantal (2018): For a left populism, London: Verso. Müller, Jan-Werner (2016): Was ist Populismus?, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Panizza, Francisco (ed.) (2005): Populism and the mirror of democracy, London: Verso. Schmidt, Alfred (1960): Ideologie und Anspruch auf Wissenschaftlichkeit, in: Periodikum für wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus 16 (2), pp. 59–66. Silverstein, Michael (1992): The uses and utility of ideology: Some reflections, in: Pragmatics 2 (3), pp. 311–323.

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Theory, ideology and IR’s quest for scientific credibility Katarzyna Kaczmarska

Introduction There is a common understanding of theory as a research-explanatory tool and of ideology as a collection of ideas employed to steer and judge behaviour. Describing an element of scholarship or a body of thought as ideological is usually aimed at discrediting it. The designation ‘ideological’ stipulates that an idea is unscientific and/or inextricably linked to specific interests.1 Conversely, the word theory is used to elevate the status of an idea or argument and to reaffirm its scientificity. Ideologues are considered to base their ideas on belief and dedication to a specific value system, whereas scholars’ societal positions are built on the objective, non-partisan and de-ideologised nature of their findings. This routine distinction between theory and ideology is problematic, especially if one enquires into the meanings attached to theory across the International Relations (IR) discipline. There is a stark disjuncture in what theory signifies when we – IR scholars – write about it formally and speak casually, and when we use the notion of theory to assess and judge. Its multiple meanings notwithstanding, theory continues to stand on a firm pedestal in IR. It is regarded as a precondition for research (Dunne et al. 2013, 415; Mearsheimer 2016, 147). Theory’s producers are presented as having a ‘great deal to say about how the world works’ (Brown 2013, 483). It is even assumed that the world ‘would have been a better place’ if more attention had been paid to their words (Brown 2013, 483). In this chapter, I approach the problem of theory from a sociology of scientific knowledge perspective, which allows me to enquire into the roles which the designation of claims as theory play in identifying and structuring the discipline and assessing academic production within it. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections on the processes that shape the scientific field (Bourdieu 2004, 64f.), I suggest that the continued preoccupation with theory and frequent overpromising related to the theory’s explanatory potential can be linked to the perceived need of justifying IR as a scientific profession and ensuring the respectability of IR among other social scientific disciplines.2 This ‘defensive’ attitude has prevented IR scholars from approaching theories as cultural products that arise from specific socio-political contexts and have status-building functions in scholarly communities. Several studies in IR illustrate how specific theories become myths (Weber 2010 [2001]) or turn into dominant

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discourses (Ashley 1988; Williams 2005), how they cease to have analytical functions and become reified and even acquire agency (Barder and Levine 2012; Kaczmarska 2018). Despite these inputs, and in spite of the immense variety of meanings attached to the word theory, factors such as insecurity regarding IR’s scientific credentials and intra-disciplinary dynamics contribute to the continued affirmation of theory as the ultimate goal of academic production in the mainstream IR literature. Theory allows for constructing ‘objective reality irreducible to that of another discipline’ (Bourdieu 2004, 51). It also raises the ‘price of entry’ into the discipline (Bourdieu 2004, 48–51) and allows for the separation of professionals from amateurs. This chapter starts with a brief overview of what theory and theorising mean to IR scholars. I assess theory’s positioning with respect to the research process and disciplinary aims. The chapter moves on to considering the distinction between theory and ideology, which is particularly problematic when we look at definitions of normative theory. The third part develops this argument further by showing how the critically oriented scholarship undermined theory’s claims to objectivity and revealed the fragility of the theory-ideology division. This literature pointed to scholars’ reliance on disciplinary myths and their propensity to reify theoretical propositions. The fourth part considers in more depth why – despite criticism that should have weakened theory’s status – theory continues to be regarded as key to academic endeavours and seems to hold power over the IR discipline. I discuss the social workings of theory, in particular, its semantic function of certifying disciplinary independence and the value of research. Theory serves as a gate-keeping practice and scholars identified as theorists enjoy greater prestige. I focus on three sources of theory’s continued power in IR: Theory helps distinguish professionals from amateurs and secure scientific credibility and the status of a social scientific discipline, and it is also used, if unconsciously, to construct and reproduce the hierarchical ordering of knowledge. This study relies primarily on the analysis of IR literature and of research assessment guidelines, led by two questions: How has the concept of theory been defined, and how has its role been presented? In addition, in autumn 2018, I approached a small number of prominent IR scholars based in the UK, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, as well as at major international conferences, asking what it means for them to be an IR theorist (respondents are referred to in the text with a code letter R). I supplemented this study with my own experience of having my research outputs reviewed in several IR journals as well as casual rather than structured conversations with fellow academics, PhD researchers and MA students. Due to the still narrow scale of this research, this chapter is an invitation to a conversation rather than the presentation of results.

What is IR theory, and what does it mean to be an IR theorist? The designation theory retains high value across various strands of IR. Many consider it to be a precondition for research (Dunne et al. 2013, 415; Mearsheimer

Theory, ideology and IR 53 2016, 147). Academic textbooks introduce entrants to the discipline with the idea that theory ‘should be relevant for a large number of important issues’ (Jackson and Sørensen 2016, 56). IR journals usually expect their authors to contribute to theory development (Underhill 2018, 4f.) and to submit work that is ‘theoretically informed’3 and ‘pushes the boundaries of the discipline through theoretical, conceptual and methodological innovation’.4 The merits of developing or acknowledging ‘non-Western’ IR theory are now broadly discussed, for example, Acharya and Buzan (2007), Tickner and Wæver (2009) and Eun (2018). The Global IR research programme suggests that concepts and approaches developed in nonWestern settings should apply to and explain the world at large, thus contributing to IR theory (Acharya 2014, 2017). At the same time, theory has generated heated and at times emotionally charged debates among IR scholars.5 There has always been either too much theory, understood as generalisation, or too little theory, understood as a rigorous approach to study. While some scholars suggest theory has reached its limits (Epstein 2013) and discuss ‘the end of IR theory’ (Dunne et al. 2013), others claim ‘the international’ has not been theorised properly – a fact which is said to undermine the entire discipline (Rosenberg 2016). The proliferation of theoretical approaches, while generally celebrated,6 has not increased the confidence in IR as a selfstanding discipline. On the contrary, some see the multiplication of approaches as dissolving the disciplinary focus, potentially leading to ‘outright cacophony’ (Jackson and Nexon 2013), whereas others criticise its superficiality, explaining that plurality is not pluralism (Levine and McCourt 2018). The designation ‘theory’ acquired many different meanings in IR and, as Jackson and Nexon rightly observe, debates about IR theory often rely on different interpretations of what counts as theory (Jackson and Nexon 2013, 544). Almost 20 years prior, Marysia Zalewski commented on the contributions to her edited volume on international theory in the following way: ‘[S]ome people write about theory as a tool, some use theory as a critique, and some think about theory as everyday practice’ (Zalewski 1996, 341, emphasis in original). Theory is also used with reference to meta-studies, for instance: ‘Do not mourn the end of theory, if by theory we mean the Great Debates in International Relations’ (Lake 2013, 580). The application of the term is particularly problematic when it is used casually, that is in texts that do not take theory as their immediate object. IR scholars have used the word to denote the academic study of international politics, as in the debate about the links between academic social science and policy-making exemplified in Stephen Walt’s The Relationship Between Theory and Policy in International Relations (Walt 2005);7 to describe the process of reflection, as in David Singer’s Theorizing About Theory in International Politics (Singer 1960); and to differentiate between arguments and evidence: ‘[T]hey expressed a preference for scholars to produce “arguments” (that we would call theories) over the generation of specific “evidence” (what we think of as facts)’(Avey and Desch 2014, 244). Such variety prompted some to despair that the word ‘theory’ has become ‘meaningless’ (Ward 2017).

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The meaning of the word is not the only bone of contention. IR scholars are far from united on where theory should be placed with respect to the research process and disciplinary aims. For instance, some authors see theory as a distinct part of IR. One of the respondents described their professional objective as ‘trying to improve [those] very theories. Theory is not a means to an end but an end in itself’ (R2). Others consider theorising as an inalienable element of all IR scholarship. For this group, theorising is an act of making complex social reality simpler: Theory allows us to simplify the complexity, to understand and possibly help shape international politics. In that sense we are all theorists. The moment of simplification is crucial to get traction on the object.8 I think theorising is unavoidable: we all do it, even unconsciously. Theories are nothing more than organised assumptions that help us make sense of complexity, and we make such assumptions all the time as we navigate our way through social life. All humans are folk theorists. When we study any aspect of international relations we have to make assumptions about what matters and what doesn’t matter, and we have to decide how these things relate. We do this by making assumptions – theoretical assumptions. (R3) Jackson and Nexon take a philosophy-of-science approach to theory and its definition, suggesting that it should be understood as ‘scientific claims about the ontology of world politics, including its actors, proper units of analysis, and how such elements fit together’ (Jackson and Nexon 2013, 544, emphasis added). Others compare the act of theorising to the possession of divine powers: Waltz simply assumes that states seek to ensure their survival. This assumption is not meant to provide a realistic description of state behaviour, thus no attempt is made to fit the assumption to the facts of the case; rather for Waltz the test of an assumption is to ask whether it is useful. Here, the theorist takes on the role of God to complete the theory, not as a human artificer that composes in respect of an order of secondary causes, but as a primary or first cause. Waltz defines a domain of inquiry and he develops a theory that purports to explain certain observed regularities without having to account for the origin of the force that governs the states system. . . . In other words, he establishes a conceptual order of things that endures only so long as he sees fit, just as God, the author of nature, condescends to uphold the laws that ground the regular order of nature.9 Those who see theorising as present in all IR endeavours emphasise that it structures the way we ask questions, what questions we deem worth answering and how we look for answers (Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008). Theory, on this account, permeates the study of international relations, embracing questions, assumptions and logical arguments (Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008, 4).

Theory, ideology and IR 55 Clusters of ideas may be recognised as theory but still castigated for underdevelopment as in Buzan’s critique: ‘For all of its many attractions, English school theory is neither fully developed nor without its problems . . . [It] is in serious need of taxonomical overhaul’ (Buzan 2004, 15). A similar critique was voiced by Robert Keohane towards what he termed the ‘reflective’ approach in the discipline. Keohane castigated it for failing to ‘develop a coherent research programme of their own’ (Keohane 1989, 41).10 This is why the what is theory question has been supplemented by an enquiry into what should count as a good theory. John Vasquez proposed that a ‘good theory’ should be accurate, falsifiable, parsimonious and elegant. It should also possess explanatory power, be progressive in terms of its research programme and consistent with what is known in other areas (Vasquez 1995). According to this logic, scholars should frame questions in such a way that answers could be delivered independently of context (Toulmin 1990, 5–44, quoted in Rytövuori-Apunen 2005, 159). For Kenneth Waltz, the best theory was one with the greatest explanatory potential.11 While not meant to capture the field in a realistic way, it needed to explain and predict (Waltz 1979, 6f.). King, Keohane and Verba in their seminal monograph on methodology take an orthodox position with regard to theory: A social science theory is a reasoned and precise speculation about the answer to a research question, including a statement about why the proposed answer is correct. Theories usually imply several more specific descriptive or causal hypotheses. A theory must be consistent with prior evidence about a research question. (King et al. 1994, 19) The ideal of developing ‘cumulative verifiable knowledge’ underpinned the discipline (Keohane 1988), with its credo to make ‘qualitative research more scientific’ (King et al. 1994, 18). For positivists, to know meant ‘to construct a coherent representation that excludes contesting interpretations and controls meaning from the standpoint of a sovereign subject whose word is the origin of truth beyond doubt’ (Ashley and Walker 1990, 261). Reus-Smit and Snidal argue that a good theory needs to be logically coherent and lead to new insights: Logical coherence with heuristic or deductive power is the one criterion that all theoretical approaches accept and to which they give pride of place (. . .) Good theory is distinguished by how well its integral logic leads us to new insights and conclusions. (Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008, 13) More recently, Felix Berenskötter called for a renewed effort to establish what constitutes a proper theory and to set fundamental parameters for theorising. He portrayed contemporary theory as trapped between so-called shallow theorising, that is, the conflation between theory and method, and the rejection of abstraction and generalisation (Berenskoetter 2018, 816).

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Berenskötter considers grand theories of particular value because they provide ‘“big pictures” of a configuration of particular actors and their interactions with each other and within a particular socio-political order that governs their lives’ (Berenskoetter 2018, 818). Grand theories have the ability to ground ‘ontologies, explanations and prescriptions in answers to philosophical questions of what drives “us”, where and who “we” are, and should be, in space and time’ (Berenskoetter 2018, 833). However, it is important to note how this approach changes the traditional definition of a grand theory. Berenskötter reconceptualises grand theories as ‘situated, political and dynamic’ (Berenskoetter 2018, 816), whereas to the original proponent of the term, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, grand theory aspired at universalism over time and across space. In his description of theorising on a grand scale, Mills gave precedence to formal organisation and logic over empirical differences (Mills quoted in Eriksson 2014, 94). This brief overview shows that theory and the act of theorising, while regarded as important elements in knowledge production, continue to be defined in many different ways in the written contributions. This has practical implications for scholars, especially those entering the discipline. For instance, a colleague shared with me the following observation about their uneasiness and confusion regarding theory that continued throughout their doctoral programme: Over the years, several of our PhD colleagues have asked me either whether I was ‘a theorist’ and also which theorists/body of theory I was working on and with. In those moments, I guessed that ‘being a theorist’ must mean some particular thing within the department (as the department was the context in which I was asked these questions), but I did not understand what it meant, and I had the feeling that it would not be an appropriate question to ask – that it might make me look stupid in front of other PhD students who were already older. At a recent International Studies Association (ISA) panel titled Theory Building – What Is It and How Are We Doing?, the convener asked the panel to tackle a host of highly specialised questions related to theoretical production, such as How do we build theory? What do we do when we theorise? Do we refine or build from scratch? Is there a method of theory-building? What do we build with? How good are we in it and how do we judge this? Interestingly, in the Q&A session, when confronted with the question ‘Do you consider yourselves IR theorists, and if so how do you see your role is the discipline?’, some panellists attempted to trivialise the question by saying ‘I don’t know, I never look in the mirror and think about myself in that way’. Others opted for a different label than theorist: ‘I have not thought about this; I think of myself as a teacher and as a teacher I wish to negotiate the encounter of difference’. The Q&A part of the session generated reflections from junior scholars along the following lines: ‘Can one switch between theoretical camps?’; ‘I fear that theory is controlling my research process. I feel I am required to have a theoretical framework’. In response, one panellist suggested, ‘Students often think about theory as a template and want to apply it but no one really wants this’. Another panellist

Theory, ideology and IR 57 recollected how they had once been told ‘you need to apply development theory if you are interested in the construction of gender in Latin America’. Another panellist suggested, ‘Don’t think about theory in terms of its application. Go on with your empirical interest and pick and choose what suits your research from the literature that exists’.12 The following section delves more deeply into these definitions of theory that suggest closer connections between theory and ideology. It shows that what used to be a clear distinction between theory and ideology started changing especially in more recent attempts at defining a normative theory.

The normative dimension: theory and ideology The suspicion that IR theory masks ideology has been present in the discipline since the days of Carr and Morgenthau (Allan 2018). Morgenthau, delineating six principles of political realism, claimed that there existed objective laws of politics, which should form the basis for a rational theory: Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion – between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking. (Morgenthau 1948, 4) Morgenthau argued against a ‘relativist conception of man and society’, which he recognised as denying the existence of ‘objective, general truths in matters political’ (Morgenthau 1959, 18). According to Morgenthau, this relativist conception made theory ‘undistinguishable from political ideology’ (Morgenthau 1959, 19). Morgenthau himself, however, followed a political ethics in which an action was judged by its political consequences. Despite this normative commitment, Morgenthau advocated a foreign policy course that he argued was grounded in objective reality. For Morgenthau, one type of theorising was embedded in science, whereas others – in particular, idealism – were of an ideological nature. This distinction between theory and ideology is premised on the claim of IR theory’s scientificity. Underpinned by reason and logic, IR theory was presented by pioneers of the field as the opposite of ideology. Such distinction was achieved with the help of several strategies, one of them was the insistence on the ‘scientific method’ (Keohane 1998). To Keohane, it is of no consequence whether the subject is ‘dinosaur extinction’ or a ‘sequence of political actions’ – the elementary method of social science should be the same: [M]ake a conjecture about causality; formulate that conjecture as an hypothesis, consistent with established theory (and perhaps deduced from it, at

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Katarzyna Kaczmarska least in part); specify the observable implications of the hypothesis; test for whether those implications obtain in the real world; and overall, ensure that one’s procedures are publicly known and replicable. Relevant evidence has to be brought to bear on hypotheses generated by theory for the theory to be meaningful. (Keohane 1998)

This scientific method was constructed through or with the help of simplified analogies, explicit marginalisation of problematic themes and the erasure of human subjectivity (Walker 1993, ch. 4). However, many contemporary scholars continue to draw a stark distinction between theory and ideology. In a fascinating study about the gap between academic production and those who seek to be informed about politics and international affairs, David Dreyer contrasts objective academic research with non-academic ‘books of a partisan or ideological nature’. He writes about ‘the norm of objectivity in scientific research’ and contrasts it with ‘engaging in partisan politics’ (Dreyer 2014, 269f.). Analysing the IR discipline in Russia, Omelicheva and Zubytska draw a clear line between ideology and theory. From their perspective, ideology is closely linked to political purposes as it simplifies reality to advance a political agenda. Theory, in turn, is employed to make complex reality intelligible (Omelicheva and Zubytska 2016, 30). From these examples, we see that the emphasis on theory and theorising is premised on two core assumptions – that of the apolitical nature of academic endeavour and on the Enlightenment tradition or way of thinking that pays tribute to reason and logic. The emphasis on logic, in other words a claim that reasoning should proceed according to strict deductive steps, in Western philosophy is considered the way of assuring robustness and rigour. One of its drawbacks, according to Baggini, is that it produces dichotomous ways of thinking (Baggini 2018, 53f.). Indeed, the relation between theory and ideology may not be of a dualistic nature. In their analysis of radical conservatism, Jean-François Drolet and Michael Williams argue that conservatism should be taken seriously both as a theoretical perspective and as an ideological project (Drolet and Williams 2018). A close reading of the depictions or definitions of a normative theory leads us to questioning the stark dichotomy customarily drawn between theory and ideology. A number of IR scholars define theory as both empirical and normative: ‘All theories of international relations and global politics have important empirical and normative dimensions’ (Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008, 6, emphasis in original). According to Berenskötter, a theory’s normative dimension ‘highlights how theory guides thoughts and actions with the intent of improving our lives. It expresses the theorist’s value orientation and reveals that heuristic and explanatory functions are infused with subjective experiences, concerns and hopes’ (Berenskoetter 2018, 817). For Buzan, normative theorising includes ‘philosophical advocacy for certain structures or practices on the grounds that they are good in themselves, as for example, those who argue in favour of human rights, democracy, theocracy, or

Theory, ideology and IR 59 communism’ (Buzan 2018, 392). Such a broad understanding of theory does not privilege theory over ideology; instead, it erases the boundary between the two.

Theory undermined The work of post-positivist scholars contributed greatly to challenging the narrow view of theory as a purely explanatory tool (Walker 1993, 84; Hamati-Ataya 2016, loc. 2086). Whereas in 1990 Ashley and Walker wrote of a ‘possibility of a post-positivist international relations discourse’ (1990, 263, emphasis added), the previously dissident voices speak with more self-assurance now. Post-positivist scholars managed to undermine the alleged neutrality of theories and to distort categories through which reality had hitherto been scientifically organised (Dunne et al. 2013; Guzzini 2013). The purported impartiality of IR theories has come to be forcefully questioned: Coherent theories in an incoherent world are either silly and uninteresting or oppressive and problematic, depending on the degree of hegemony they manage to achieve. Coherent theories in an apparently coherent world are even more dangerous, for the world is always more complex than such unfortunately hegemonic theories can grasp. (Harding 1986, 164) More critical attitudes entered IR handbooks. In the introductory part to International Relations Theory. A Critical Introduction handbook, Cynthia Weber writes that IR theory works through myths that are apparent truths and that function as building blocks for IR theorising. Such myths include, for instance, the belief that ‘international anarchy is the permissive cause of war’ or that ‘there is an international society’ (Weber 2010 [2001], 2). For Weber, IR theories are stories that are told in such a way that they ‘appear to be true’ (Weber 2010 [2001], 2). Weber argues that the stories IR theory tells are compelling because of ‘IR myths’, that is, apparent truths that have become unquestioned within the discipline: ‘IR theory is a site of cultural practice in which conscious and unconscious ideologies are circulated through stories that appear to be true’ (Weber 2010 [2001], 7, emphasis in original). The myth function in IR theory explains how a cultural interpretation is transformed into a ‘natural fact’: ‘[T]he transformation of what is particular, cultural, and ideological (like a story told by an IR tradition) into what appears to be universal, natural, and purely empirical’ (Weber 2010 [2001], 7). Ashley, in his article ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, noticed, without pointing to individual scholars or concrete works, that a specific conversation – a discourse – had been developing in the discipline of IR. This conversation, argued Ashley, was animated by a tension between recognising interdependence as prevailing in international affairs and taking anarchy as the intrinsic feature of world affairs. This conversation spurred an important question: How, under the condition of anarchy, lasting cooperation might become the norm (Ashley 1988, 228). But rather than engaging with this query, and with no pretentions to assess whether

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the anarchy discourse was ‘descriptively accurate or empirically fit’, Ashley preferred instead to explore how this discourse works and gains significance and comes to be recognised as compelling. Michael Williams’s The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (2005), published two decades after Ashley’s article, is a reflection on the politics of the construction of knowledge. Williams asks how it came to be that realism continues to be the enduring and powerful claim in the study of world politics despite the misreading of texts realist thinkers appropriate as the classical foundations of this strand of IR research. He argues that the idea of a Realist tradition has a powerful impact on the study of international politics as it has become the central element in the narrative told by the discipline of International Relations about itself. Williams, however, does engage with specific social elements that may be determining realism’s power. For Daniel Levine (2012, 14–16, 23), all IR theoretical approaches encourage reifications. Levine and Barder (2014, 869) define reification as ‘the tendency to forget that concepts and theories cannot capture the full, dynamic, constantly changing nature of things-as-such’. Since reification blurs the distinction between theoretical concepts and objects, or processes which they purport to be describing, it contributes to naturalising academic ideas. Reification gives a particular agenda a ‘false sense of necessity, inevitability, scientific objectivity’ (Levine and Barder 2014, 869). The process through which ideas become reified has been explored in detail on the example of the English School and its treatment of international society (Kaczmarska 2018). IR scholarship traversed a long way from proposing international society as a framework for explaining international politics to approaching it as a political entity in possession of spatial presence and agency. The Expansion of International Society in particular illustrates the tense relationship between an analytical concept, a desired world outlook and a description of the world as it actually is (Bull and Watson 1984). This influential volume argued that international society acquired global reach and universal acceptance. Reifying international society, the English School authors failed to recognise and acknowledge their own contribution to the constructed-ness of this particular world. Endowing international society with geographical presence and agency, scholars turned a model of international politics into an accurate depiction of reality. Rather than studying international politics with the help of this concept, scholars have often studied international society as international politics. These examples show that a theory may cease to have solely explanatory functions and develop into a school, or even a way of thinking and ‘worlding’. As a way of thinking, theory requires ideological commitment.13 Yet, as the following section will illustrate, theory continues to play an important role in the discipline and disciplining of IR.

Theory and its continued power in IR This section illustrates how theory has been employed in order to achieve three aims: First, to distinguish professionals, that is, academics, from amateurs,

Theory, ideology and IR 61 primarily journalists, and to raise the price of entry into the field; second, to secure scientific credibility and status of the discipline for IR, including its independence from political sciences; and third, to construct and reproduce a hierarchical ordering of knowledge in the discipline. Scholars repeatedly point to insufficient theoretical sophistication of the discipline, arguing that it does not allow for distinguishing between professionals and amateurs. Despite growing interest in international politics, explained Fred Halliday more than 20 years ago, the IR discipline remains invisible and atheoretical (Halliday 1996, 319). Ken Booth, delivering a lecture in the Centenary Lecture Series celebrating 100 years of the study of international politics at Aberystwyth University, spoke along similar lines, criticising public intellectuals for unfounded pronouncements on international politics and the IR discipline for expanding into a ‘general studies project’ rather than thinking about the ‘core problematique’.14 IR continues to be castigated for not producing one big theory. Those who recognise theory as constitutive of the discipline see the absence of a ‘big idea’ as subordinating IR to political science (Rosenberg 2016, 2017). IR, if it has nothing to offer to other social sciences and if it proposed no unique idea for the understanding of social reality, cannot be considered an autonomous discipline: ‘[T]here is no IR equivalent to the big, trans-disciplinary ideas that have emerged over the decades from Geography, History, Sociology, Anthropology and Comparative Literature’ (Rosenberg 2017, 90). The perceived lack of IR’s contribution to wider social sciences is also often presented in terms of weak theorising in IR and a reason for which ‘the intellectual standing of our field remains uncertain and vulnerable’ (Rosenberg 2017, 90).15 The historiography of IR provides insightful illustrations of how scholars reached out to theory in order to secure the autonomy of the discipline. In Guilhot’s account of the discipline in the 1950s, the need to develop a distinct theory of international relations first appeared in the context of ‘disciplinary anxiety’. Guilhot links this anxiety to continuing uncertainty as to whether there can exist a science of politics and international politics. The science question, in turn, depended on the definition of politics and, more specifically, doubts raised about its rational character and amenability to rational understanding (Guilhot 2011, 1f.). Morgenthau’s writing reveals his willingness not only to define and establish the principles of realism but also to use it with the view to differentiate the study of international politics from other disciplines. His implicit aim was to show that there exists not only a separate domain but also a distinct way of reasoning about it: Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles.

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Katarzyna Kaczmarska The economist asks: ‘How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?’ The lawyer asks: ‘Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?’ The moralist asks: ‘Is this policy in accord with moral principles?’ And the political realist asks: ‘How does this policy affect the power of the nation?’ (Morgenthau 1948, 8)

The uncertainty surrounding the status of IR as a discipline has been a permanent feature of its history. In the 1990s, Fred Halliday commented on the opportunities and ‘dangers’ the discipline was facing, phrasing the latter in terms of IR being perceived as atheoretical: [W]idespread public and intellectual interest in matters ‘international’, be it in the university or elsewhere, is not matched by any remotely comparable awareness of the distinctive conceptual framework with which the discipline operates or, indeed, of the possibility of examining international questions in a comparative and theoretical vein. (. . .) The result is that, in the broader intellectual culture of the times, IR remains largely an invisible discipline, its subject-matter considered as inherently atheoretical, and open to everyone to assert of it what they will. (Halliday 1996, 318–319) Even if International Relations scholarship no longer links the science question to the meaning of politics and the possibility of its rational investigation, what continues to be considered important when it comes to the discipline’s autonomy and scientific status is theory. The discipline of IR has built its scientific credibility on the commitment to constructing and approaching theories as analytical/ explanatory tools rather than as cultural products that arise from specific context, have specific functions for the scholarly community and represent the world in specific ways. To ensure IR’s respectability as a scientific discipline, scholars have often borrowed from the sciences. For instance, theories are often described with terminology borrowed directly from a scientist’s laboratory, such as a ‘lens’ or a ‘tool’. This is reinforced by the imagery used on handbook covers, for instance, the differently tinted lenses pictured on the cover of International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity. The construction of the field of IR has been influenced by a set of assumptions about what science is, how it is practiced and what its goals are. A traditional view, exemplified for instance in the chapter titled ‘Genetics as Science’, presented science as an ‘organised body of scientific knowledge’ consisting of a body of factual data derived from experiments and a general theory, which ‘gives the simplest general explanation of all the observed facts and separate laws’ (Huxley 1949, 106). Science was regarded as a specific activity distinct from other social activities and the polar opposite to ideology. The construction of a dichotomy

Theory, ideology and IR 63 between science and ideology, in turn, has its historical roots in the critique of science in totalitarian systems. Julian Huxley, British geneticist, wrote about Soviet genetics in 1949 in the following terms: They move in a different world of ideas from that of professional scientists, and do not carry on discussion in a scientific way . . . it is less a branch of science comprising a basis of facts, than a branch of ideology, a doctrine which it is sought to impose upon facts. (Huxley 1949, viii; emphasis added) Similarly to the processes characterising the field of economics (Ross and Kincaid 2009, 5), many IR scholars seem to have been convinced that a mature science is expected to produce theories – or one general theory – that would explain phenomena in a given field. Ross describes the philosophical underpinnings that used to dominate the study of economics in the following way: Theories are the central content of science. A mature science ideally produces one clearly identifiable theory that explains all the phenomena in its domain. In practice, a science may produce different theories for different subdomains, but the overarching scientific goal is to unify those theories by subsuming them under one encompassing account. (Ross and Kincaid 2009, 6) The neorealism of Kenneth Waltz and neoliberalism of Robert Keohane seem to have followed these prescriptions. Both scholars claimed to be offering a universal theory with which they aimed to explain the fundamental dynamics of international relations. While the word ‘theory’ lacks a single designation, the social conditions of scholarly practice are unforgiving. The term ‘theory’ has an important semantic function – it is used as a certificate of value. Describing a piece of scholarship as theory generally tends to raise its intellectual status in the academic world of IR and legitimises its study. Arlene B. Tickner reminds us that theory is an important marker in the hierarchical arrangement of the IR discipline globally, where the English-speaking core is situated higher due to its theory-building capacities: ‘What is clearly provided by the center and not produced locally is IR theory’ (Tickner and Wæver 2009, 335). A similar mechanism operates at the level of individual scholars. Those who are regarded or self-identify as theorists seem to acquire higher symbolic status in the discipline. As one academic put it: ‘Saying that I am an IR theorist does something. This is a very special position; there is elitism to this language of theory’ (R1). In carving out the space for IR discipline, the emphasis on theory was one among the gate-keeping practices. As Patricia Owens illustrates, IR’s professionalisation process proceeded by means of theory advancement and resulted in a turn away from diplomatic history. This led to the marginalisation of female

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IR scholars who were mostly trained as historians and conducted empirically grounded research: From the 1970s, IR largely organised itself around a set of ideological ‘isms’ and ‘Schools’. Diplomatic history was caricatured as incapable of advancing ‘theory’, the level of abstraction necessary for a distinct theory of the ‘international system’. This marginalized all of the women mentioned above. Unsurprisingly since it mirrors what we already know about the history of History and Sociology, it is starting to look as though the carving out of a distinct IR discipline was a gendered process. (Owens 2019)16 Authors who approach international politics from the area studies perspective have a tendency to adopt theoretical frameworks even in the face of incompatibility between their observations and assumptions inscribed within a particular theoretical approach. This is because ‘localised’ knowledge is viewed as inferior to generalised theoretical insights. It is often held that area studies may achieve legitimate status in debates about international politics only when they make use of frameworks and contribute to general narratives (Bates 1997; Hanson 2009; Capan and Zarakol 2018). Very few authors are explicit and open about problems related to the application of theoretical approaches to developments they encounter ‘on the ground’. Cai Wilkinson is a notable exception (Wilkinson 2013).17 The editors of the European Journal of International Relations signal interest in ‘empirically grounded’ research that would contribute to theoretical developments and reflect changes in global politics (Underhill 2018, 4f.). However, these ambitious guidelines face a number of practical obstacles, especially if empirics are derived by means of fieldwork and interviews. The word-limit of a journal article rarely permits scholars to make extended references to interviews or describe fieldwork and its methods in detail, in addition to developing a robust theoretical contribution. Fieldwork as a research method, developed and widely recognised in ethnography and anthropology, has not been a standard way of conducting enquiry in IR and may not be valued equally by reviewers. Colleagues report that the situation is no different with archival research. The word-limit of journal articles does not allow for laying out an archive and citing primary sources like historians would do, especially if at the same time one is expected to produce a ‘robust theoretical contribution’. In addition to serving as a means to produce and maintain hierarchies in the field, theory continues to be one of the benchmarks against which academic production is assessed in at least three instances: academic publishing where ‘theory’ becomes the judging tool in the hands of a peer reviewer; the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey and, in British academia, the Research and Excellence Framework, where ‘advancing theory’ is among four criteria used to assess originality and appears in the description of significance and rigour: Significance will be understood in terms of the development of the intellectual agenda of the field and may be theoretical, methodological and/or

Theory, ideology and IR 65 substantive. Due weight will be given to potential as well as actual significance, especially where the output is very recent. Rigour will be understood in terms of the intellectual precision, robustness and appropriateness of the concepts, analyses, theories and methodologies deployed within a research output. (emphasis added)18 When used as a yardstick against which to assess written contributions, these may be judged as ‘theoretically weak’ or ‘theoretically overpromising’. Authors may be told they were missing out on ‘theoretically-powerful literatures’.19 As Ward describes: ‘If one argues that my theory is underdeveloped (ahem, reviewer number 3), that my theory is wanting, what does this mean?’ (Ward 2017). Some scholars as well as students use theory to assess others or their own preparation to partake in a debate about international politics. Students may be rebuked for having ‘not enough theoretical background in IR’ or castigate themselves for ‘not knowing much about theories’. In Polish academia, scholars sometimes express frustration with their fellow academics’ research as insufficiently theory-led or not contributing to theory.20 Theory can also be used by scholars to distort and overturn existing hierarchies in IR. The descriptive adjective placed before the very word ‘theory’ may change the disposition certain groups of scholars have towards that theory or a piece of scholarship it denotes. For some academics, classical IR theory evokes negative connotations due to its alleged defence of the status quo. For others, critical theory may sound ascientific. In that sense, theory becomes an inclusionary-exclusionary category for specific communities of scholars. An early career scholar shared with me her experience of being called a ‘po-co’ upon joining one of the top 10 UK departments in international politics and presenting her research area that was only marginally related to post-colonial studies.21 Theory and theory-related issues occupy the central place as key criteria in TRIP’s assessments of the state of IR discipline. The TRIP project has two major components: The study of articles published in 12 journals between 1980 and 2015 and a survey of over 5,000 scholars in 32 countries. While not without critics,22 the TRIP project survey is usually presented as ‘the largest and most extensive data collection effort to date on the field of international relations’ (Avey and Desch 2014, 228). The survey’s data have been used in critical assessments of IR in the United States (Bilgin 2010, 823; Leeds 2019), Poland (Czaputowicz and Wojciuk 2017) and in China and India (Kristensen 2019). The TRIP survey uses concepts like ‘atheoretic’, ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘theory’ to examine the discipline. The analysis of journal articles showed that 7% of almost 7,800 articles ‘concerned IR theory directly’. When analysing the use of paradigms in research, 56% of articles were termed as ‘non-paradigmatic’ and further 12% as ‘atheoretic’. These results change under the rubric ‘paradigm taken seriously’, in which case almost 71% is termed atheoretic and only 10% non-paradigmatic.23 The survey revealed an interesting phenomenon. While only 7% of 4,600 surveyed scholars declared that international relations theory was their major area of research,24 as many as 73% of 2,000 surveyed scholars considered IR theory

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as one of four courses that should be required in an undergraduate IR degree program.25 This suggests that theory is considered a product on which to build teaching programs and expertise. It is also regarded as an important element to be offered to new generations of scholars. A panellist at the aforementioned ISA conference referred directly to social processes structuring the discipline and linked the question of theory to the necessities of the job market: Do you have [a] job? One has to get it and there are established commodification patterns out there. You have to be understandable to the person who employs you and you need to tick certain boxes (. . .) If one feels secure in their job, one is more comfortable with not having interlocutors for a while.26

Conclusion The question of how theory is used has usually been posed with respect to the intellectual product. More specifically, it has been asked with the view to enquire into how a specific theory is employed to explain an international event or process (e.g. Ward 2017). Rarely has it been directed at the theory’s application in the social construction of the discipline of IR. This chapter aimed to fill in this gap by enquiring into how exactly and to what effect theory has been used in the disciplinary social setting.27 It reflected on multiple contradictions in the attempts to define theory. Despite the importance attached to theory in the discipline of IR and its seemingly stark differentiation from ideology, there is widespread disagreement as to what theory is. The distinction between theory and ideology is particularly unclear in definitions of normative theory. Having no fixed meaning, the term ‘theory’ retains its status-building and inclusionary-exclusionary power. The lack of agreement on what theory is has not prevented scholars from using theory to elevate specific concerns and structure social interactions within IR. Presenting a set of ideas as a theoretical perspective raises those ideas’ intellectual status and legitimises their study. The chapter illustrated how IR continues to be oriented towards theory because of its disciplinary insecurity and the perceived need to be recognised as ‘scientific’. The commitment to constructing theories as research-explanatory tools and differentiating them from ideologies helped IR to build its scientific credibility. Theory allowed for maintaining the autonomy of IR vis-à-vis other epistemic communities, for instance, think tank analysts. Theory has also been deemed indispensable for securing recognition among other social scientific disciplines. Theory continues to serve as an important marker against which to judge the discipline, its development and prospects. It is used to assess academic production, either through the review process or in broader exercises such as the TRIP survey. Scholars employ theory as a means to produce and reproduce internal hierarchies in the field. It is important that we recognise the politics that exist in using and strategically deploying the term ‘theory’ and that we are more aware of those politics when we refer to the term in our research, teaching and when we assess the work of others.

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Notes 1 Such criticism is usually exercised without considering ideology’s original meaning as the study of ideas. 2 The term ‘scientific profession’ is used here in an analogous way to Bourdieu’s description of sociology (Bourdieu 2004, 12f.). 3 Journal of International Relations and Development webpage, [online] www.palgrave. com/br/journal/41268 [accessed 11.04.2019]. 4 Review of International Studies webpage, [online] www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ review-of-international-studies [accessed 11.04.2019]. 5 See, for instance, Ken Booth and Steve Smith’s animated responses to William Wallace’s article reviewing several major works in IR (Wallace 1996; Booth 1997; Smith 1997). See also Marysia Zalewski’s reflection on how debates about theory ‘bring out the worst in those of us involved in the discipline of International Relations’ (Zalewski 1996, 340). 6 For example in: (Booth and Erskine 2016; Jørgensen 2017). 7 See also the debate on links between theory and policy (Wallace 1996; Booth 1997; Smith 1997). 8 Senior IR scholar discussing theories at a seminar for MA students, Aberystwyth University, autumn 2018. 9 Forthcoming book by William Bain. 10 Reflective in today’s terminology, and according to a description provided by Rob Walker (Walker 1993, 84), would amount to critical IR. In addition, Walker usefully explains that by ‘coherent’, Keohane meant that which bears comparison with the structuralist models of Kenneth Waltz or theory of international regimes (Walker 1993, 82). 11 This, of course, is linked to the contested distinction between explanatory (causal) and constitutive theory. See (Wendt 1998). 12 Noteworthy at a different panel dedicated to teaching, ‘TB83: IR education in times of innovation and progress’, a panellist suggested this was exactly what we expect from students. 13 See also David Lake’s argument on ‘-isms’ (Lake 2011). 14 ‘International Relations; the future’s inconvenient truth’, a lecture by Ken Booth, 21 February 2019, [online] www.aber.ac.uk/en/interpol/about/centenary/events/5thcentenary lecture-kenbooth/. 15 A rare contrasting view is exemplified by Barry Buzan in his latest intervention where he presents theory as constructed within as well as outside academia. In his view, such an approach opens up space not only for theory in an academic sense but also for big framing ideas generated by practitioners, public intellectuals and others outside of academia. What I am trying to capture in this non-academic sphere is the practice of thinking about IR in big and general ways (Buzan 2018, 392). 16 Interestingly, in the United States, the ‘percentage of men studying IR theory was nearly twice as high as that of women’ (Leeds 2019, 3). 17 On the hierarchical arrangements between theoretical and other types of knowledge, see also (Bliesemann de Guevara 2017). 18 Originality, significance and rigour are used to assess an academic output’s contribution to a given field of study. See: ‘REF 2014. Panel criteria and working methods’, January 2012, paragraph 69, REF Panel C criteria, pp. 66–67, [online] www.ref. ac.uk/2014/media/ref/content/pub/panelcriteriaandworkingmethods/01_12.pdf. 19 These are examples collected randomly, but as a continuation of this study, I hope to receive access to and analyse reviews solicited by leading IR journals. 20 Speaker at the EISA annual conference in Prague 2018. 21 Conversation with a PhD student, autumn 2018. 22 A critical discussion develops on social media, but there have been no inputs to it presented in the form of academic journal articles.

68 23 24 25 26 27

Katarzyna Kaczmarska TRIP survey, [online] https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/fullreport/43. For 17%, theory was a secondary area of research. [online] https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/fullreport/43. Panel WB35 titled ‘Theory building. What is it and how are we doing?’, ISA 2019. The social role of theory is at times briefly acknowledged, for instance, by recognising that it influences power struggles within the field (Berenskoetter 2018).

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Theory, ideology and IR 69 Buzan, Barry (2004): From international to world society? English school theory and the social structure of globalisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, Barry (2018): How and how not to develop IR theory: Lessons from core and periphery, in: The Chinese Journal of International Politics 11 (4), pp. 391–414. Capan, Zeynep Gulsah and Zarakol, Ayse (2018): Between ‘East’ and ‘West’: Travelling theories, travelling imaginations, in: Gofas, Andreas, Hamati-Ataya and Onuf, Nicholas (eds.), The SAGE handbook of the history, philosophy and sociology of International Relations. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526402066. Czaputowicz, Jacek and Wojciuk, Anna (2017): International Relations in Poland: 25 Years after the transition to democracy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dreyer, David (2014): The engaged public-political science gap: An analysis of New York Times non-fiction bestsellers on politics, in: European Political Science 13, pp. 266–274. Drolet, Jean-François and Williams, Michael (2018): Radical conservatism and global order: International theory and the new right, in: International Theory 10 (3), pp. 285–313. Dunne, Tim, Hansen, Lene and Wight, Colin (2013): The end of International Relations theory?, in: European Journal of International Relations 19 (3), pp. 405–425. Epstein, Charlotte (2013): Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations: Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight, in: European Journal of International Relations 19 (3), pp. 499–519. Eriksson, Johan (2014): On the policy relevance of grand theory, in: International Studies Perspectives 15 (1), pp. 94–108. DOI: 10.1111/insp.12008. Eun, Yong-Soo (2018): What is at stake in building ‘non-Western’ International Relations theory?, Oxon: Routledge. Guilhot, Nicolas (2011): Introduction: One discipline, many histories, in: Guilhot, Nicolas (ed.), The invention of International Relations theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 conference on theory, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–32. Guzzini, Stefano (2013): The ends of International Relations theory: Stages of reflexivity and modes of theorizing, in: European Journal of International Relations 19 (3), pp. 521–541. Halliday, Fred (1996): The future of International Relations: Fears and hopes, in: Smith, Steve, Booth, Ken and Zalewski, Marysia (eds.), International theory: Positivism and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 318–327. Hamati-Ataya, Inanna (2016): IR Theory and the question of science, in: Booth, Ken and Erskine, Toni (eds.), International Relations theory today, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 69–84. Hanson, Stephen (2009): The contribution of area studies, in: Landman, Todd and Robinson, Neil (eds.), The SAGE handbook of comparative politics, London: Sage Publications. Harding, Sandra (1986): The science question in feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Huxley, Julian (1949): Soviet genetics and world science, London: Chatto and Windus. Jackson, Patrick and Nexon, Daniel (2013): International theory in a post-paradigmatic era: From substantive wagers to scientific ontologies, in: European Journal of International Relations 19 (3), pp. 543–565. Jackson, Robert and Sørensen, Georg (2016): Introduction to International Relations: Theories and approaches, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jørgensen, Knud (2017): International Relations theory: A new introduction, London: Macmillan International Higher Education. Kaczmarska, Katarzyna (2018): Reification in IR: The process and consequences of reifying the idea of international society, in: International Studies Review 21 (3), pp. 347–372. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viy016.

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Keohane, Robert (1988): International institutions: Two approaches, in: International Studies Quarterly 32 (4), pp. 379–396. Keohane, Robert (1989): International institutions and state power: Essays in International Relations theory, Boulder: Westview Press. Keohane, Robert (1998): Beyond dichotomy: Conversations between International Relations and feminist theory, in: International Studies Quarterly 42 (1), pp. 193–197. King, Gary, Keohane, Robert and Verba, Sydney (1994): Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kristensen, Peter (2019): States of emergence, states of knowledge: A comparative sociology of International Relations in China and India, in: European Journal of International Relations 25 (3), pp. 772–799. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119829804. Lake, David (2011): Why ‘isms’ are evil: Theory, epistemology, and academic sects as impediments to understanding and progress, in: International Studies Quarterly 55 (2), pp. 465–480. Lake, David (2013): Theory is dead, long live theory: The end of the great debates and the rise of eclecticism in International Relations, in: European Journal of International Relations 19 (3), pp. 567–587. Leeds, Brett (2019): Diversity of scholars and diversity of scholarship, in: International Studies Review, online first, pp. 1–6. Levine, Daniel (2012): Recovering International Relations: The promise of sustainable critique, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Daniel and Barder, Alexander (2014): The closing of the American mind: ‘American School’ International Relations and the state of grand theory, in: European Journal of International Relations 20 (4), pp. 863–888. Levine, Daniel and McCourt, David (2018): Why does pluralism matter when we study politics? A view from contemporary International Relations, in: Perspectives on Politics 16 (1), pp. 92–109. Mearsheimer, John (2016): Benign hegemony, in: International Studies Review 18 (1), pp. 147–149. DOI: 10.1093/isr/viv021. Morgenthau, Hans (1948): Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace, New York: Alfred Kopf. Morgenthau, Hans (1959): The nature and limits of a theory of International Relations, in: Fox, William (ed.), Theoretical aspects of International Relations, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 15–28. Omelicheva, Mariya and Zubytska, Lidiya (2016): An unending quest for Russia’s place in the world: The discursive co-evolution of the study and practice of International Relations in Russia, in: New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central and East European Politics and International Relations 24 (1), pp. 19–51. Owens, Patricia (2019): On the heirs to Agnes Headlam-Morley: Women and the history of international thought, [online], http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/whit/2019/04/10/on-the-heirsto-agnes-headlam-morley/ [accessed: 10.04.1019]. Reus-Smit, Christian and Snidal, Duncan (2008): Between utopia and reality: The practical discourses of International Relations, in: Reus-Smit, Christian and Snidal, Duncan (eds.), The Oxford handbook of International Relation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–40. Rosenberg, Justin (2016): International Relations in the prison of political science, in: International Relations 30 (2), pp. 127–153. Rosenberg, Justin (2017): The elusive international, in: International Relations 31 (1), pp. 90–103.

Theory, ideology and IR 71 Ross, Don and Kincaid, Harold (2009): Introduction: The new philosophy of economics, in: Ross, Don and Kincaid, Harold (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of economics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–32. Rytövuori-Apunen, Helena (2005): Forget ‘post-positivist’ IR! The legacy of IR theory as the locus for a pragmatist turn, in: Cooperation and Conflict 40 (2), pp. 147–177. Singer, Joel (1960): Theorizing about theory in international politics, in: Journal of Conflict Resolution 4 (4), pp. 431–442. Smith, Steve (1997): Power and truth: A reply to William Wallace, in: Review of International Studies 23 (4), pp. 507–516. Tickner, Arlene and Wæver, Ole (eds.) (2009): International Relations scholarship around the world, Oxon: Routledge. Toulmin, Stephen Edelston (1990): Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Underhill, Geoffrey (2018): European journal of International Relations march issue: From the editors, in: European Journal of International Relations 24 (1), pp. 3–7. Vasquez, John (1995): The post-positivist debate: Reconstructing scientific enquiry and International Relations theory after enlightenment’s fall, in: Booth, Ken and Smith, Steve (eds.), International Relations theory today, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 217–240. Walker, Rob (1993): Inside/outside: International Relations as political theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, William (1996): Truth and power, monks and technocrats: Theory and practice in International Relations, in: Review of International Studies 22 (3), pp. 301–321. Walt, Stephen (2005): The relationship between theory and policy in International Relations, in: Annual Review of Political Science 8, pp. 23–48. Waltz, Kenneth (1979): Theory of international politics, London: McGraw-Hill. Ward, Michael (2017): Do we have too much theory in International Relations or de we need less? Waltz was wrong, Tetlock was right, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, pp. 1–23. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.301. Weber, Cynthia (2010 [2001]): International Relations theory: A critical introduction, Oxon: Routledge. Wendt, Alexander (1998): On constitution and causation in International Relations, in: Review of International Studies 24 (5), pp. 101–118. Wilkinson, Cai (2013): On not just finding what you (thought you) were looking for: Reflections on fieldwork data and theory, in: Yarnow, Dvora and Schwartz-Shea, Peri (eds.), Interpretation and Method, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 387–405. Williams, Michael (2005): The realist tradition and the limits of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zalewski, Marysia (1996): ‘All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up’: Theory, theorists, theorising, in: Smith, Steve, Booth, Ken and Zalewski, Marysia (eds.), International theory: Positivism and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 340–353.

4

‘I see something you don’t see’ Niklas Luhmann’s social theory between observation and meta-critique Florian Edelmann

Introduction1 An observer cannot see what [s]he cannot see. Neither can [s]he see that [s]he cannot see what [s]he cannot see. But there is a possibility of correction: the observation of the observer. . . . There is no privileged point of view, and the critic of ideology is no better off than the ideologue. (Luhmann 1994, 28)

While ideology features prominently in critical approaches to social theory and International Relations (IR), it is common to assume that social systems theory is much less concerned with the concept and its potential as a tool of critique of dominant knowledge claims. By contrast, this chapter argues that Niklas Luhmann’s focus on communication, meaning-making, and the necessities of semantically mediating social structuration allows for approaching the theory-ideology-nexus in unexpected, yet highly insightful ways. A small volume entitled Theory of Society or Social Technology (Habermas and Luhmann 1971) highlights the origins of a long-standing, often polemical and seemingly irreconcilable, although mutually productive, dispute between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 70f.). Debating potential benefits and perils of a systems theory perspective on society, both authors are deeply concerned about the purposes of social theory in late modernity on a theoretical and explanatory, but also on a political and normative plane. Needless to say, both aspects are deeply intertwined. While their theoretical differences focus on the question of whether increasing societal complexity requires a cognitive shift towards higher abstraction or the reappropriation of a theory of action in communicative terms, the normative issue at stake is the role of theory in politics and society. Luhmann conceives of it solely as a mode of closely, if also critically, observing the shifting sociographies of modern society (Luhmann 1993, 1995b). Habermas, however, aims to use his own critical observation of late capitalism as a means of changing the very sociography of modernity towards increasing social emancipation (Habermas 1987; Honneth and Joas 1991). The ways in which the normative side of this controversy is framed point directly to this volume’s core problem: The slippery, elusive and difficult – albeit crucial – distinction between theoretical and ideological reasoning.

‘I see something you don’t see’ 73 In so doing, the normative underpinnings of the Habermas–Luhmann debate aptly illustrate one of Benjamin Martill and Sebastian Schindler’s central points of departure (Martill and Schindler, this volume, 11). We tend to identify our own approaches to making sense of global politics as theoretically grounded, regardless of the ways in which we define the very concept of theory. However, we are equally prone to label every analysis of global society and politics that we do or cannot agree with as ideologically driven (Jahn, this volume, 241; Wallmeier, this volume). Not unlike terrorism, ideology seems to be only what the others do (Cooper 2001). Therefore, it is not only possible but also highly instructive to read the difference between Habermas’s and Luhmann’s positions on the theoretical implications of societal changes in late modernity in light of their different forms of differentiating theory from ideology. For Habermas, this distinction is relatively clear-cut. It relates back to a tradition of critique according to which any theorising not aimed at demystifying and de-objectifying the social and political realities of (late) capitalism forms part of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser 1971) and reproduces capitalist hegemony or the ideational mediation of the dominant condition into the lifeworld (Gramsci et al. 1971). Since ‘technological’ approaches to society and the theoretical work of a non-critical social science are textbook examples of ideology for this school of thought (Habermas 1968), Habermas’s verdict that Luhmann’s contribution represents ‘technocratic consciousness of the highest order’ (Habermas 1971, 142) essentially articulates an ideology critique of systems theory (la Cour and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013a; Wagner 2013, 63–65). Accordingly, he interprets Luhmann’s focus on abstracting from social complexity, increasing functional autonomy within societal sub-sectors and a formal concept of communication as status quo oriented, theoretically alienated knowledge production (Habermas 1971). By contrast, Habermas develops throughout his main body of work an explicitly critical understanding of theory that aims at transcending the dominant functional rationality of late modernity, since ‘functionalist reason’ increasingly encroaches into the domain of the lifeworld. Theory, in this perspective, goes beyond mere observation and analysis since it always entails a transformative telos: Challenging the status quo to foster the emancipation of humankind (Habermas 1984, 1987). IR as a discipline reflects this understanding of critical theory, above all in Cox’s classical and influential distinction between problem-solving and critical approaches to international politics (Cox 1981; McDonald 2009). As one of Luhmann’s core methodologies consists in the functional analysis of society and its institutions (Baraldi et al. 1997, 61f.), his work is often associated with status quo oriented functionalist perspectives (Rasch 1997, 112–114); Patricia Owens’s critique of the functional underpinnings of the concept of ‘the social’ in counter-insurgency is a case in point within IR (Owens 2015). If and when we take Luhmann’s argument that ideology and ideology critique perform the same epistemological short circuit as our point of departure, a very different distinction between ideology and theory suggests itself. First and foremost, the concept of ideology plays a less essential role in Luhmannian theoretical architecture while the ways in which the term is conceptualised shift throughout

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his extensive and diverse body of work. In his posthumously published Political Sociology (Luhmann 2010), Luhmann employs a normatively informed concept of ideology. Apart from its functionalist underpinnings, this concept reflects to quite some degree Arendtian notions of totalitarian ideologies (Arendt 1973). He contends that a unified, highly integrated and universal ideology represents ‘the very constitution of the political process’ in one party systems as it allows for relocating the goal of consistent political agency into the future while an ideologised theoretical apparatus helps rationalising inconsistencies and contradictions on the way towards this future (Luhmann 2010, 305–318). Although these thoughts still resonate in later writings (Luhmann 1996 [1985], 53, 2002, 218–219), Luhmann already emphasises in his early analysis of the function of ideology that ideological reasoning in the strict sense is only one possible reaction to the fundamental contradiction of politics: Claiming to represent the universal in the name of particular interests (Luhmann 2010, 263f.). The opposite reaction, namely to institutionalise competition between differing claims whose values and norms should guide the particular universalisation in the political, points towards Luhmann’s later conceptualisation of the relation between theory and ideology. In a move that reflects Reinhart Koselleck’s work on conceptual histories (Andersen 2013), Luhmann traces semantic shifts in understanding ‘ideology’ from a concept of ideational steering over ideology critique towards an analytically meaningful category (Luhmann 1998, 1076–1082). Theoretically locating the concept of ideology within the semantic mediation of social structurations (Luhmann 1987a), he argues that the emergence of ideologically actionable value orientations is a consequence of the impossibility of representing the differentiated society of modernity in a single, integrated principle with a normative telos (Herborth, this volume, 43–44). The fundamental contradiction of modernity, namely that societal progress results in the loss of integration and external purpose, leaves, according to Luhmann, only two viable options: Embracing societal contradictions in a tautological sense since society is what it is – the conservative approach – or articulating the paradox that society is what it is not (yet) – the progressive answer (Luhmann 1990f). Since Luhmann concedes elsewhere that his own work is not immune to ideological reasoning and interpretation (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 70), he cannot draw the line between theory and ideology as neatly as the Habermasian argument implies. In a pointed critique of the legacy of the Frankfurt School of critical social enquiry, he formulates his theoretical ambitions thus in a seemingly modest way, as the attempt to build a social theory that tries ‘not to eliminate, but endure this insight into its own blindness’ (Luhmann 2002, 190). According to these modest ambitions (King and Schütz 1994, 261), this chapter does not understand itself as an attempt to develop a definite critical reinterpretation of a complex theoretical architecture in light of the particular problem of differences and interrelations between theory and ideology. Starting from the discussed differences of delimiting the realms of theory and ideology, it aims at outlining how, to what purpose, and with which limitations Luhmann’s work helps to rethink gaps between reification and critical analysis in IR. In so doing, this

‘I see something you don’t see’ 75 contribution speaks to a recent literature that aims at unsettling orthodox readings of Niklas Luhmann’s social theory (Amstutz and Fischer-Lescano 2013; la Cour and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013c; Moeller 2012) and to a nascent movement to introduce Luhmannian conceptualisations to IR (Albert 2016; Albert et al. 2013a, 2010; Albert and Hilkermeier 2004; Helmig and Kessler 2007; Jaeger 2007; Kessler 2012). The chapter’s argument will proceed in three stages. First, starting from a discussion of Luhmann’s problematisation of modern society as paradoxically complex, Luhmann’s notion of a polycentric, heterarchic, and polycentric ‘world society’ is introduced as an alternative approach to the classical IR conceptualisation of an international state system, in order to deconstruct the discipline’s semantic construction of IR’s object of study. Second, the chapter discusses Luhmann’s concept that communication establishes meaningful, selective distinctions and, in so doing, results in social differentiation and evolution with contingent consequences. Here the chapter also addresses interrelations between the consequences of functional differentiation and their ideological mediation. Finally, the chapter’s conclusions relate the discussion back to our point of departure and discuss how its reading of Luhmann’s social theory relocates the boundaries between theory and ideology.

Troubles with Luhmann: IR and ‘world society’ Social theory . . . is a consequence of the attempt to co-ordinate a plethora of different theoretical decisions. And only this relatively loose form of theory design – keeping as discernible as possible which decisions have been made and which consequences it would have had if the same points would have been decided otherwise, appears appropriate as an offer for a self-description of modern society. (Luhmann 1998, 1138f.)2

Luhmann’s highly complex and abstract social theory departs from a relatively basic assumption. He argues that society and all its subdivisions – politics, morals, law, religion and science, to name but a few – consist ‘in and by communications’ and hence ‘produce and reproduce themselves by communication alone’ (Andersen 2003, 63, 77). The project of ‘explaining the normal as improbable’ (Luhmann 1995a, 114) aims at a comprehensive theory of the emergence and consequences of modernity in its paradoxical complexity (Luhmann 1998, 16–35). This modern antinomy is observed throughout his main body of work as a highly dynamic and productive form of social differentiation that fails to solve any of its inherent problems, cannot provide for a viable or commonly shared vision of unity or integration and impacts on its living and non-living environments in increasingly harmful ways (Luhmann 1990f, 1996 [1985], 1997). While Luhmann’s theoretical venture almost inevitably polarises and triggers either overtly enthusiastic support or hypercritical dismissal, both reactions often fail to fully realise the farreaching, different and differential consequences of Luhmannian thought (Albert 2010, 50f.; King 2001, 2). On the basis of the central concept of ‘autopoiesis’,

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Luhmann develops a radically constructivist and reflexive understanding of society that, as Oliver Kessler puts it, ‘separate[s] the individual from the social and argue[s] that society is a complex, meaning constituted system consisting of and reproduced by communication only’ (Kessler 2009, 133). Luhmann borrows his key term from the post-Darwinian evolutionary biology of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela to argue that (social) systems emerge and evolve as self-generated, auto-logical forms:3 Systems are based on the interconnection of ephemeral, self-generated operations and only the dynamic interrelation of these events facilitates systemic structuration (Graham and McKenna 2000, 41–44). This brief overview of some of the seemingly paradoxically interdependent elements of Luhmann’s social thought indicates the fundamental and multilayered ruptures with familiar ‘old-European’ conceptualisations of the social and the political Luhmann dares us to accept (la Cour and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013b). Accordingly, it is not surprising that scholarly observers describe his theoretical project in contradictory terms. While Hans-Georg Moeller emphasises the theory’s self-declared ‘antihumanism’ that sets out to ‘de-anthropologise’ descriptions of society (Moeller 2012, 5), Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden argue that Luhmannian conceptualisations are ‘unashamedly anthropocentric’ (Cudworth and Hobden 2011, 129). Additionally, Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen and Oliver Kessler contend that Luhmann consequently de-ontologises his theoretical concepts (Andersen 2003, XII–XV; Kessler 2009, 134). Hans-Georg Moeller and William Rasch, however, state that Luhmann’s ontological underpinnings are more complex and presuppose a notion of reality that cannot be accessed but is nevertheless a condition of possibility for constructing social realities (Moeller 2012, 78–87; Rasch 2013). Consequently, the theory’s radical and discomforting potential is only recently rediscovered, tellingly outside the debates of IR or international political sociology. Namely, radical re-appropriations take place in critical legal scholarship (Amstutz and FischerLescano 2013; King 2001; la Cour and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013c) and social and political philosophy (Clam 2013; Moeller 2012; Rasch 2013; Thornhill 2013) after a first wave of unorthodox re-readings in literature critique (Rasch and Wolfe 1995, 2000). Notwithstanding Luhmann’s frequent statements about the general limitations of theoretical aspirations, it seems appealing for critical scholars to interpret any resort to ‘grand’ theorising as cushioning doubt and immunising arguments by the invocation of a higher authority (Leander 2009). Especially the discipline of IR with its particular, thorny and discontinuous history of relating to systemic theories is, therefore, understandably cautious about the potential added value of Luhmannian conceptualisations for making sense of global politics (Kessler and Kratochwil 2010, 25–33).4 Barry Buzan, for instance, doubts whether Luhmann’s purely analytical understanding of ‘world society’ is commensurable with more normative interpretations of the term in the English School tradition (Buzan 2004, 72). Hans-Martin Jaeger’s cautious reassessment of Buzan’s argument, which suggests that both understandings might well speak to each other, offers a case of another, equally understandable counter-reaction to the discipline’s troubles with Luhmann (Jaeger 2010, 82–85). Attempts to introduce Luhmannian thought

‘I see something you don’t see’ 77 to IR more often than not pre-emptively argue in over-cautious and defensive ways. Matthias Albert, for instance, stresses in a seminal article that only a partial, eclectic reading of Luhmann’s theory is appropriate for IR (Albert 1999), even if the suggested conceptual shifts heavily draw on his theoretical lexicon (Albert et al. 2013b). The appeal of concepts and theories originating in (political) sociology for IR, which challenge the discipline’s core assumptions and conceptual frameworks at least since the ‘third debate’, often materialise in calls for a sociological approach to IR (Lawson and Shilliam 2010). As Albert points out, Luhmann’s social systems theory points in a different direction. It argues that IR in its communications, not least the so-called great debates, produces and reproduces a specific social form, namely a discipline situated somewhat between scientific analysis, normative critique and policy advice of an historically particular constellation of territorially delimited political units that is universalised (Albert 2010, 51). The discipline’s location at the interstices of analysis, critique and advice is prone to reify the global status quo and produce ideological knowledge claims in the Habermasian sense discussed earlier (Cox 1981). While the actuality of IR’s ‘great debates’ often resembles clashes between supposedly incommensurable theoretical-conceptual positions in which the suspicion of ideological reasoning is never far (Smith 2008, 725), it therefore becomes possible to address this seemingly strange way of ‘debating’ as a particular form of communication. The concomitance of highly resilient concepts that are at the same time almost void of conceptual meaning (Legro and Moravcsik 1999) can be interpreted as one of the specific features of IR as a communicative system that might help explain the discipline’s resilience to fundamental reorientation in spite of obvious and significant problems of its dominant frame of reference (Luhmann 1997, 67–70, 2002, 220–227). Luhmann programmatically claims that methods should allow for interrupting the assumed ‘immediate continuum of reality and knowledge’ and thereby focus on problematising the basis of knowledge claims in the first place (Luhmann 1998, 36–43). Accordingly, a Luhmannian perspective on IR helps asking the discipline’s typical questions in new and unexpected ways (Kessler 2012, 85). Luhmann’s methodological programme is highly sceptical of the conventions of social science and its various sub-disciplines, including IR, which all too often ‘satisfy their theoretical curiosity by a post mortem examination of their classics’ (Luhmann 1997, 77, emphasis in original). In so doing, they operate within conceptual frames that are deeply rooted in disciplinary traditions and at the same time already point beyond these very traditions. New problems are articulated in old vocabularies and established lexicographies, simply because there are no meaningful ways to communicate the issues at hand. At the same time, changing constellations of problems also gradually shift established semantics (Luhmann 1990g, 184–187). While such tensions cannot be circumvented, they can become cognitive deadlocks if they are not reflected upon. To return to our point of departure, Luhmann also contends that this is the reason why theoretically informed ideology critique articulates itself in ideological terms and thus runs the

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risk of reproducing the very ideology it criticises. Luhmann specifically points to four core assumptions about society that establish cognitive blockades: That society consists of human beings and their relations, that society is hence integrated by consensus, that societies (in the plural) constitute territorially limited units and that societies (as discriminate groups of human beings or territorial units) can be observed as objects (Luhmann 1998, 24f.). Moeller interprets this repositioning of the individual human being from the centre of society into its environment and the radical deconstruction of commonly shared descriptions of society as the ‘fourth [sociological] insult to human vanity’. He also argues that this repositioning ultimately shifts the focus from political steering or control of the social world to its contingent evolution in non-arbitrary but also non-necessary ways (Moeller 2012, 28–31). While politics, according to Luhmann, still fulfils an important and indeed indispensable social function, its assumed centrality within society is a (necessary) mythology that enables society to cope with the potentially devastating consequences of functional differentiation (Luhmann 1990e). In this perspective, politics is not so much the hard reality of power games, but a means of semantically mediating the insecurity inherent to contingent social evolution, closely linked to ideologies in the second sense discussed earlier. The centrality of the modern territorial state in world politics, the ‘Westphalian moment’ essential to the foundation of IR even in its most ardent critiques (Lawson and Shilliam 2010), can be interpreted as a particular expression of necessary political mythology (Luhmann 2002, 220f.). Again, these semantics fulfil crucial communicative functions, not least for the discipline itself. They address specific centrifugal and problematic aspects of the social reality of world society and relate these aspects back to familiar conceptualisations, but they cannot provide concepts for reformulating theoretical approaches to the problems of late modernity (Luhmann 1990g). Luhmann’s seminal essay ‘Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society?’ identifies a set of interrelated problems: Severe economic discrepancies reinforced by seemingly rational behaviour that result in uneven levels of ‘development’, the mutually contingent dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that define the possibility space of regional actors and far-reaching ecological impacts of widely used technologies (Luhmann 1997). However, he also contends that these phenomena are not expressions of an imperfectly realised world society, the resilience of regional differences or the remaining dominance of central actors, but outcomes of functional differentiation itself. For Luhmann, functional differentiation does not implicate a tendency towards convergence but reinforces different levels of participation in, and reactions to, the primary mode of global social differentiation (Luhmann 1998, 167–171). The state, accordingly, is by no means prone to disappear, but its centrality for world society is increasingly contested. In his fashion of embracing irresolvable paradoxes, Luhmann contends that ‘the political system of world society is a state system that no longer allows for observing individual states as discrete units’ (Luhmann 1998, 808). By contrast, he argues that the state and its role within world society should be observed from the perspective of a functionally differentiated world society.

‘I see something you don’t see’ 79 As the next section will discuss in detail, functional differentiation constitutes, according to Luhmann, a level of social complexity that does not allow for a central, unifying representation of societal identity (Luhmann 1995b, 176– 181). Accordingly, he argues that world society does not tend towards harmony but represents a polycentric, heterarchic, polycontextual, self-substitutive and auto-logical order. In so doing, he focuses on contingency and centrifugal tendencies since it becomes unlikely ‘that structural developments within function systems remain compatible with each other’ (Luhmann 1997, 75f.). In light of these considerations, the state has to be approached quite differently from its traditional IR understanding as the discrete, central and constitutive unit of the international system or international society. Rather, the state is a consequence of a double moment of differentiation: First, the differentiation of (world) society into sub-systems according to functions, including politics, constitutes the semantic self-description of the state ‘as a point of reference for political action’ (Luhmann 1990e, 166). Second, the differentiation of functional systems into discrete units allows for addressing them in meaningful ways, in the case of global politics as territorially defined segments or ‘that what we call territorial states’ (Luhmann 2002, 222). While these ‘units’ nominally relate to each other as functional equals, their interrelations are at the same time organised in terms of shifting centre/periphery-distinctions in the political medium of ‘power’.5 This dual differentiation has, according to Luhmann, a double-edged effect. On the one hand, politics becomes an autonomous sphere of communication, which potentially allows other social systems to develop independently from the strict political logics of power. On the other hand, all territory has to remain addressable as territorial states in order to participate in political communication (Luhmann 2002, 223–227). From this perspective, states are not the basic, irreducible elements of an international system that might transform into an international society but historically contingent constructions of the political differentiation of world society (Kessler 2012, 81). Since the semantics of the nation state represent an integral element of organising global politics, IR’s disciplinary focus on interrelations between states always contributes to the ideational reproduction of the politics of world society. In the sense of semantically mediating current structurations of world society, IR therefore constitutes a form of ideology. Furthermore, Luhmann argues that the historical contingency through which the nation state emerged as the prevalent self-description of the political system owes much to the establishment of state/society distinctions in the nineteenth century. This particular distinction, he contends, allowed for marking the unity of the difference in terms of a semantic of ‘identity’ (Luhmann 1987a, 87): The idea of sovereign nation states which effectively distinguish one nation from all others and allowed for a transitory period to identify rule with a normative claim (Luhmann 2002, 252f.). This development, in turn, presupposes another historically contingent moment in the evolution of world society: The ‘discovery’ and nearly universal Eurocentric colonisation of the world. The colonising process forcibly included the whole of the globe into regular communicative interrelations,

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demanded for the establishment of a world-time and a related rearrangement of time semantics (e.g. in the distinction pre-modern/modern) and time horizons (towards a teleology of progress), promoted the full implementation of the principle of functional differentiation and exploited the full potential of new communicative techniques (Luhmann 1998, 147–151). The discussion of Luhmann’s concept of world society and its differences to IR uses of the term in this section has located a Luhmannian notion of global politics within a wider frame of reference and introduced a set of critical theoretical concepts. Namely, we have referred to the interrelated ideas of communication, differentiation and evolution, which attain particular meanings within Luhmann’s lexicography. The following section will examine these particular meanings in more detail to provide foundations for discussing differences and interrelations between theory and ideology.

Conceptualising world society: communication, difference and evolution In vain we try to use the leftover vocabularies of a tradition whose ambition it was to define the unity, or even the essence, of the social. Our problem is to define difference and to mark off a space in which we can observe the emergence of order and disorder. (Luhmann 1997, 69)

These remarks from the programmatic piece ‘Globalization or World Society’ reaffirm a point that our discussion in the previous section has already highlighted: Luhmann’s own conceptualisations aim at reflecting the inherent limitations of established conceptual vocabularies with their conventional or even essentialist notions of the social (Luhmann 1994, 1995b). While he extends this sceptical approach to language in use and even to the limitations of language itself, linguistic and semantic conceptualisations still represent critical elements of society and of theoretically apprehending it (Luhmann 1995a, 77). This doublebind relates to the ways in which Luhmann employs sociological, political and other terms that originate in self-descriptions of society as necessary but contingent and contentious preconditions of observing the social. He claims that conceptualisations should be observed within a different frame of reference to become theoretically more meaningful: As manifestations of the reproduction of social systems (Luhmann 1995a, 388). Luhmann hence does not claim to offer the only possible or true interpretation of social realities, but rather intends to facilitate plausible observations on all manifestations of the social as networks of communication(s). In the following subsections, the chapter first discusses Luhmann’s notion of communication as a means of selectively (re-)producing the social world. Second, it elaborates how this understanding of social communication relates to his interpretation of differentiation and evolution. Third, the chapter argues on this basis that Luhmannian social theory suggests a particular way of

‘I see something you don’t see’ 81 conceptualising differences and interdependencies between theory and ideology beyond mere ideology critique. Communication and the (re-)production of society A communication does not communicate [mitteilen] the world, it divides [einteilen] it. Like any operation of living or thinking, communication produces a caesura. (Luhmann 1994, 25)

Communication is for Luhmann the fundamental element of society insofar as it produces a particular caesura in the world: The ability to communicate a difference and, in so doing, process meaning distinguishes the social world from its living and non-living environments and constitutes the very space of society. Accordingly, Luhmann’s social theory asks how society develops and temporarily stabilises self-descriptions by distinguishing itself from multiple environments and by (re-)producing systemic identities out of self-constructed elements (Luhmann 1995a, 9–11). He argues that only the reiterative connection of ephemeral communicative events gradually establishes systemic histories and a related set of semantics that allows for identifying a communication as ‘belonging’ to a specific social structure (Luhmann 1994, 29). At the same time, society, as the overarching but by no means overriding unity of difference of each and all social forms, has a definitive boundary in communication: All communications are social and only within society is communication possible (Luhmann 1977, 43, 2002). Focusing on difference and the need to draw a distinction to an overtly complex environment, Luhmann reformulates the basic problem of systems theory into the question of how operationally closed autopoietic systems remain open to irritations from their environment(s) (Rasch and Wolfe 2000, 22). While selective, self-referential closure establishes a clear-cut difference, differential identities depend on heteroreferential relationality as any system presupposes multiple environments (Luhmann 2017 [1993], XXVII–XXXIII; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013, 71f.). Luhmann criticises communication theories which argue on the basis of transmission-metaphors and related sender-recipient models, since they assume that (manifest or latent) meanings can be disclosed, and thus essentialise the utterance of meaningful messages (Luhmann 1995a, 139). By contrast, he argues that meaning is communicatively constructed through processes that make a difference of their own, namely between actualised contents and their potential significance in social, factual and temporal terms (Luhmann 1990d). Utterances merely represent propositions for selecting from an infinite, complex pool of meanings to establish regularities while understanding does not presuppose that certain meanings are accepted (Luhmann 1990b, 1990c). Misunderstanding and dissent are hence ‘understanding’ in the Luhmannian sense: They provoke further communication and open ‘modes of communication outside of normal constraints’ (Luhmann 1990a, 14f.). On a related note, the ‘function’ of social systems is not

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conceptualised according to a notion of specific normative requirements of societal functionality that avoid ‘dysfunctional’ developments (Luhmann 1988, 135– 137). Rather, the term implies that social systems perform and connect specific communications in ways that ‘give meaning to events which otherwise would be meaningless for society’ regardless of a system’s concrete ‘performance assessed on any other basis’ (King and Thornhill 2005, 9). Dysfunctional consequences of shifts in world society’s differential structuration and social evolution, above all the harmful social and environmental impacts of functional differentiation to which politics can react only in very limited ways, still trigger meaningful communications (Luhmann 1998, 795–805). Inasmuch as the primacy of functional differentiation is less a normative concept than an analytical observation, dissatisfaction with the status quo and concern about the social and ecological costs of its material dysfunctionalities are critical for society (Luhmann 1989, 1992c). Accordingly, organised protest and spontaneously emerging (but increasingly institutionalised) social movements represent modes of disturbing the established communicative conventions of modern society whose sub-systems are highly selective and specialised, but therefore also deaf to the consequences of differentiation (Luhmann 1996 [1995], 206). Counterintuitively, Luhmann’s particular brand of functional theory can, therefore, also be read as a theory of conflict about the strange duality of functionalities and dysfunctionalities in late modernity, including its ideological consequences (Fuchs 2013). As the following sections will argue in more detail, Luhmann conceptualises protest movements as particular expressions of this conflict over about the consequences of modernisation. Social differentiation and evolution My argument can be summarized by two statements: (1) a functionally differentiated world system seems to undermine its own prerequisites; and (2) planning cannot replace evolution – on the contrary, it will make us more dependent on unplanned evolutionary developments. (Luhmann 1990g, 183)

The ‘normal constraints’ of social communication introduced in the previous subsection reflect, according to Luhmann, the underlying conditions of communicative situations: The double contingency of reciprocally insecure expectations (Luhmann 2004 [2002], 321). While communication establishes a boundary between society and its environment, specific communications articulated in binary codes establish distinctions between societal sub-systems that constitute social environments for each other (Luhmann 1998, 597f.). Constructing information about society, for instance, by differentiating power from powerlessness addresses an issue in the medium of politics, while problematising whether a proposition is true or false refers it to the realm of science (King and Thornhill 2005, 22–24). In so doing, particular communications are distinguished in terms

‘I see something you don’t see’ 83 of inclusion and exclusion, topically connected by the activation of scripts and temporarily ordered by different modes to anticipate reactions, reflecting the three dimensions of meaning discussed earlier (Luhmann 1998, 44–59). Therefore, the crossing of binary distinctions becomes possible since rejection, conflict and misunderstanding do not ‘end’ communication but stimulate further communicative reactions (Esposito 2013, 181f.). Transitions of power from one actor to another, to stay with our example, actualise the differentiation of politics according to its coding of power (Luhmann 2002, 88–90). In a similar vein, the falsification of a truth claim facilitates new knowledge claims within the scientific system according to its operational code true or false (Luhmann 1992b, 369–373). Consequently, codes as such do not have a preferential value and cannot be applied to themselves: Strictly speaking, there are no temporally fixed criteria for scientifically defining the ‘truth’ of a truth claim, and the distinction itself cannot be true or false, it simply is (Luhmann 1989, 38–42). The excluded third, a preference or a conditional programme and a system-specific rationale or ‘formula of contingency’, has to be reintroduced to enable the code’s meaningful application (Luhmann 1998, 470). In politics, the general norm of ‘legitimacy’ occupies this space as it postulates the legitimate use of force to contain the possibility of violence, thus establishing a self-validating normative claim (Santiago et al. 2013, 235). Its foundation is paradoxical since it presumes what it supposedly established in the first place; internationally agreed norms such as ‘recognition’ or ‘sovereignty’ rely on similar paradoxes (Luhmann 1987b, 2002, 122f.). As Luhmann reminds us frequently, functional differentiation is not a quasinatural consequence of the modernisation process according to an overarching rationality inherent to social evolution. He is highly sceptical of convergence theses, according to which an underlying evolutionary teleology ensures that functional differentiation stabilises social relations in rational ways or offers a promise of non-transcendental salvation (Luhmann 2002, 82; Rasch and Wolfe 1995; Wagner 2013). However, Luhmann identifies historically contingent tendencies that result from gradually, but permanently increasing, levels of social complexity. He argues that historically different primary forms of differentiation evolve in a series of multilayered ruptures whenever communicative mechanisms can no longer manage a critical amount of internal complexity in the social, temporal and factual dimensions of meaning discussed earlier (Kessler 2012, 81f.). According to his methodological strategy of operating with a minimal amount of conceptual differentiation, Luhmann typifies forms of social evolution according to the distinction between equality and difference (Barbesino and Salavaggio 1997, 82). While segmented societies differentiate equal sub-systems according to familial or spatial distinctions, centre/periphery-differentiation reinforces spatiality and stratification ‘class’ as a marker of difference between unequal subunits (Luhmann 1998, 612–614). Functional differentiation, by contrast, relies on the equality of sub-systems, which are differentiated only according to their functions. None of the highly specialised functional systems are capable of representing the unity of society or provide for an inclusive semantics that permanently integrates the self-descriptions of society into one overarching principle (Luhmann 1990f,

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124f.). Ultimately, Luhmann’s concept of the polycentric and heterogeneous differentiation of world society rejects, in William Rasch and Cary Wolfe’s words, ‘the so-called “project of modernity” and its desire for a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld’ (Rasch 2002, 19). The primacy of functional differentiation presupposes that no sub-system is able to dominate functional logics or society as a whole; it does, however, not imply that other differences just disappear (Luhmann 1997, 2002, 76–81). Rather, social hierarchies and centre/periphery-differences cut across functional differentiation. Consequently, the likelihood that territorial segmentation, regional inequalities and social discrimination intensify increases since differences reinforce themselves (Luhmann 1998, 743–776; Rasch 2013, 51). While high levels of differentiation are hence highly productive, they come at the price of increasing ontological insecurity and have high social as well as environmental costs. This inherent duality of the modern condition bears consequences for the ways in which society is semantically or ideologically reflected, as the following subsection will discuss. Dysfunctional modernities and the rise of ideological reasoning Then, we will see a society without top and without centre; a society that evolves but cannot control itself. . . . This society makes very specific distinctions with respect to its environment, e.g. usable and not usable resources with respect to ecological questions or (excluded) bodies and (included) persons with respect to human individuals. (Luhmann 1997, 74)

Social sub-systems achieve a high degree of not only functional specialisation but also ‘organisational blindness’, when they operate according to specific codes which determine particular conditional programmes. Any functional system ‘represents a specific function and social sphere, but constructs a comprehensive cosmology’ according to this monopolised function (Kessler 2012, 85). By the same token, sub-systems remain indifferent to all irritations which their particular code and its programming exclude, simply because they lack frames to address problems that differ from their established functional identity (Luhmann 1990a, 3f.). Consequently, Luhmann emphasises the concept of difference instead of the idea of social integration by representing society in a singular principle, be it substantial or merely procedural (Kessler 2012, 80; Rasch and Wolfe 2000, 19).6 Structural couplings or ‘models of other systems in the environment’ within particular sub-systems (Albert 1999, 249) partially fill the void of impossible universal representation and social integration (Luhmann 1996 [1990], 166). Mechanisms of structural coupling – for instance, constitutions or international treaties at the intersection between the (global) political and legal system – establish factual interfaces (Baraldi et al. 1997, 186–189) but at the same time create potential for disproportional irritations and conflicts between partial, contradictory systemic logics (Luhmann 1998, 779–788). The concomitance of differentiation and

‘I see something you don’t see’ 85 coupling, functional autonomy and factual interdependence, and self-substitutive sub-systems whose operations mutually presuppose each other, articulates, according to Luhmann, an inherent ambiguity of modernity (Luhmann 1990g, 181–183; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013, 64f.). Two interrelated consequences structure society’s expectations and guide possible reactions to the ambiguous, paradoxical foundation of (late) modernity. On the one hand, Luhmann argues that ‘complex systems require a high degree of instability to enable on-going reaction to themselves and their environment’ (Luhmann 1995a, 501). Openness to irritations is a precondition for establishing new and different ways of relating to other systems and reacting to profound changes within society’s environment (Luhmann 1998, 795). That these changes are not least caused by the problematic effects of social evolution not only increases the need for destabilising the status quo but also reinforces its dysfunctional consequences (Luhmann 2017, 54–57). When adapting anticipations in the face of irritations caused by frustrated expectations, functional systems are engaged in processes of ‘cognitive learning’: They revise programmes, adapt self-descriptions and produce new forms of knowledge about the environment (Luhmann 1995a, 320). On the other hand, systems cannot develop meaningful structures when they try to react to any, even minor, irritation. Highly specialised functional systems develop a highly selective ability to irritate themselves while being non-responsive to most disturbances (Luhmann 1997, 74). Luhmann conceptualises forms of dealing with insecurity and frustrated expectations without adapting or learning as ‘normative’ since they maintain norms counterfactually (Luhmann 1998, 638). While morally overdetermined interpretations of the status quo provide normative security (Luhmann 1992c, 24), the dynamic evolution of world society tends, however, towards cognitive responses to the unfolding of the fundamental paradox of functional differentiation (Horst 2013, 197–199). Precisely because the functionally differentiated society of modernity is unable to control its subsystems’ selection processes and guarantee social integration by referring to universal principles, it also depends on normative semantic reassurance (Clam 2013, 30). Luhmann contends that the demand for ideational rationalisations and the semantics of ideology hence rises as the heterarchic, polycentric structuration of functionally autonomous, but interdependent and self-substitutive sub-systems results in the impossibility ‘of an unchallenged representation of society in society’ (Luhmann 1990f, 125). As the paradox that social modernity results in the loss of a project of modernisation cannot be resolved, Luhmann argues that two forms of reflecting the paradoxical foundation of modern society in ideological terms remain. Either it is embraced tautologically, presupposing that society is what it is (and ought to be) in attempts to solve its problems conservatively, or a new paradox of social critique is introduced, assuming that society is not (yet) what it is supposed to be by projecting the possibility of social identity to future progress (Luhmann 1990f, 127f.). While both versions miss the point, since society, according to Luhmann, always is what it is and what it is not, they are not equally suited to process information cognitively and thus unfold the paradox

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theoretically, since conservative, tautological approaches negate the paradox on which they are built. Therefore, ‘the intellect has a certain preference for the leftist side of the political and intellectual spectrum’ (Luhmann 1990f, 136) while ‘a state of lack of theory’ characterises conservative approaches (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 68). Since autopoiesis depends at the same time on normative operational closure and openness for irritations or cognition, both elements require each other (Paterson 2006, 16). Furthermore, it is argued here that the constant crossing of the boundary between cognitive and normative reactions to modern ambiguities is a precondition of autopoietic reproduction. In this context, Luhmann argues that protest and social theory represent the two most important spaces in which society still attempts to reflect the contradictions of late modernity (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 72). However, protest communication inhabits a precarious institutional space since success and failure to influence the agenda of established social systems equally compromise the persistence of concrete social movements (Luhmann 1992a, 149–152).7 This double-bind can be overcome by developing self-descriptions of protest that entail a concept or even a theory of movement which allows for transcending issue-related goals and imagining movement as trajectory – a so-called movement teleology (Luhmann 1995a, 401). Theory can, therefore, become a political Trojan horse. If the ways in which contradictions of modernity are observed feed back into the self-description of social movements, communication evolves and can result in different interventions (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 74). These, in turn, might adequately reflect the impossibility of representing dysfunctional modernities in a singular, unifying contingency formula and avoid ‘the wrong conclusion that deparadoxization generates true ideological knowledge’ (Luhmann 1990f, 136). In so doing, the difference between theory and ideology counter-intuitively appears less crucial than critical traditions suggest: To some degree, this section has argued that theory needs ideology to become socially meaningful as long as it reflects its inherent limitations and avoids tautological answers to current problems.

Conclusions: theory and ideology between critique and meta-critique Oh, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. This chapter started from a debate in which Habermas, a key thinker of ‘Critical Theory of the second generation’, insinuates in not so implicit words that systems theory is a textbook example of hegemonic knowledge production (Amstutz 2013, 366). While our argument has taken some unexpected turns in reading Luhmann’s theory on different terms, one central observation should be obvious: Luhmann’s venture into a theory of society in which sociologists neither ‘play the role of the lay-priests of modernity’ nor ‘satisfy their theoretical curiosity by

‘I see something you don’t see’ 87 a post-mortem examination of their classics’ (Luhmann 1997, 77) does not lend itself easily to the apologetics of the status quo. He argues that social structures are always dynamic and evolve with every communication in unexpected ways. Therefore, the reproduction of social systems depends on the constant irritation of their normative foundations and does not follow the neat rational reasoning of structural functionalism. On the contrary, the maintenance of latent structures that safeguard societal integration becomes precarious in a functionally differentiated society ‘without top and without centre’ (Luhmann 1997, 74). If and insofar as these comments on the modern condition can be interpreted as a theoretical rationalisation of the constant need to progress, adapt and grow, Luhmann’s remarks on the potentially fatal consequences of social evolution in (late) modernity for society’s living and non-living environments clearly point out the limitations of progressive narratives (Luhmann 1996b [1986]). Other more orthodox or conservative readings that aim at advocating a (perceived) status quo ante remain possible. But here Luhmann is in the good company of more explicitly critical thinkers. Bruno Latour’s clinical deconstruction of the scientific paradigm has often been misread as a precursor of narratives of post-truth (Martill and Schindler, this volume, 3), and Habermas’s proceduralisation of constitutional legitimacy resonates in concepts of normative power that do not resemble discourses free of domination (Azmanova, this volume, 108f.). However, the unintended consequences of theorising society, which can turn theoretical intentions topsy-turvy and use critical analysis against its purpose of critique, are less surprising from a Luhmannian perspective that argues for strong reflexivity. If even theories have to endure that they reappear in their own subject area in tautological ways (Luhmann 1992b, 71f.), the method of ideology critique can become an instrument for denouncing Critical theories (with a capital C) as ideology and deconstructing their emancipatory project (Luhmann 1998, 1116). We might add another reason to Moeller’s explanation for Luhmann’s proverbial inaccessible, obscure and convoluted writing style (Moeller 2012, 10–15): Setting the bar for penetrating the theory’s radical and radically discomforting potential high might constitute a safeguard against counter-intuitive uses of the theory, above all as a catechism for apologetic ‘lay-priests of modernity’. Again, Luhmann would be in good company. Going back to our other point of departure, Luhmann’s intervention that ‘the critic of ideology is no better off than the ideologue’ (Luhmann 1994, 28), at least in epistemological terms, another pertinent question suggests itself: Does this statement not imply that his neo-Marxist counterparts produce mere ideology in their theorising? Does Luhmann not use the concept of ideology as a tool of othering and immunising critique in the same ways as his analysis of the ‘Frankfurt’ tradition suggests? This chapter’s answer is less straightforward than we might hope; it will reflect our previous discussions in light of three unorthodox readings of Luhmann that aim at making sense of the difference between critique and observation. Moeller’s re-appropriation of Luhmannian radicality transfers the problem to a different plane. He contends that Luhmann proceeds from critical to ‘metacritical’ theorising: By abandoning the ‘unfinished project of enlightenment’,

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Luhmann undertakes a paradigm shift towards a non-humanist theory of society that profoundly challenges dominant narratives and confronts society with an analysis without hope or fear (Moeller 2012, 19–31, 105–119). Chris Thornhill, by contrast, argues in his contraposition of the ‘sociological antipodes’ Marx and Luhmann that both share a common approach to social enquiry in which cognition and ideated principles form part of society’s semantic materiality (Thornhill 2013, 269–272). Luhmann’s rejection of Marx’s ‘residual totalism’ represents, accordingly, the main difference between the two thinkers (Thornhill 2013, 263). Marc Amstutz, finally, performs a conceptual volte-face in his discussion of a critical systems theory: As Luhmannian theory is by definition social communication and therefore contributes to the dynamic reproduction of society, it has implicit and explicit social consequences (Amstutz 2013, 366f.). Consequently, Luhmann’s non-normative, strictly immanent and self-reflexive observation of society can develop an analysis of social normality that bears normative consequences, even if it tries to avoid them. Such a ‘non-normative critique that is normatively meaningful’ might deliver a more adequate description of the contradictions of the status quo than normative, critical theorising (Amstutz 2013, 384–389). These three readings suggest three different, yet interrelated, answers to the question of whether Luhmann’s critique of critical theory ultimately must argue that it represents ideology. For Moeller, the answer would be clearly affirmative. However, this might not be the end of the matter: Since Luhmann reminds us that even the thesis of the end of all metanarratives can establish a new meta-narrative (Luhmann 1995b), a theory that analyses society ‘nec spe nec metu’ might also create new fears and hopes that have societal effects (Luhmann (1996a [1986], 73). If, according to Thornhill, the rejection of ‘totalism’ represents the essential difference between critical and systems theory, the answer points in a similar direction. Nevertheless, Luhmann’s denial of a repraesentatio identitatis of society also relegates market and democracy from representations of the unity of society to metaphors for increased, but structurally bound, adaptability and contends that any form of reintroducing the primacy of one functional system has totalitarian consequences (Luhmann 1996 [1985], 53). Consequently, systems theory might become a new tool of critique, especially when increasing interdependencies threaten to de-differentiate society. By relocating the problem of normativity from the foundations to the social effects of theorising, Amstutz circumvents the problem. While his argument reflects Luhmann’s credo that methods should surprise and unsettle the orthodoxy of ‘normal research’ (Luhmann 1998, 37) and earlier remarks on the consequences of reflexive theorising, it also urges systems theory to overcome one of its fundamental blind spots: The distinction between observation and critique. This seems to end up outside of Frankfurt in the doldrums of the Bielefeld Blues in which we are left with complex and often astonishingly clear-sighted observations on the fundamental contradictions of modernity which do not allow for an engaged critique of the modern condition (Fischer-Lescano 2013, 15). Yet Luhmann’s observations on the rise of ideological narratives and spaces of protest in the communications of modern society indicate a breeze that blows in a

‘I see something you don’t see’ 89 direction that synthesises the three radical readings discussed in the last paragraphs. Relocating critical perspectives in the ways suggested in the previous section performs Moeller’s paradigm shift towards meta-critique, avoids ‘residual totalism’ according to Thornhill and is ‘normatively meaningful’ in the sense of Amstutz’s ‘critical systems theory’. Moreover, it allows us to see why critical thought is co-opted for revisionist purposes, how the insistence on critical positions with a capital C can become conservative and that the problem of identity politics is not so much the reference to differentiated identities, but a tendency to universalise identity in tautological ways. These considerations also have consequences for the opportunities and limitations of observing IR with Luhmann. The cautious, piecemeal approaches discussed earlier run the risk of reinforcing orthodox readings of systems theory that this chapter aimed to unsettle. Luhmann’s programmatic, highly critical and rather gloomy piece ‘Globalization or World Society’ (1997) has inspired Moeller’s radical re-appropriation of Luhmannian theory (Moeller 2012) as well as this chapter’s comments on the precarious location of current IR within the evolving global politics of late modernity. It is telling that this article is hardly ever discussed or even cited in contributions to ‘Luhmannian IR’.8 Furthermore, the nascent literature that draws on Luhmann’s work to make sense of international politics might also be in danger of unintentionally constructing Luhmannian IR as a conservative project in the tautological understanding of the term discussed in this chapter. Attempts to reassess the discipline’s classical terms and conceptualisations within the lexicon of systems theory implicitly reintroduce ‘world society’ as a normative concept – not in the English School’s sense of overcoming the Hobbesian status quo, but on the level of the discipline itself. Albert, for instance, argues that IR might overcome its inherent problems with a more adequate descriptive and analytical apparatus based on a theory of the differentiation of world society (Albert 2016). If and insofar as such approaches refrain from adequately addressing the discipline’s communicative paradoxes, they turn an author who set out to problematise knowledge claims by ‘explaining the normal as improbable’ into an object of ‘post-mortem examination’. While this chapter’s reading of Luhmann is purposefully eclectic, it aims at productively deconstructing attempts at normalising Luhmann within the context of his work. Counter-intuitively, this reading also provides leverage for reconstructing IR as a critical endeavour. Just as Luhmann argues that functional differentiation is not a fail-safe, self-realising and self-fulfilling principle (Luhmann 1998, 811), he also contends that ‘the system with the highest failure quote dominates since the breakdown of specific functional conditions can nowhere be compensated’ (Luhmann 1998, 769). In this perspective, the increasing economisation of politics, academia and – to use a Habermasian term – the lifeworld itself, is less a purpose-driven hegemonic project than a consequence of the dominance of the most failure-prone particular logic (Rasch and Wolfe 2000, 25). We might well end up in a world in which critical scholarship and activism have to defend the complex, non-representational society of late modernity in all its contradictions against de-differentiation.

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Notes 1 I am grateful to all participants of the EWIS workshop ‘Theory as Ideology’ for their thought-provoking comments and the editors of this volume for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Also, I would like to extend my thanks to Dr Katharina Höne for extremely helpful discussions of its conceptual ideas. 2 All translations of Luhmann’s works are the author’s unless stated otherwise. Wherever possible, English editions of his texts have been used. 3 Luhmann understands ‘evolution’ in general and ‘social evolution’ in particular strictly in non-deterministic terms. He conceptualises evolution as a contingent, historical and recursive process without teleology or causal determination (Luhmann 1998, 425–431). 4 If these difficulties do not even concern the ways in which the discipline makes sense of different theoretical approaches in a more general sense (Luhmann 1997, 2002a, 220–227). 5 Luhmann conceptualises this element of differentiation on the level of segmentally differentiated territorial systems and its political organisation (Luhmann 2002a, 244–253). Nevertheless, he also discusses shifting centre/periphery-relations according to constellations of ‘internationally impacting political power’ (Luhmann 2002a, 224). Consequently, it seems adequate to situate the question of power differences according to centre/periphery-distinctions also on the level of the territorial segmentations of the global political system. 6 Rudolf Stichweh, however, seems to argue that the semantics of ‘globalisation’ might fulfil the function of a new totalising self-description of society (2013, 59). 7 These dynamics are discussed in more detail elsewhere (Edelmann 2014). 8 The majority of ‘Luhmannian’ contributions do not reference the piece (Albert 1999, 2007; Helmig and Kessler 2007; Jaeger 2007, 2010; Kessler 2012). While the bibliography of the volume Observing International Relations (Albert and Hilkermeier 2004) contains the article, none of its chapters discuss it. A short intervention in a debate in International Political Sociology (Jaeger 2009) is to my knowledge the only voice within this literature that draws on this seminal paper.

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Luhmann, Niklas (1995b): Why does society describe itself as postmodern?, in: Cultural Critique 30, pp. 171–186. Luhmann, Niklas (1996 [1985]): Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf ökologische Gefährdungen einstellen?, in: Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (ed.), Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 46–63. Luhmann, Niklas (1996a [1986]): Das trojanische Pferd. Ein Interview, in: Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (ed.), Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 64–74. Luhmann, Niklas (1996b [1986]): Alternative ohne Alternativen. Die Paradoxie der ‘neuen sozialen Bewegungen’, in: Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (ed.), Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 75–78. Luhmann, Niklas (1996 [1990]): Umweltrisiko und Politik, in: Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (ed.), Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 160–174. Luhmann, Niklas (1996 [1995]): Protestbewegungen, in: Hellmann, Kai-Uwe (ed.), Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 201–215. Luhmann, Niklas (1997): Globalization or world society: How to conceive of modern society?, in: International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie 7 (1), pp. 67–79. Luhmann, Niklas (1998): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas (2002): Theories of distinction: Redescribing the descriptions of modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas (2010): Politische Soziologie, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas (2017): Das Risiko der Kausalität, in: Baecker, Dirk (ed.), Die Kontrolle von Intransparenz, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 46–64. Luhmann, Niklas (2017 [1993]): Risk: A sociological theory: With a new introduction by Nico Stehr and Gotthard Bechmann, translated by Barrett, Rhodes, Abingdon: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas and Beacker, Dirk (eds.) (2004 [2002]): Einführung in die Systemtheorie, Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-System Verlag. McDonald, Adam (2009): Emancipation and critical terrorism studies, in: Jackson, Richard, Breen Smyth, Marie and Gunning, Jeroen (eds.), Critical terrorism studies: A new research agenda, London: Routledge, pp. 109–123. Moeller, Hans-Georg (2012): The radical Luhmann, New York: Columbia University Press. Owens, Patricia (2015): Economy of force: Counterinsurgency and the historical rise of the social, Cambridge studies in International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paterson, John (2006): Reflecting on reflexive law, in: King, Michael and Thornhill, Chris (eds.), Luhmann on law and politics: Critical appraisals and applications, Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 13–35. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas (2013): The autopoietic fold: Critical autopoiesis between Luhmann and Deleuze, in: la Cour, Anders and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas (eds.), Luhmann observed: Radical theoretical encounters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 60–81. Rasch, William (1997): Locating the political: Schmitt, Mouffe, Luhmann, and the possibility of pluralism, in: International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie 7 (1), pp. 103–115.

‘I see something you don’t see’ 95 Rasch, William (2002): Introduction: The self-positioning society, in: Rasch, William (ed.), Theories of distinction: Redescribing the descriptions of modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–30. Rasch, William (2013): Luhmann’s ontology, in: la Cour, Anders and PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, Andreas (eds.), Luhmann observed: Radical theoretical encounters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 38–59. Rasch, William and Wolfe, Cary (1995): Introduction: The politics of systems and environments, in: Cultural Critique (30), pp. 5–13. Rasch, William and Wolfe, Cary (2000): Introduction: Systems theory and the politics of postmodernity, in: Rasch, William and Wolfe, Cary (eds.), Observing complexity: Systems theory and postmodernism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–32. Santiago, Willis, Filho, Guerra and Ghetti, Pablo (2013): Luhmann and Derrida: Immunology and autopoiesis, in: la Cour, Anders and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas (eds.), Luhmann observed: Radical theoretical encounters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 227–242. Smith, Steve (2008): Six wishes for a more relevant discipline of International Relations, in: Reus-Smit, Christian and Snidal, Duncan (eds.), The Oxford handbook of International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 724–732. Stichweh, Rudolf (2013): The history and systematics of functional differentiation, in: Albert, Mathias, Buzan, Barry and Zürn, Michael (eds.), Bringing sociology to International Relations: World politics as differentiation theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 50–70. Thornhill, Chris (2013): Luhmann and Marx: Social theory and social freedom, in: la Cour, Anders and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas (eds.), Luhmann observed: Radical theoretical encounters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 263–283. Wagner, Elke (2013): Systemtheorie und Frankfurter Schule, in: Amstutz, Marc and Fischer-Lescano, Andreas (eds.), Kritische Systemtheorie. Zur Evolution einer normativen Theorie, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 63–80.

Part II

Contemporary theories as ideologies

5

The costs of the democratic turn in political theory Albena Azmanova

Introduction: the ascendance of democracy in political theory1 Democracy, or ‘the growing role of the common man in the affairs of state’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrasing (2000 [1975], 122), became an unstoppable historical force in the second half of the nineteenth century. For quite some time until then, the concept had carried the derogatory connotation of mob rule, a regime of the ignorant masses; it had been absent from not only the vocabulary of polite politics and educated scholarship but also the language of the American and the French revolutions of the eighteenth century.2 When Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed the Democratic-Republican Party in 1792, this was an early sign of the term’s rapidly changing historical connotation. By 1870, the democratisation of politics in Western societies had become irreversible – ‘the exclusion of the masses from politics seemed a utopian undertaking’, even as the prospect of mass democracy was still unpalatable to ruling elites (Hobsbawm 2000 [1975], 123, 1987, 85). It took, however, another century for the idea of democracy to reign supreme in political theory. In 1951, David Easton lamented the declining rigour of political theory, the exhaustion of its creative energies and its penchant for turning to the past for inspiration: ‘Contemporary political thought lives parasitically on ideas a century old and, what is more discouraging, we see little prospect of the development of new political syntheses’ (Easton, 1951, 36). Easton empanelled two reasons for the impoverishment of theory: First, political theorists had abandoned theory’s unique function – ‘creatively constructing a valuational frame of reference’, that is, offering ideas about the desirable course of human affairs. Second, energy had been diverted away from building a systematic theory about political behaviour and the operation of political institutions. To vigorously connect these two orders of knowledge – value and fact – is the high task of political theory, he urged (Easton 1951, 36). This task was eventually accomplished by the democratic turn in political theory – the emergence of a body of scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century that delineated a subfield known as ‘democratic theory’. This development was aided by three waves of historical upheaval: Decolonisation in the 1960s; the 1970s’ democratisation in Southern Europe, Latin America and Asia;

100 Albena Azmanova and the collapse of the (quasi-)communist dictatorships in Eastern and Central Europe with the end of the Cold War. As democracy became the dominant regime across the world and democracy-promotion an avowed foreign policy ambition, so did democratic theory ascend to its hegemonic position in political theory. Democratic theory confidently rose to Easton’s challenge by making democracy both an empirical object of analysis (addressing institutional structures and political behaviour) and a matrix of valuation (a normative frame of reference). However, in what follows, I will claim that, under certain conditions, democratic theory is apt to mutate into ideology, placing its analytical functions in the service of political ones. When it switches to an ideological mode of operation, democratic theory places its analytical rigour, albeit inadvertently, at the service of conservative political goals – namely, of normalising and therefore stabilising relations of oppression. I am setting aside the amply discussed deliberate misuse of the discourse of democracy in the pursuit of an imperialistic agenda – the deliberate politicisation of democratic theory. Any set of values can be hijacked for nefarious political purposes, just like the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and China did with the ideals of communism or neoliberal capitalism did with the hedonistic irreverence of 1968. Neither do I hold that theory should be objective in the sense of being value-free and therefore politically neutral. Any framework of conceptualisation selectively articulates what is relevant and how it is meaningful, and is, therefore, part of struggles over the structuring of the social order. To remain critical of power dynamics, democratic theory needs to, at a minimum, be cognizant of, and come to terms with, the particular ideological nature of its own theorising. I therefore undertake to explore the mechanisms intrinsic to theorising through which democratic theory is prone to reproduce the very ideological effects it purports to critique. In other words, I propose to investigate the ideological kernel contained in a certain type of scientific analysis of modern Western societies that proceeds as a scrutiny of the institutional configurations and normative arsenal of liberal democracy. In what follows, I will argue that democratic theory starts performing an unintended ideological function when the mechanisms of theorising contain an incestuously close coexistence between democracy as an object of analysis, a normative horizon of critique, a social ontology (a set of presuppositions about society from which the enquiry proceeds) and a tool of progressive social change. When such circularity emerges, democratic theory, I will claim, becomes a source of normative validation for its purported object of critique. Theory transforms from an explanatory device with a critical, world-disclosing purpose into a doctrine – a conceptual mechanism of justification and stabilisation of power relations. When speaking of the ideological effects of the democratic turn in political theory I do not have in mind ideology as an explicit political doctrine, a dogma – akin to the way Marxism was deployed by the dictatorships in East and Central Europe and is still used in China. Neither do I refer to ideology as ‘false consciousness’ that is to be dissolved when confronted by the scientific method (this connotation implies that there is a cognitively pure, socially untainted mental state).3 Rather,

The democratic turn in political theory 101 I refer to ideology as a system of beliefs and attitudes (collective rationalisations) accepted unreflectively by the agents who hold them. As these ideas are thus endowed with the status of common sense, they delineate a normative horizon beyond which critique and criticism cannot reach. In this way, they mask, or divert attention away from, the manner in which these ideas originate in relations of power, validate these relations, and supply legitimacy to forms of socialisation that perpetuate these power relations. Importantly, ideology is not simply a matter of normativity, of valorisation of rules and practices. It is also a vehicle for establishing and maintaining the social conditions needed for the unproblematic reproduction of the system of social relations that yields the particular ideological constructs. A political theory or philosophy could play an ideological role in society, notes Raymond Geuss, in that it fostered certain common ideological illusions, made them more difficult to detect, or created new ones, e.g. the idea . . . that all people in every society everywhere aspire before all else to a particular kind of democratic political culture. (Geuss 2008, 53) The shift from theory to dogma is not rooted in the empirical observation that some societies at a certain historical conjuncture might be endorsing democracy. The ideological transgression, rather, germinates from the conjecture (the idea) that this is the case – a presupposition built into the very foundation of theorising. To be sure, vetting political theory as a standard bearer of democracy is not necessarily objectionable. Yet political decency and academic honesty command that, whenever it enters into a mode of ideology-production, democratic theory admits and effectively endorses such a function – and pays the requisite price for it. As a test case of my hypothesis, I will take critical social theory of Frankfurt School origin (hereafter Critical Theory),4 and I will focus on the democratic turn that Jürgen Habermas has effected within this school of thought. Critical Theory is a particularly appropriate object for the study of the relations between theory and ideology within democratic theory for at least three reasons: First, it inherits from Karl Marx the ideal of democracy as a form of emancipated society – that is, society emancipated from the imperatives of the competitive production of profit and therefore able to focus on long-term societal interest. In this sense, Critical Theory constitutes a form of democratic theory. Second, it has maintained a commitment to eliminating the injustices that afflict capitalist democracies (such as growing material inequalities as well as gender and racial discrimination) which remain central concerns of democratic theory today. Thus, Critical Theory’s treatment of forms of discrimination is part of its critique of democratic capitalism as a comprehensive social formation – analysis informed of Marxian critique of political economy and Freudian psychoanalysis. The first generation of Frankfurt School authors has interpreted racialised and gendered social roles as part of an oppressive ideology and the construction of exclusive collective identities as a strategy for oppression.5 Third, the intellectual enterprise of unmasking injustice

102 Albena Azmanova is pursued through a critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) – systems of beliefs and attitudes (collective rationalisations) accepted unreflectively by the agents who hold them (Geuss 1981, 20).6 In this sense, theory is deliberately on the alert for the entrapments of ideology. Jürgen Habermas’s iteration of Critical Theory warrants particular attention because the author is explicitly dedicated to constructing a theory of democratic politics. He contends that the continuous proceduralisation of the democratic ideal (putting in place procedures for nurturing and enacting the democratic will) safeguards us from the temptation of ideology-construction – social criticism thus keeps clear from a substantive normative project susceptible to ideological sanctification. Tracing the deepening of the democratic turn in Habermas’s analyses of modern society, however, I discern an inadvertent transition from a critique of ideology to ideology-construction. Underlying this transition is the recasting of critical social theory that Habermas undertakes. As conceived by the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, critique was an aporetic enquiry animated by a commitment to emancipation from domination without the guidance of transcendental ideals. Habermas, instead, rebuilds critical theory as a normative political theory guided by the ideal of democracy as a matrix of justice, a (counterfactual) conceptual device for identifying injustices and a practical institutionalisation of a just society. This shift charts a secure path for progressive politics. Yet this security comes at a price – that of narrowing, if not altogether foreclosing, the critical enterprise because democracy transforms from an essentially contested concept with a heuristic and critical purpose to one designating a final destination, a telos – both conceptually and politically.7 In what follows, I will first review some of the tenets of Critical Theory as formulated by its founders, with particular attention paid to democracy and ideology critique. I will then trace the democratic turn in the work of Jürgen Habermas in order to disclose the particular mechanisms that tend to misdirect democratic theory into the mode of ideology-construction.

The democratic credentials of critical theory The first generation of Frankfurt School authors set out to develop a dialectical social theory with a practical emancipatory intent; the idea of emancipation, both as a normative yardstick and a political goal, is what distinguishes ‘critical theory’ from a positivistic theory that aims at description and explanation (Horkheimer 2002 [1937]). This normative commitment to emancipation does not set an unquestionable normative horizon (and thus, does not deteriorate into ideology) because emancipatory critique is not driven by a distinct telos susceptible to sanctification. This is a commitment, to use a phrase coined by Amy Allen, to ‘emancipation without Utopia’ (Allen 2015).8 Critical Theory inherits this aversion to grand normative ideals from Marx, who rejects romantic visions of communism and offers no detailed account of a post-capitalist society beyond the idea that such a society would institutionalise the values of social cooperation and mutuality: Thus, communism becomes the only possible realisation of democracy as the

The democratic turn in political theory 103 spontaneous self-organisation of the people (Marx 1976 [1846], 1989 [1875]). For Marx, ‘communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx 1846, 49). Emancipation is, therefore, to be understood as a process, not a final point, a terminus: It is a process of identifying and removing the circumstances of oppression (Horkheimer 1982, 244), rather than offering a blueprint for the institutional framework and normative substance of an emancipated life. Admittedly, in Marx’s analysis of the movement of history from one social order to another, communism is also a social formation that is to supersede capitalism. However, Marx does not elaborate the normative substance of communism other than in the most inclusive conception of humanism – ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels 2004 [1848], 49). Marx’s ideas of Communism’s institutional infrastructure (e.g. public ownership of the means of production) do not arise out of an abstract search for the institutionalisation of the values of solidarity and mutuality, but through a scrutiny of the harmful dynamics of nineteenth-century capitalism. The private property of the means of production is to be eliminated not only because of the specific form of injustice (e.g. exploitation) that it generates but also because it becomes a hindrance to the further development of the forces of production and to technological advancement. In a word, while democracy is present as a normative ideal, the analysis proceeds in the form of critical scrutiny of the historically specific forms of injustice and the underlying dynamics and structures that generate these injustices.9 While identifying and fighting oppression is a goal of the intellectual enterprise, the critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) was adopted by the early Frankfurt School authors as a key instrument of critique. The systems of beliefs and attitudes (collective rationalisations) accepted unreflectively by the agents who hold them are at the centre of Critical Theory’s scrutiny. However, the ultimate ambition of Ideologiekritik is not just to destabilise the oppressive certainty of normative attitudes (to deprive them of their status of common sense) but also to unveil the social conditions and power dynamics within which these normative attitudes emerge; critique is to provide ‘a comprehensive insight into the objective origin of ideologies and the objectivity of their social function’ (Adorno 1972 [1956], 185). Ideologies contain a grain of truth in the sense that they originate within intersubjective (ergo, objectively existing) power dynamics, which themselves are rooted within social structures. Proper critique of ideology therefore necessitates an analysis of the ‘conditions which make them [individuals] what they are or to which they are subject’ within a study of ‘the objective historical constellations’ and the structures that underpin them (Adorno 1972 [1956], 184). I will abstain from venturing here a detailed clarification of what is meant by the ‘objectivity’ of the structured social environment that critique is to target.10 What is important for the purposes of the current enquiry is to note that critique is to focus not on substantive states of autonomy (ideals of autonomous life) but

104 Albena Azmanova instead on conditions of autonomy (enabling conditions) and processes of gaining autonomy – our social environment must be appropriately structured to allow collective self-determination. Those ‘objective historical constellations’ that are to be the terrain of critique are the various iterations of capitalism as a comprehensive social order. Thus, in his analysis of capitalism, Adorno often refers to it as the ‘social whole’, a ‘social totality’ which is fractured yet internally structured (e.g. Adorno 1973, 37, 47).11 From its inception, Critical Theory adopts from Marx an understanding of capitalism as a historically specific comprehensive system of social relations. It develops as a school of thought through historicist analyses of capitalism as a social formation shaped by the dynamics of capital accumulation (the competitive profit production), of the institutional and normative infrastructure through which these dynamics are enacted, and of the forms of life they engender.12 The historicist nature of social analysis is here of paramount importance. As Marx notes, we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history. (Marx 1976 [1846], 29)13 The normative task of emancipation is to be achieved by deploying philosophy and social science in interdisciplinary empirical social research (Horkheimer 1993). Such an ambitious programme of analysis would require a comprehensive social theory which the first generation of Frankfurt School authors achieve through building a synthesis between a Marxian critique of the political economy of capitalism and an analysis of mass psychology informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Indeed, the critiques of capitalist society developed by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, took the shape of historicist analyses ranging from a critique of consumerism and mass culture, militarism, environmental crisis and economic disruption, to analyses of the authoritarian personality. What is the status of liberal democracy as an object of critique within Critical Theory, thus conceived? To the extent that the institutional edifice and normative matrix of liberal democracy are part of democratic capitalism as a unitary (albeit fractured) social order, they become objects of scrutiny for Critical Theory.14 Because the original commitment to emancipation was pursued through a critique of the dynamics of capitalism and its attendant socio-cultural representations, critical theorists inherited from Marx suspicions of the complicity of liberal democracy in capitalism’s delictum. Importantly, object of critique and target of criticism is the manner in which the conception of liberal democracy and its particular institutionalisations underpin dynamics of oppression. It is in this sense that for Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin democracy is an essentially contested concept – the process of contestation consists not so much in maintaining the conceptual indeterminacy of the notion of democracy as in questioning the

The democratic turn in political theory 105 work that the notion does in view of the emancipatory commitments of critical theory.15 Marx’s misgivings about liberalism and liberal democracy are well known. They have to do with the universalistic normative content of natural law and social contract traditions underpinning the institutional model of liberal democracy. Marx insists that the human essence should be grasped not as an ‘abstraction inherent in each single individual’, but instead as social essence, whose reality is the ‘ensemble of the social relations’ (Marx 1969 [1845], 14). It is this ontology of the socially embedded individual, the socially constructed nature of human subjectivity, and of social life as a unity of historically specific social practices that prevents the abstract values of rationality and mutuality (which undergird the idea of democracy) from being vetted also as instruments and procedures for attaining a democratic form of society. Moreover, Marx holds that by forging the idea of legal persons as seemingly free and equal, and thus of bearers of equal individual rights, liberal constitutionalism mimics the contract relationship governing the bourgeois economy, thereby masking the structures of social inequality on which the system is based. Marx’s misgivings about the institutional edifice of liberal democracy are shared by the first generation of Frankfurt School authors. Marcuse speaks of the ‘repressive tolerance’ of liberal democracy (Marcuse 1965, 95); he rejects the democratic argument for tolerance (of all positions, including those of the misinformed and the bigots) because this argument is ‘invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic process itself’, that is, by the concentration of economic and political power in late capitalism (a theme that Habermas takes up later). Indeed, deficiencies in the existing practice of democracy and the inability of the institutional paraphernalia of liberal democracy to embed a just society remain of core interest for critical theorists to this day, in the work of Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Amy Allen, Rainer Forst and many others. To be sure, critical theory inherits from Marx a commitment to democracy as a spontaneous self-organisation of the people. Importantly, members of the tradition share an understanding of the non-alienated form of collective human existence as a rational society, not just a political system; the democratic state of society is one in which ‘all conditions of social life that are controllable by human beings depend on real consensus’ (Horkheimer 1982, 249f). However, this normative commitment does not transform into an ideological endorsement of democracy as a political system because the social theory through which the critique is conducted does not have a place for a socially unencumbered self and a rational society in its ontology – that is, democracy is not among the set of presuppositions from which the social world is viewed. That ontology is instead centred on the notion of human beings as social beings whose social essence is shaped by the ensemble of social relations – as I noted in the earlier discussion of Marx. Thus, a distance is preserved between a normative commitment to a democratic society and an understanding of the socially constituted reality. To obtain ‘real democracy’, procedural mechanisms and institutional devices would, therefore, not do; one would need to change the system of social relations within which human beings interact. Critique therefore takes shape as an analysis of the historically

106 Albena Azmanova specific dynamics, institutional settings and structures of socialisation, with particular attention to the power dynamics generating domination – including those that run under the auspices of legitimate democratic procedures. Within such an understanding of the tasks and methods of Critical Theory, the fallacy of the democratic turn would not be related to the intrinsic qualities of liberal democracy as a political system or the emancipatory normative potential contained in the principles of equality and liberty, but rather in the nature of theory deployed in the analysis of society. When critique is performed without attention to the historically specific power dynamics and social structures that underpin the institutions and enact the norms of liberal democracy, those institutions and norms become liable to serve the very interests which emancipatory critique is to unmask. Adorno notes that the price of failing to perform a critique of ideology as a comprehensive analysis of the historical circumstances and structural conditions of oppression is twofold: On the one hand, it enables the perpetuation of the conditions of oppression. On the other hand, it supplies the oppression with justification: ‘[T]he domination over the deluded is also justified’ (Adorno 1972 [1956], 184). The first generation of Critical Theory scholars deploys these tenets of critique – a normative commitment to a democratic society enacted via a critique of capitalism as a historically specific system of social relations – through a wide-ranging investigation into the transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the monopolistic and state-managed capitalism (Spätkapitalismus) of the twentieth century.16

Habermas’s democratic turn Habermas’s first publications (on consumer society, the media, work and leisure) retain the features of analysis typical of the first generation of Frankfurt School authors – a historicist critique of the oppressive dynamics of democratic capitalism as a comprehensive social formation. His first major work, his post-doctoral dissertation (‘Habilitationsschrift’) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]) provides a historical account of the emergence and consolidation in eighteenth-century Europe (the time of pre-industrial, liberal capitalism) of a critical public with its own institutionalised sphere of action. He credits this public with a capacity to hold state power accountable through the use of reason in a process of argumentation. Here the perspective of critique alters: Analysis centres on the democratic constitutional state; the main emancipatory concern is the power asymmetry between central political authority and citizenry. Attention is shifted away from the processes of socialisation, of the social production of reasoning publics. Tellingly, Adorno and Horkheimer found the dissertation insufficiently critical of the ideology of liberal democracy and rejected it (Calhoun 1992, 4f).17 From the historical account of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, with its (purported) emancipatory powers, Habermas derives the philosophical construct of the public sphere as a realm of social interactions (ideally) impervious to

The democratic turn in political theory 107 the malign influence of money and power, in which citizens relate to one another as fully rational beings. This philosophical construct becomes the social ontology from the perspective of which Habermas develops his critique of the dynamics of modernity. On this conceptual foundation Habermas then builds his diagnosis about the erosion of the democratic public sphere in the conditions of modern mass society in late capitalism. It is worth noting that the very entry point of analysis – the bourgeois public sphere – presupposes an unproblematic coexistence between the dynamics of capitalism and those of democratic citizenship. In this account, under the impact of industrialisation and the rise of consumerism in late capitalism, the concerns of efficiency that are central to the dynamics of economic production and administrative rule start to penetrate the cultural system, eventually stifling genuine democratic debate. The active publicity of genuine democracy is replaced by the passive consumption of technical media of communication and entertainment. As a result, the separation between the private, public and political realms on which classical bourgeois democracy had depended is lost. The public sphere becomes indivisible from the sphere of private conflict, which ultimately imperils democracy. In this first comprehensive analysis Habermas articulates of modern society, it is the erosion of the structural conditions for democracy, understood as the autonomy of the public sphere, that marks advanced capitalism. The solution is implied in the diagnosis – a secure institutionalisation of the democratic public sphere must be provided so as to safeguard it from the perilous instrumental dynamics of modernity. The democratic turn that Habermas thus undertakes in Critical Theory from the 1960s onward offers an effective solution to Critical Theory’s predicament at the time. By the late 1950s, the emancipatory ambitions of Critical Theory had entered an impasse, with Horkheimer and Adorno articulating a distinctly grim diagnosis of total alienation in the context of advanced capitalism (Azmanova 2019b). It is this aporia – the enduring commitment to emancipatory critique, combined with the apparent impossibility of discerning either a plausible vantage point of critique or a political project of emancipation – that prompts Habermas to proffer the notion of a politically emancipated critical public as an agent of emancipation. This, however, would demand a thorough recasting of the intellectual apparatus of critique, which Habermas endeavours to accomplish in subsequent writing by drawing on Kantian moral theory, linguistics, developmental psychology and systems theory. Ultimately, this would lead him to replace the Marxian critique of capitalism as a comprehensive and historically specific social formation with a critique of modernity’s drive for economic and administrative rationalisation. The project of emancipation comes to be centred on institutional tools and procedures for democratic citizenship, within an affirmative conception of historical progress (Allen 2016). Legitimation Crisis (1975 [1973]) delivers an important shift in the social ontology through which the critical enterprise proceeds. Habermas intends this work to be an application of Marx’s critique of capitalism to the conditions of the late twentieth century. However, he alters Marx’s conceptualisation of capitalism as a comprehensive system of social relations by drawing on Talcott Parsons’s

108 Albena Azmanova structural functionalism and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. In this revised version, society stands as a unity of formalised and relatively autonomous, though interconnected, economic, administrative, socio-cultural and legitimation systems (or sub-systems) of action, each contributing to social integration and with relative functional autonomy from each other. Thus, while like Marx, the first generation of critical theorists perceived democratic capitalism as an institutionalised social order permeated by capitalism’s constitutive dynamics – the competitive production of profit (with its concomitant dynamics of commodification, exploitation and alienation) – Habermas constrains the dynamics of capitalism to the economy as one sub-system alongside others. This would allow him to present the political institutions of democracy and liberal constitutionalism, due to their presumed autonomous status, as vehicles of emancipation. Let us recall that for Marx, as for the first generation of Frankfurt School authors, rationality itself had been a problem (i.e. as being prone to alienation and false consciousness engendered by capitalist social relations). Habermas purports to solve this problem by way of distinguishing between, on the one hand, the instrumental rationality that eventually entraps reason’s emancipatory valence and, on the other, the communicative rationality that preserves its emancipatory power under certain conditions. These conditions refer to maintaining the autonomy of the public sphere (a sphere outside of the institutionalised political system) as a space of free opinion- and will-formation (e.g. Habermas 1984/1987 [1981]). Importantly, Habermas discerns the conditions of emancipated life not in terms of the socio-economic dynamics structuring the system of social relations, but in terms of conditions regarding morality, democracy and law that are propitious to the free opinion- and will- formation of citizens. He holds that the contradictions of advanced capitalism could be brought to consciousness and thematised (and thus addressed) under conditions of substantive democracy – that is, genuine participation of citizens in the process of discursive political will-formation. To prevent this, the administrative system of capitalist democracies shields itself from the process of free will-formation via the mechanisms of formal democracy that nurture a passive citizenry – in the formula of ‘civic privatism of the civil public’ (political abstinence combined with an orientation towards career, leisure and consumption with attendant demands from public authority for money, leisure time and security). Ultimately, this entails the demise of the public sphere of solidarity and non-instrumental rationality, as this sphere becomes colonised by the technical rationality of administration, deployed in the management of the economy and culture (Habermas 1984/1987 [1981]). Thus, by the 1980s, the nature of Habermas’s social critique has altered significantly – in his analyses, the culprit of social injustice becomes not capital but the state (‘administration’, ‘technocracy’), and therefore solutions emerge within the remit of democracy as a political system rather than in the remit of the political economy (e.g. new forms of property; countering the dynamics of capital accumulation). This is predicated on Habermas’s no longer stylising capitalism as a comprehensive social order, but rather as a domain of value-neutral instrumental rationality (deployed in the production of wealth) which can be oriented towards human values through democracy.

The democratic turn in political theory 109 In terms of political emancipation, revolutionary mobilisations are replaced by the procedural mechanisms of deliberative democracy which help establish the principles of legitimate law-making in which the ‘revolutionary subject’ is the rational and reasonable citizenry; collective and individual emancipation is achieved via the consensus of all citizens of a legally constituted community in a dynamic and conflictual process of reason-giving and reason-taking. The key claim is that political deliberation develops a truth-tracking potential, thereby facilitating a legitimation process under certain conditions – namely, that a selfregulating media system gains independence from its social environments and that anonymous audiences enable a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society (Habermas 2006). Rather than seeking the emancipatory dimension of socially embodied human rationality (the possibility of undoing alienation and false consciousness) in the structural conflicts endemic to capitalism, Habermas locates these conditions in the structures of linguistic interactions (Habermas 1979 [1976], 1990 [1983], 1984/1987 [1981], 1996). The matrix of emancipated social existence is unencumbered communication. Here Habermas tackles the Marxian problem of false consciousness (i.e. the proletariat’s incapacity to perceive its proper interests as an exploited class and endorsing, instead, the interest of the bourgeoisie) by replacing the productivist paradigm of society based on labour with a discursive paradigm of society based on communication. In turn, this solution is enabled by the distinction between communicative and strategic forms of rationality and action. The substitution of the critique of capitalism as a social formation with the philosophy of language has significant consequences for the critical enterprise. Presenting the preconditions for non-alienated communicative rationality (free from the instrumental logics of power and money) in terms of an ideal speech situation of unencumbered communication transforms the immanent critique of capitalist democracies into a constructivist search for the procedural conditions for a democratic public sphere that can nurture citizens’ capacity for collective selfdetermination. The historicity of this sphere rests solely on intersubjective communicative procedures which face practical limits in scope and scale. In his monumental work Between Facts and Norms (1996), Habermas reinforces his reliance on the properly institutionalised public sphere as he seeks to realise social freedom through law, thus viewing democracy not as a form of society, but as a form of political system perfectly compatible with a capitalist system of social relations. Let us recall that one of the tenets of Marx’s critical approach is the effort to denaturalise and demystify the bourgeois division between, on the one hand, the private sphere of socio-economic existence structured by private rights and, on the other, the sphere of public freedoms, duties and virtues claiming to nurture democratic citizenship. Habermas replaces the Marxian critique of the process through which notions of democratic citizenship render legitimacy to exploitative dynamics in the private sphere with an effort to construct a philosophical formula through which the tension between the sphere of social existence and that of political membership is conceptually resolved. The solution comes in the formula of the co-originality between private and public autonomy within a properly articulated and institutionalised system of rights. With this, Habermas

110 Albena Azmanova deepens the liberal-democratic turn in critical theory: The critical enterprise proceeds as a critique of democracy and its cultural and institutional prerequisites (a public sphere of free deliberation) rather than as a critique of the socio-political order (democratic capitalism). Thus, while for Marx and the early Frankfurt School authors, the combination between liberal constitutionalism and democratic citizenship had been part of the problem insofar as it serves capitalist reproduction, for Habermas, liberal democracy is part of the solution, as he deems the procedures and institutions of liberal democracy as able to safeguard social solidarity from the systemic logic of economic and administrative efficiency. While Critical Theory had suspected liberal democracy as being the political institutionalisation of bourgeois rule, Habermas champions liberal democracy as being the ‘performative meaning of the practice of self-determination’ (1996, 110). In his account, liberal democracy, properly institutionalised, can supply the conditions for autonomous political willformation since it embodies a system of rights that ensures all citizens’ access to equal political participation. We are asked to have faith that, notwithstanding our socialisation within a system of social relations permeated by capitalism’s constitutive dynamics of primitive accumulation and competitive profit-production, we can rely on the institutions of liberal democracy (including an autonomous public sphere) to set us free from that socialisation. At best, this strategy can contribute to the democratisation of the political organisation of capitalism – making capitalism more inclusive. However, we have no solid reasons to believe that the democratisation of capitalism will amount to a radical social transformation – that is, a transformation of the very system of social relations. The recasting of the critical enterprise through what I described as the ‘democratic turn’ effected by Habermas has strong advantages. In elaborating his model of deliberative liberal democracy, Habermas retains the commitment to emancipation that has been constitutive for Critical Theory. The values of autonomy and solidarity which had served as normative pillars in the Marxian critique of capitalism undergird Habermas’s trust in the emancipatory potential of noninstrumental, communicative interactions in a genuinely democratic public sphere and a lifeworld untainted by the instrumental rationality of power and money. Moreover, Habermas does not stipulate a substantive ideal of democracy that could become an object of ideology-construction. No norms of justice are offered a priori; democratic publics are not only to validate binding norms but also to generate these through actual processes of reasoned argumentation. This perspective ‘privileges the communicative presuppositions and procedural conditions of democratic opinion- and will- formation as the sole source of legitimation’ (Habermas 1996, 450, 1995). The quality of democracy stands as a matter of the quality of the process of reasoned deliberation. Henceforth, the task of democratic theory is to articulate the mechanisms and conditions for such a deliberation (Azmanova 2012). However, as Habermas subordinates, and thus trivialises, the critique of capitalism within the larger framework of a critique of the democratic public sphere – whose emancipatory power is conceptualised with the tools of philosophy

The democratic turn in political theory 111 of language and linguistics – he removes social analysis from political theory. Capitalism is reduced to a market economy and the critique of political economy all but vacates analysis. This deprives critical social theory of the conceptual tools it needs to scrutinise the socio-structural dynamics of domination that embed and condition the very creation of the social subject. The project of emancipation as democratisation of the entire social order, as conceived by the founders of Critical Theory, is reduced to a project of the proper institutionalisation of the public sphere. With this, the status of democracy changes: It becomes a political project, not a form of society. Through the democratic turn in Critical Theory, thus performed, the enterprise of Ideologiekritik transforms from a scrutiny of the historically particular social conditions of injustice and the forms of consciousness these conditions engender into liberal-democratic ideology-construction. Autonomy, social cooperation and mutuality are no longer just ethical values (a valuational frame of reference) – they are also elements of the social ontology (a description of the human condition) from which the critique draws its fundamental presuppositions. In other words, autonomy, social cooperation and mutuality are deemed to be features of unencumbered anthropological communicative reason which is, in turn, an enabling condition for democratic reasoned argumentation – a precondition for democracy. Theory thus already presupposes what it tries to demonstrate analytically and achieve politically. When democracy (and its attendant rational and sociable subjects) becomes both a normative ideal and a component of the ontology, the ensuing circularity forecloses the critical enterprise. Democracy as an ideal and an enabling condition for attaining this ideal becomes immune to critical scrutiny – democracy becomes an idol. This risks making the enterprise of the critique of ideology complicit in moral and ideological justifications for that social order whose injustices and contradictions are meant to form the object of critique. In other words, the democratic turn in Critical Theory has not only deserted the critique of capitalism as an organising pillar of social criticism but also brought the other of its pillars (Ideologiekritik) to a state of limbo as it has embarked on constructing ideological representations of liberal democracy instead of deconstructing the ideological justifications that liberal democracy as a political system supplies to capitalism as a social system. Enter Ideologiekritik-cum-ideologyconstruction.18 This move eliminates the space of reflexivity within which the ongoing contestation of democracy’s contribution to emancipation can take place. Once democracy is equated with the emancipatory project itself, the concept can no longer perform the aporetic work of disclosure.

Conclusion: towards a critical democratic theory What lessons should a political theory that is committed to progressive ends, as democratic theory surely is, draw from the democratic turn in Critical Theory, as effected by Jürgen Habermas? Exactly 400 years ago, Francis Bacon formulated the mission of political theory as charting the road ‘between the arrogance of dogmatism, and the despair of skepticism’ (Bacon 2000 [1620], Introduction).

112 Albena Azmanova In the context of the early twenty-first century – a time beset by the rise of autocrats professing to salvage democracy – the challenge is to keep our faith in democracy without elevating it to an idol. To stay the course between dogmatism and scepticism, democratic theory needs to preserve the contestability of its core concept – that of democracy – and deploy it in the aporetic project of critique. This contestability, I have suggested, is not just a matter of maintaining the definitional openness, or indeterminacy, of the notion of democracy. Rather, it consists in ongoing scrutiny of the work this notion does in view of the goals of emancipation. In order to leave the space of reflexive contestation open, a distance needs to be maintained between the normative goals of theory, the social ontology from which theorising proceeds, and the requisite tools of analysis. When these are equated, the ensuing circularity vitiates the rigour of the analysis: In this mode, a theory can do little more than supply normative validation of its object of analysis, thereby becoming a vehicle of ideology construction. When the idea of an emancipated/just society is equated with democratic politics, when democratic politics is posited as a tool of emancipation, and, in turn, that conceptual edifice is placed on the foundation of an ontology that views human beings as naturally prone to reasonable and rational coordination of their collective existence, democratic theory acquires tremendous authority. Enhancing in this way its own credentials, democratic theory is prone to operate in the manner of a political theology committed to the fostering of democracy as a civil religion. If this is the aspiration of democratic political theory – then we know what road to take. Indeed, democracy has become one of those rhetorical ‘common-places of common sense’, to borrow Michel Billig’s (1991, 72) phrase, a unit of broadly shared knowledge without fixed content, which lulls our thinking as it anchors it. In its mode of Democratic Theory, political theory reinforces our seemingly benevolent ‘democratic prejudice’, thus making us not only poor readers of the past but also poor critics of the present and blinding us to the opportunities of the future.19 This poses a problem especially for any political and social theory that defines itself as a critical enterprise and aspires to offer a valiant critique of capitalism as a system of social relations. Such a critical effort can not only seek to disclose the ways in which capitalism imperils democracy but also must clarify the ways in which liberal democracy as a political system hampers or enables capitalism as a social system. To the extent that democratic politics concerns institutionally mediated expressions of broadly shared preferences, democracy as a political system functions on the terrain of socially produced subjectivities. This is not a matter of ‘false consciousness’, ill will or deficient rationality. As Wolfgang Streeck observes, ‘Expectations in relation to which the political-economic system must legitimate itself exist not only among the population, but also on the side of capital-as-actor’ (Streeck 2017, 21). The dynamics of capital reproduction affect, even if they do not constitute, the democratic subjects. It is in this way that liberal democracy becomes not only hostage to the exploitative dynamic of capitalism but also complicit in these dynamics. Even in conditions of fully democratised capitalism, when the structures of private property of the means of

The democratic turn in political theory 113 production and the attendant asymmetries of power are eliminated, democratic citizens can remain fully committed to the process of capital reproduction with all its deleterious effects on human beings, their societies and their natural environment. That we are all equally complicit in, and equally damaged by, these dynamics is not much of a consolation. This means that political theory should remain committed to the normative ideals of democracy without burdening democratic politics of inclusion and equality with the task of radical social transformation. If it is to discern the path for such a transformation towards a more just society, critical political theory should aim to develop as a sociologically informed critique of the historically specific social order we inhabit. For truly democratic politics demands a truly democratic society.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Azar Dakwar, Raphaël Wolff and Daniel López Pérez for their insightful and timely feedback to earlier drafts. 2 As Pierre Rosanvallon reminds us, the term ‘democracy’ did not belong to the vocabulary of Enlightenment philosophers, and it was not until 1848 that the word ‘democracy’ definitively entered political discourse in France. Between 1789 and 1796, none of the numerous revolutionary newspapers and journals used ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ in their name. In the United States, the Founding Fathers used the term ‘democracy’ to address the political ills and dangers they sought to avoid, and calling someone a ‘democrat’ was almost an insult at the outset of the nineteenth century (Rosanvallon 2009, 541). In Montesquieu and Tocqueville’s well-known accounts, democracies are marked by instability and a tendency to become corrupt – flaws that accompany the virtues of democracy, in their accounts. Kant’s taxonomy of political regimes has a place for despotic democracy. It is all the more curious that at the French National Constituent Assembly of 1789 supporters of the monarchy (the group of the Monarchiens) also called themselves ‘Democratic Royalists’. 3 In its original usage, as conceived by Antoine Destutt, Comte de Tracy, in late eighteenth century, ideology stood for a ‘science of ideas’ (See his ‘Eléments d’idéologie’, 1801). The society of ‘ideologists’ at Institut de France which he formed was united by the understanding that our ideas are the necessary consequence of the society in which we live; the group therefore committed to an enquiry of the social production of ideas. 4 I refer to the form of reflective social science initiated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s and developed at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt, Germany, through a collaboration among himself, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, Leo Lowenthal and others. The Institute originated as a Marxist study group and developed into a heterodox school of thought, uniting the diverse research trajectories of its members by an interest in the relationship between history and reason, with a commitment to emancipatory social change. 5 ‘[T]he emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race’, writes Marx in the preamble to the 1880 ‘Programme of the Parti Ouvrier’ (Marx et al. 1974 [1880], 376). The often quoted dictum ‘Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded’ is from an 1866 letter Marx writes to François Lafargue; the line is repeated in ‘Capital’ (Marx 1972 [1866], 275, 1967 [1867], 301). The concern with gendered inequities is present also in Marx’s early writings: In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1959), he argued that women’s position in society could be used as a measure of the development of society as a whole. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

114 Albena Azmanova

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explore anti-Semitism as the social construction of racial prejudices through which the bourgeoisie enacts its repressed frustrations, which are, in turn, engendered by the contradictions of capitalism; Erich Fromm (1957) views the authoritarian personality as trapped in a masochistic surrender to a higher power articulated as an exclusive collective identity (e.g. nation or race). For a detailed discussion of the conceptual mechanisms of Ideologiekritik, see Azmanova (2012). My critique of the democratic turn in critical social theory dovetails with that offered by Valerie Waldow in her contribution to this volume, where she demonstrates that even a minimalist conception of democracy (as developed within critical approaches to democratic peace theory) can be generalised and essentialised, thereby reproducing the ideological effects a theory sets out to critique. Allen here draws on the work of Michel Foucault to extend the intuitions of the Frankfurt School into a negativistic conception of emancipation; for the purposes of the current analysis, I remain on the territory of the pioneers of Critical Theory. For a clarification of the distinction I draw between, on the one hand, the systemic dynamics (or operational logic) of capitalism – the competitive production of profit – and, on the other, the structures through which these dynamics are enacted (e.g. the institution of the private property of the means of production), see Azmanova (2016, 2018). Critical Theory inherits Marx’s understanding of the ‘objectivity’ of the social world (the material life-process of society) in contra-distinction to solipsistic, subjective perceptions. That objectivity is enacted in intersubjective practices through which humans create their world as they make sense of it. The central unit of analysis is practice: The ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’ (Marx 1969 [1845], 14). Moreover, society is understood holistically, as a system of social relations – the sum of interrelations into which people enter in the course of ‘the social production of their existence’ (Marx 1977 [1859], 2). The notion of intersubjective practice does not allow for a rigid subjectobject divide (see Azmanova 2019a). For the best substantiated refutation of the move to attribute to Marx an ontology of objectivity, see Henry (1983). See Jay (1984) for a detailed discussion of Adorno’s ontology of the social as a fractured yet structured totality. The commodification process is also enacted through extra-market mechanisms which Marx termed broadly ‘primitive accumulation’, which is not just an embryonic stage in capitalist development; it is an ongoing structuring process which mainly takes the forms of physical domination, violence and destruction. Marx refused to identify himself as a Marxist to the extent that this term came to signify a method of socio-economic analysis based on abstract laws (Engels, ‘Letter to Edward Bernstein’ 1882). I use the term ‘democratic capitalism’ to grasp the unity of democracy as a political system and capitalism as a system of social relations that has been typical of the institutionalised social order of the majority of Western societies since forms of representative democracy began to be combined with the competitive production of profit (capitalism’s constitute dynamic) sometime in the eighteenth century. For an alternative understanding of the essential contestability and openness of the concept of democracy, see Valerie Waldow (this volume). Horkheimer, Adorno, Kirchheimer and, later, Marcuse viewed advanced capitalism as politically manipulated and authoritarian capitalism in which the corporatist accumulations of private interests obstruct the formation of genuine democracy, while Pollock and Neumann saw it also as democratic capitalism and an achievement of progressive forces. It is, therefore, ironic that Horkheimer had previously opposed the appointment of Habermas as Adorno’s assistant in Frankfurt on grounds of Habermas’s being too strongly influenced by Marx. Habermas had shaped his early intellectual biography as

The democratic turn in political theory 115 a Marxist and was one of the very few openly Marxist academics in the anti-communist West Germany of the 1950s. 18 I owe this phrase to Azar Dakwar, and I am grateful to him for an enlightening discussion of the way this process plays out in Habermas. My initial view was that Habermas comes to suspend both the systematic critique of the political economy of democratic capitalism and the critique of ideology. The functioning of Ideologiekritik as ideology construction merits a more careful exploration than the one I am offering here. On this, see, for instance, the exchange between J.G. Finlayson and D. Cook (Cook 2000; Finlayson 2003; Cook 2003). 19 Nietzsche spoke of the ‘democratic prejudice’ of the moderns, observing that when we perceive the past through the egalitarian and progressive historiographical selfcongratulatory conceits of the present we fail to understand other schemes of values and we miss the chance to understand and reflect on ourselves through them (Nietzsche, 1967 [1887], 28). Here I follow Wendy Brown’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s term (Brown 2001, 98f.).

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116 Albena Azmanova Cook, Deborah (2003): A response to Finlayson, in: Historical Materialism 11 (2), pp. 189–198. Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude (2018 [1801]): Éléments d’idéologie: ptie. Grammaire, Saskatoon: HardPress. Easton, David (1951): The decline of modern political theory, in: The Journal of Politics 13 (1), pp. 36–58. Engels, Frederick (2010 [1882]): Letter to Edward Bernstein, in: Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (eds.), Collected works, Volume 46, Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart, p. 353. Finlayson, James (2003): The theory of ideology and the ideology of theory: Habermas contra Adorno, in: Historical Materialism 11 (2), pp. 165–187. Fromm, Erich (1957): The authoritarian personality, in: Deutsche Universitätszeitung 12 (9), pp. 3–4. Geuss, Raymond (1981): The idea of critical theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, Raymond (2008): Philosophy and real politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1975 [1973]): Legitimation crisis, translated by McCarthy, Thomas, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp]. Habermas, Jürgen (1979 [1976]): Communication and the evolution of society, translated by McCarthy, Thomas, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [From Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp and Apel, Karl-Otto (ed.), Sprachpragmatik und Philosophy, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp]. Habermas, Jürgen (1984/1987 [1981]): The theory of communicative action, translated by McCarthy, Thomas, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp]. Habermas, Jürgen (1989 [1962]): The structural transformation of the public sphere, Boston: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1990 [1983]): Moral consciousness and communicative action, translated by Lenhardt, Christian and Weber Nicholsen, Shierry, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp]. Habermas, Jürgen (1995): Reconciliation through the public use of reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s political liberalism, in: Journal of Philosophy 92, pp. 109–131. Habermas, Jürgen (1996): Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2006): Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research, in: Communication Theory 16 (4), pp. 411–426. Habermas, Jürgen and Cooke, Maeve (1998): On the pragmatics of communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Henry, Michel (1983): A philosophy of human reality, translated from French by McLaughlin, Kathleen, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric (1987): The age of empire 1875–1914, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hobsbawm, Eric (2000 [1975]): The age of capital 1848–1875, London: Abacus and Little, Brown, and Co. Horkheimer, Max (1982): Critical theory, New York: Seabury Press. Horkheimer, Max (1993): Between philosophy and social science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The democratic turn in political theory 117 Horkheimer, Max (2002 [1937]): Traditional and critical theory, in: Critical theory: Selected essays, translated by M.J. O’Connell, New York: Continuum, pp. 188–243. Jay, Martin (1984): Adorno, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1965): Repressive tolerance, in: Wolff, Robert, Moore, Barrington and Marcuse, Herbert (eds.), A critique of pure tolerance, Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 95–137. Marx, Karl (1959 [1844]): Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl (1967 [1867]): Capital: A critique of political economy, 3 vols, Volume 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl (1969 [1845]): Theses on Feuerbach, in: Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (eds.), Selected works, Volume 1, translated by W. Lough, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 13–15. Marx, Karl (1972 [1866]): Letter to François Lafargue, in: Padover, Saul (ed.), Karl Marx: On America and the civil war, New York: McGraw-Hill. Marx, Karl (1976 [1846]): The German ideology, in: Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (eds.), Collected works, Volume 5, Translated by Clemens Dutt, W. Lough and C. P. Magill, Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 19–539. Marx, Karl (1977 [1859]): A contribution to the critique of political economy, translated by S.W. Ryazanskaya, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl (1989 [1875]): Critique of the Gotha programme, in: Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (eds.), Collected works, Volume 24, translated by Peter and Betty Ross, Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 75–99. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (2004 [1848]): The communist manifesto, in: Moore, Samuel (transl.), Karl Marx: The communist manifesto and selected writings, translated by Samuel Moore, London: MacMillan Collector’s Library. Marx, Karl, Lafargue, Paul and Guesde, Jules (1974 [1880]): Preamble: Programme of the Parti Ouvrier, in: Fernbach, David (ed.), The First international and after, political writings, Volume 3, London: Penguin Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967 [1887]): On the genealogy of morals, translated by Kaufman, Walter, New York: Vintage. Rosanvallon, Pierre (2009): Democratic universalism as a historical problem, in: Constellations 16 (4), pp. 539–549. Streeck, Wolfgang (2017): Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism, 2nd edition, London: Verso Books.

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The spirits we cite How democratic war theory reproduces what it opposes Valerie Waldow

Introduction This chapter addresses the relationship between theoretical knowledge and political ideology by investigating the ideological underpinnings of a particular strand of IR theorising. It undertakes a critique of the critique of democratic peace (DP) research and, in particular, the attempt of democratic war theory (DWT) to develop a critical complement to the DP. I will show that DWT’s attempt to establish a critical liberal theory of democratic foreign policy behaviour reproduces the basic premises of DP – democratic distinctiveness – and thus the ideological effects which follow from DP research’s assumptions. Consequently, instead of providing a critical approach which would allow for a confrontation with the current militarist practices of democratic states, DWT as critique of DP rather provides indirect justification of these practices. DP scholarship is a textbook example for the transfer of theory into practice and thus frequently serves the study of ideology in IR. Empirical evidence for the effectiveness of DP study in political practice has been provided for a number of cases, from US foreign policy (Smith 2007; Lynch 2009; Parmar 2013) to Israel (Ish-Shalom 2008) and debates in international law (Geis 2013). The political character, or more precisely the politicisation of the DP, became the subject of discussion in light of the increased participation of democracies in military undertakings since 1990, and especially the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the ‘coalition of the willing’. While most proponents of DP research have remained silent on the links between their scholarship and militant foreign policies of liberal democracies in the post–Cold War era, critical scholarship has emphasised the legitimating effects of the theory for new coercive forms of international regulation and intervention (i.a. Barkawi and Laffey 2001; Smith 2007; Hobson et al. 2011). Discussion of the reasons for the political utilisation of DP in practice surprisingly tends to externalise researchers’ responsibility from research itself. The arguments proffered range from the idea that ‘the utility of DPT in the study of international relations is . . . outweighed by its flaws in construction and . . . its destructive policy consequences’ (Smith 2011, 153f.) or that ‘the ways DP was researched and presented to policymakers left it vulnerable to political actors to utilize in pursuing their own ends’ (Hobson 2011c, 149). Others argue it is rather

The spirits we cite 119 America’s liberal tradition which bolstered both the DP thesis and the Iraq War (Owen, 2011, 162). Still others have suggested that the ‘theory’s migration to the political world entails complex socio-political processes in which the theoreticians’ role, if there is one, is minor’ (Ish-Shalom 2011, 181). Such reasoning, however, externalises processes of politicisation from the production of theory itself. It neglects that theorising is already part of more or less intentional struggles over meaning, implying in the process the discursive vindication or challenge of political order (Skinner 1999; Tully 2002).1 This insight into the performative character of political theory is of particular relevance when it comes to attempts to extend DP research by subsuming its assumptions within a critical framework (for a conceptual reflection on performative aspects of ideology, see Herborth, this volume) and on their implications for a theory-as-ideology agenda also Jahn, this volume, 241f.). The most prominent example in this context is democratic war theory. DWT responds to attacks on DP research for neglecting the increased participation of democracies in military endeavours since the early 1990s.2 It aims instead to contribute to a pluralist and reflective research programme by reflecting on the dark side of liberalism and avoiding the ideological biases associated with DP by developing a more ambivalent narrative in terms of critical liberalism. While this strand of research and theory production claims to provide new perspectives for the critique of democratic foreign policy, I argue that DWT is deficient in this regard, owing to a lack of reflexivity in relation to its central categories, democracy and liberalism, and the implications of these for how the relationship between democracy and war is conceptualised within the framework. Repeatedly, commentators pointed out problems of operationalisation and presumed conceptualisations of democracy in DP research (e.g. Owen 1997; Czempiel 1996; Ish-Shalom 2008). Critics of DP particularly emphasise the ideological effectiveness of DP research in terms of the externalisation of democracy promotion (Barkawi and Laffey 2001; Kurki 2013), the dichotomisation and hierarchisation of states due to their political constitution (Hobson 2011a), the exclusion and degradation of the ‘non-liberal other’ in the form of liberal enemy constructions (Reus-Smit 2005; Hobson 2008) and the justification of military interventions in the name of regime change, protection of human rights and the fight against terrorism (Smith 2007, 2011). They demand deeper engagement with the ideational foundations of DP and stress the necessity to reflect the contested nature of DP’s basic concepts, democracy in particular (Hobson 2011b). Within DWT, there are indicators of an increased awareness of the relevance of such a debate (Geis and Wagner 2006, 2008). So far, however, no systematic attempt has been made to examine the links between the ideological effectiveness of the theories and the uncritical utilisation of democracy of both DP and DWT.3 For this reason, the following discussion makes two interlinked arguments: First, I argue that the ideological effects of the DP are more than just a result of a trivialisation or ‘misrepresentation’ (Ish-Shalom 2008, 680) because of the nature of the translation of these claims from theory into political practice. The ideological effects are inherent in theory itself, and should, therefore, also be addressed on a conceptual

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level. Second, I also argue that the ideological connotations of DP research and its progress-oriented assumptions also apply to recent critical studies on democratic war, and to DWT in particular.4 Even critical frameworks in this field rest on ‘liberal’ assumptions about the international and generalise (at the very least) a minimalist conception of democracy. Thus, they reproduce the ideological effects they intend to critique in the first place. My criticism in this chapter exemplarily targets DWT as it has been established within the research programme ‘Antinomies of Democratic Peace’ by the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). PRIF’s account can be considered as the most substantial theoretical contribution to a critical research programme on the ambivalences of the DP. In this regard, the following discussion provides insights for similar attempts which centre on both the distinctiveness and ambivalence of liberal-democratic foreign behaviour (i.a. Doyle 1983a, 1983b; Owen 1997; Daase 2004). Structurally, the next section of this chapter will present a brief overview of the DWT as a theoretical and empirical framework, before drawing out its claims and self-understanding as a critical liberal response to DP research. My rationale here is to take DWT at its own words and to ask whether DWT’s critical liberalism is able to avoid the ideological effects associated with the DP. The main part of this chapter is, therefore, dedicated to showing how on a conceptual level, due to its uncritical use of democracy, DWT fails to overcome the ideological effects of DP. Drawing upon the notion of the essential contestability of political concepts (Gallie 1956), in the final section of this chapter I will argue in favour of the necessary politicisation of the core concept of both DP and DW study – namely, democracy itself. The result will be a shift in the focus of research. The chapter concludes that taking the contestability and openness of democracy seriously has methodological implications for democratic war study on three levels: The object of investigation, the operationalisation of key concepts and the contexts of theory production and influence.

Democratic war theory The most comprehensive exposition of DWT has been articulated by the PRIF research group ‘Antinomies of Democratic Peace’.5 DWT draws upon the idea of a specific democratic inclination to the use of force by democracies (Geis et al. 2007, 71). In its broad meaning, ‘democratic war’ refers to the specific incentives, legitimation patterns, threat conceptions and forms of warfare, typical of democracies but not of non-democracies (Geis et al. 2007, 71). In a narrow sense, the term refers to the use of force without authorisation by the UN Security Council (Brock et al., 2006, 7). This implicates circumventing collective authorisation in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter as well as attempts to widen the scope of admissible unilateral force under Article 51 right up to pre-emptive strikes in self-defence (Brock et al. 2006, 8). As mentioned earlier, DWT is an explicit response to attacks on DP research for neglecting the increased participation of democracies in military endeavours since the early 1990s. It follows increasing demands for a more reflexive and pluralist

The spirits we cite 121 research programme on DP. ‘Designed to complement DP research, not to dismiss it’ (Geis and Müller 2013a, 6), DWT develops a specification of the dyadic variant of DP to address two lacunas: First, to explain DP’s core finding that consolidated democracies rarely (if ever) fight one another, but are nevertheless as war-prone as other regime types (Chan 1997, 62–63), and second, to provide an explanation for the variance in democratic conflict behaviour (Clausen 2012; Mello 2014). According to DWT, democracies are as militant against non-democracies as nondemocracies are against each other. Moreover, it is for the very same reasons and mechanisms that democracies have established peaceful relations among each other that they behave violently against non-democracies. In line with normative and institutional explanations of DP research it is argued that the ‘same domestic preferences, institutions and norms that promote peacefulness in interaction with other democracies can under certain circumstances also permit the legitimisation of violence in interactions with some non-democracies’ (Geis et al. 2007, 6–7). In contrast to DP, however, liberal-democratic norms are assumed to be inherently ambivalent. Moreover, democratic risk aversion can be undermined, as institutional constraints of democratic governments are restrained by parliaments in very different degrees, and preferences of citizens are not immutably peaceful (Geis et al. 2007, 75). Military interventions and wars initiated by democracies are, therefore, assumed to be more than empirical anomalies; rather, they are interpreted as manifestations of the ‘antinomies of DP’ itself (Geis et al. 2007, 75). DWT’s concept of antinomy asserts that the relationship between democracy and peace is neither unique nor deterministic and that the DP framework itself is underspecified. On the one hand, antinomies can occur if the theory’s assumptions lead to a different causal path than the one indicated in the hypothesis, or if the indicated path leads to contradictory results. On the other hand, the explanatory mechanisms of the different meta-theories can conflict with each other, generating contingent effects which are not predicted by the theory, or they may lead to contradictory assertions on political actions, which are nevertheless plausible within the overall theoretical framework (Geis et al. 2007, 75; Müller 2004). Against this background, the dyadic finding of DP (the ambivalent behaviour of democracies) as well as variance in their conflict behaviour are traced back to the structuring effects of liberal-democratic political culture and ambivalences of liberal ideology. As a result, democratic war appears as the ‘flipside’ of democratic peace (Geis et al., 2013). Central to this approach is the assumption of a fundamental ambivalence of liberalism. The notion ensues from militant readings of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of peace and his considerations on the concept of the ‘unjust enemy’ (Müller and Wolff 2006, 59; Müller 2014).6 It suggests that, although war is not justifiable at all under conditions of law, it would be required in light of an actor whose principles are in fundamental opposition to any reasonable legal order (Müller and Wolff 2006, 60). This interpretation implies that both a pacifist and a militant position are a priori justifiable within liberal thought. Applied to current foreign policy practices of democracies, it is argued that the liberal normative imperative cannot be assumed to be deterministic, but is rather bifurcated. This argument is based on the assumption that democratic violence

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underlies – both internally and externally – the rule of proportionality: Decisions on the use of force have to fulfil procedural demands, as determined by the corresponding constitution and international law (legality). They also require substantial justification with reference to normative beliefs on legitimate reasons for the use of force (legitimacy). It is the reference to liberal democratic values and their quasi verification through democratic procedures which is characteristic of democracies (Müller and Wolff 2006, 61). Consequently, specific procedural and substantial requirements enable and constrain their use of force. On the one hand, decisions on the use of force are constrained as they have to meet specific legitimisation requirements. On the other hand, since military force can be presented as legitimate, policy-makers are able to refer to external violence at the same time (Müller and Wolff 2006, 61). As a result, the causal mechanisms so far assumed to lead from the independent variable ‘democracy’ to decisions on ‘peace or war” must be considered contingent upon the relation to the ‘other’, that is, on whether the opponent is (perceived as) a democracy or not: ‘Democratic peacefulness, then, is an emergent attribute of the interaction’ (Müller and Wolff 2006, 58). From this perspective, liberal-democratic militancy as well as liberal-democratic pacifism become poles of a continuum of hypothetically valid interpretations of the same liberal canon of ideas and values, shaped differently in individual democracies due to their respective power positions within the international system, foreign policy role conceptions and politico-cultural traditions.

DWT as critical liberalism DWT explicitly follows a critical approach. In its self-understanding as ‘critical liberalism’ (Geis and Müller 2013b, 364), DWT aims at contributing to a more ambivalent narrative to DP by questioning its optimism in history and exploring dark sides of liberalism’s progress-oriented teleology. DWT aims to integrate into its analysis the normative ambivalences and historical contingency of both democratic foreign policy and those theories engaging with it. This means on the empirical level that liberal reasons for the use of force ‘are not uniformly compelling. They are framed differently in the public discourses of different democracies, and they lead democratic actors to different conclusions’ (Geis and Müller 2013b, 362f.). On the explanatory level, critical liberal DWT emphasises the ambivalence of liberal ideology explaining the varying violent practices of liberal democracies against the background of the structuring effects of liberal ideology on decisions over war and peace (Geis and Müller 2013b, 362f.). The demand of a more ambivalent narrative to the DP is also inferred from an insight into the ‘indissoluble link between political theories and political practice’ (Geis and Müller 2013b, 364). By returning ‘to the critical legacy of the Enlightenment’ in terms of an ‘emancipatory exercise’ based on ‘self-criticism and self-reflection’, DWT intends to provide an ‘antidote’ against democratic hubris (Geis and Müller 2013b, 364). Liberalism’s basic values, however, are not rejected but might be critically reflected:

The spirits we cite 123 We indicate that our approach might be able to contribute to a critical liberal theory that does not renounce its basic values, but adds a self-reflective and thereby self-critical layer to the traditional ethical self-confidence and selfassertiveness that are so characteristic of liberalism in our days. (Geis and Müller 2013b, 346) This statement expresses the very lowest demand conceptualisations of democracy in DWT, resulting from these both defendable and criticisable norms, should be able to meet. Against this background, it seems only consequent that individual proponents of DWT are aware of the conceptual challenges associated with understanding and operationalising democracy as a political concept (cf. Geis 2008, 186, 2011, 169). Surprisingly, however, DWT lacks any comprehensive conceptual discussion of democracy (e.g. Geis et al., 2006, 2007, 2013). In the following, I will, therefore, take DWT at its own word and discuss whether the approach is able to avoid the ideological effects associated with DP’s conception of democracy. Three aspects will be addressed in particular: DWT’s explicit reference to Doyle’s conception of the liberal state and the lack of a conceptual discussion, the level of operationalisation and the contestability of democracy as a political concept.

Which democracy? Although being aware of the need for a normative demanding conceptualisation of democracy, conceptual considerations on democracy are rare within DWT. Exemplary in this regard is again PRIF’s account on DWT. In their initial report, the authors acknowledge that a normative demanding conceptualisation of democracy is still a desideratum (Geis et al. 2007, 13). However, to define one of their central concepts they are not only satisfied with the space provided by a footnote but also apply a problematic understanding of democracy: Our conception of ‘liberal democracy’ follows Michael Doyle . . . for which democracies are characterised by constitutional principles and norms protecting via institutionalisation of rights in particular the freedom/liberty of individuals, such as civic and participatory rights, recognition of private property and orientation on market economic principles of supply and demand. (Geis et al. 2007, 13, FN 1, translated from German by VW) The problematic implications of relying upon Doyle’s conception of the liberal state as the starting point of a definition of liberal democracy have been addressed with regard to DP research from various sides. DP has been criticised for using a structural, liberally framed conception of democracy that obscures the historical, political and social context of the concept, representing rather the dominant ideological framework delineating Western democracies: As Barkawi and Laffey have argued, ‘Defining democracy in liberal terms, collapsing the distinction between democracy and liberalism is the dominant ideology of the modern state

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in the contemporary West’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2001, 13). Liberal democracy blurs the difference between liberalism and democracy: ‘The liberalism and empiricism structuring the DP debate leads to modes of analysis that fetishize liberal democracy, its mechanisms and its effects’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2001, 13). From a historical sociological perspective, however, current democracies must be considered as more than an exclusively liberal entity, always also bureaucratic, capitalist and post-colonial entities, and therefore diverse and complex social formations (Barkawi and Laffey 2001, 14). This allegation against DP research particularly targets the premise that democracy is already realised in the existing capitalist Western state, since this premise is a starting point for establishing external democracy promotion as tool of a violently implemented global ordering project (Barkawi and Laffey 2001, 14). Critiques of (liberal) hegemony offer a similar objection. Here liberal democracy is problematised by its function as a normative civilising standard for the assessment of international relations, supporting the naturalisation of liberal democracy and thus the exclusion of the ‘uncivilised other’ (Hobson 2008; ReusSmit 2005). The ‘definitional consensus on liberal democracy’, so the argument goes, implies a structuring and hierarchisation of the international along the demarcation of democracy and non-democracy, which is hegemonic in character, and which limits democracy to observable phenomena (Hobson 2011a, p. 1908). This ‘liberal consensus view of democracy’ (Kurki 2010, 372) with its implicit acceptance of the liberal bias has also been identified as a feature of democracy promotion. A number of studies in this area share the diagnosis that the problem of contemporary democracy promotion is one of ‘too little of democracy’ and ‘too much of liberalism’ (i.a. Gills et al. 1993; Smith 2000; Hobson and Kurki 2011). Consequently, applying Doyle’s conception in DWT comes with a cost: Democracy is still described in terms identical to those of the DP mainstream. Peculiar in this respect is that in his own argument, Doyle does not even refer to democracy, but rather to liberalism (1983a, 206ff.). From its central principle, liberty, Doyle deduces norms and institutions by which political regimes can be identified as ‘liberal regimes’: A market economy based on the principle of private property, external sovereignty, civil rights and a republican representative government (Doyle 1983a, 212). He acknowledges that these formal criteria could be subsequently qualified with regards to democratic aspects, for instance by specifying who is entitled to vote according to economic achievement or position within society. Yet, with a minimum of only 30% male suffrage (with the prospect of the establishment of a general female suffrage within one generation after claims in this direction have been made for the first time, Doyle 1983a, 212), Doyle’s standard for the qualification is more than low. For a material definition of the term, this is obviously unsatisfactory. Although lacking a comprehensive conceptual discussion of democracy, the normative content of DWT’s understanding of (liberal) democracy can be analysed against the background of both its conceptual basis and its explanatory framework. Here the decisive aspect is the difference between liberalism, as the ideology structuring political decisions, and democratic institutions. This

The spirits we cite 125 distinction becomes apparent in the references to substantial and procedural requirements for the justification of military force in the explanatory framework (Müller and Wolff 2006, 61). While liberal elements are localised at the ideational level, democratic elements are confined to the institutional level. The implications of this distinction should not be underestimated, since the approach offers no clarification of how liberalism and democracy are analytically related: Are the latter supplementary variables? Or is the conjunction not a closer one, given that the use of force has to be subject to both substantial and procedural requirements? Taking liberal ideology as the origin for the development of democratic policies implies a prioritisation that leads to an overwriting of ‘democracy’ with ‘liberal ideology’. DWT self-evidently starts with liberal democracy and reduces democracy to its institutional form while assuming liberalism as a superior ideational ordering principle. This corresponds with DP’s liberal reading of democracy, suggesting that democracy and liberalism are intertwined from the very start. It also applies to the theory’s central term ‘democratic war’, since the expression already suggests that liberalism and democracy go hand in hand. Consequently, instead of providing an ambivalent reading of democracy, DWT possesses an implicit conflation of democracy and liberalism at the conceptual level. This self-understanding refers to liberal democracy, but without any differentiation of the relation of democracy and liberalism. Instead, the concept of democracy is reduced to liberal ideals.

The power of measurement This is also apparent with respect to the operationalisation of democracy in DWT. Similarly to DP research, most of the studies on democratic war behaviour refer to the Polity IV dataset (i.a. Geis et al. 2007, 13, 2013; Schörnig et al. 2013, 27). Polity IV has been criticised for a number of methodical flaws, in particular, for the danger of producing false diagnoses (Schmidt 2016) and for its institutional bias (Foweraker and Krznaric 2001; Munck and Verkuilen 2002). In the following, I want to emphasise the political dimension of the usage of indices such as Polity IV, in particular, the symbolic and constitutive power of measurement. Measuring instruments define the social world according to certain rules and values, they ascribe scientificity and thus legitimacy to their descriptions: On the one hand measurement creates an ‘illusion of precision’ that policy makers, media, practitioners, scholars, and public opinion find appealing . . . on the other hand, it is a formidable source of power acting as the scientific lens through which political and economic powers have the capacity to define frameworks and adjudicate facts, to include and exclude, to impose a system of thought and set of value. (Giannone 2012, 4) In this regard, the act of measurement also has constitutive effects. Beyond its descriptive function, measurement influences what is considered as democracy,

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establishes the concept’s normative framework and ascribes rights and duties to a diverse array of actors, including citizens and international donors. DWT’s reliance on Polity IV should involve an acknowledgement of the ‘power of the factual’ inherent in the use of the dataset, which is hegemonic in character. The starting point of Polity’s definition of democracy is the embeddedness of the executive in the institutional order of a given system. The measure differentiates between democratic (fully institutionalised democracies), anocratic (mixed or incoherent authority regimes) and autocratic (fully institutionalised autocracies) states (Jaggers and Gurr 1995, 469). Three aspects are highlighted in these definitions: 1) the institutions and processes that allow citizens to effectively express their political preferences and to combine these preferences into a package of alternatives from which they can choose, 2) the institutional constraints on the executive, and 3) the presence of guaranteed civil rights and liberties for all citizens of the state. If all of these conditions are met, the regime in question is classified as an institutionalized democracy. (Marshall et al. 2014, 14) If democracy is defined in structural terms, then at first view democracy and autocracy appear as opposite poles of the same political continuum (Pickel and Pickel 2006, 184). However, such a distinction is based on a very narrow, institutional understanding of democracy, which ignores the complexities of constitutional realities and of the implementation of civil rights and liberties (Pickel and Pickel 2006, 191; Schmidt 2016, 117–118). Moreover, by focussing primarily on the executive level democratic processes and practices at the sub-state level or beyond the liberal paradigm are excluded (Woltering 2012). Also ignored are alternative political cultures, identities and self-understandings which may have important implications for an understanding of what constitutes democratic politics (Woltering 2012). This raises the question of what kind of democracy is actually covered by Polity IV. Critics suggest that Polity does not even measure liberal democracy, which would include the protection of civil and political rights, but only electoral and procedural democracy (Landman and Häusermann 2003, 11). That the latter two sub-types are nevertheless associated with liberal democracy confirms the tendency to universalise and naturalise the term. Democracy is simultaneously presumed to be liberal and yet so vaguely defined that it is almost impossible to link the measurement construct to the underlying democratic theory (Pickel and Pickel 2006, 250). It could be argued against my reasoning that defining democracy in terms of Doyle’s definition and the Polity IV measurement should rather be understood as a primarily descriptive endeavour. Such an objection, however, would face the problem that developing a theory based on the distinctiveness of democratic foreign behaviour requires an account of the distinction between ‘democratic’ and ‘non-democratic’ or ‘non-liberal-democratic’ regimes. However, DWT neither

The spirits we cite 127 reflects on how these relations might turn out with respect to other forms of democracy (it offers no differentiating criteria to alternative democracy types) nor does it consider the diversity of authoritarian systems (of which could actually be listed a number of states which have not been involved in military disputes since 1990). As a result, liberal democracy is generalised as the exclusive democratic form. Insisting on the primarily descriptive status of its conception of democracy would also contradict DWT’s claim that a critical liberalism must take into account the inextricable relationship between theory and practice. Postulating an institutional understanding of democracy as the starting point for assessing actual political forms ‘in the world out there’ would be a normative assertion. Such an assertion would presuppose a separation of the empirical and the normative which is not only problematic in general but also not applicable in the specific case: Even if presented with a critical impetus, in its basic assumptions, DWT implies an affirmation of liberal democracy and its peace promoting power, and finally its distinctive status. The problem arises from the constitutive tension between normative theory (aiming at the justification of politics) and empirical theory (interested in questions of their empirical constitution). Yet within DWT, the tension between explanation and criticism is resolved in favour of explanation. As such, the interest in a substantial contribution to empirical research obviously outweighs the critical aspiration: PRIF has thus sought to realize what Christopher Hobson is calling for in his contribution: core issues of democratic distinctiveness could and should be tackled by a critical scholarship that is prepared to develop a substantive research agenda and does not confine itself to criticizing established DP research. (Geis 2011, 168) What the approach does not reflect is how the fundamental ambivalence of liberalism – should it point to specific democratic aspects beyond liberal ideology – would affect other forms of democracy. On the level of operationalisation, liberal democracy therefore remains uncontested. The multiparty electoral democracy, based on an individualist conception of human rights, linked with free market economy still appears as the only legitimate form of modern statehood. This not only excludes alternative conceptions of democracy but also reproduces the demarcating and devaluating effects on non-democracies implied in DP research’s linkage of legitimate statehood and liberal democracy. Consequently, also on the level of operationalisation, DWT employs the liberal consensus view associated with the DP. In its attempt to ‘recover’ the positive results of DP research, DWT undermines its self-imposed critical aspirations. As a result, DWT’s conception of democracy appears to be empty in two respects. On the one hand, democracy becomes subsumed within the concept of liberalism without any corresponding clarification as to how liberal and democratic elements are analytically related. On the other hand, the fixation on the concept of democracy as it is utilised by DP

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scholars neglects the particular definitional challenge of democracy: Namely, that democracy is a political, and thus essentially contested, concept.

The uncontested democracy in DWT In his diagnosis of the ‘birth defect’ of the political form of democracy, Derrida argues, ‘Democracy, the only name of a regime, or quasi-regime, open to its own historical transformation, to taking up its intrinsic plasticity and its indeterminable self-criticisability, one might even say its interminable analysis’ (Derrida 2005, 25f.). Here Derrida addresses the decisionistic tendencies of democracy inherent in its open and indeterminate form. They result from a paradox in which democracy must inevitably exclude those elements which endanger its existence as a political form. In so doing, however, it contradicts the very purpose to which this form was originally directed: Namely, support for openness and indeterminacy. Derrida’s observation concerns democracy in its encounter with its ‘other’, but also refers to democracy as political concept, and is in this regard informative for the following argument. I assume that democracy is a paradigmatic case of essential contestability, and that as such must be understood as an open concept, re-described and potentially re-created time and again through criticism of democratic practice.7 According to W.B. Gallie, who introduced the term more than 50 years ago, essentially contested concepts are political concepts which have no general clear usage that would lead to a distinct, singular meaning (Gallie 1956, 167): I want to show that there are disputes for which neither of these explanations need to be the correct one . . . there are disputes, centred on the concepts which I have just mentioned, which are perfectly genuine: which, although not resolvable by argument of any kind, are nevertheless sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence. This is what I mean by saying that there are concepts which are essentially contested, concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users. (Gallie 1956, 169) According to this understanding, political concepts are fundamentally disputable. They are linked with intellectual traditions and social practices and can take on different meanings at any given time (Whitehead 2002, 14; Kurki 2010, 371). But they are not just contested in historical terms. A final decision about their appropriate use is simply impossible. Political concepts thus imply a variety of possible meanings which can be determined only through processes of interpretation. Each of their meanings suggest a different set of political practices. Transferred into political discourse and practice, they contribute to the legitimation or delegitimation of particular actions. In this sense, definitions have a political dimension and are thus a matter of conceptual politics. With conceptual politics, however, I do not only refer to ways in which political concepts are interpreted

The spirits we cite 129 by political actors and are utilised and employed in concrete social or political struggles. Conceptual politics also occurs within the academic realm.8 This has consequences for analysing the conceptual foundations of DWT. It suggests that conceptual clarity cannot be achieved through further precision. Political concepts are arenas of social and political struggles, they are contested for political reasons. Gray puts this political meaning and its implications for social theory in a nutshell when concluding: All conceptual definitions are bound up with complex political, ethical and ideological lines of contestation. It follows from this that all theories of a concept that is essentially contestable are implicated in normative and political power relations and positions: indeed, in virtue of the essential contestability of its constitutive concepts, any kind of social theory is a form of moral and political practice. (Gray 1983, 77) DWT offers several starting points for a reconsideration of its conception of democracy in light of its contestability. Already the interest in exploring differences in the violent behaviour of democracies suggests that there is no single version of democracy to refer to. The possibility to draw attention to the contested character of the concept is also implicit in the constructivist framework of DWT. If the use of force depends on whether the opponent is perceived as democratic or not, then this assumption is compatible with the idea that there is no strict mechanism to categorise states as democratic or not. In addition, DWT literature engages explicit remarks on the conceptual contestability of democracy definitions in theory and practice (Geis et al. 2007, 13), although, as the previous discussion showed, without any implications for the conceptualisation or the operationalisation of democracy within DWT. One of the key DWT publications even involves a radical democratic contribution drawing on post-structuralist arguments (Liste 2007, 202), such as those developed by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2009) and Jacques Derrida (2005). It suggests a deconstructivist approach to understanding the alleged inner relations of democracy, with certain political practices viewed as ascriptions, and thus as something political (Liste 2007). From this point of view, it is not the bright or the dark side of democracy appearing in DWT’s explanations but the ascriptions themselves which are a form of democratic politics, an attempt to claim authority over the meaning of democracy (Liste 2007). This is of particular relevance when it comes to the normative implications of DWT: If assertions on the peace- or war-proneness of democracies are understood as positions within a struggle over meaning, then the fixed meaning of democracy within the ambivalent (or antinomic) concept assigns the possibility of a debate on peace and war to a specific location within the field of the political. Instead of considering democratic wars as only a ‘sporadic expression’ (Liste 2007, 202) of a particular political culture and its ascriptions, they are established in DWT as consequence of democracy, implying that there is no ground within democracy for a fundamental debate on the use of force.

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From this point of view, DWT’s insistence on connecting democracy with certain norms can be interpreted as a strategy, and critically addressed as such. Although published in the same volume, this perspective is not taken into account in the overall research programme. At most, it is acknowledged that a divergent model of democracy is addressed (Geis et al. 2007, 38). In this way, DWT neglects not only the particular relevance of diverging understandings of democracy but also a key source through which it might achieve a better understanding of its own failures in integrating democratic theory and conceptual reflection on the political character of democracy. References to the political dimension of defining democracy made in several contributions outside of the programmatic DWT project illustrate this point. In particular, Anna Geis, several years joint leader of the PRIF research group on the antinomies of DP, repeatedly addressed the ideological effectiveness of DP and its differentiating effects in political practice, especially regarding the establishment of threats to democracy, the construction of enmity and the dichotomous depiction of non-democratic states as second class (Geis 2008, 2013, 2011; Geis and Wolff 2007). She discusses the development of DP as part of a broader justificatory narrative, present not only in the foreign policy practices of liberal democracies but also in the ‘new’ liberal discourse on international politics and international law (Geis 2011). The establishment of this narrative itself, however, is interpreted as merely a result of an reduction of a much broader and more complex democratic distinctiveness research to selected areas and simplified conclusions: ‘The coherence and consensus of this scholarship has been overstated’ (Geis 2011, 166). Sympathising with critical scholarship on the DP, Geis acknowledges that DP’s establishment as a ‘fact’ would obscure the historically contingent character of democracy as a desirable regime-type, providing a certainty to our prognoses of human behaviour which simply does not exist (Geis 2011, 166). However, she also emphasises the need for a research programme focussing on democratic distinctiveness due to the necessity to understand the relation between democracy, liberalism and peace. Consequently, her plea for a ‘more balanced and critical research agenda’ which would also include the ‘dark sides’ of democratic foreign policy (Geis 2011, 165), eventually resolves to introduce DWT as the obvious answer (Geis 2011, 168). This perfectly matches the self-description of PRIF’s account on DWT: We also contribute to critical self-reflection about liberal foreign policies by elucidating the dilemmas that result from our liberal convictions and norms . . . analysing ‘democratic wars’ as the ‘dark side’ of democratic peace not only enhances our knowledge about the conflict behaviour of democracies, but also counteracts simplified political messages. (Geis and Müller 2013a, 3f.) Geis critically remarks on the logic of inclusion and exclusion of identity and difference implicit in DP scholarship (Geis 2008, 177). She also addresses its misuse in foreign policy, owing to what she describes as problematic theoretical

The spirits we cite 131 assumptions, leading to problematic practical implications. However, within the overall framework of DWT such considerations receive no foundation informed by democratic theory. Therefore, Geis’s objections based on criticisms of hegemony amount to little more than the admittedly important claim as to the historical conditionality of the phenomenon: That democratic wars aim at the implementation of a liberal-hegemonic world order (Geis et al. 2007, 88). The productive moments of the own democratic ascriptions remain neglected. While Geis is emphasising its importance of revisiting the conceptual assumptions of DP, she is concerned about the danger of displacing critical engagement with DP into the academic ivory tower (instead of producing substantial contributions for empirical research; Geis et al. 2007, 88). Apparently, the decision to privilege the study of empirical variance in democratic foreign behaviour works to the disadvantage of exactly these conceptual demands. Consequently, fixating the concept in the common descriptions of the discipline neglects the particular definitional challenge regarding democracy: Namely, that it is a political, and thereby contestable, concept. DWT disregards recent developments in democratic theory but is nevertheless taking a position with respect to these developments as part of synchronous controversies over the role of liberal democracy as a global ordering project. This becomes apparent with respect to its liberal-democratic selfunderstanding, but is also demonstrated by the avoidance of post-democratic or radical-democratic perspectives. As a result, insights into the position of DWT within current controversies on democracy are precluded, as is a reflection about the potential of a deeper conceptual engagement with democracy. To sum up, DWT itself offers sufficient reasons for a conceptual engagement with the concept of democracy. However, its criticism of democracy lacks a demanding, normative conception of democracy. Rather, DWT fixates on the link between democracy and liberal norms, a fixation that goes hand in hand with the tendency to overwrite democratic elements with liberal ideals. The critical diagnosis for DP of too much liberalism and too little democracy applies to the explanatory approaches of DWT as well. In the end, DWT appears as the study of democracy without democracy. The concept-oriented analysis offered in this chapter not only unveils the fixed meaning of democracy in the antinomic concept but also shows how this fixation assigns to any possible debate on war and violence a specific location within the realm of the political: Namely, presenting it as a consequence of democracy itself.

Politicising democracy – a shift in perspective Democracy, this chapter has argued, is anything but contested within DWT. The aforementioned approaches not only share irrespectively of their critical selfunderstanding the same understanding of democracy, on both the conceptual level and the operationalisation level, but also reassume the concept as it is used in DP research despite its shortcomings. By so doing, they (re-)employ several of the ideological effects of DP: The externalisation of democracy promotion, the hierarchisation and structuring of the international system due to regime type, a general

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affirmation of democratic distinctiveness (although embedded in an ambivalent narrative) and the particular role of democracies in implementing international rules and norms. Consequently, DWT fails to meet its own critical demands. In line with the rationale of this volume, however, I do not want to end this chapter by identifying the ideological underpinnings of DWT. Attesting the ideological effectiveness of DWT itself calls for further engagement. If the ideological effects of both DP and DWT are more than a result of their subsequent utilisation in political practice but already part of theory production, then this has implications for critical theorising. Specifically, it invites the important questions, What follows after critique? and What follows for critique? In other words: What would critical scholarship on DP that would be able to avoid the reproduction of DP’s ideological pitfalls look like? To answer these questions, I argue that a broader engagement between DWT and democratic theory is needed. Such an engagement would have to integrate two related steps: First, a reflection on the implications of the essential contestability of democracy for theory production itself, and second, a shift in perspective towards the political dimension of the concept. I discuss both of these in the following: First, taking the idea of contestability and openness of democracy seriously has methodological implications for democratic war study on three levels: On its object(s) of investigation, on the operationalisation of key concepts and on the context(s) of theory production and influence. The challenge on the level of operationalisation is to develop specific instead of generalised or universalised schemata. On the basis of historical contextualisation, these should also involve strategies to avoid the differentiating and hierarchising effects of DP and provide space to discuss the explanatory assumptions against the background of alternative conceptions of democracy (in terms of variables). Promising in this regard might be to integrate hitherto conceptual criticisms of the DP (Hobson 2008, 2011a; Hobson and Kurki 2011). Taking the openness and contestability of democracy seriously also affects the subject(s) of research. If what democracy means is always, and is only, the result of democratic processes, then the actors which come into view will no longer be confined to those involved in institutional processes. This would at least imply a renouncement of the nation state as the central unit of analysis. Taking the contestability and openness of democracy seriously also draws attention to the context of theory production and influence: Both DP and DWT direct political choices only towards policy-makers. If the subjects of research change with the subjects of democratic politics, then so too will the audiences of this research change. This, however, challenges a defining aspect of DP research – policy suitability. Linking political research and political practice is a plausible step which also serves to legitimise funding the study of politics. However, the eligibility and success criteria for current research operate within the status quo. The discussion in this chapter indicated that even critical approaches in the field confirm the status quo of liberal democracy. They cleave to a paradigm which sets both the perspective of the discipline and the analysed social system in absolute terms. This implies that the shortcuts undertaken by critical research with the aim

The spirits we cite 133 to ensure compatibility with DP and to produce ‘reliable’ findings run the risk of reproducing the ideological pitfalls of DP in the process. Any attempt at opening up the basic categories of DWT has to remain in the modus of critique or it must establish an alternative research framework. Consequently, avoiding falling into the pitfalls of DP may require a fundamental shift in perspective: Embracing politicisation instead of rejecting ideology. It can be learned from Derrida’s reflections on the relation of democracy and philosophy that neither of these concepts is immune to the violence of political struggle (Derrida 2005, 25). Therefore, the challenge for future research consists in a combination of translation and extension: To develop theoretical and methodical instruments allowing for both analysis and negotiation of the diversity of possible visions and practices of democracy. Second, the engagement I propose also requires that democracy, if understood in all its contestability and openness, appears less as a political form than as a form of the political. Against this background, the execution of democratic politics could be understood as more than the mere transmission of given preferences and norms through institutions, as rather a process emerging from those practical contexts within which the diverse values associated with democracy come into effect. This raises the question of the understanding of politics or, better, the understanding of conceptions of the political which buttress DWT. Post-democratic or radical democratic theory emphasises the contingency of social order and the openness and indeterminacy of democracy (Derrida 2005) as well as the fundamentally conflictual character of the political which can only ever be temporarily settled by institutions (Mouffe 2000, 2009). Here may lie sources for both reconstruction and critique of the conceptual framework established by DWT for negotiating the use of military force. In DWT, justification of force is constrained (and enabled) by the ideal-type continuum of militant and pacifist democracy, based on a procedural understanding of politics in which differently structured inputs become transmitted into politics in accordance with the representative liberal-democratic system. Anchoring the fundamental ambivalence of liberalism (and thus the antinomies of the democratic peace) within liberal democracy continues to fixate the socio-political in terms of national borders, sovereignty, legitimacy, democratic institutions and political culture, the opposition of violence and politics, reasonable arguments and boundaries of the acceptable, agency and asymmetric delegation of articulation, governability and controllability. A politicisation of DWT, however, demands engagement with the question of which realms of the social are politicised or depoliticised. This applies not only to the contents of political negotiation and decision-making processes but also to all those who are included or excluded as political subjects (cf. Bröckling and Feustel 2010, 12). From this point of view, democracy could still be a vanishing point for an ethical imperative. If democracy exceeds existing democratic practices, subject to its own constant (re-)realisation, then it involves certain options of critique. Democracy itself would be turned against any rhetoric masquerading as an actual fulfilment of democratic claims (Derrida 2005, 123). Diagnoses of a post-political status of liberal democracy address the retreat of democracy, notwithstanding its

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nominal persistence and hegemonic position (cf. Raimondi 2014, 9). So too did the historical optimism of the early 1990s and the rise of democratic interventions require critical intervention. Meanwhile, this optimism has been replaced with disillusion about liberal democracy, regarding both its internal conditions and its external practices. Moreover, the very plausibility of speaking of both a liberal and an interventionist paradigm is under scrutiny (i.a. Heathershaw 2008; Chandler 2015; Chandler and Richmond 2016). Only against this background can DWT be understood as a certain form of criticism in a particular historical period, as an articulation within a paradigm change but without an expression of the change itself. Only in this way can DWT adjust to the move from the optimism surrounding the liberal state- and peace-building of the 1990s to the post-political and post-interventionist paradigm of today.

Notes 1 I understand the relationship between political concepts and ideology as characterised by the fact that in the latter certain key concepts are not contested anymore as soon as they become accepted as such: Ideologies, from this perspective, are ‘groupings of decontested political concepts’ (Freeden 1996, 82). Ideology then refers to the ways in which the ascription of meaning serves the legitimation, support and circulation of power relations and the persuasion or motivation of individuals to political action by endowing political concepts with meaning. Acknowledging that ideology itself is a contested concept, it is used here as an analytical tool to address the productivity of the DWT. This implies a non-epistemological and relational understanding of ideology (neither neutral – Mannheim – nor false – Marx – consciousness, but a socio-historical one, calling out to be ‘opened up for self-reflection’, Eberl 2008, 32). According to this understanding, also the critic cannot claim to argue in a non-ideological manner anymore. Jahn (this volume, 304) emphasises this intimate relation between theory and ideology within the ‘theory-as-ideology paradox’. 2 For an overview on DWT, see Geis and Wagner (2006, 2008); and the following paragraph in this chapter. 3 Attempts can be found in Czempiel (1996), Jahn (2005), Ish-Shalom (2008), Liste (2007) and Eberl (2008). The closest text in this regard is Hobson (2008). For a comprehensive account, see Waldow (2019). 4 In so doing, this chapter also points to a more general phenomenon. Both DP and DWT are important constituents of a broader ‘democratic turn’ (Geis and Wagner 2011, 1555) in IR towards an increased study and theorising of democratic distinctiveness. During the last two and a half decades, this ‘democratic distinctiveness programme’ (Owen 2004, 605) has contributed to the establishment of democracy as starting point and end of a broad strand of studies, reaching from democracy promotion, security studies, international relations and development studies; being widely adopted and utilised by political actors. See also: Azmanova, in this volume, who traces the roots of the democratic turn and its ideological effects in the field of political theory. 5 Key publications include Geis et al. (2007, 2007, 2013), Brock et al. (2006), Brock (2006) and Müller and Wolff (2006) as well as Müller (2007). Details can be found at: www.hsfk.de/forschungsprogramm-projekte/projekt/ursachen-d-wechsl-kriegsbeteiligungv-demokratien/. 6 Kant (1977 [1797], 473). On problems of this re-appropriation of Kant in recent liberal theorising in IR: Jahn (2005), Eberl (2008), Hidalgo (2012) and Waldow (2019). 7 On the concept, see Gallie (1956); on modification and critiques: Gray (1983), Freeden (1996); on current applications in democratic theory: Jörke (2011), Buchstein (2009); and in IR: Kurki (2013, 2010), Hidalgo (2008), Waldow (2019).

The spirits we cite 135 8 I am drawing here on discussions which can be traced back to Weber’s reflections on objectivity in social science and social policy (1973, 170), their methodical deepening in Koselleck’s conceptual history, Foucault’s archaeology and Skinner’s intellectual history (on their relation, see also: Huhnholz 2015); for IR, see Hidalgo (2008) and Waldow (2019). For a reflection on the mutually constitutive nature of theory and politics and its method within the theory-as-ideology agenda, see Jahn (this volume, 241).

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From theory to practice The paradox of neoliberal hegemony in twenty-first-century world politics Philip G. Cerny

Introduction: neoliberalism as a dominant practice1 Neoliberalism is the hegemonic theory, ideology and doctrine of the late-twentieth and now of the twenty-first century. In approaching this topic, first I will argue that the significance of neoliberalism stems not simply from the ideas – the theory and ideology – that lie behind its emergence and evolution, but in the varied ways it has been put into practice. This is at the core of how world politics and political economy have themselves evolved in recent decades. Second, I will outline some of the complexities and tensions intrinsic to neoliberal theory and ideology – its core theoretical problématique, followed by an examination of the relationship between explanations and norms characteristic of neoliberalism, with particular reference to concepts such as competition, human nature, price efficiency and the role of the state. This leads into an outline of the trajectory of neoliberalism, from the different schools it has involved to the various dimensions of neoliberalism in practice. Finally, I will consider the complex politics of neoliberalism today and its relationship to what I see as the dominant strand or version of neoliberalism in both theory and practice – what I call post-Ordoliberalism. At one level, therefore, neoliberalism represents the latest phase in the longterm evolution of ideas and practices in Western society, international institutions and processes, and, increasingly, in the underdeveloped or ‘developing’ world, stretching back to liberal theories of modernity from approximately the eighteenth century to today (Laval 2007). At the same time, however, it involves a radical ‘branching point’ in the path dependent trajectory of recent decades, dominating the conduct of elites and the popular perception of the core problematics of the current era – where the nation state is increasingly surrounded and cut across by a dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation (Cerny and Prichard 2017). In this process, neoliberalism is exceedingly flexible. It covers a range of theoretical and practical contradictions, tensions and conundrums that can be pursued in diverse ways in a range of policy processes and institutional transformations from the local to the global. Finally, it provides a set of road maps for diverse political, social and economic actors. I argue that this process is primarily governed by changes in market structures from the local to the transnational, from the ‘Fordist’ Second Industrial Revolution

From theory to practice 141 to the ‘flexible’ Third (and Fourth), from material production to ‘intangibles’, from production to consumption, from the proactive nation state pursuing public goods to a ‘disaggregated’, privatised and pseudo-deregulated ‘reactive’ or ‘residual’ state. Other theories and ideologies are increasingly seen as anachronistic, easily bypassed and whipsawed, from the uneven development of polycentric global governance, to the hegemony of special – mainly transnational and often oligopolistic – economic interests, to diverse popular reactions from populism to a worldwide ‘new anarchy’ characterised by Durkheimian anomie and an increasingly heterarchical playing field (Belmonte and Cerny 2019). Neoliberalism has been a kind of muddling through in an unstable and rapidly changing world.

Neoliberalism as a theoretical problématique In political and social science theory in general, theorisation and ideology are inextricably intertwined. In the natural sciences, theory entails the attempt to find objective explanations for particular phenomena through the testing of hypotheses, systematic observation and/or laboratory experimentation on physical, biological or other material objects extrinsic to the researcher, and the replicability and/or falsifiability of results, especially using quantitative methods to operationalise the research questions and assess the outcomes. In contrast, theorising in the social and political sciences always involves the hypothesising, problematisation and consideration of value-laden premises, whether explicit conjectures or implicit assumptions, and the consequential adoption of particular contested methodologies; quantification is a particularly debated example (Linsi and Mügge 2018). Empirical evidence can always be interpreted in different ways, and those interpretations involve ideology in a general ideational sense, broadly represented by three stages of analysis. The first stage is perception, that is, the identification of what is considered important to study and interpret in social and, in this case, political life in the first place. The second is the choice of how to frame the research questions being asked. This process inherently entails choosing between and/or elucidating the relationships between different competing paradigms (Wolin 2016) and/or philosophical issues (Strauss and Cropsey 1987), interpreting structures and processes through value-laden lenses rather than through a dominant paradigm as in the natural sciences (Kuhn 1962). A third level involves choosing how to conduct the empirical analysis per se when the observer is a constituent part of the process himself or herself. Finally, the results of the exercise involve speculating on the further social and political implications of different potential trajectories – trajectories that cannot be predicted in advance and the interpretation of which is intrinsically normative. In this context, any study of neoliberalism involves examining the concept along at least three dimensions. The first is to look at what sort of explanations of social and political life are presented by neoliberal theorists. The second is to examine the normative prescriptions that are being asserted. And the third is

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to ask how these explanations and normative prescriptions have influenced and, indeed, shaped how political actors, both neoliberal and otherwise, have developed and attempted to implement neoliberal or quasi-neoliberal practices and may have revised or even transformed them in the process. Those explanations, even though they have become ideologically and politically hegemonic in recent decades, are highly problematic and have been widely challenged not only in political theory but also in wider political and social life, and, indeed, in so-called renegade economic theory. Furthermore, the normative prescriptions of neoliberalism themselves have been modified and adjusted – even discarded – in diverse ways by political and social actors, leading to questions of whether what we have today is genuine neoliberalism or an adulterated form or diverse forms. Neoliberal theory and ideology involve several core conundrums or tensions: how to conceive and interpret human nature, the issue at the heart of all political theory; how to characterise the material world and the interaction between nature and nurture; and what sort of role the state and other political actors can and should play in these processes. While it has to a large extent diversified over recent decades, neoliberalism remains hegemonic despite increasing theoretical and practical challenges, the quasi- or pseudo-neoliberal ‘rationality’, ‘conduct’ or ‘governmentality’ (Dardot and Laval 2009); its practices have become embedded in world politics because of a lack of effective alternatives in a rapidly changing structural environment.

Neoliberalism in theory: explanations and norms At the very heart of neoliberal theory lies the concept of competition – not merely in the economic system but also in human society and progress more generally. The neoliberal concept of competition is seen as underlying human society in a range of ways that are theoretically distinct, on the one hand, but seen as congruent and mutually reinforcing, on the other. Each of these conceptions has been challenged in significant ways, but their synthesis is seen to be at the core not only of efficiency and modernity, but also of how human nature can – or should – be understood. The first conception involves a quasi-biological interpretation of human nature. People are seen fundamentally and overwhelmingly as individuals, not the social animals seen in classical Aristotelian political philosophy. The social derives from the de facto interaction of individuals, not from any overarching or inclusive set of social relationships. Furthermore, the interaction of individuals derives from their competition with each other, with their competing interests, whether material or immaterial. However, and this is the key to understanding how this interaction works in practice, competition is seen to be the most crucial factor in economic efficiency – competition over material goods and assets. Indeed, in the neoliberal canon, human progress lies not in production, as in much traditional liberal and Marxist theory, but increasingly in competition between individuals over consumption as well as social status in a more economically flexible world where choices are expanding across the globe. In neoliberal theory, then, people are essentially and inherently concerned first and foremost with their economic well-being – their material survival and

From theory to practice 143 prosperity – as the essence of their social status and their very being. That imperative is at the core of the shift from pre-modern, hunter-gatherer, tribal, communal and collectivist societies, especially as represented by the neomedieval era, to modern (and postmodern) societies (Cerny 1998). The essence of this transformation is that people increasingly see themselves and others in the modern world as essentially economic, entrepreneurial animals – what has been called homo economicus (Laval 2007; Dardot and Laval 2009; Davies 2017; Plehwe et al. 2006; Biebricher 2018; Slobodian 2018; Davidson and Rees-Mogg 1997; and, indeed, virtually every source on neoliberal theory). Economic, entrepreneurial ‘man’ (in traditional gender-laden language) is not only the driving force of progress, but also the key to future progress. It is the interaction of the parts that creates the whole, not the other way around. As Margaret Thatcher so famously said: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first’ (Thatcher 1987).2 But where does this behavioural essence spring from? Is it a ‘spontaneous’ order or is it man-made? If it is spontaneous, where and how does that spontaneity originate? And how holistic is this process? Does it have an overarching design, or are outcomes essentially accidental, stemming from ignorance rather than effective knowledge of others’ interests? There are several competing explanations in neoliberal theory. The first explanation is biological. Competition and competitiveness are inherent in our bodily makeup. No two individuals have quite the same experiences, memories, complex relationships, physical/biological characteristics and so on as other individuals, despite the social structures and processes they are embedded in. In this sense, people’s individuality is inherently both rational and egotistical. The second explanation is essentially metaphysical or theological. People are individualistic, entrepreneurial, competitive beings because that is rooted in wider, universal factors, whether God-given or otherwise spiritual or metaphysical. Kotsko (2018) sees this explanation as essentially an ideological justification couched in terms of the spiritual inevitability of life, of the superiority of what Whyte elsewhere calls an ‘invisible order’. In her study of the ideas of probably the main founder of neoliberalism, Friedrich A. Hayek, Whyte argues that Hayek invokes what she calls ‘the reification of economic relations’: ‘[H]is account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible market forces’ (Whyte 2017, 1, 22). The third explanation is evolution. As societies expand, economic requirements expand too. More people need more goods to live and to improve their lives, so a process of ‘adaptive evolution’ takes place – the ‘survival of the successful’ (Whyte 2017, 7; Duggan 2019). Competition between individuals grows as it becomes necessary to control ever-increasing material assets and resources. The fourth explanation is simply that competitive order is not essentially a ‘spontaneous order’, despite the apparent language of Hayek and others, but a different form of ‘made order’ – created and imposed, paradoxically, by government (Mirowski 2009). This version of neoliberalism is primarily embodied in German ‘Ordoliberalism’ (see especially Bonefeld 2017) and its variants, which will be considered later in this chapter. Finally, there is the ideological explanation – that

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competition involves the internalisation of norms. Neoliberalism and competitive individual entrepreneurship are ‘good things’ that people and governments ought to be putting into practice. All of these explanations, however, involve the same range of spontaneous and/or normative requirements. They involve the commodification of people (and of the soul) and the ‘instrumentalisation of others’ in a ‘cosmological order of global competition’ (Dardot and Laval 2013, 213–216). As Wendy Brown puts it: ‘[N]eoliberalism can become dominant as [Foucauldian] governmentality without being dominant as ideology’ (Brown 2005, 49, quoted in Dardot and Laval 2013, 309). The central role of competition – and, crucially, of the market as the structural context and process through which competition is implemented and put into practice – has been widely critiqued in a range of literature since the inception of theoretical neoliberalism in the 1920s and 1930s and the various forms of implementation that have been put into political practice, especially since the 1970s (Slobodian 2018; Lindblom 2001; Stiglitz 2019). The first criticism is that neoliberal understandings of individual behaviour are misguided. Competition is a derivative phenomenon of social life, not our core behavioural drive. In this context, neoliberals argue, for example, that inequality is a good thing insofar as it incentivises individuals to work harder, compete harder and make that competition more effective and efficient. However, critics argue that competition is not efficient by and of itself. Indeed, competition in a range of economic sectors leads not to efficient competition but to oligopolisation and monopolisation, especially where particular sectors are characterised by ‘specific assets’ in the sense used in the New Institutional Economics (Williamson 1975). Successful competitors seek to put their competitors out of business or to buy them out, not to continue competing with them in a skewed market. Rent-seeking replaces efficiency as the goal of economic actors. In one version of neoliberalism, the Chicago School, this problématique is overcome by the highly controversial view that monopolies can be the most efficient way to structure certain sectors, but this is widely contested (Van Horn et al. 2011; Davies 2017, ch. 3). Market systems therefore have to deal with a range of structurally deep-seated imperfections. Lindblom, for example, regards market systems as better than the alternatives, but he also specifies several ever-present problems of both structure and practice. These include ‘spillovers among activities and sectors; monopoly in its many forms; corporate powers other than monopoly, including political power; managerial authority within the enterprise; entrepreneurial motivation; investment; and distribution of income and wealth’ (Lindblom 2001, 254). As pointed out earlier, many analysts argue that market systems have to be imposed from top down by governments – as in Ordoliberalism. As Vanberg notes, the state has to have the strength to create and sustain the ‘conditions under which the “invisible hand” that Adam Smith had described can be expected to do its work’ (Vanberg 2015, 29). Lindblom does not include inequality and its psychological consequences in this list. However, as Peter Beattie argues:

From theory to practice 145 [E]xperimental evidence reveals a strong psychological aversion to inequality, stronger even than pure self-interest. This is supported by the weight of anthropological and archaeological evidence, which indicates hierarchical, unequal societies are a relatively recent innovation, and for most of our species’ history we lived in ‘aggressive egalitarianism’. (Beattie 2019, 15) Indeed, Beattie writes, inequality and competitiveness lead to increased ‘risk of depression, difficulties of cognitive functioning, and cynical hostility . . . violent behaviour and suicide’, with ‘stress on families, psychological problems in children and poor mental health generally.’ In contrast, ‘winners’ exhibit ‘dominance motives’, increases in materialistic values, hypocrisy, moral exceptionalism, egocentricity and lack of empathy for others, leading to entitlement, narcissism, dominance in workplaces, work–family conflicts, the commodification of sex and corruption. ‘[P]eople in countries experiencing increasing inequality [are] becoming less happy’ (Beattie 2019, 17f.). Thus, the justifications for individual entrepreneurial behaviour may go against, not with, the underlying characteristics of human nature.

Neoliberalism in practice: from crisis to hegemony Neoliberalism in practice has often been seen as a revival of what has sometimes been called ‘classical liberalism’ or ‘nineteenth-century liberalism’ – that is, a return to purer laissez-faire principles and the ideology (and economic theory) of the self-regulating market. However, neoliberalism in its varieties paradoxically includes an active role for the state in designing, promoting and guaranteeing the free and efficient operation of the market (Plehwe et al. 2006; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) – a kind of imposed laissez-faire somewhat analogous to Rousseau’s image of people being ‘forced to be free’. Its rise has coincided with structurally transformative transnational and globalising developments. Neoliberalism has, therefore, superseded ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982) as the common sense and key ‘shared mental model’ (Roy et al. 2007) of the evolving ‘art of governmentality’ in a globalising world (Burchell et al. 1991) – the common sense of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the embedding of neoliberal discourse and practice is, in turn, transforming neoliberalism from a relatively closed doctrine associated with particular actors, governments, interest groups, political parties, international organisations and even academic schools of thought like the Mont Pèlerin Society (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009), into a hegemonic concept that is co-opting the whole spectrum of political life. In particular, the globalisation/fragmentation dialectic itself is drawing in a much wider range of political, economic and social actors. These include not only trade liberalisation, the shift of the international monetary system from fixed to floating currencies, the explosion of international capital mobility and integration of global financial markets, the expansion of multinational corporations, the growth of transnational supply chains, and so on, but also network forms of

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business organisation, vast technological changes especially in information and communications technologies – the ‘intangible’ economy (Haskel and Westlake 2018) – but also economic actors involved in these evolving market structures and networks, business school academics concerned with developing global strategies, actors in transnational organisations, state actors in both traditional policymaking bureaucracies and ‘trans-governmental networks’, cross-border ethnic and religious groups, workers in high technology sectors, ordinary people linked through the internet and social media who do not need to move physically to participate in transnational society and consumers whose preferences are for transnationally produced goods and assets. Neoliberalism also increasingly appears in a diverse range of national types that unfortunately there is not space here to examine (cf. Ban 2016; Robison 2006; Beattie et al. 2019; Vail 2019; Kennedy 2018). Neoliberalism’s main precursor, liberalism, is itself a complex mixture of meanings, reflecting the ambiguity of its central referent – the notion of freedom and, in particular, the centrality of the individual – rather than a more holistic conception of society (there is not enough space here for a full treatment of liberalism: see Cerny 2013). In the first place, in neoliberalism more than liberalism, it is seen as crucial to proactively instil a culture of individualistic, market-orientated behaviour in people of all social classes – especially to counteract the ‘dependency culture’ of the Keynesian welfare state that was blamed for the slump of the 1970s. International regimes, too, have pursued similar goals, for example in the so-called Washington Consensus of the 1980s and 1990s (Williamson, 1990). Governments themselves and international institutions too, it was argued, should be imbued with market-friendly attitudes and practices. Second, barriers to international trade and capital flows should be progressively dismantled. The most efficient markets, in theory, are those with the largest numbers of buyers and sellers, so that an ‘efficiency price’ can be established that will ‘clear the market’ (Williamson 1975; Lindblom 1977). Thus, the most efficient markets ought to be world markets. As Slobodian (2018) demonstrates, a major school of neoliberal thought since before the Second World War was the Geneva School, whose members sought to subsume nation state—level economic decision-making into a complex, multi-level global system. Neoliberalism in practice therefore became dominant as a reaction to the 1970s crisis of post-war European and American states, which had several dimensions. The most important ones for our purposes are the following: The ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ (O’Connor 1973), in which the budgetary costs of social policies, public services, nationalised industries and bureaucracies were seen to grow faster than the tax base, feeding into a vicious circle of budgetary crisis and an endemic inflationary spiral, especially in the UK. So-called conservatives (neoliberals) proposed reducing tax rates and cutting back government services with the aim, not only of re-imposing budgetary discipline but also of producing additional economic growth that would result in higher tax payments despite lower rates – so-called supply-side policies.

From theory to practice 147 The partial breakdown of ‘social partnership’ or ‘neocorporatist’ arrangements that had become increasingly important in the 1960s for negotiating wages, working conditions, hiring and firing of workers and so on (Lembruch and Schmitter 1982; Goldthorpe 1985; Eichengreen 2006). The ‘stickiness’ of wages and the slowdown in investment attributed to these arrangements were blamed for economic stagnation (Middlemas 1979). International and domestic economic conditions, raising fears of a vicious circle of economic stagnation and decline. These conditions ranged from the reduction in the growth rate of world trade (and an actual brief decrease in 1982) along with an alarming rise in the ‘new protectionism’, mainly through the introduction of ‘non-tariff barriers’, on the one hand, to increasing ‘stagflation’, or simultaneous stagnation and inflation, on the other. The breakdown of that part of the Bretton Woods system concerned with maintaining the ‘adjustable peg’ system of managed exchange rates known as the ‘dollar standard’ or the ‘Gold Exchange Standard’. Endemic exchange rate crises that had first led to the end of the dollar’s link to gold (1971–1973) were dramatically exacerbated by the Yom Kippur War of 1973–1974 and the fourfold rise of oil prices that resulted, starting a process that led to further rises in inflation, interest rates and developing (sometimes called underdeveloped) countries’ debt that regularly erupted during the 1970s and early 1980s, entrenching the deepest recession since the 1930s (Strange 1988). At the same time, however, attempts to shift from Fordist ‘organised capitalism’ to neoliberalism in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and elsewhere were mixed, given the historical ‘path dependency’ of political institutions and the variation of political coalitions and economic structures in different advanced industrial countries, reinforcing different patterns of ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001). However, those varieties are increasingly seen as diminishing. Neoliberalism has, therefore, made increasing inroads into the politics and economic policies of a range of countries and across the political and sociological spectrum. In the 1980s and 1990s, the British Labour Party, the Democratic Party in the United States, the Socialist Party in France and the Social Democratic Party in Germany moved distinctly to the right in order to recapture the centre ground, with labels like ‘New Labour’, the ‘New Democrats’ and the ‘Third Way’. The European Union (EU) adopted neoliberalism as a driving force too, not merely in terms of competition policy and the development of the single market after 1985, but also through the evolving discourse of European integration (McNamara 1998). This process was not limited to the developed world. Bureaucratic authoritarian governments in the developing world, especially those mired in the debt crisis of the early 1980s, found their quasi-nationalist, quasi-socialist coalitions based on import substitution industrialisation dissolving in hyperinflation and crony capitalism. Neoliberalism in various forms – including what has been called ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Bruff and Tansel 2019) – has become the preferred economic policy programme by elites in China, India, Brazil and South

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Africa, the main middle-income developing countries, as well as in the ‘Asian Tigers’ and increasingly in poorer countries too. Endemic financial and economic crises from the Latin American debt crisis of 1982 to the Asian and Russian crises of 1997–1998 and the Argentine crisis of 2001–2002 demonstrate that adjustment to neoliberal policies and structural reforms can be a very painful and politically divisive experience. The key debates about neoliberalism have revolved around whether globalisation in its neoliberal manifestation is inevitable and whether there is a long-term process of ‘convergence’ taking place across the world – one which cuts across the levels of analysis distinction and affects domestic and international politics alike (Hülsemeyer 2003).

Dimensions of neoliberalism Convergence is seen to have several dimensions. The first concerns the reduction of barriers to trade and capital flows. Free trade is in many ways the core building block of both embedded liberalism and later neoliberalism. This process has been accompanied by a growing consensus that new trade barriers lead to a vicious circle of retaliation, leaving all participants worse off. Furthermore, the debate on international capital mobility today focuses chiefly on how to institute effective financial regulatory systems at the national, regional (European, North American and Asian) and international levels in order to smooth adjustment to an open global capital markets regime, often called the ‘international financial architecture’. Another aspect of economic globalisation, the internationalisation of production, linked to both trade and financial liberalisation, concerns the increasing acceptance of a leading role for multinational corporations (Henderson et al. 2002). The second key dimension of neoliberalism is the reform of national finances, that which has been called ‘embedded financial orthodoxy’. The central feature of this process is the control of inflation. A vicious inflationary cycle was seen to be at the heart of the crisis of the advanced economies during the 1970s, when political demands by powerful interest groups were seen, especially by the conservative Right, to lead not only to a worsening ‘wage-price spiral’ but also to ‘overloaded government’ (Rose 1980). Inflation had to be ‘wrung out of the system’ before markets could be freed up so as to work efficiently. This is the key to price efficiency as the core of neoliberal economic thought. With regard to developing countries, this inflationary cycle of decline was even more complex, involving over-dependence on import substitution policies; featherbedded industries; stateowned or supported banks providing cheap loans to such businesses, often with a government guarantee and little hope of repayment; overextended and overstaffed government bureaucracies; a declining tax base; crumbling welfare states and public services struggling to counteract rising discontent from workers and poor people hit by rising prices on the one hand and falling incomes and state benefits on the other; and increasingly authoritarian superstructures trying to keep the system from collapse, often in the face of popular guerrilla movements. Defeating inflation therefore often involved fundamental regime change.

From theory to practice 149 Beyond basic anti-inflationary policies, lower taxes have become a key part of the neoliberal consensus on both the left and right and, in some countries, especially the United States, have been the centrepiece of vote-winning strategies. Balanced budgets are in theory another central tenet of embedded financial orthodoxy, although they are often more honoured in the breach than in reality. Another aspect of embedded financial orthodoxy has been the drive to reform state ministries and agencies in order to reduce waste and make them operate according to the same sort of efficiency standards used in successful businesses (Datz 2007). Finally, macroeconomic management is generally carried out more through monetary rather than through fiscal policy. The result has been a ‘financialisation’ of both business and public policy. The third dimension of neoliberalism is a sea change in the character of state intervention in the domestic economy. Traditionally, both socialist and social democratic approaches to state intervention could be characterised as ‘outcome oriented’, and in the post-war period, the key objectives of public policy were economic growth, the promotion of industrialisation, full employment and a limited amount of redistribution of wealth and income through the tax system and the welfare state. Increasingly, however, such substantive, more direct interventionist goals have given way to regulation and the ‘regulatory state’ (Moran 2003; LeviFaur and Jordana 2005). The understanding of ‘regulation’, however, one developed mainly in the United States, involves what has been called ‘arm’s-length regulation’ – that is, that the role of ‘regulators’ by definition is not to intervene in order to produce particular outcomes, but rather is to establish and enforce general rules applicable to a particular sector, industry or service in order to make it work more efficiently in the economic sense of the term. The ostensible purpose of these rules has been to prevent fraud, promote competition and restrict monopolistic and oligopolistic practices, counteract ‘market failures’, enforce contracts and property rights, and generally provide a quasi-legal environment for actors – mainly private market actors – to operate in efficient market fashion. Neoliberals are seriously divided on one key aspect of this process. Some neoliberals in the 1970s and 1980s argued that markets would be automatically efficient and self-regulating – the so-called efficient market hypothesis – if left alone. However, other neoliberals argued that it was the type of regulation that mattered, and that arm’s-length ‘prudential’ regulation was necessary in order to promote efficient market behaviour. Deregulation, in effect, was never really deregulation; it increasingly became the replacement for outcome-oriented and discretionary interventionism with new market-friendly regulations – a form of pro-market or pro-competitive re-regulation. Indeed, in many cases, the new regulations were more complex and onerous than the old type (Mirowski 2009). A well-known example is the regulation of insider trading in financial markets (Cerny 1991; Tooze 2018). Thus, pro-market regulation can paradoxically be actually more intrusive than traditional forms of direct government intervention. The arm’s-length regulatory model is increasingly used to restructure public and social services (Evans and

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Cerny 2003; Jessop 2002). Moran argued that the culture of ‘hyper-innovation’ characteristic of the new regulatory state is more intrusive and centralising than ever (Moran 2003). The core of the regulatory approach is contractualisation and ex post regulation – that is, that behaviour is not constrained a priori (or ex ante) but is agreed on a contractual basis and then subject to later litigation when and if rules are broken, especially through independent regulatory agencies, sometimes called ‘agencification’. The main legal aspects of this process are property rights, patent law, the marketisation of the public sector (whether under private or public ownership), and, crucially, austerity. Such rules-based systems require extensive monitoring and surveillance in order to determine whether agreed performance indicators or targets have been met: ‘It’s through auditing, monitoring, ranking, etc., that individuals actively participate in and recreate neoliberal norms . . . no matter what they think or believe at an ideological level’ (Simon Choat, personal communication). Ever more aspects of economic life are today subject to extensive regulation of this sort, imposed by governments of both left and right. Indeed, one of the main roles of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank today is to proselytise the regulatory creed and spread their version(s) of ‘best practices’ throughout the world. There is a whole new academic industry emerging around the analysis of regulation in a global context, both critical and problem-solving (Jayasuriya 2010; Levi-Faur and Jordana 2005; see the journal Regulation & Governance). The fourth core dimension of neoliberalism concerns the role of the private sector and its complex interaction with public sector institutions and mechanisms in a range of contexts. Neoliberalism has always involved the privatisation of many public and social services and experimentation with mixed public-private productive and distributive goods. However, the emphasis has shifted from the direct sale of government-controlled industries to the private sector, to ‘contracting out’ services, the development of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the use of private sources of finance for public purposes; an example is the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) for the construction and, sometimes, operation of schools, hospitals, prisons and so on (Dunleavy 1994). Opponents argue that such services have a public character that is undermined by privatisation, especially where combined with austerity (Blyth 2013). Another objection is that cost savings have not materialised and that governments have assumed private contractors’ financial risks where cost overruns and quality deficiencies have occurred, as with Capita, Carillion and Virgin Rail recently in the UK. In this sense, neoliberalism involves the semi-fragmentation of government – what Machin and Wright (1985) called the ‘splintered state’ and Slaughter (2004) the ‘disaggregation’ of the state.

The politics of neoliberalism What is remarkable about neoliberalism is that it would appear to be ‘overdetermined’. In particular, the role of the nation state has changed dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century. Macroeconomic policy is increasingly

From theory to practice 151 constrained by the integration of international markets, leading to a convergence of monetary and fiscal policies and policy-making processes, including tax competition, the convergence of interest rates, the trend towards politically ‘independent’ central banks and the like. Regulatory policy is increasingly affected by regulatory competition or ‘arbitrage’. Industrial policy has been transformed by the transnationalisation and flexibilisation of production and is increasingly targeting niches that must be internationally competitive to survive, including many small- and medium-sized firms. Barriers to cross-border trade and capital flows are being reduced, however unevenly. Social policies are being both marketised and reoriented towards compensating losers. And perhaps most salient of all at the present time, environmental problems such as climate change can be tackled only through extensive cooperation, constituting a crucial challenge to national policy autonomy that states are having serious difficulty adjusting to given their other policy priorities. Neoliberal discourse and normative principles have proven to be a particularly flexible resource in this institutionally complex and even messy world. Interests and interest groups are less rooted in domestic society and more locked into transnational and international patterns. Of course, such changes provoke backlashes from those at the sharp end. In the short term, such pressures can seem very strong, whether anti-globalisation, anti-deregulation (like the Occupy movement in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) or populism. However, what is perhaps most striking is that these backlashes rarely alter the wider trend towards openness (Crouch 2011). Traditional ‘sectional groups’ such as businesses, trade associations and trade unions seek to develop active, organised cross-border networks. The most effective groups are those that are able to proactively articulate their activities on a multi-scalar basis, for example by coordinating local-level and grassroots-type organisational activities with pressure on provincial authorities, media campaigns, traditional methods of influencing national governments, legal action through courts and quasi-legal administrative bodies, recourse to and coordination with international regimes, pressuring and negotiating with multinational businesses and the like at the same time. In this process, groups cannot merely call for authoritative action by hierarchical governments. They must also appeal to consumer interests, formulate innovative regulatory proposals and seek privatesector solutions such as ‘corporate social responsibility’ guidelines (Lipschutz and Rowe 2005). Involvement in transnationalising firms, market structures and networks also generates a different kind of economic consciousness, requiring skills that are transferable across borders, and a concept of economic efficiency and profit that links the individual with the global context. For example, financial regulators are likely to have far more in common with their interlocutors in other financial regulatory agencies, financial services regimes and trade associations and so on in terms of norms and understandings of how to deal with financial globalisation, than they will with politicians and bureaucrats in other parts of their own state apparatuses (Baker et al. 2005). A third process involves political actors interacting with the expanding range of diverse international organisations, regimes and other organs of ‘global governance’.

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These are staffed by people who see themselves as having an inherently more global perspective than those who work in national governments. They seek to make those institutions increasingly autonomous of their formally intergovernmental sponsors. To the extent that such actors are able to entrench their positions, they will be able to both protect and expand their organisational ‘turf’ while at the same time further embedding neoliberalism as the common sense of evolving global governance. In this context, social actors are also a key transnational category. Issues of global inequality, environmental degradation and challenges to the welfare state have mobilised a wide range of actors, including transnational value groups and ‘global civil society’, cross-border ethnic and religious groups and ordinary people linked through the internet who do not need to move physically to participate in transnational society. Local and global actors interact through ‘global microspaces’, ‘transnational circuits’ and ‘shifting spaces’ (Sassen 2007). In all of these cases, actors have sought to craft new ways to navigate among the different levels and nodes of a complex, transnationalising system. Therefore, in the evolving world of embedded neoliberalism, the dominance of the discourse of neoliberal ideas gives actors who participate in the embedded neoliberal consensus greater ability not only to proactively design creative quasineoliberal responses and solutions but also to entrench, through socialisation, a priori anticipated reactions that internalise neoliberalism in the way people frame political and economic issues (Plehwe et al. 2006). At the same time, the major international economic institutions, the leading developed states and many nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) increasingly emphasise ‘good governance’ and democratisation as key objectives necessary for stability and growth. Indeed, some analysts would include these as a fifth dimension of the embedded neoliberal consensus, what have been called ‘regime complexes’ (Alter and Raustiala 2018). Similarly, the World Social Forum and other non-governmental platforms have shifted the focus of advocacy group debate from anti-globalisation to alternative approaches to globalisation. Neoliberalism, with its mixture of institutionally backed free-market liberalism at intersecting levels, arm’s-length regulation, institutional flexibility and international openness, has proven to be a relatively manipulable and fungible platform for actors to use to reconstitute their strategies and tactics. This is particularly true of what Lindblom (1977) called ‘the privileged position of business’ (Eberlein 2019) and the increasingly institutionalised actors whom Slobodian (2018) has called ‘globalists’.

The paradox of the neoliberal state: in the shadow of Ordoliberalism There have been several overlapping, interacting but also competing neoliberal schools at least since the early days of the Mont Pèlerin Society: The Austrian School, which represented the more laissez-faire tradition of classical liberal economics (Peters 2016); the Chicago School, mentioned earlier, which overlaps with what is often called the Anglo-American School, which promoted a range of legal prerequisites but abandoned the anti-monopoly strain of neoliberalism (Van Horn et al. 2011); the Geneva School, which emphasised the need to

From theory to practice 153 reconstruct governance at a global level (Slobodian 2018); and the Ordoliberal Freiburg School (Bonefeld 2017). I will argue here that Ordoliberalism has been particularly crucial to the evolution of neoliberalism because it has addressed the tensions by promoting a strong state to impose competition, markets and entrepreneurial man – homo oeconomicus – more systematically than the others, while attempting to blend it with the non-market aspects of capitalism. Ordoliberalism (closely associated with what was, in fact, called neoliberalism in Germany) is about a strong ‘constitutive rule-based economic order’. Nevertheless, the core dynamic of both Ordoliberalism and so-called paleoliberal neoliberalism – more closely related to the Austrian School and parts of the Anglo-American School – is still marketisation. Efficient markets, regulated by the price mechanism, are seen as the raison d’être of successful capitalism. For both, the most crucial condition for market efficiency is competition. However, Ordoliberalism diverges from the others on the requirements for effective competition. Anglo-American neoliberals see the market as a ‘spontaneous order’ with a minimal role for the state, whereas Ordoliberals believe markets left to their own devices are prone to systemic anti-competitive cartelisation and rent-seeking by capitalists, labour unions and bureaucrats. Competition therefore must be promoted, enabled and enforced not only on industry but also on trade unions and other interest groups by a strong pro-competitive state through ‘commodifying’ regulation. Ordoliberalism in theory and practice (and, to a large extent, AngloAmerican neoliberalism in practice) has involved extensive ad hoc re-regulation in response to complex, unforeseen events such as the global financial and Eurozone crises and other market failures and inefficiencies. It has become more regulatory and interventionist de facto. These diverse policy prescriptions can not only conflict in practice but also appeal to different constituencies, pressure groups and political and bureaucratic actors, making it difficult to pursue a coherent policy programme without a strong coalition and a centralised governmental structure. Ordoliberalism is no longer simply a German phenomenon; it is an inherent part of the trajectory of neoliberalism everywhere. Thus, there are significant gaps between neoliberal theory and practice, allowing ‘ideational entrepreneurs’ to change its trajectory. Perhaps most important in terms of its resilience – and its widespread acceptance among mass publics – neoliberalism is discursively powerful (Plehwe et al. 2006). As pointed out earlier, there is little public desire to go back to the high inflation and unemployment of the 1970s, despite the crises and instabilities of neoliberalism itself and a certain nostalgia for the secure employment and the welfare state of those times, and there is little in the way of coherent conceptions of how to move forward, past neoliberal capitalism to either a newly localised or a globalised post-capitalist economy. Powerful interests are vested in the concept, and neoliberal policy approaches have been embedded in key institutions – especially the European Union and the Eurozone, but also in the United States, the developing world (Öniş and Şenses 2009) and even China (Breslin 2014). However, running through all these approaches are two underlying independent variables. The first is a structural transformation – globalisation. As noted earlier, probably the most important factor in the embedding of neoliberalism was the

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crisis of the post-war mixed economy, neocorporatism and welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s (Biebricher 2018). The most significant policy shift resulting from the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s therefore was a growing focus on causes external to those domestic state policy-making apparatuses which had dominated capitalist development since the Second Industrial Revolution. The Third Industrial Revolution of flexible production systems and the revolution in information and communication technologies increasingly stretched across borders. The service sector and white-collar jobs grew while traditional blue-collar occupations shrank. Finance and investment became more and more globalised. These material conditions dramatically increased awareness not only of global realities but also of its potential pitfalls. Second, in this rapidly evolving environment, the role of the capitalist state itself has been transformed. Welfare functions have been reduced and industrial policy and state investment in parastatal firms, research and development, infrastructural investment and ‘national champions’ cut back and austerity imposed. Rather than one clearly set out ideology or set of policy prescriptions, however, the evolution of neoliberalism involves an uneasy admixture of de facto policy responses. The market is increasingly seen as coming to embody the social, as analyses of Germany’s post-war Social Market Economy have pointed out, despite the various compromises and limited social policies that were involved (Hein 2013). In Ordoliberal theory, in contrast to mainstream capitalist economic thinking, this was not a spontaneous bottom-up restructuring coming from markets themselves. Rather, it was created by the state, regulated by contract law and private property rights in which individuals are legally designated as autonomous agents. The core of Ordoliberal theory, therefore, was that left to themselves market actors will act in hierarchical and ‘opportunistic’ ways, seeking to control markets and prices, create cartels and monopolies, extract ‘rents’, and, worst of all, ally and collude with state actors to impose forms of centralised planning, fundamentally undermining both competition and efficiency. This was the core message of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (Hayek 1945; for a comprehensive critique, cf. Finer 1946), although his relationship with the Ordoliberal school is complicated.3 The alternative to potential ‘serfdom’ was not to trust Keynesian, industrial policy or welfarist attempts to stabilise and promote capitalism, as these would inevitably lead to centralised planning – a fear deeply felt in the wake of Nazism, corporatist Italian Fascism and Stalinist planning. However, while certain kinds of welfare state were seen as a foot in the door towards centralised planning, Ordoliberals and neoliberals in the Mont Pèlerin Society were divided amongst themselves about how far such limited state intervention should go and what it should include. Many participants supported a range of basic welfare measures designed to create a floor to permit the impoverished to take advantage of market opportunities and become competitive; for example, Walter Eucken, probably the most prominent post-war Ordoliberal economic theorist and founder of the Freiburg School, believed that the welfare state was a crucial component of the Ordoliberal or ‘social market’ approach. There was even support for some economic stimulus measures, especially in downturns

From theory to practice 155 and crises, for state ownership of ‘natural monopolies’ such as utilities and railways, for strong anti-cartel regulation and the breakup of large firms, for support for small businesses and ‘urban deconcentration’, the reduction of inequality and the like – so long as these measures promoted competition in the economy more generally and, crucially, enabled and reinforced the free working of the price mechanism. The key issue was the role of the state. For most Ordoliberals, the ‘modern’ state’s role of correcting market failures through ‘decommodifying’ intervention – taking a range of businesses and socio-economic activities out of the market – was turned on its head. On the one hand, the market economy had to be ‘denaturalised’: ‘Markets according to this reasoning are not naturally emerging phenomena; they have to be established in order to come into existence.’ On the other hand, it could not work, or even exist, unless it was created and enforced by the state. Even more importantly, ‘markets are not self-sustaining institutions’ (Biebricher 2013, 340). What this role of the state would turn out to be in practice was highly contested. Measures beyond fairly minimal support for those in unavoidable poverty were often seen to result in a vicious spiral of state hierarchy and monopolistic behaviour. As Jackson notes: The difference between their liberal philosophy and central planning, they argued, was like that between, on the one hand, constructing rules of the road to bind all drivers to the same general regulations, as in the Highway Code, and, on the other hand, ordering drivers where to drive. (Jackson 2010, 138) Vipond has called this ‘design regulation’ in contrast to ‘outcome regulation’ (Vipond 1993). Ordoliberalism is, of course, a contested concept. It can be both narrow and broad. I define it here as generally involving five elements. In the first place, Ordoliberals posit that efficient markets are ‘made, not born’, that is, they are not ‘spontaneous orders’. Furthermore, they argue that making markets work efficiently requires ‘constitutive rules’ – that is, ‘design regulation’ or ‘rules of the road’ rather than outcome-oriented, redistributive intervention. In this context, the key ‘constitutive rules’ involve monetary stability and ‘liability’, but the list is often longer and flexible. For example, Nedergaard and Snaith identify several ‘Ordoliberal principles’ that are relevant to the Eurozone crisis: Avoid limits on liability; debt should be individualised and fully subject to market pricing; primacy of price stability: maintain low inflation (sub-2% inflation); predictability and regularity in economic policy; institute an economic constitution; restraint in macroeconomic steering: an independent central bank – the ECB; economic stabilisation policy; maintain low public deficits (Nedergaard and Snaith 2015, 7). These rules are seen to be a necessary precondition for the price mechanism to work efficiently and therefore for markets to work well. Post-war German Ordoliberalism and the social market economy, however, involved significant compromises. Michel Foucault argued that there was a clear

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trajectory from Ordoliberalism to neoliberalism in general from the 1930s to the late 1970s (Foucault 2008), but this has been disputed and the Anglo-American version is widely seen as quite distinct (Davies 2017). Nevertheless, neoliberal policies in practice, although legitimated by and elaborated through the paleoliberal rhetoric of Reaganism and Thatcherism, are in effect inextricably intertwined in practice with a kind of virtual Ordoliberalism, not as opposites but as a spectrum where policy-makers are increasingly having to ‘muddle through’ by producing more and more supposedly arm’s-length regulation. However, these developments have not led to a ‘paradigm shift’. They are still seen as anomalies, not undermining the fundamental principles of neoliberalism itself, but representing political compromises in reaction to specific market failures and popular pressures – especially what has been called ‘compensating losers’ in a rapidly evolving, globalising world. Indeed, the neoliberal paradigm has been embedded precisely because of its shape-shifting properties. Thus, what might be called the ‘deregulatory paradigm’ in Anglo-American neoliberalism is dying in practice. Regulation is back, expanding and taking new and more constraining forms, from banks and nonbank financial businesses (‘shadow banking’) to the infrastructures of other businesses and social services. For example, the shift of the state towards the New Public Management requires more regulation, not less. Rather than bureaucratic hierarchies exercising direct control over the provision of public services and the management of publicly owned industries, those services and industries have to be closely regulated at arm’s-length if efficient organisation and delivery are to be achieved. Siems and Schnyder argue that ‘Ordoliberal lessons’ are about ‘different kinds of regulation, not more regulation’ (Siems and Schnyder 2014), but the one is leading to the other. Regulation today is about both less onerous, decommodifying regulation and more pro-market, commodifying regulation, in a state of dynamic tension, whether involving gridlock in the United States, the crisis of the Eurozone, ex post rather than ex ante financial regulation (Cerny 2014) or the challenges of global environmental politics (Kütting and Cerny 2015). Outcomes are shaped by the interaction of interest groups and ‘transgovernmental networks’ rather than by either sovereign states or global governance. At the same time, although regulations are proliferating, they are often ineffective. For example, in the issue area of financial regulation, Goldbach argues that as regulators attempt to construct cross-border, transnational or ‘global’ rules, the paradoxical result is the watering down of state-based regulations and the creation of new loopholes and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage (Goldbach 2015). Ironically, then, the more neoliberalism becomes embedded in political culture, the less effective it becomes in practice. This paradox is best illustrated in the titles of Steven K. Vogel’s Freer Markets, More Rules (Vogel 1996) and Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State (Gamble 1994) (Freie Wirtschaft – starker Staat was a phrase coined by neoliberal theorist Alexander Rüstow in 1932). However, confusion of the two strands is widespread. Hein argues that it was, in fact, a political compromise between Protestant Ordoliberals and Catholic neocorporatists in Germany, neither of which are ‘neoliberal’ in the

From theory to practice 157 Anglo-American sense (Hein 2013). Similarly, Young attributes the Social Market Economy to a combination of Ordoliberalism and a quasi-Keynesian compromise enabled by the Marshall Plan and, even more crucially, the London Debt Agreement of 1953, which relieved Germany of 50% of its external war debt during its crucial recovery phase, leading to the formal adoption of a limit on state debt – the ‘debt brake’. More recently, writers have attributed the rigid German stance on Greek debt in the crisis at the time of writing to a misreading and misunderstanding of Germany’s own history (Young 2014). Nevertheless, Anglo-American neoliberalism started taking a different turn, towards what would come to be taken for granted from the 1970s and 1980s onward – paleoliberalism, ‘with its roots in the libertarianism of the nineteenthcentury “liberal creed”’ (Paton 2012, 96). While more recent literature on neoliberalism examines the Ordoliberal/neoliberal transmutation in some detail, much writing still sees neoliberalism almost entirely in its Anglo-American version (Harvey 2005). The core of this version involves not the construction of the kind of ‘strong state’ in the sense that Bonefeld (2017) uses it, but of a weak state. As Ronald Reagan stated in his inaugural address: ‘[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ The Anglo-American neoliberal approach, in partial contrast to Ordoliberalism, then, has several evolving dimensions, all of which have become increasingly problematic. As mentioned earlier, these include: •

A shift from a focus on antitrust regulation to a belief that monopolies and oligopolies, when they are seen as the efficient outcomes of market competition, are not to be broken up but favoured, stemming from the views of the main Chicago School neoliberal theorist, Milton Friedman. (Friedman 1962; Davies 2017)

•

A shift on patent protection from seeing it as a form of cartelisation to celebrating it as a form of competitive entrepreneurship. (Van Horn and Klaes 2011)

•

An emphasis on privatisation of previously nationalised industries and, in particular, the question of how to regulate privatised utilities to make them more efficient than their public predecessors; most traditional Ordoliberals were more open to state intervention in this issue area, whereas in practice, neoliberals have been forced to improvise extensively. The New Public Management and the quasi-privatisation of public and social services, including public-private partnerships; inefficiencies have grown significantly in this issue-area. (Hood and Dixon 2015)

•

• •

Education, training, youth policy, and so on, which are meant to enable young people to compete while cutting related ‘welfare’ costs. Performance-related pay (and individual reviews) imposed by new hierarchical structures, target-setting and the like, in both public and private sectors. (Dardot and Laval 2009, 402–454)

158 • •

•

Philip G. Cerny Labour market regulation – ostensibly deregulation, but, in fact, involving the imposition of new regulations restricting collective action, labour unions and so on. Trade liberalisation, in particular, moving from the lowering or elimination of tariff barriers, mainly dealt with through prior trade agreements, to the dismantling not only of specific non-tariff barriers but also the ability of governments and, especially, foreign companies to challenge domestic regulations deemed to restrain trade, including features like Investor-State Dispute Settlement and challenges to social and public services. Financial regulation, especially the re-regulation of banking and shadow banking in the wake of the post-2008 global financial crisis, which are nevertheless able to manipulate or avoid change. (Cerny 2014)

Ultimately, these issues lead to questions about democracy (Brown 2015). Both Ordoliberals and neoliberals believe that real democracy lies not in the expression of public opinion through elections and party politics but through consumer choices and market mechanisms, especially in the relationship of supply and demand through competition as fused in and controlled through the supposedly self-regulating price mechanism. As Hayek said: ‘Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism’ (interview in El Mercurio, 1981).

Towards ever more post-Ordoliberalism? As I argue in this chapter, neoliberalism has become hegemonic in practice primarily because of the transformations involved in the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions and the developing dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation of political economy that is resulting. In all these issue areas, regulation and state intervention are often being reinvented on the hoof, creating new hybrids, especially where resistance and behaviour not consistent with the new paradigm of ‘neoliberal/entrepreneurial man’ cannot be overcome simply by pro-competitive ‘constitutive rules’. This is an old conundrum, as noted earlier – people having to be ‘forced to be free’. I would argue that embedding competition between individuals and groups through competitive tests, personal assessments and supposedly ‘meritocratic’ selection processes – including access to increased income – from educational establishments to businesses to bureaucracies is creating far more losers than winners and, indeed, leading to opportunistic manipulation of outcomes (Heffernan 2014). Despite the hegemony of neoliberal discourse, therefore, we are moving into a world where pro-competitive constitutive rules are leading not to effective regulation by sovereign states, nor to more coherent and effective global governance, but rather to an unstable post-Ordoliberal world of ineffective ad hoc incrementalism and improvisation, indebtedness (Graeber 2011) and increasing inequality, as the debate sparked off by French economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated (Piketty 2014).

From theory to practice 159 While ‘renegade’ economists such as Joseph Stiglitz (2019), Mariana Mazzucato (2018), Steve Keen (2017) and Paul Collier (2018), among others, clearly identify the structural problems with neoliberalism, most economists are puzzled by its incoherence in practice and struggle to come up with a viable alternative. In a recent posting to the Brookings Brief, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Isabel Sawhill writes: ‘I don’t know what a new paradigm would look like. I’m still a little sceptical but I’m prepared to at least start thinking about it’ (Sawhill 2019). Garrison Keillor described what we might think of as the ideal neoliberal community in his widely listened to public radio show since 1974: ‘Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and the children are above average.’ The ideal of a neoliberal society and economy populated by Ayn Rand’s ultra-neoliberal type of superior entrepreneurial individuals, whether out of human nature or imposed by a strong Ordoliberal state, is a myth. But it is a myth that has a deep hold on economic actors, policy-makers and, indeed, the public at large. In a world of globalisation and fragmentation, the paradox of neoliberalism is that it leads to a political and economic practice that is anachronistic, but still essentially unchallenged in policy and governance. As cultural historian Lisa Duggan has argued in her critique of Rand’s philosophy, we are increasingly living in a world of ‘Zombie Neoliberalism’ (Duggan 2019).

Notes 1 I am grateful to Werner Bonefeld, Simon Choat, Michael Peters and the editors of this volume for their extremely valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 It must be pointed out, however, that the notion of family has always played a residual but crucial socialising role in neoliberal theory, underpinning and enabling effective individual competition in the wider political economy (Cooper 2017). 3 Whether Hayek should be considered an Ordoliberal is highly controversial, as he is generally thought to be closer to the Austrian School. Some authors like Werner Bonefeld and Wolfgang Streeck see his concept of the Rule of Law as essentially Ordoliberal, but its relationship with the concept of ‘spontaneous order’, central to the Austrian School, is not clear. He also had close ties with Ordoliberalism and spent some time at the Freiburg School. Like Bonefeld (personal communication), I regard him as a ‘bridge’ between Ordoliberalism and the Austrian School; as Wolfgang Streeck writes, ‘The most important liaison between the two was, of course, Friedrich von Hayek, who for a few years occupied a chair at Freiburg, the academic home of the German Ordoliberal School’ (Streeck 2015, 364).

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8

Liberalism and the Cold War The international thought of Jo Grimond Benjamin Martill

Introduction1 The story of liberalism in International Relations (IR) theory is often told against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War. Indeed, liberal works proliferated in the decades since the end of the Cold War, leading to a vibrant research programme premised on the importance to international politics of international institutions (Abbott and Snidal 1998; Deudney and Ikenberry 1999), cooperative strategies (Fearon 1998; Snidal 1991), diverse regime-types and domestic politics (Bueno de Mesquita 2002; Owen 1994) and sectoral and other sub-state interests (Moravcsik 1993; Milner 1997). Whilst realism ‘rules the theoretical seas’ during the Cold War (Schweller and Wohlforth 2000, 60), it is liberalism that was held to possess a comparative advantage when it comes to explaining politics in the post–Cold War world, characterised as it was by complex and dense forms of interdependence, the expansion of the Western (liberal) world order, American hegemony and concomitant hierarchy and efforts to promote liberal individualism and democratic rule across the globe. The role of prominent realists in devising and implementing containment policy – such as George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau (Gaddis 1982) – has reinforced the association between realism and the Cold War. Yet the origin story of (modern) liberal IR theory has been subject to increasing challenge in recent years. Jahn has argued in particular that many aspects of Cold War thinking were liberal, not least the preoccupation of Western states with defending their ‘liberal sphere of influence’ from the threat that communism represented to property rights and the liberal way of life (Jahn 2013b, 27f.). She claims that ‘liberalism is historically linked to a much wider range of policies, institutions, and norms than is recognised in the contemporary conception’, noting that existing assessments of liberalism inappropriately strip away the tradition’s association with power politics and its ability to adjust to ‘the power political opportunities and constraints provided by the international system” (Jahn 2013b, 15f.). A number of other examples of scholarly research have also hinted at a more complex relationship between liberalism and the Cold War. Studies of the Kennedy administration, for instance, have noted the link between the embrace of modernisation theory and the adoption of explicitly liberal development policies (Ish-Shalom 2006b). Support for the American strategy of containment on the European continent, meanwhile, was staunchest among the self-styled liberal

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parties of the political centre, rather than among more ‘realist’-leaning conservatives (Hofmann 2017; Martill 2019). Moreover, key components of liberal IR theory arguably have their origins in the Cold War, including the development of rationalist and game-theoretic approaches to the study of world politics (Milner 1998; Schelling 1958) and theories of regimes and interdependence (Axelrod and Keohane 1985; Oye 1985). The upshot of these arguments is that liberalism has a tendency to disown its own associations with Cold War power politics, leading to an impoverished conception of both liberal IR theory and Cold War thinking within the discipline. The work of Jahn and others has done more to correct our view of Cold War thinking and the recent history of liberal international theory. This chapter seeks to further this emerging body of work by engaging with the liberal worldview during the Cold War – specifically, by engaging with the works of the liberal ‘scholarpractitioner’ Jo Grimond, former leader of the British Liberal Party and a prolific writer on liberalism and foreign affairs. Existing work has mainly been conceptual, rather than empirical, and has tended to focus on the liberal views espoused by would-be realists (e.g. Ish-Shalom 2006b; Jahn 2013a) rather than by selfstyled liberal theorists. Examining the claims of those who regarded themselves as writing about the Cold War from within the liberal tradition is a helpful extension of this work, since it can both substantiate the original claim and also extend our understanding of the difference between contemporary liberal and realist conceptions of the Cold War, however intertwined. This chapter offers an applied study of Cold War liberalism by engaging with Grimond’s works on foreign affairs, written during the early decades of the Cold War (in the late 1950s and early 1960s). The chapter begins by offering a number of reasons why it is worth examining Grimond’s views on foreign affairs in detail, before giving a brief overview of his life and times and the context within which he came to write on international affairs. It then sets out five aspects of his perspective on the Cold War that recur frequently in his writings, specifically his views on the sources of the Soviet threat, global obligations, the pursuit of peace, collective deterrence and (Western) institutionalisation. The chapter then discusses these views in relation to five questions: How they relate to principles of liberal internationalism, how they manifest contradictions and tensions in liberal thought, how they relate to realist perspectives, how hawkish the view of containment is and how relevant the discussion is to politics today. The chapter concludes by arguing that an engagement with the arguments of Cold War liberals can demonstrate both distinct forms of liberal argumentation and important overlaps with realist thinking. It also suggests liberal IR scholars need to be more careful in representing their endeavour either as an impartial theoretical endeavour or as a development of the post–Cold War era.

Jo Grimond: the scholar-practitioner Intellectual history is, of course, of value for its own sake, and an uncontroversial individual such as Grimond (certainly relative to other Liberal leaders) requires

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perhaps little independent justification. Yet the marginalisation of British liberalism and Grimond’s relative obscurity in the canon of British political leaders – he lacks the stature of contemporaries such as Harold Wilson and Ted Heath – makes it necessary to offer some opening thoughts on the choice of subject. There are several important reasons why Grimond’s international thought is worthy of our attention. The first reason is that Grimond offers a rare example of a scholar-practitioner whose activities navigated the ‘trading zone’ (Steffek and Holthaus, this volume) between political practice and academic theorising. Grimond dedicated a large chunk of his time to political philosophy, and in particular to the task of (re-) formulating a liberal view of politics and society that could make sense of the post-war order both within the country and in international order more generally. Characterised by the rise of state interventionism at home and the institutionalisation of an international order based on free-trade (so-called embedded liberalism, Ruggie 1982), the transposition of classical liberalism to post-war British politics and foreign policy was not a simple task, and it was Grimond who is perhaps best associated with undertaking the intellectual effort to achieve this. He was a prolific writer and produced a number of pamphlets on liberalism – starting with The Liberal Future in 1959 – all of which sought to understand contemporary political and moral dilemmas through the lens of liberal political theory. Moreover, he penned the majority of these during his time as leader, making them relevant both as Liberal policy platforms and – given their dense theoretical content – as works of applied political theory. Grimond’s profligacy as a writer and theorist makes him not only a weathervane for liberal thought but also a representative of a key turning point in the history of liberal theory of interest for its own sake, since it affords us a better understanding of changing currents of liberal international thought. A second reason is that the Grimond-era of British liberalism is of significance in terms of both the galvanising and the reorientation of British liberal thought. In terms of public support, Grimond presided over a period of relative Liberal resurgence, at least relative to the sorry position the party had reached by the early 1950s. Although the country’s single-member district plurality electoral system translated the proportion of Liberal votes into a smaller number of seats than would other systems – since votes accruing to the non-winning candidate were effectively not counted – Grimond was able to increase the party’s share of the vote from 2.7% in 1955 to 11.2% less than a decade later. Whilst the party never gained sufficient seats to be realistically considered a force in British politics, the fourfold increase in popular support achieved by Grimond was no mean feat and suggested that Liberal ideas underwent something of a renaissance under his leadership. Moreover, Grimond’s efforts to re-articulate Liberal thought so as to make it more compatible with social democracy and the welfare state – and to spell out the basis of Liberal foreign policy – contributed to a redefinition of the party which itself had important political consequences further down the line. His articulation of British liberalism as essentially a centre-left tradition would lay the foundations for the subsequent (and ultimately short-lived) ‘Lib-Lab’ pact of

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the late 1970s, as well as the eventual merger between the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party, the latter comprising centre-left refugees from the Labour Party. A third reason Grimond’s international thought is worthy of closer examination is the dearth of existing scholarship on the international thought of British liberalism in general. Whilst Grimond has been the subject of a number of political biographies (e.g. Barberis 2005; McManus 2001), his international thought has not been subject to the systematic discussion it deserves, nor indeed has liberal international thought in Britain during the Cold War received much attention. There has, for instance, been no systematic appraisal of Liberal foreign policy along the lines of those penned on the other parties in the British system (e.g. Beech 2011; Callaghan 2007; Daddow and Schnapper 2013; Vickers 2011). Moreover, intellectual history scholars working on traditions of international thought have not yet, it would seem, discovered Grimond’s rich writings on the topic. This is in spite of considerable interest in liberalism and International Relations (IR) more generally over the years (e.g. Boucoyannis 2007; Jahn 2009; Ikenberry 2009; Moravcsik 1997; Zacher and Matthew 1995). Whilst Grimond and other self-identifying liberal politicians from other middle-powers would not be expected to enter this discussion automatically, there is certainly value in revisiting the historical arguments of those who grappled earlier on with the application of liberal principles to questions of foreign policy. If studies of welfare liberalism and socialist internationalism find value in revisiting the works of such scholar practitioners as Leonard Woolf and David Mitrany (e.g. Wilson 2003; Steffek and Holthaus 2018), then Grimond certainly deserves to be among those liberals discussed in relation to post-war liberal internationalism. Indeed, as I shall argue later, Grimond’s early writings foreshadow a number of key debates in post–Cold War liberal international theory, suggesting greater continuity than is perhaps acknowledged. An engagement with Grimond’s thought can, therefore, help us understand in greater detail how self-declared liberals viewed the Cold War. In the remainder of this chapter, I set out to explore how Grimond understood the changing nature of international order, how liberal principles applied to this and how the constraints of power politics served to temper liberal impulses.

Life, times, politics Born on 29 July 1913 in St Andrews, Fife, Joseph ‘Jo’ Grimond grew up in the stable environment provided by his family, who had garnered considerable wealth from the textile industry in nearby Dundee (McManus 2001, 2f.). Although born and raised north of the border, Jo would receive the education of the English elite, attending Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, before joining Middle Temple as a barrister in 1933, a well-trodden path into the circles of the British elite. Although himself from a Liberal family, Grimond nevertheless surprised friends and family by announcing he intended to stand for Parliament as a Liberal when the time came, irrespective of the party’s poor electoral performance and political marginalisation. His first experience came whilst working on the campaign of Arthur Irvine in 1935 who was contesting the Kincardine and West

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Aberdeenshire for the Liberals, although he was unsuccessful (McManus 2001, 33). Between this initial engagement with politics and contesting his own seat, Grimond was called up in 1939 to serve in the British Army, where he would play his part in the 1944 invasion of France and the Rhineland following the D-Day landings (McManus 2001, 48f.). Grimond first contested the remote Orkney and Shetland constituency in the 1945 general election, although he was unsuccessful in this first effort, albeit during a particularly poor year in Liberal electoral fortunes (McManus 2001, 55). He entered parliament at the subsequent general election of February 1950, one of only nine Liberals MPs returned, winning the Orkney and Shetland constituency by just under 3,000 votes. This was the election in which Clement Attlee’s Labour government managed to cling on to power with a razor-thin majority of six seats, despite a sizeable swing to the Conservatives nationally. Grimond delivered his maiden speech, during which new MPs set out their stall and raise issues and themes important to them, the following month on 10 March, in response to the debate on the King’s Speech (Barberis 2005, 33). In it, he raised a number of issues that would recur in his political activities and writings, including the economic plights of Scottish islanders, the benefits of a federal model for Scotland’s position in the UK, and – as part of this latter discussion – the idea of a federal model for Europe more broadly (Barberis 2005, 34). In his support for European integration, Grimond was not unique in his party, merely re-stating his party’s pro-federal line which it had taken since the end of the war, under leader Clement Davies. When, on 9 May 1950, French foreign minister Schuman unveiled proposals for what was to become the European Coal and Steel Community, Davies argued that Britain should join ‘the six’ in preliminary negotiations, although ultimately Attlee precluded this option on the grounds that British industries were too important to relinquish to supranational control and their constituents too important for the Labour vote (Barberis 2005, 38). Anthony Eden, for the Conservatives, also opposed Attlee’s decision not to participate in the preliminary negotiations, but would subsequently demonstrate only cautious support for the European project whilst foreign secretary and, later, prime minister (Ruane 2002). The October 1951 election, coming a mere 20 months after Grimond was first elected to Parliament, saw the Liberal vote continue to decline. Although he was re-elected with an increased majority of 6,000 in his own constituency, the election returned only six Liberal MPs nationally. As Chief Whip, albeit of a small number of MPs, Grimond’s job required him to maintain party unity in the face of a surprising number of defections from the party line, a product both of the Liberals’ continuing dismal performance and the inability of its new position ‘between’ Labour and the Conservatives to satisfy both left- and right-leaning Liberals. Defections among Liberal peers, of whom the party had far more than it did MPs, were especially prominent in the early 1950s, and a number of defeated Liberal MPs would also subsequently defect to the other parties (Barberis 2005, 49–51). It was in this context of dissatisfaction with the party leadership and the future of Liberal policy that Grimond was to become party leader. In the midst of the Suez crisis in 1956, following Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal, the party assembly

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in Folkestone produced such vocal opposition to Davies’s leadership that he was persuaded during the conference to submit his resignation. Grimond, as the rising star in the party, was duly elected leader and took the reins on the day British forces entered Port Said in the Canal Zone. As one of his first tasks as leader, and with relatively little difficulty, given the disaster that was fast becoming the British response to the Suez crisis, Grimond established the Liberals as an ‘anti-Suez’ party (Barberis 2005, 70). As party leader, Grimond dedicated his efforts to keeping the Liberals together but also to continual efforts to reinvigorate liberal political philosophy, which he aimed to do through a series of remarkably academic pamphlets written during his leadership, beginning with The Liberal Future in 1959. In this volume, Grimond offered a distillation of liberal beliefs as he saw them, placing significant emphasis on the concept of individual freedom which he regarded as central to the liberal enterprise. Liberalism, Grimond argued, was premised on a notion of the individual as ‘eminently redeemable’, and therefore capable of working out their political salvation for themselves, without overbearing state interference (Grimond 1959, 11). ‘The task for Liberals’, he argued, was thus to ‘give back power to the individual and to reform Society, the State, the Government and the Nation so that they may serve individuals’ (Grimond 1959, 23). Yet Grimond was at pains to point out this did not connote unthinking commitment to laissezfaire, since this mode of organising society could deprive individuals of liberty just as much as others, but would rather require the pruning of government to its truly helpful tasks for society (Grimond 1959, 19, 22). Enumerating the core values of liberalism, Grimond stressed the importance of responsibility for politics and its problems, criticism of existing social arrangements – especially where problematic – and reason, the latter of which he associated with the belief ‘that nothing is above examination by reason and that disputes are best decided by reasoned argument’ (Grimond 1959, 13). He placed significant emphasis, too, on society, understood as ‘the variety of relationships which individuals feel agreeable and useful’, which individuals freely opted into on the basis of mutual interest, and within which inequalities and hierarchies should exist only to the extent they benefited the worse off (Grimond 1959, 15–17). Grimond’s politics, then, represented an attempt to reconcile the core concepts of classical liberal thought with the political and social reality of the welfare state and its role in bringing about the conditions for reasoned choices and meaningful lives. Choice, he argued, ‘can only take place in an environment, and the right choices will only have a chance of being made if the environment is Liberal’ (Grimond 1959, 13).

Writings on the Cold War Grimond’s views on foreign affairs generally, and on the nature of the international order specifically, are set out in his general texts on the application of liberal political philosophy to pressing questions of British politics and statecraft, with discrete chapters on foreign policy in The Liberal Future (1959) and The Liberal Challenge (1963). The starting point for Grimond’s analysis of foreign affairs

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was his effort to specify how liberal principles should extend to the realm of a country’s external relations, a similar task to that undertaken by successive liberals in the decades ahead, most notably John Rawls in his Law of Peoples (1999). Grimond associated the liberal view of foreign affairs with three key principles: the spread of liberal ideas, the pursuit of peace and the establishment of the means of peaceful change (Grimond 1959, 151–153). Liberalism requires us, he claimed, to promote a Liberal world, by peaceful means so far as that may be possible; to make it more possible by helping to create international authorities through which peaceful change could be agreed and enforced and all the time to work for freer trade and greater prosperity with due regard to the true interests of the British people. (Grimond 1959, 154) Not unsurprisingly, Grimond’s views were heavily influenced by the context of the Cold War and the changes which had been wrought on the international system by the endgame of the Second World War and the emergence of the two competing superpowers out of the ashes of allied victory. His writings on foreign affairs in the 1950s and 1960s are preoccupied with questions of Cold War security and he developed a number of these arguments further in specific writings, most notably his 1966 volume Eastern Europe Today. Grimond’s writings on the Cold War took place against the ever-changing backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, marked both by escalation at such moments as the Berlin crisis (1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962) as the Kennedy/Khruschev showdown reached its climax, and by the gradual routinisation of the Cold War through the stabilisation of expectations and the relative parity – in strategic terms – obtaining between the two sides. As a result, his earlier statements on the Cold War in the 1950s betray a more hawkish attitude than those he made in the late 1960s, although his support for détente (of some kind) remained a constant in his writings. The Cold War context had an important effect on Grimond’s writing and strongly influenced a number of his positions. To begin with, the Cold War set the stage for his analysis of international relations. Two changes in particular Grimond believed to be game-changers; these were ‘the decline of the nation-state’ and ‘the invention of nuclear weapons’, which together had removed from states the ability to fulfil their traditional functions (Grimond 1963, 227). Both of these changes pointed in the same direction for Grimond, since they both undermined the pretence of control held by nation states and augured for greater collaboration and supranationalism (Grimond 1963, 227). He argued that the ‘boundaries between sovereign nation states have become dangerous anachronisms. Industry is international. The great firms of modern business operate all over the free world’ (Grimond 1959, 157). The result is that ‘no country can save itself . . . from slumps and booms even though Governments still sometimes pretend that they can control their own economic climate’ (Grimond 1959, 157–158). In the strategic field, moreover, the creation of nuclear weapons has made insignificant both the conventional capabilities of states and their geographical position in the

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international system. ‘In the last century’, Grimond argued, ‘an assessment could be made of the advantages and disadvantages one country would get out of an alliance with another. Foreign affairs dealt with questions of relative strength and interest’ (Grimond 1963, 227). Nuclear weapons changed all this, however, by flattening the power hierarchy between states and rendering geography less important. Grimond’s support for European integration, the aspect of foreign policy on which his views are perhaps best known, was also a product of his understanding of the realities of the Cold War environment. European integration allowed for the creation of a political community which buttressed Western coherence without the need for the overt threat of force. The ‘new political strength in western Europe’, he argued, provides a much more effective bulwark against communism than any military forces can [and] provides the sort of peaceful strength and stability which might at last restore that measure of equilibrium to Europe which could make possible a real detente and settlement between east and west. (Grimond 1960, 2–3) ‘Unlike armed alliances’, Grimond noted, ‘union in western Europe provides the sort of peaceful strength and stability that could make an understanding with Russia and eastern Europe easier and not more difficult to achieve’ (Grimond 1960, 1). It was for these reasons that the United States was demonstrably behind the project of European integration, since it fed ultimately into the Americans’ Cold War strategy (Grimond 1960, 7). The Common Market, then, was ‘finally burying the possibility of war between Germany and its western neighbours, helping to restore Europe to an influential place in world affairs and strengthening the west’ (Grimond 1960, 1).

Five arguments Grimond wrote at length on the Cold War in his discussions of international affairs, touching upon myriad aspects of the conflict. Although complex and at times contradictory, there are five themes in Grimond’s take on the Cold War that stand out both as frequently recurring talking points and as elements of thought where liberal principles can be argued to play a significant role. These are, in turn, the sources of (Soviet) threat, global obligations, the pursuit of peace, collective deterrence and (Western) institutionalisation. Sources of (Soviet) threat To begin with, there was the nature of the Soviet threat which, for Grimond, was ideological rather than geopolitical. The communists, he argued, ‘dislike us for what we are and not what we do’ (Grimond 1963, 231). For Grimond, the authoritarian nature of Soviet politics, moreover, resulted inevitably in aggressive

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behaviour abroad. Anticipating the arguments of later theorists of the ‘democratic peace’, he claimed that it was ‘difficult to believe that a doctrine based on force can be wholly pacific . . . [Communists] have an entirely different attitude to force from that of Liberals. They reject both the democratic and humanistic traditions’ (Grimond 1963, 231). Communism, he asserted, ‘is a tyranny. Like all tyrannies, it believes in force at home and abroad’ (Grimond 1960, 39). And while the West ‘may frequently resort to violence’, he claimed, ‘violence is not part of its normal way of thought. It is more difficult for a democracy to engage in war than an autocracy’ (Grimond 1963, 240). By identifying the Soviet Union’s illiberal and antidemocratic character as the source of its threatening behaviour abroad, Grimond was continuing a long-held tradition of liberal thought that had sought to identify threats to peace in the constitution of international actors themselves, rather than in the structural conditions in which they found themselves. The emphasis placed on ideology and political system in the Cold War struggle suggested, to Grimond, that conflict was inevitable so long as communism persisted in the Soviet Union. It also helped establish an important bifurcation between Western countries with which Grimond regarded further integration an important priority and those in the communist bloc which were inherently aggressive and non-cooperative. This led to the ‘great division’ – in Grimond’s words – in his writings between ‘the question of our relationship with other countries and peoples outside the Communist world and the question of our relationship with that world’ (Grimond 1959, 154–155). Global obligations A recurring theme in Grimond’s writings is the emphasis he places on the illegitimacy of communism and the threat this form of government poses to those living behind the Iron Curtain. There is an unsurprising liberal universalism underpinning Grimond’s writings on the topic, evident in his insistence that liberal values – if they are indeed moral imperatives – must apply to both the communist and non-communist worlds. Whilst many contemporaries shared Grimond’s disdain for communist ideology, not all of them couched their arguments for this in (liberal) cosmopolitan terms. Realists, for instance, tended to focus on strategic considerations and on the security threat to their own citizens. Grimond’s emphasis on universal liberal duties led him to emphasise the need for an assertive anti-communist stance that went beyond defence and containment. ‘One aim of Liberal foreign policy’, he argued, ‘is to spread Liberal ideas. Liberalism is the enemy of Communism and it cannot stand on the defensive’ (Grimond 1959, 151). It also led him to stress that the ultimate aim of Western policy must be that of ‘defeating communism’, decrying those on the left and right who ‘disclaim all intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Communist countries’. Although liberals do not mean to subvert communism through force of arms or other violent means, Grimond argues liberals must acknowledge ‘the claim on us to fight for liberalism” (Grimond 1959, 151). Grimond’s emphasis on duties also led to something of an interventionist streak in his writings. Grimond’s (cautious) defence of

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American involvement in Vietnam and his regret at the less-than-forceful Western response to the Hungarian uprising suggest he was more ready than most to see fault in cases of Western non-intervention (Grimond 1959, 151–153). Finally, there is an important emphasis in Grimond’s writings on demonstrating to citizens of communist countries the superiority of Western liberalism, and he argued: Liberals do not believe that it is enough to counter Communist lies . . . Some positive alternative to Communism is needed. The alternative is individual liberty and opportunity and the respect for each other’s welfare and freedom which must go with it. (Grimond 1959, 152) ‘Britain’, he argued, ‘must take her full part in assisting the free world to build up a way of life which can appeal to the uncommitted and eventually to the Communist part of the world’ (Grimond 1963, 228). Pursuit of peace Grimond regarded the pursuit of peace as a core liberal value, noting that ‘the maintenance of peace between states has a big claim on us’ (Grimond 1959, 152– 153). In his writings, he suggests a number of ways to achieve more peaceful relations with the communist bloc. ‘Liberals must start on the assumption’, he claims, ‘that we are going to negotiate with the Communist Governments and argue with its citizens’ (Grimond 1959, 155). Grimond claimed there were ‘subjects upon which it at least seems to be worth opening negotiations: at present disarmament in the Middle East and military disengagement in Central Europe seem to be such subjects’ (Grimond 1959, 156). He argued the UK had a duty to ‘suggest joint ventures to the Russians’ (Grimond 1960, 42), and in 1963, he suggested the West ‘try continually for possibilities of political agreement, however small the results may seem’ (Grimond 1963, 232). Grimond’s support for negotiations with the communist bloc must be understood in the context of the time, during which many felt that negotiations with the Soviets were either wholly futile or unjustified as a result of prior bad behaviour on behalf of the USSR. Active support for negotiations was, in a sense, not the default position, even for many governments. Support for talks and peace initiatives, however, did not obviate the need to maintain the Western deterrent, nor to bolster it in places (see below). Grimond was adamant that negotiations must be conducted against the background of a strong and unified Western deterrent, a position not all that dissimilar from what would come to be known as the ‘twin track’ in the 1980s (e.g. Risse-Kappen 1988). By 1966, Grimond’s emphasis had shifted somewhat and he advocated working on the assumption that there is now considerable diversity in the Communist world and that we are no longer engaged in resisting a monolithic Communist threat but in

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attempting to pursue a policy of positive coexistence in the tackling of common problems with such countries as are ready to do so. (Grimond 1966, 11) In other words, the emphasis was on Western unity as a precondition for talks. Collective deterrence The West required a strong and credible (nuclear) deterrent to avoid offering the Soviets openings which they could take advantage of. Grimond was especially critical of arms control efforts as envisaged by elements of the British left – who were ‘far too complacent about the nature of Communism’ – arguing that there did not exist sufficient trust between East and West to guarantee reciprocity. ‘If the West gave up nuclear weapons’, he argued, ‘the Communists would cheer but not follow (Grimond 1960, 39–40). Parallel to efforts at negotiation, therefore, he also pointed to the need to build up conventional forces in NATO (Grimond 1960, 42). Moreover, he suggested, we would not know ‘what pressures internal and external might be brought to bear on the Kremlin to undertake or support local adventures’ in the absence of a nuclear deterrent (Grimond 1963, 240). Thus, for Grimond, while disarmament would remain the ultimate goal for liberals, deterrence represented ‘the best hope of preserving world stability as a temporary measure until we can get general disarmament’ (Grimond 1963, 233). Deterrence for Grimond was a purely functional affair, mandated not by any veneration for force itself but by the perceived need to maintain sufficient capabilities to deter aggression from the other side. In principle, Grimond opposed nuclear weapons and supported efforts at disarmament so long as these did not risk tilting the balance in favour of the Soviets. He also opposed the British ‘independent’ deterrent, on the simple grounds that it was unnecessary in light of the American nuclear umbrella, and thus defensible only on the grounds of national prestige (Grimond 1963, 246). ‘Deterrence does not mean that each nation must keep up its own nuclear arsenal’, Grimond argued. ‘Deterrence means having enough nuclear power to deter and no more’ (Grimond 1963, 246). (Western) institutionalisation One of the core aims of a liberal foreign policy, Grimond argued, was to ‘make a peaceful and liberal transition to new political organisations’ (Grimond 1959, 159). ‘It is vital to remove the barriers which have been thrown up in the last fifty years’, he claimed, noting that ‘we cling obstinately and harmfully to the picture of a bygone diplomacy: a diplomacy which acts as though the units of the world were still the nineteenth-century independent states’ (Grimond 1959, 157f.). For Grimond, the establishment of supranational forms of authority served an important strategic function, since ‘[w]ithout such new political organisations we are neither going to remove the causes of war nor create an authority capable of

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enforcing any sort of international order and peace’ (Grimond 1959, 159). It is, he argued, the ‘attempt to keep up outworn ideas of national prestige which leads to insecurity’, whereas to ‘work for practical steps in international cooperation – that makes for security’ (Grimond 1960, 41). In practical terms, however, Grimond was disenchanted with the progress made by global forms of supranationalism – such as the United Nations – which he regarded as being hamstrung by the Cold War. Indeed, it is clear he preferred the idea of extending existing forms of Western integration globally to placing his faith in reforming existing global institutions, claiming liberals ‘have been too prone to concentrate their efforts on supporting the UN to the exclusion of other forms of collaboration’ (Grimond 1959, 166). Unity is likely to be stronger, he argued, ‘if it grows up from those areas which already have considerable homogeneity. Indeed, there is a danger that by attempting to spread the umbrella of international unity too widely in its early stages we shall weaken it’ (Grimond 1959, 169). Moreover, whilst global institutionalisation was to be the ultimate goal, Grimond worried that if attempted initially it would give the Soviets an opening ‘which they [would] seize all too joyfully’ (Grimond 1963, 231). He argued there was ‘very little evidence that the Russians want to return of world tranquillity . . . [making] it all the more necessary for the West to improve its own international institutions’ (Grimond 1963, 231).

Liberalism and the Cold War A number of interesting questions are raised by an engagement with Grimond’s writings on the Cold War. As a self-declared liberal, it is interesting to ask which principles of liberal thought Grimond is invoking in his depiction of the international order. It is also instructive to ask how these principles relate to one another (and whether or not they do so seamlessly). Moreover, we might wish to ask how specifically liberal his arguments are compared with alternative (realist) perspectives on the Cold War, and – in line with widely used labels – how hawkish or dovish is his take on the West’s response to communism. Finally, it is worth asking what the relevance of Grimond’s arguments is today, and how particular his diagnosis of international politics was to the early Cold War era. This section engages with a number of these questions, discussing, in turn, the principles and tensions discernible in Grimond’s Cold War writings as well as the specificity, hawkishness and relevance of these arguments. Principles These five elements of Grimond’s thought do not capture the full complexity or depth of his theorising about the Cold War, for which a more comprehensive investigation would be required. But they do succeed in distilling some of his principal claims and in doing so highlighting linkages between the liberal principles outlined by Grimond and the imperatives for foreign policy which follow from these. A number of core liberal themes emerge in Grimond’s discussion. Grimond’s emphasis on the domestic make-up of the USSR as the source of its threatening

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behaviour follows a well-established line of liberal argumentation which has it that democratic states are more prone to behave pacifically than their autocratic and illiberal counterparts (Doyle 1986; Maoz and Russet 1993; Owen 1994). His preoccupation with the global duty to overturn communism and his repeated concern for individuals trapped under the communist yoke stems from a moral universalism that has long been associated with cosmopolitanism and with liberal human rights discourses (e.g. Archibugi and Held 1995; Erskine 2008). The duty to pursue peaceful relations between states as well as the more optimistic belief that this is indeed possible in an anarchic system resonates with liberal traditions of ‘pacific-ism’ – not to be conflated with pacifism (Ceadel 1987) – and with more optimistic liberal depictions of international order (Keohane 1988; Lake 1996). The focus on collective deterrence, moreover, is linked to liberal notions of collective security and, one might argue, to the broader tradition of viewing international politics as an exercise in rational calculation rather than tragic misperception (e.g. Jervis 1976; Mearsheimer 2001). Moreover, Grimond’s support for the institutionalisation of the (Western) world and the benefits of supranational authority fits neatly with pre-existing liberal justifications for the establishment of transnational authority (e.g. Haas 1956). Each of these principles is evident in Grimond’s writings and each is, moreover, regarded as a cornerstone of the liberal approach to international affairs according to those mapping the field of liberal international theory (e.g. Moravcsik 1997; Zacher and Matthew 1995). Tensions If the principles of liberal internationalism are often in tension with one another (Ikenberry 2009; Jahn 2013a), then it is no surprise that these tensions are also evident in Grimond’s writings on international affairs. Indeed, he himself prefaces his discussion with the warning that the principles he identifies with liberalism may conflict with one another from time to time. These tensions are evident in a number of aspects of his writings. To begin with, there is the tension Grimond himself identifies between the promotion of liberalism and the imperative of seeking peaceful relations with the Soviet Union. ‘[T]he preaching of liberalism’, he notes, ‘has its dangers. . . . It may conflict with another aim of a Liberal foreign policy, which Liberals share with Tories and Socialists, and that is peace’ (Grimond 1959, 152). In a sense, Grimond is cognizant of the trade-off theorists would later describe as ‘order versus justice’ (Bull 1971). Still another tension exists between support for peace and support for the principle of rational deterrence. Grimond’s enthusiasm for arms control and other peace initiatives was, for instance, tempered by his belief that such moves risked affording the Soviets the upper hand and imperilling Western security. To some extent, Grimond’s support for parallel negotiations and deterrence is an attempt to square this circle. Moreover, there is also an important tension between Grimond’s globalism and his more practical commitment to Western order. Whilst on a theoretical level Grimond’s liberalism calls for universal institutions as the only means of securing peace and prosperity, in practice it is clear he favoured Western institutions over

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global ones, not least because these particular forms had greater executive power than existing global institutions, and because he regards them as better functioning organisations than the UN. In this manner, the more general liberal principle on which Grimond’s argument originally appeared to rest is quickly tempered by a more practical, particular concern for institutions that both enshrine Western values and are also deemed more likely to succeed in the medium term (Ikenberry 2009). The prevalence of these broader liberal tensions attests to the breadth of liberal forms of thinking (Jahn 2013a) and cautions us that a number of diverse claims – normative, strategic, rationalist – are at play in any combination of these distinct liberal principles. Specificity Setting down Grimond’s view of the Cold War and examining the principles behind it suggests a number of areas of what we might term ‘liberal specificity’, that is, arguments that differ from well-known realist alternatives. For one thing, the emphasis on the inherently aggressive nature of the Soviet Union stemming from its illiberal nature diverges sharply with the realist emphasis on the systemic determinants of aggression and the need to abstract from domestic variables. The critique of communism as an illiberal system opposed to individual rights globally similarly diverges significantly in principle from the realist emphasis on the strategic threat and also expands the scope of moral concern further than the principles of political realism extend, although it must be noted those associated with realism were also wont to speak of the immorality of communism. The pursuit of negotiations with the Soviet Union is not inimical to realist pragmatism – consider, in this regard, the views of de Gaulle or Nixon – but it is notable that many self-identified Cold warriors at the time thought differently and opposed talks with the Soviet Union on the grounds of communist duplicity or the need to talk only from a position of strength. Collective deterrence is one principle that Grimond endorses that is perhaps already well associated with realism, although it is noteworthy that the supranational elements in Grimond’s formulation – and his opposition to the British deterrent – represent liberal caveats to an essentially realist argument. Finally, Grimond’s emphasis on the need to further institutionalise world politics also went further than realism, since this tradition has always been sceptical of both the legitimacy and efficacy of forms of supranational rule, and since the limitations on state sovereignty supported by Grimond went beyond what realists would generally tolerate (although in practice, of course, many realists actively supported the institutionalisation of Western order). Whilst suggesting, then, that there are important elements of specificity in liberal Cold War thinking, this brief analysis also reinforces Jahn’s (2013b) contention that important elements of Cold War thinking owed as much to liberalism as they did to realism. Interestingly, while many of the arguments Grimond gives us would differ from realism in principle, in many cases self-declared realists tended to follow the more liberal argument sketched by Grimond.

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Hawkishness The liberal view of the Cold War, as epitomised in Grimond’s writings, is in some ways more hawkish than the realist alternatives. Liberalism’s purported universalism, for instance, militates for a more robust response to Soviet actions that curtail the liberties of its own citizens, not for purely strategic reasons, or out of concern for precedent – as realists would have it – but rather out of concern for the inalienable rights of these individuals. Moreover, the emphasis liberalism places on democratic institutions and on the domestic sources of aggression – as visible in Grimond as it is in Kant – results in a theory of threat that is intimately tied to the nature of the Soviet system and is thus, in principle, not as malleable as alternatives theories which regard Soviet intentions as the product of, for instance, mutual antagonism and distrust, or the properties of the international system. It is also clear Grimond favoured containment over disarmament when push came to shove. His support for arms control was tempered by mistrust of the Soviet Union and a belief that reciprocity would not be forthcoming. His position, to be sure, was perhaps more subtle than that of more infamous Cold Warriors; he favoured a combination of negotiation and deterrence (when many wrote off the idea of negotiating at all) and viewed nuclear capabilities as a necessarily evil (rather than an expression of national prestige). But for all intents and purposes, Grimond’s liberal principles were severely constrained by his pessimism towards Soviet intentions. And yet there are also clear respects in which Grimond’s argument, and the liberal principles it invokes, are more dovish than the views we associate with Cold War realism. For instance, he favoured negotiations with the Soviets on a host of issues governments were not willing to consider, and his support for such initiatives increased over time. He was also adamant that further measures towards the regulation and institutionalisation of international order needed to be achieved. Moreover, he supported only a limited, collective deterrent and opposed even his own country possessing nuclear weapons, since these were unnecessary for the collective effort. In sum, while elements of the liberal Cold War worldview were more hawkish than the realist view (in principle, at least), this was tempered in a number of respects by elements of liberal pacificism and prudence. Contemporary relevance The themes and tensions in Grimond’s views of the Cold War, while certainly of their time, also retain much relevance for those analysing world politics today. This is partly because liberal internationalism is a broad and trans-historical approach that is used for analysing ‘perennial questions’ in international politics, and also partly because some of the conditions associated with the Cold War era are now thought to have returned (Lucas 2009). The link between autocracy, illiberalism and war remains a thriving area of research and an area of considerable engagement between scholars and politicians (Ish-Shalom 2006a), and the rise of China and resurgence of Russia both, in their own way, reopen the relevance

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of ‘democratic peace’ arguments (e.g. Müller 2015). Decades of Western intervention in the Middle East and Africa on humanitarian grounds – some more credible than others – reopened important questions regarding the legitimacy of interventions for ‘saving strangers’ (Wheeler 2000) and the trade-offs between sovereignty and individual rights, while the Western response to the Syrian civil war suggests the trade-off between moral imperatives and geopolitical prudence is now more salient than ever (Wagner and Anholt 2016). Today, of course, debate continues also on the politics of diplomacy and force, and the extent to which actors can be trusted to behave reciprocally and not to defect on agreements (e.g. Rathbun 2014). Debates from Grimond’s time over how much one could trust the Soviets and whether negotiation was best conducted at the barrel of a gun or through concessions and compromise are back in fashion. The debate over the durability of international order in an emerging multipolar world also heralds the return of questions surrounding the viability of a distinctly Western (and liberal) order and its ability to secure ‘buy-in’ from rising powers (Laïdi 2014), much like the Cold War choice between universal but weak institutions (e.g. the UN) and deep but geographically limited Western ones. That many of the questions – and contradictions – Grimond grappled with are still relevant suggests we should be cautious both in our assessments of the novelty of some of our present debates and wary of viewing liberal arguments involved in these discussions as a post–Cold War phenomenon.

Conclusion This chapter has examined in detail Jo Grimond’s writing on foreign affairs in order to offer an empirically grounded engagement with the liberal perspective on the Cold War. It began by discussing Grimond’s life and times, offering a number of reasons why an engagement with his writings would be helpful, not least the absence of sustained empirical discussion on the views of Cold War liberals. The chapter then examined the background of Grimond’s views on foreign affairs before setting out five key arguments which together best expressed his perspective on the Cold War, namely, his views on the sources of (Soviet) threat, global obligations, the pursuit of peace, collective deterrence, and (Western) institutionalisation. It then used these five arguments as a springboard from which to ask a number of important questions about Cold War liberalism, examining their relation to pre-existing liberal principles, their coherence vis-à-vis one another, their relation to realism, their relative hawkishness and dovishness and their relevance for politics today. This engagement with Grimond’s thought is instructive for a number of reasons. To begin with, it helps us to understand some of the complexities – and contradictions – of liberalism’s relationship with the Cold War. As Jahn and others have suggested, elements of liberalism did indeed resonate with much of Cold War thinking, such that self-identified liberals such as Grimond could count themselves supporters of deterrence, containment and a Western-centric view of the world. Indeed, this much is clear from Grimond’s writings on the subject,

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made all the more compelling by the fact that his starting off point was itself the application of liberal principles to the foreign affairs domain. And yet the liberal perspective on the Cold War, whilst superficially similar to the realist one, differed in a number of respects, not least its distinct account of the Soviet threat, its emphasis on the dual-track of deterrence and negotiations and the emphasis it placed on the duties held by Western governments to the citizens in the communist countries themselves. Some of these aspects of Cold War liberalism pushed adherents towards a more hawkish stance – especially those related to the inherent immorality of communism – while other aspects, including the perceived need for a more regulated, peaceful and institutionalised international order, pushed in a more dovish direction. Ultimately, the picture that emerges is not a neat one; liberal principles did not apply neatly to the Cold War and resulted in many tensions and contradictory positions, as Grimond himself acknowledged. Moreover, while elements of Grimond’s perspective veered close to realism at times, it was also the case that many realists endorsed positions similar to Grimond that were in essence liberal arguments. Grimond’s writings are also insightful in terms of what they tell us about the place, and status, of liberal theory in the discipline. Grimond discusses in much detail many of those fundamental claims that would later come to be associated with liberal IR theory in the 1990s, including the decline of the nation state, the pacific nature of liberal democracies and the duties on liberal countries to intervene abroad to uphold individual rights. This entails not only a blurring of the line between theory and ideology but also an inversion of the oft-assumed linear relationship between theorisation and policy-making where it is within the academy that these ideas are first developed (e.g. Ish-Shalom 2006a), since an engagement with Grimond’s work confirms Jahn’s (2013b) claim that the key concepts of liberal IR were in circulation in political circles long before they found their way into the discipline. There is also a sense, too, in which the overlap between Grimond’s arguments and subsequent – and better specified – analytical variants challenges the ostensible analytical neutrality which liberal IR theory, through its scientism, covets. For Grimond’s works are, in part, scholarly, but they are also works of political propaganda – efforts to promote the liberal view of politics and the Liberal party programme. They are not neutral texts, but they are also efforts in theorisation and systematisation. If the core categories and claims of liberal IR were involved in political discussion over the direction of Cold War security policy, then it stands to reason that they cannot provide a wholly neutral vantage point from which to explain international politics.

Note 1 I am grateful to Audrey Alejandro, Leonie Holthaus, Beate Jahn, Tom May, Tim Oliver, Sebastian Schindler, Jens Steffek and Philip Wallmeier for helpful comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank participants at the workshop on ‘Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018’ held at Northumbria University in November 2018, at which an earlier version of the chapter was presented.

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Ruane, Kevin (2002): Agonizing reappraisals: Anthony Eden, John Foster Dulles and the crisis of European defence: 1953–54, in: Diplomacy & Statecraft 13 (4), pp. 151–185. Ruggie, John (1982): International regions, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order, in: International Organization 36 (2), pp. 379–415. Schelling, Thomas (1958): The strategy of conflict: Prospectus for a reorientation of game theory, in: Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1), pp. 203–264. Schweller, Randall and Wohlforth, William (2000): Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war, in: Security Studies 9 (3), pp. 60–107. https://doi. org/10.1080/09636410008429406. Snidal, Duncan (1991): Relative gains and the pattern of international cooperation, in: International Organization 85 (3), pp. 701–726. Steffek, Jens and Holthaus, Leonie (2018): The social-democratic roots of global governance: Welfare internationalism from the 19th century to the United Nations, in: European Journal of International Relations 24 (1), p. 106. Vickers, Rhiannon (2011): The Labour Party and the world, Volume II: Labour’s foreign policy since 1951, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wagner, Wolfgang and Anholt, Rosanne (2016): Resilience as the EU global strategy’s new leitmotif: Pragmatic, problematic or promising?, in: Contemporary Security Policy 37 (3), pp. 414–430. Wheeler, Nicholas (2000): Saving strangers: Humanitarian intervention in international society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Peter (2003): The international theory of Leonard Woolf: A study in twentiethcentury idealism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zacher, Mark and Matthew, Richard (1995): Liberal international theory: Common threads, divergent strands, in: Kegley, Charles, Jr. (ed.), Controversies in International Relations theory: Realism and the Neoliberal challenge, New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 107–150.

Part III

Theorisation outside academia

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Ideologies of international organisation Exploring the trading zones between theory and practice Leonie Holthaus and Jens Steffek

Introduction1 Robert W. Cox was among those scholars of International Relations (IR) who show an extraordinary sensitivity not only for the potentially ideological character of academic theorising, but also for the practical power of ideology. Ideologies are sets of values and ideas that are interrelated in such a way that they can provide practical orientation in political matters. Many theories of IR, even if abstract, aspire to do this for the field of international politics. Cox has been characterised as a ‘fugitive from practice’ (Leysens 2008, 5) who gave up a long career in the International Labour Organization (ILO) to dedicate himself to critical reflection. As a practitioner-turned-scholar, Cox has been roaming what we call the ‘trading zones’ between the academic production of theories and the organisational environments where such theories become politically effective, even hegemonic. His take on the ideological character of international theory was certainly shaped by his personal experiences with the ILO bureaucracy and the rigidity of its doctrines. On the other hand, Cox also had an academic interest in understanding the evolution of ideas in their historical context and in the minds of the people who used them. This transpires from a series of relatively early articles on international organisations (IOs) and development issues that Cox wrote in the 1960s and 1970s (Cox 1968, 1971, 1979). His 1979 piece on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) is probably most instructive in this respect, showing in quite some detail how ‘theory and practice are fused in regard to the NIEO’ (Cox 1979, 266). Cox’s seminal work on IOs and their ideologies draws our attention to the inevitable situatedness of the international theorist and the potentially ‘ideological’ character of all international theory. ‘Ideological analysis is’, Cox said, ‘a critic’s weapon and one most effectively used against the prevailing orthodoxies which, when stripped of their putative universality, become seen as special pleading for historically transient but presently entrenched interests. Social science is never neutral’ (Cox 1979, 257). Theoretical statements about international relations are issued by people who have material interests, but also a worldview, political beliefs and often a personal agenda. Cox thus took the theorisers as seriously as the theories themselves.

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In more recent years, a bourgeoning literature informed by Bourdieu’s social theory has in some sense continued Cox’s critique of positivist social science and presentist historiography. Bourdieuian scholars ask us to pay attention to IR academics’ relations to the political centres of power, or their double function as practitioners and theorists (Hamati-Ataya 2012; Guilhot 2005). In a similar vein, critical historians of international theory observed that the double function of theorist and practitioner has often been the norm rather than the exception and asked for what, and for whom, international theory was actually written. Their often revisionist histories revealed, for instance, imperial and colonial legacies and connections with branches of social theory which are normally not considered pertinent, such as Darwinism or ‘scientific’ racism (Bell 2014; Owens 2015). This literature has given us valuable insights into the history of IR theory and the political projects of its theorists. It has not gone very far, however, in theorising the relationship between international theory and political practice. To remedy this, we suggest conceiving of the social spaces where academic theory and various kinds of practice meet as trading zones. In these spaces, abstract theorising turns into ideology, a doctrine that practitioners can use to explain and justify their work to others. We illustrate this theoretical point with the emergence of welfare internationalism in IR, understood as a programmatic doctrine concerning the scope and purposes of public international organisations (Steffek and Holthaus 2018). ‘Welfare internationalism’, IR-scholar Hidemi Suganami writes, ‘argues for strengthening those institutions which are designed to promote the welfare of individuals located in different states’ (Suganami 1989, 191). Historically, it has been a blueprint for functional IOs, agencies or advisory bodies in the business of promoting public health, socio-economic development or human rights. The rise of welfare internationalism in the twentieth century affected the nature of international theorising to the extent that the very purpose of international organisation was redefined: Catering to the needs of individuals rather than solving conflicts among states. The ideal was not a concert of powers, but a transnational bureaucratic institution, populated by experts and working for citizens. Welfare internationalism thus conceived was never just an academic statement but an ‘ideology’ of international organisation. It (re-)defined the very purposes of international organisation, what it was good for and who should profit from it. Promoters of welfare internationalism had a political mission more broadly conceived and were spreading their message in the world beyond academic books and articles. In this chapter, we substantiate this claim by looking in some depth at the activities of scholar-practitioners who spearheaded the campaign for international organisations that catered to the individual, and not chiefly to states. These scholar-practitioners navigated a trading zone between academic reflection and the practical world of politics. Our aim here is to show by way of example how, in the first half of the twentieth century, scholar-practitioners with broadly speaking ‘social-democratic’ political affiliations established welfare internationalism as a new perspective on international affairs, complementing (rather than reproducing) the domestic welfare state. In other words: This chapter is about the building of ideology and the persons who are working in ideology construction. It is

Ideologies of international organisation 189 organised as follows: In the next section, we define what we mean by ideologies and the trading zones between academic theory and political practices. The third section then introduces three individuals who actively pursued the construction of welfare internationalism: James T. Shotwell, David Mitrany and C. Wilfred Jenks. The fourth section briefly concludes.

Theory, ideology and trading zones This section will outline our theoretical assumptions and understanding of ‘ideology’ and ‘trading zone’. For this purpose, we will contextualise the term ‘ideology’ before we seize Jean-Philippe Thérien’s recognition of ideologies of international organisation. However, in distinction to Thérien, we will argue that ideologies of international organisations cannot be neatly separated from theories of international relations and that early IR scholar-practitioners developed and exchanged ideological, political and academic arguments in so-called trading zones. In historical perspective, ‘ideology’ accrued different meanings, and the conceptual relation between ideology and theory shifted over time. It is today largely forgotten that the term ‘ideology’ can be traced back to the time of the French Revolution. The so-called French ideologists introduced it to name a new rationalist philosophy. Napoleon Bonaparte found that the unworldly and overly theory-prone ideologists were of little political use (Dierse 2004). Philosophicalideological and strategic-political thinking were then opposites. However, thanks to Napoleon’s political interventions, the rise of journalism and the evolution of conflicting mass beliefs, the term ideology became less and less identified with philosophy. Instead, it became a widely used, politicised and contested term. This is most evident in Marxism, which conceived of (other) ideologies as a distorted form of political thought that justified economic class interests. According to Marxism, non-Marxists cannot acquire appreciable epistemic positions, so all non-Marxist theory is inherently ideological. Arguably, the term ‘ideology’ never got rid of this Marxist imprint – in everyday language it is still very common to call untenable ideas ‘ideological’. Liberal identifications of ideology with Nazism and totalitarianism furthered this trend. In what follows, we will not side with those who define ideology as a particular kind of distorted thinking but with those scholars (Michael Freeden and, in particular, Pierre Bourdieu) who put emphasis on the fact that only powerful elites can create and diffuse ideological views. We will introduce our understanding of the ideologies of international organisations in order to put emphasis on the trading zones between international thought and practices. Ideologies may be defined as competing political belief systems which contain patterned ideas and secular claims to truth (Steger 2012). They change over time and relate political ideas to one another under the conditions of specific historical and social circumstances. Consequently, the internal architecture of an ideology is in a state of flux (Freeden 1996). Social elites steadily shape ideologies, since the capacity for political and ideological meaning-making was and remains unevenly distributed in society (Bourdieu 1979). However, their political and semantic

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innovations need to be embraced by significant groups in society to become politically meaningful. Ideological thought is thus about the imposition of particular meanings on contested political concepts, such as freedom or equality (Freeden 2008). Only when otherwise indeterminate meanings of political concepts are limited can ideologies provide political orientation or perform a series of other functions, such as simplifying otherwise overly complex issues, enhancing social integration, justifying group claims or legitimating political institutions. Our approach hence acknowledges that ideological interventions contain purposive simplification, but rejects the Marxist view that ideologies are a distorted form of political thought. It rather suggests accounting for a continuum between scientific, political and ideological thought. Modern ideologies have philosophical or scientific elements, and the lucidity of these arguments is especially important to educated segments of society. However, the scientific ideal of epistemological openness conflicts with the political functions of an ideology (Bahrdt 2003). Politically, ideologies provide orientation, persuasion and mobilisation. Whether their political impact results in an expansion of consciousness or stultification of the people depends on the historical constellation and the position of the evaluator. Furthermore, our approach departs from the view that ideologies are necessarily mutually exclusive political belief systems. Innovating intellectuals often combine elements from several ideologies and, as a result, ideologies may overlap, as in the case of social liberalism. Political concepts have relational definitions which are determined by their relation to other terms within a broader ideological framework. However, and in spite of continuous ideological overlap, one can observe a trend towards thin ideologies that work only in combination with other ideologies and ideological eclecticism. To be recognisable as an ideology, the modern mass ideologies of the early twentieth century reconciled universalistic claims with the reality of national loyalties (Steger 2005; Sylvest 2009) and gave answers to a wide range of political questions. The thin ideology of nationalism was then an exception in comparison to Marxism or liberalism since it needed to combine its emphasis on ethnically defined political communities with other ideologies in order to decide modern political questions (Freeden 1998). Today, thin ideologies are no longer regarded as exceptions and many scholars diagnose an increasing degree of ideological eclecticism and overlap. The broad lines of nineteenthcentury ideologies and of the right-and-left distinction remain in use (Noël and Thérien 2008). But to make sense of the domestic effects of globalisation, ideological coalitions and ideological extensions (re-)emerge (Azmanova 2011). Some of the scholars who are interested in ideological change and overlap argue that international organisations create their own ideologies. According to Thérien (2015, 225), the core of ideological thinking – the imposition of meaning on political concepts in order to provide political orientation – is evident in public statements of international civil servants. Constructivists seem to subscribe to this view when they emphasise the distinctive epistemic and discursive power of IOs (Adler and Bernstein 2004; Barnett and Finnemore 2004). In this perspective, IOs are places for the development of knowledge, new ideas and distinctive

Ideologies of international organisation 191 ideological positions. Thérien (2015) identified a belief in the compatibility of peace, justice and international capitalism as a core principle of the UN ideology. Thérien is not the only prominent IR scholar to speak about the ideologies of international organisations. In the early years of the UN, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld recognised a ‘UN ideology’ based on the modern belief that man can form his own destiny and create peace (Hammarskjöld 1972). Next to Cox, Ernst Haas (1964) and Robert Keohane (1978) were also important IR scholars, who spoke habitually about ideologies of international organisation in the 1960s and 1970s. We build on Thérien’s definition of ideology but would like to suggest a number of qualifications. Although we would defend the view that there is something like discernible ideologies of IOs, we find it critical to stress that such ideologies differ from traditional, mass- and nation state–focussed ideologies. They may be seen as elite-centred and ‘thin’ ideologies because they contain only a restricted core of political ideas and their addressees usually include member state governments, their staffs and the wider public (Gronau and Schmidtke 2016). An organisation’s mandate usually serves as focal point for ideological redefinitions; distinct from political manifestos, such mandates restrict the organisation’s functional competencies. The reinterpretation of the mandate vis-à-vis powerful member-states legitimises an organisation’s acquisition of new competencies, and this can be seen as an ideological activity. The ésprit de corps of an international staff can also be defined by the active endorsement of the organisation’s (political) mission. Ideologies of international organisations never just provide political orientation but also express the self-interest in the financing or empowerment of the respective organisation. Most important for us, however, is that ideologies of international organisations cannot be separated neatly from international relations theory, since public and scholarly theories impact the portrayal of an international organisation in the so-called trading zones. We use the metaphor of a trading zone to argue that only elites who possess social capital can enter the social space where theoretical knowledge about international relations and practical experiences are matched (Ashworth 2012). Such a social space may be located in a think tank, an international organisation or a political party, but it need not have an institutional home of that kind. It may also reside in a loose network of persons who belong to different institutions but still build a bridge between academic theory and political practice. Two bodies of knowledge meet in such a trading zone. On the one hand, there are inherited or philosophical arguments about the regularities, causal pathways and mechanisms of international affairs. In the trading zone, they may be used to justify practical proposals or courses of action. On the other, there is practical knowledge about options, constraints or hindrances that condition the application of such theoretical knowledge. The economic metaphor of the trading zone illustrates that one needs to possess capital in the form of academic degrees or practical experience to be able to enter a trading zone and suggests the potential utility of the two bodies of knowledge that come together here. Theoretical arguments, for instance, may be an asset to the (self-)legitimation of an international institution.

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Since the early years of IR there have been trading zones constituted by exchanges between practitioners and theorists with particular ideological affiliations. For Lucian Ashworth (2012), the discipline as a whole originated as such a trading zone. Before academic paradigms such as liberalism or realism emerged, IR was more of a ‘public discipline’ than today (Lawson 2008; Wallace 1996). IR intellectuals differentiated between different branches of ideological thought; wrote as academics, activists and practitioners for different audiences; and closely cooperated with (other) practitioners, journalists and political commentators in the increasingly systematic study of international order (Zimmern 1922; Knutsen 1992). They wrote both as missionaries and ‘detached analysts’ (Oisander 2014) and, as Ashworth (2012, 39–41) has shown, developed a pidgin language out of their common interpretation of the political practices found in the League of Nations and IR intellectuals frequently developed elements of the vocabulary in the academic context later on. However, whereas Ashworth suggests that practitioner-theorist trading zones eventually gave way to exchanges between theorists of different schools, we contend that they have remained in place and will focus in this chapter on their continuing relevance. Practitioners of, or in, IOs have their own interests. As Cox described: Executive heads of international organizations are concerned with the institutional continuity of their organizations, often with expanding the tasks and strengthening the authority of these organizations and sometimes with playing a role toward international integration. Their choices of activities and programs tend to be made in relation to these primary political goals. (Cox 1968, 310) When entering the trading zone, these interests are likely to imbue theoretical statements. Many influential figures, from Eric Drummond (first Secretary-General of the League of Nations) and James Arthur Salter (Head of the League’s Financial and Economic Section) to John Ruggie (UN Under-Secretary General under Kofi Annan), rose to prominence as both practitioners and theorists (Holthaus and Steffek 2016). Critical observers described scholar-practitioners such as Salter and Drummond as ‘pillars of the political establishment’ who possessed social capital in different fields (Bordieu [2001, 19–20] speaks here of homologies) (Hobsbawm 1994, 128). In their organisational roles, as secretaries-general or senior international civil servants, they contributed to the creation of legitimation strategies which were then diffused by sympathetic academics and political activists. Officials such as Drummond were aware of the political dimension of their interpretations of often vague administrative rules and their communication with and mediation between governments and self-consciously pursued ‘international propaganda’, as it was still called unashamedly at the time, for the purposes of their organisation (Davies 2012). From their insider perspective, the creation and legitimation of the first modern international organisations (following peace treaties between states) required an adaptation of the political and semantic suggestions

Ideologies of international organisation 193 made by most powerful ideologies such as Marxism and liberalism, which still focussed on the nation state. IO officials also tried to control the academic knowledge production on their organisations. Civil servants became amateur historians and wrote volumes on the history of their IO (van Daele 2010, 17–19). Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer (1945), for one, provided an authoritative and widely acclaimed account of the functioning of the League Secretariat. Founding Director-General Albert Thomas edited most academic books on the ILO. As the historian Madeleine Herren put it, ‘[I]nternational organizations preferred to describe themselves’ (Herren 2009, 9). Those who were temporarily employed in academia hardly resisted. Relations between international officials and academics were usually good since both shared an ideological enemy – the nationalist staff of the foreign office opposing further international integration or, later on, classical realist scholars who made thinking in terms of unconstrained power politics academically acceptable (Woolf n.d.; Mitrany 1952). Trading zones relate persons and institutions and provide the background to the generation and structuration of acceptable ideas. We concede that innovative intellectuals can still transform ideas, for instance by elaborating and systematising ideas which had been originally generated in the field of political practice. They may combine elements from ideologies, current practice and theory to spread new worldviews (Freeden 1986; Skinner 2004, 148). However, the range of socially acceptable innovation is restricted, common practices such as peer review ahead of publication usually create dialogue about facts and the acceptability of the theoretical and political arguments. Hence, our understanding of the evolution of international relations theories in so-called trading zones is at odds with positivist assumptions about theory building and knowledge accumulation that deny the embeddedness of the researcher.

Welfarist scholar-practitioners in International Relations In the following, we will shed light on how IR intellectuals attempted to mobilise public opinion in support of international organisations, and how this attempt, in turn, affected their theorising. As indicated, our analysis of changing trading zones will draw mainly on Bourdieu’s sociology of knowledge. It starts from the premise that it is imperative to account for socio-economic and political power structures, available ideas and an intellectual’s unique position in a field and his or her relation to the centres of political power (Bordieu 2001, 17–19). We cannot provide a comprehensive picture but restrict ourselves to an analysis of interchanges between broadly conceived social-democratic theory and action – others have already analysed how IR theorists and centrist liberals such as Gilbert Murray were equally involved in the popular promotion of the League of Nations within the British context (McCarthy, 2012). For our analysis, we chose the cases of three individuals who represent different types of scholar-practitioners: First, we introduce historian James T. Shotwell, who combined his academic engagements

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with political advisory work in the United States. The trading zone in his case is situated between academia and government. Second, we turn to David Mitrany, who for many years moved back and forth between different roles as a scholar, journalist and practitioner, roaming a trading zone between academia and the media. Third, there is the example of C. Wilfred Jenks, an international lawyer who made his career as a civil servant in the ILO but regularly intervened into scholarly debates. We are thus able to cover three typical cases of trading zones between academic reflection and practice. Beforehand, however, it is critical to recognise historical precursors to the social-democratic trading zones that we will analyse. The most important political ideologies were international at the turn of the century, if only in the sense that they found support in more than one country, and prompted some transnational organisation. Socialists founded the First and Second Internationals (1848, 1876) in London and Paris, while reformist lawyers created the International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL) in 1900. Bourgeois intellectuals and Catholic reformers also gathered here and thought of international labour legislation as an urgent task and, in particular, France used the IALL to advertise itself as the democratic leader of international social policy against Bismarck’s Prussia (Herren 1993). Perhaps most important, the persons around the IALL sympathised with socialist ideas, but they still remained rather close to the political centre of power, and the network which they formed (re-)figured largely in the International Labour Organization (ILO; 1919) and the League of Nations (1919). Likewise, scholar-practitioners such as James T. Shotwell continued to understand social reform as a reformist and transnational project as opposed to Marxism. They also remained close to political power holders, social-democratic parties and trade unions, using diverse channels to spread their views. James T. Shotwell Shotwell’s biography is a formidable example of continuous exchanges between academia and politics. He long pursued a special interest in the history of international relations and originally looked forward to a classical academic career. The son of two Quaker parents, Shotwell studied history, received his doctorate (1900), and became full professor (1908) at Columbia University. However, during the First World War, he was recruited by US President Woodrow Wilson to sell the war to the American people and to justify America’s democratic war cause abroad (Josephson 1975, 56). Towards the end of the conflict, he became a member of the American research team that sought to prepare the post-war settlement and was assigned to issues such as ‘social justice’ and ‘international labour’. After the war and working for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Shotwell returned to academia in 1930 when he became Bryce Professor of the History of International Relations at Columbia University (Anderson 2005). During the Second World War, Shotwell was once again recruited by the government to prepare the American proposals for the UN Charter. Shotwell hence played an influential role in the processes establishing international organisations, in the promotion of these organisations and in the writing of histories about the historical origins of

Ideologies of international organisation 195 the organisations. It is intriguing how the different tasks merge in his publications which cannot be classified as strictly academic or political. Shotwell diffused the idea that the causes of war had changed since the Industrial Revolution and that international organisations were critical for both social and international peace. Wilson’s wartime rhetoric spoke of a ‘war to make the world safe for democracy’ and of a positive, democratic peace following the conflict. Secretly signed, bilateral peace treaties became manifestations of a ‘negative’ peace, whereas a transparent peace-making process ought to establish international organisation guaranteeing peace between states and the peoples (Josephson 1975, 66). Wilson formulated the democratic peace thesis after Lenin had contrasted democracy and imperialism, and, like the British government, he feared a spread of Lenin’s ‘revolutionary democracy’ and upheavals all over Europe. As Shotwell himself recalled, the Bolshevist revolution much disturbed the bourgeois and other European classes (Shotwell 1920, 43). To moderate the demands of organised labour, the Allied governments announced an organisation for labour standards, and Shotwell’s first project was the establishment and promotion of the International Labour Organization. He is sometimes remembered as an author of the ILO charter, but this is an exaggeration (Anderson 2005). Shotwell joined the technical committees preparing the ILO charter at a rather late point in time, and the charter emerged as a compromise between the British and French proposals (Josephson 1975, 85). He was more important in the public and scholarly promotion of the ILO. At first glance, Shotwell’s interventions accord well with the approach of the ILO’s founding director, Albert Thomas. Both often referred to the line of the ILO charter which stipulates that a universal and lasting peace had to rest on social justice. For Shotwell, the ILO represented not only labour but also all social interests and ought to be called an ‘organisation for social justice’ (Shotwell 1959). Shotwell and Thomas also acknowledged that the governments signing the ILO charter had not understood the full importance of their act and of social justice for world peace. Shotwell, though approving of capitalism, aimed at moderating its most inhuman excesses, such as child labour. He did conceive of labour legislation as ‘an international problem’ that required an international organisation with a clear mandate. Accordingly, the great peculiarity of the ILO was that it ‘deals with matters that have always been considered the proper sphere of home government – except by those whose creed is the “Internationale”’ (Shotwell 1920, 64). Even when many lost faith in the League and the ILO, Shotwell kept arguing that peace was a function of political, economic and social justice and that, in turn, justice was a criterion of international and domestic dealings (DeBenedetti 1974, 391). Shotwell’s distinct and difficult task was, however, selling ILO to a rather unfavorable American audience. At that time, American liberalism had lacked a strong welfarist branch, and even American labour organisations opposed the ILO. In many academic articles, Shotwell (1920, 1933) hence argued that the ILO was consistent with American interests. A particular concern had been ILO’s effects upon American federalism, which conceived of labour legislation not as a matter of the federal government but of the states. In response to American concerns, and

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thanks to Shotwell’s mediation, the ILO allowed that federal states might treat under special circumstances conventions as recommendations only. Shotwell hence had good reasons to stress that the ILO was compatible with American federalism. Furthermore, Shotwell (1933) rejected the US Congress’s denunciation of the ILO as a dangerous and revolutionary body. In doing so, he stressed what Thomas or European social-democrats had rather downplayed: The elites’ moderating intentions, or, as a title suggested The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution (Shotwell 1933). Similar to ILO officials, Shotwell tried to master the narrative of the ILO’s historical origins and edited the volume The Origins of the International Labor Organization (1934), which historians still appreciate as an important source (Herren 1993). According to Shotwell’s narrative, the ILO was designed to combat the new causes of war, but it was not yet clear whether the organisation was powerful enough to overcome these. As an academic historian, he had already argued that the industrial revolution marked a new historical era, giving rise to new causes of war (Zaidi 2011, 33). As the editor of the Carnegie’s massive history of the First World War and international lecturer, Shotwell continued this line. He argued that his debates with statesmen about the causes of the war confirmed that only the financial and economic structures of modern society could explain the outbreak of the war and its transformation into a world war (Shotwell 1929). For Shotwell, the modern era was characterised by international interdependence and rapid technological advances and demanded new conceptions of how states resolved their differences and international organisations addressing modern problems (Anderson 2005). ‘Machtpolitik is no longer Realpolitik’ (Shotwell, cited in DeBenedetti 1974, 384). After the expansion of warfare and the arrival of national economic planning, planning for peace became a rational necessity. Shotwell’s narrative at first allowed diversity in interpretation even if its gradualist and positivist assumption identified international experts as agents who ought to rationalise world order (DeBenedetti 1974, 382). Progressive scholars and officials could use it to deny differences between social and economic problems and to demand further welfarist legislation responding to the needs of individuals. The ILO was then, as for Shotwell, the prototype of a rational organisation bringing together experts devoted to the mediation of class and international conflicts (DeBenedetti 1974, 385). On the other hand, Shotwell’s belief in the new role of experts was also lined up in a more technical ‘problem-solving’ discourse by officials of the more conservative Economic and Financial Section of the League’s secretariat (Clavin 2013, 233). In this perspective, modern complexity overexerted the foreign offices and reasoned a need for task-specific functional organisations to avoid the politicisation of unpolitical, socio-economic matters (Bailey 1930; Zaidi 2011). Put simply, in Shotwell’s words, the complexity of the modern world demanded the application of ‘the method of Geneva’ (Shotwell, cited in DeBenedetti 1974, 386). Differences between progressive and more conservative practitioners and scholars linked to the League receded around 1930. Although the ILO and the League’s Economic and Financial Section at first relied on different economic

Ideologies of international organisation 197 doctrines, the latter gradually absorbed a welfarist perspective in view of the Great Depression (1929) and the turn to national planning (Clavin 2013, 243). The EFO established a commission that was to study how a proper ‘living standard’ might be defined and how inequality between and within states might be reduced. The central technocratic and welfarist argument that national attempts at planning had little chances of success in an era of international interdependence pervaded scholarly thinking and domestic debates. Even Gilbert Murray, who was the chief architect of the centrist popularisation of the League in Great Britain, was now willing to conceive of social security as an international issue (McCarthy 2012, 19). The most important case in point for the diffusion of welfarism is probably Alfred Zimmern’s invention of the phrase ‘welfare state’. Zimmern, the first professor of International Relations in 1919, Deputy Director of the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation (Paris) in the mid-1920s and candidate for the post of the first secretary-general of UNESCO, is usually conceived of as a liberal. From a liberal perspective, he appreciated awareness of distinct nationalities but opposed vulgar nationalism. Furthermore, and despite his membership in the British Labour party, he exhibited few radical tendencies (Morefield 2005). However, Zimmern began accentuating the mismatch between international economic problems and the scale of national democracy from the late 1920s onward (Zimmern 1928). Accordingly, the future of democracy depended on the British and other governments’ willingness to further the League’s welfarist projects. Later, in view of the rise of German fascism, Zimmern retold the story (Zimmern 1934). Even though the remaining democracies had just failed to agree on a concerted programme at the World Economic Conference in London (1933), Zimmern described democracies as ‘welfare states’. These states knew that the problems of international security and social security were interwoven so that ‘the welfare state is cooperative by its nature’ (Zimmern 1934, 33). Zimmern created the term to contrast warfare and welfare as different purposes of the state and to delegitimise the power state of the dictators (Woodroofe 1968, 303). However, while his perspective recognised democratic welfare states as the pillars of international society, the concrete tasks of welfare organisation still appeared to be a matter for international organisations (Schouenborg 2015). The consideration of Zimmern’s move partly explains one particularity of Shotwell’s ‘trading zone’. By travelling, editing and holding diverse posts, Shotwell build up a vast network of liberal and left-liberal scholars and entertained close contacts with, for instance, Jean Monnet, John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge (DeBenedetti 1974). The latter is well-known as the architect of the British welfare state. But Beveridge also adopted Shotwell’s vision that an ‘impartial study of international problems’ was imperative and ought to be implemented through experts working for the League (Sims 2017). Hence, having organised an evolving discipline around welfarist ideas, and having eased original American opposition to them, is an important part of Shotwell’s legacy (Fox 1968, 5; Anderson 2005). At this point, welfarist scholars and practitioners did not conceive of a division of labour between international organisations and ‘welfare states’ or the possibility of

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competing competencies. International welfarist organisations were instead conceived as critical preconditions to the survival of democracy, or as manifestations of social-democratic progress. Eventually Shotwell’s last great project was drafting the economic and social provisions of the UN Charter. Shotwell’s political impact cannot be underestimated, but his academic works tend to reflect changing historical circumstances and the language used by League officials and exhibit little theoretical abstraction. However, even if Shotwell himself was not much engaged in theory building, his historical and public interventions promoted the functionalist approach from the 1930s on (DeBenedetti 1974, 392). This approach, often associated with David Mitrany, will be in the focus of the next section. David Mitrany The career of the chief academic functionalist, David Mitrany, would perhaps not have been possible without Shotwell’s support. Mitrany (1888–1975) was an expatriate Romanian with left-wing interests who lacked social and material capital when he arrived in Britain in 1912. He studied under L.T. Hobhouse, one of the most important British left-liberal scholars, and under Graham Wallas at the London School of Economics (Anderson 1998). Thanks to Hobhouse’s support, Mitrany gained a post at the Manchester Guardian and access to British intellectual elite circles, becoming a respected member. In 1922, however, Mitrany contributed to Shotwell’s series on the history of the war for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and it was Shotwell who introduced Mitrany to American practitioners and theorists (Anderson 1998, 578). Mitrany’s most influential publication became the pamphlet A Working Peace System (1943). Even though the piece began as a commissioned work written for Chatham House’s Foreign Press and Research Section, which was then part of the British Foreign Office’s war effort, it later became a ‘classic’ of IR theory (Ashworth 2012). A particularity of the Working Peace System (WPS) and of Mitrany’s functionalism as a whole is the conflation of the language used by welfarist international civil servants and British left-liberalism. International civil servants could continue to identify with functionalism, but since Mitrany performed the role of a more radical auto-critic, international civil servants who were favourably inclined to transgovernmentalism did not accept all of the proposed changes. Mitrany simultaneously made functionalist ideas academically acceptable and also developed them in a demanding manner. This becomes evident if we look at his first and unduly neglected contribution to functionalism, the Progress of International Government (Mitrany 1933). Here Mitrany draws on the established argument that international economic interdependence and modern complexity make functional devolution and thus the empowerment of the League’s functional branches imperative (Steffek 2015). Broadening the ILO’s focus on labour standards, Mitrany introduced ‘need-satisfaction’ as the defining purposes of functional organisations. Labour and social-democratic parties had furthered the recognition of a socio-economic right to a minimum of need-satisfaction allowing a life in dignity and democratic activism in their domestic contexts, and Mitrany

Ideologies of international organisation 199 suggested that international thought and practices had to catch up with this development. Western states – and their continuations in particular in the form of the British and American governments – had a duty to further welfare-directed cooperation addressing the needs of individuals: [T]he moment we speak of the satisfaction of actual needs it becomes clear that the people themselves, and not the formal States, are the rightful claimants and beneficiaries. And if their claims may go beyond the ordinary functions of the national State, then clearly the method of satisfying those claims may pass, if need be, above the authority of that State. (Mitrany 1933, 79) In view of the institutionalisation of national economic planning and Keynes’ temporal advocacy of protectionism, Mitrany began stressing that democracies, too, start distinct planning policies. Functional agencies with supranational authority were hence necessary to harmonise otherwise inevitably conflicting planning strategies. Although the approaching Second World War undermined common welfarist progress, welfarist ideas gained credibility during the war and especially among formerly hesitant American scholars and practitioners. American planning for the post-war order began even before American entry into the war and was based on the assumption that the mistakes of 1918, namely, the establishment of formal democracies plagued by wartime destruction, underdevelopment, poverty and social inequality, had to be avoided by all means (Clavin 2001, 200). US President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Address (1941) indicated that the US government was committed to the international furtherance of socio-economic rights or ‘the freedom from want’. The Atlantic Charter (1941) signed by the American and British government equally envisioned far-reaching changes in world trade and equal access to raw materials. American New Deal officials projected their welfarist ideas to the global stage when thinking about European reconstruction and the post-war order (Barnett 2011, 100). The WPS needs to be read against the background of these developments. The suggestion of functional agencies with supranational authority was a manual describing how the envisioned welfarist world order might work in practice. Functional agencies would be entrusted with all matters relevant to international redistribution and need-satisfaction: ‘[I]n that way the less powerful and less wealthy peoples would at least get some of the reality of equality’ (Mitrany [1943] 1966, 79). However, Mitrany radicalised the welfarist zeitgeist when he suggested the permanent use of Western wealth for the purpose of international need-satisfaction beyond European reconstruction and stabilisation. This, and his insistence on functional devolution and scepticism towards multifunctional political authorities, made the WPS unacceptable to many former and still-serving international civil servants, including Eric Drummond (Drummond et al. 1944). After Mitrany’s identification of functionalism with a demanding welfarist perspective, functionalism was seized by different circles and developed in different

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directions. On the one hand, international officials (namely, of the ILO, FAO and occasionally UNESCO) began to conceive of functionalism as their organisational ideology (Piquet 1945; Imber 1989). On the other, functionalism became the most popular ‘academic’ approach to international organisation. In this course, it was reduced at times to the formula that ideologically different states could still cooperate in areas relevant to the welfare of their populations. All IR academics – selfdeclared liberals as well as many classical realists – could agree on this in view of the rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union (Scheuerman 2010, 252). Mitrany not only merged different languages and theories but also formed a bridge between radical and more conservative thinkers and between British and American internationalism. He was a member of the influential Labour Party Advisory Committee on International Questions (1918–1931) and frequently joined meetings of the Fabian Society, though he never became a member of the Labour Party, or any other. But Mitrany equally worked at the more conservative Chatham House, though he disliked it (Mitrany 1975, 39–41). In the United States, Mitrany socialised with New Dealers such as the judge Felix Frankfurter as well as with classical realists such as Arnold Wolfers (Mitrany 1947). Mitrany, similar to Shotwell, disapproved of realism as the academic legitimation of power politics and thus used all available means to persuade academics and politicians that the ‘UN Economic and Social Council needed to become more important than the Security Council’ (Mitrany 1947). C. Wilfred Jenks Clarence Wilfred Jenks (1909–1973), commonly known as Wilfred Jenks, was a British lawyer who worked for the ILO from 1931 until his death in service as its Director-General in 1973 (Eisenberg 2016). Jenks was an extremely dedicated civil servant and gifted strategist and a close collaborator to Directors-General John Winant, Edward Phelan and David A. Morse, the latter of whom presided over the organisation for more than 20 years. During the Second World War, Jenks was among the moving spirits of an initiative to make the ILO the centre of all socio-economic activities in the post-war global order. Together with Phelan, Jenks drafted the Declaration of Philadelphia (1944), which reasserted and expanded the ILO’s mandate. The declaration contained two major innovations: First, it couched the ILO’s reform agenda in the language of human rights, stipulating that all human beings ‘have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity’ (International Labour Organization 1944, art. II a). Second, the Declaration also stipulated a responsibility of the ILO ‘to examine all international economic and financial policies’, thus enlarging its agenda significantly (International Labour Organization 1944, art. II d). Jenks’s ambition was frustrated when the ILO never became the ‘master agency’ among the functional organisations of the United Nations that he had envisaged (Haas 1964, 155). Nevertheless, he remained faithful to the organisation and was elected Director-General in 1970.

Ideologies of international organisation 201 C. Wilfred Jenks was not only a civil servant and strategist but also a strenuous producer of academic essays. These writings, which tackled many subjects beyond his special expertise in labour law, gained him an international reputation as a visionary and progressive scholar. In 1954, he was informally asked to replace Hersch Lauterpacht as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge – one of the most prestigious chairs in the country – but he declined, as he could not find the resolve to leave the ILO (Eisenberg 2016, 3). Incidentally, it was a conflict with Jenks that prompted Robert Cox to resign in 1972 (Cox 2013, 223–224). Jenks thus did not cross the trading zone to academia but continued his scholarly writing nonetheless. In 1958, he presented what was to become his most influential book, The Common Law of Mankind. In this monograph, Jenks sketched the contours of a new kind of international law for a welfare world, in which IOs would take care not only of peace but also of individual well-being. As he wrote: This development of international organisation, supplemented by regional arrangements, has been based on two fundamental principles; the acceptance of a common responsibility for the common peace and the acceptance of a common responsibility for the common welfare. The extent of such common responsibility remains a matter of acute controversy among and within nations; most of us are still attracted from time to time by the idea of having only a limited liability for the misfortunes of others, even though they may be our neighbours; but it is now increasingly recognised that the growth of strategic and economic interdependence has made the extent of such common responsibility so wide that the interdependence, rather than the independence, of nations has become the foundation of contemporary international relations and contemporary international law. (Jenks 1958, 140) Thus, on the one hand, it was manifest global interdependence that suggested the need to search for joint and mutually profitable solutions, a line of argument in use for a long time by the 1950s (de Wilde 1991). On the other, Jenks argued that global social policy was also a moral necessity. In his view, there were two distinct but interrelated facets of socio-economic injustice to combat: There were inequalities within countries that caused instability and unrest, but these were superseded by injustices across countries (Jenks 1972, 316–317). It was among the tasks of a global welfare law to tackle such injustices, mainly by contributing to the process of socio-economic development. Jenks thus had ‘a characteristically “social” view of law, deeply influenced by the sociological jurisprudence of the interwar years, as organic, vital and responsive to the progressive needs of society’ (Sinclair 2016, 12). The doctrinal innovation of The Common Law of Mankind is twofold: First, it seeks to extend international legal rules, in the best tradition of the ILO, to ever more social matters and the material needs of citizens. Such an orientation of international law towards the individual had not been generally accepted at the

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time, as many international lawyers still stuck to a conception of international law made by states and addressing states only. Some of Jenks’s contemporaries were suggesting similar innovations to account for a post-sovereign phase of international law that edged away from the traditional dominance of states and state interests. Wolfgang Friedmann advocated an ‘international law of cooperation’ to complement the conventional ‘international law of coexistence’ (Friedmann 1964). Philip Jessup coined the term ‘transnational law’, a new conceptual roof under which public and private international law could have come together, thus giving far more weight to non-state actors as subjects of law (Jessup 1956). The second innovation of Jenks’s The Common Law of Mankind was an attempt to overcome the Eurocentrism of international law. Jenks belonged to a generation of international lawyers who had witnessed the crumbling of Europe’s empires and the rapid spread of decolonisation movements around the globe. With the ILO eager to play a key role in relations with the Global South, Jenks tried to formulate a new conceptual apparatus for international law to accommodate nonWestern points of view. In The Common Law of Mankind, Jenks develops the argument that international law needs to be emancipated from its European roots and become truly universal, and thereby responsive to traditions such as Islamic, Chinese and Japanese law. Moreover, Jenks’s universal international law would have placed a premium on socio-economic progress and development, which had not been a typical concern of traditional international law. The new welfare orientation, however, went down well with the newly independent countries. Incidentally, it would have enabled the ILO, due to its historical origins focussed on mediating between labour and capital in the industrialised world, to also venture into the new field centred on developing the Global South. From this brief sketch of his programmatic thought, it should become clear that Jenks, the law scholar, was inspired by the practices of the ILO that were at the forefront of the changes in international law. Not only did the tripartite structure of the organisation include employers and trade unions into its decision-making, but ILO conventions were also far more intrusive than traditional international law because they required states to adjust their social security systems and labour regulation. These were developments that Jenks would have liked to push further through his doctrinal work and that would have been, of course, also in the organisational interest of the ILO itself. Jenks’s doctrinal innovations justified the transfer of new tasks, funds and formal competences to global organisations with a welfarist orientation, of which the ILO by the 1950s was the oldest and most firmly established. Jenks’s ideal was ‘a public service of mankind with an unequivocal loyalty to the world community as a whole and no special deference to any part of it’ (Jenks 1972, 320). Thus, Jenks’s progressive and universalising international law was not just a scholarly statement but also a conscious attempt at strengthening the organisation that he served for four decades.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have critically examined the role of scholar-practitioners and the way they have shaped ideologies of international organisation and IR theory.

Ideologies of international organisation 203 We selected three authors who represent different types of scholar-practitioners. C. Wilfred Jenks was predominantly a civil servant but engaged in academic debates. James T. Shotwell was first and foremost an academic but assumed practical or advisory tasks in politics or IOs for certain periods. David Mitrany navigated between theory and practice through many different functions (in his case, as a journalist, scholar and political advisor) and is probably best described as a public intellectual. Most important, all three important figures (or, ideology-makers) were in the business of advancing the welfare agenda of international governance in the twentieth century. James T. Shotwell helped sell the ILO and its global welfarism to a sceptical American audience, emphasising a connection between international and social peace. With his ‘Working Peace System’, David Mitrany supplied policy-makers during the Second World War with an influential blueprint for welfare-oriented functional organisations. When an increasing number of independent developing countries entered international organisations in the 1950s, C. Wilfred Jenks undertook doctrinal work to universalise international law and accentuate its welfare orientation. The three cases show how scholar-practitioners roamed, in their different ways, the trading zones between international theory and practice, and how they advertised their preferred way of organising international relations to a transnational public elite. We interpret their ‘welfare internationalism’ as a social-democratic strategy of accommodating the concerns of poor and disempowered people in the design of global governance institutions. The ILO, which Albert Thomas (1948, 20) once characterised as the ‘bastard child’ of a liaison between the League of Nations and the proletariat, was certainly an intellectual powerhouse in shaping the social-democratic welfare vision of international organisation and the practical rise of something one could call global social policy. After the Second World War, and with the rise of developmentalism, the focus then shifted more towards the United Nations and its specialised agencies. Hence, through our analysis and conceptual work, we proposed one way of studying theory as ideology and to trace the ideological elements within IR theory. On the basis of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of knowledge, we emphasised that only scholar-practitioners who possess different sorts of capital can enter the trading zones where ideological and theoretical claims gain shape. We thus used the trading zone concept to describe the realm between international theory and practice where theoretical ideas are operationalised as legitimating devices for IOs. In our view, these legitimating devices can be regarded as thin ideologies since they help IOs and their staff to justify and defend their activities, to attract attention (and, not least, funding) to their programs and to call for new competences for these organisations. On the other hand, as we have shown, the vocabulary of practitioners and ideas that evolved in IOs are moulded in international theories such as functionalism. Although functionalism includes many arguments for expert governance, it cannot be distinguished from the political project of welfare internationalism. In Britain, border crossings from theory to practice and back again are today less common than they were in the first half of the twentieth century. The

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American system still allows individuals to straddle the line between scholarly and practical work. Michael Barnett, Michael Doyle, Joseph Nye, Condoleezza Rice, John Ruggie and Anne-Marie Slaughter are powerful scholar-practitioners in contemporary IR. It is undeniable that their navigation between theory and practice and today’s ideology-producing trading zones have changed. The latter are to be found in countless policy think tanks and advisory groups that lie at the interface between politics and academia today. Still, recognition of interrelations between theory and practice remains a means to trace the political and ideological functions of theories that present themselves as disinterested arguments.

Note 1 Research for this contribution was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through its Cluster of Excellence ‘Formation of Normative Orders’ (EXC 243).

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10 From allegations of ideology to conflicts over forms of life Or, why political scientists don’t talk about Ecovillages Philip Wallmeier Introduction Intentional Communities are a ubiquitous political and social phenomenon. In all regions of the world and at least for the last 2,500 years were there groups of mostly unrelated adults (and their children) who decided to live together in some separation from the wider society in order to live and create some shared value(s) (Metcalf 1996, ch. 1). Despite this ubiquity, Intentional Communities never appear in the discipline of International Relations (IR) – or, more generally, in political science. This absence is surprising given the impact of Intentional Communities on global politics. Early Christian communities, the predecessors to the today’s monasteries, emerged around the year 350 in Egypt and Palestine and contributed to eroding the power of the Western Roman Empire. Today, Christianity is a world religion, shaping beliefs and values and thus politics all over the globe. Apart from being centres for the diffusion of religious beliefs and values, Intentional Communities also had a direct impact on international politics. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a wave of mostly atheist Jews from Europe, Russia and the United States founded small Intentional Communities on a territory populated mostly by Palestinians. Degania and the other Kibbutzim were the seeds out of which the modern state of Israel grew (Shavit 2015, ch. 2). Since the conflict between Israel and Palestine is one of the major dividing lines in modern world politics, it would be difficult to deny the influence of the Kibbutzim on today’s global order. The absence of Intentional Communities from IR as a discipline is further surprising given the self-understanding of the involved actors. Most inhabitants of Intentional Communities today (whom I also call ‘communards’ as a short-hand) believe that they matter to world politics. This is especially the case for the group of ecologically oriented Intentional Communities, which this chapter focuses on, ‘Ecovillages’. To put it succinctly: Most Ecovillagers live the way they live because they believe that only in this way can they play an important and desirable role in global politics. By sharing resources, by experimenting with new technologies and ways of living that are less destructive for others and for the environment, Ecovillagers want to contribute to a solution for the current global environmental crisis.

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Why do these actors, who consider themselves important actors in global politics, never appear in the stories of political scientists? Condensed into one word the answer is ‘ideology’. IR scholars – if asked, why they do not talk about Intentional Communities – often argue that communards may believe themselves to be important actors in global politics but are misled about their own actions and mistaken about the way international politics works.1 Many communards know about this perception in academia. However, from their point of view, the cold, detached and hence problematic academic gaze on international politics is the reason why scientists cannot understand the importance of Intentional Communities. As the following cartoon – which I have taken from a magazine (Communities) that has been produced and distributed by communards since the early 1970s2 – shows, they sometimes even ridicule this academic gaze on their way of life (Roth 1994, 31). As the cartoon shows, from the point of view of the communards, it is often the researchers who come and ask them questions only to confirm their own beliefs about the irrationality of the communards’ undertaking. This – the cartoon suggests – may be due to prejudices about Intentional Communities and due to pressures inherent in academia – for example, to publish ‘juicy’ stories and to impress certain authorities (‘Professor Harding’). As the cartoon points out, from the point of view of the communards, it is the researchers who are ideologically misled – who cannot see what is really going on. To sum up: Many communards believe they are important actors in global politics. Political scientists, however, usually ignore them and – if asked – deny their importance by pointing to ideology as an explanation for the communards’ ‘confusion’. The communards, on the other hand, also point to ideology as an explanation for the scientists’ misrepresentation and ignorance of their actions. This essay is an attempt to come to grips with these reciprocal allegations of ideology. My main argument is that what at first sight looks like a disagreement about theories of the world is actually the expression of a crisis of Western modernity, which materialises in a conflict over forms of life. By introducing the concept of ‘form of life’, this chapter contributes to the overall book project by showing that theories may exhibit an ideological character when they grow out of social conditions under heavy stress. I make this argument in four steps: First, I sketch out three possibilities of dealing with reciprocal allegations of ideology: One can take sides, treat both sides symmetrically or take the route of Critical Theory and make sense of the seemingly independent allegations as one conflict. To pursue this last option, in a second step, I lay out the worldview of a group of contemporary ecologically oriented communards, who call themselves ‘Ecovillagers’ and reconstruct why they believe political science is ideological. In a third step, I explain why Ecovillagers remain invisible for IR scholars and reconstruct, why – from the point of view of political scientists – Ecovillagers are hence ideologically misled. In a fourth step, I make sense of these two contradicting views by describing these reciprocal allegations of ideology as a conflict that points to contradictions in our modern Western form of life.

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Figure 10.1 Living in sin-cerity Source: Reprinted with permission from Communities, 85 (Winter), p. 31. © Jonathan Roth 1994.

Getting caught up in reciprocal allegations of ideology As Terry Eagleton (2014, ch. 1) puts it, ideology is like bad breath: It is always the ‘other’ who has it. It should hence not come as a surprise that political and social conflicts often go hand in hand with reciprocal allegations of ideology. Both sides are convinced that the others ‘just don’t get it’. Still, these allegations turn into a problem when social scientists want to understand the world through the perspective of the involved actors without taking sides: If there is disagreement about the state of the world, whose description of reality should be considered ‘true’ and whose description ‘ideological’ and on what grounds? This task becomes even more difficult when researchers are dragged into the conflict. How are we, as scientists, to judge reciprocal allegations of ideology between scientists on the one side and laypeople on the other – as is the case here. In the terminology of this edited volume, we might ask, how are we to differentiate between ‘theory’ on the one hand and ‘ideology’ on the other.

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Robin Celikates (2006) points out three traditions of dealing with reciprocal allegations of ideology as a social scientist: First, he argues, often such disputes over the state of the world are ‘resolved’ by scientists pointing to the superiority of the scientists’ perspective in contrast to the layperson. In this tradition, ideology is understood in what Raymond Geuss (1981, 12) calls the ‘pejorative sense’ and the research programme aims at establishing ‘that agents are deluded about their position, their society, or their interests’. It is assumed that the scientist has some sort of access to the truth that laypeople do not have. Such an approach stands in the Durkheimian and Bourdieusian tradition. For Durkheim, insights are won against what he calls ‘prejudices of the common man’ (1964, xxxii). Understanding society hence means to go beyond what actors believe they are doing. In a similar way, Bourdieu et al. (1991, 13) argue that ‘the social fact is won against the illusion of immediate knowledge’. Indeed, the critical sting of Bourdieu’s social theory depends on the researchers’ ability to understand the hidden laws of the social reproduction of inequality, which the actors are not aware of while acting. The problem with pointing to the superiority of the scientists’ knowledge, however, is twofold: First, while claiming to be objective, the scientist becomes a subject in her research area by simply taking sides. This ignores the possible impact of ‘theory’ on ‘practice’. Second, it remains to be explicated how the scientist knows the truth better than laypeople do. As Eve Chiapello (2003, 157) puts it: ‘[A]ll humans must be granted the same elementary capacities as social scientists when it comes to questioning ideologies and social representations. It must be acknowledged that what the social sciences produce is already included in society’s hermeneutic circle’. In contrast to this one-sided way of resolving reciprocal allegations of ideology, a second option consists in treating scientists and laypeople symmetrically. In this tradition, ideology is understood in what Raymond Geuss (1981, 4) calls the ‘descriptive sense’ and the research programme aims at describing ‘the salient features of a socio-cultural system and its change over time’. The intuition behind such an approach is similar to what Clifford Geertz (2000) has called the ‘Mannheim Paradox’: How do we know that the scientists’ exposal of ideology is not itself ideological? Thus, ‘driven by the logic of his initial assumptions’, Geertz explains, Mannheim needed ‘to submit even his own point of view to sociological analysis’. From this point of view, the values and beliefs of communards and of the political science scholars could be described separately as equally valid worldviews. Again, however, there are three major problems with this approach: First, the researcher pretends to occupy an external and neutral position in a conflict between two sides, which she, however, does not grant to the involved parties. Second, the researcher does not take the allegations of the actors seriously. Since everybody is ideological, no one is ideological – the conflictive moment disappears. Third, such an attempt at objectivity through symmetry can have the effect that highly problematic worldviews appear as dehistoricised facts of social life which, fed back into society from academia, may seem legitimate.

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 213 A last option is to reconstruct the reciprocal allegations of ideology as part of a conflict, a crack, a fissure in the political order which can be analysed from the perspective of Critical Theory. In this tradition, ideology is understood as part and parcel of society and should be approached via what Raymond Geuss (1981, 4) calls Ideologiekritik, which involves a critique of society and the ideology it produces while enabling the researcher to gain a new and different view on what is going on. Pointing to Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) Sociology of Critique, Celikates argues that we should study the practices of critique and of justification of the two parties involved in these reciprocal allegations of ideology, that is, in this social conflict. A critical position, Celikates (2006, 35) argues, would then consist in pointing to ‘closed social conditions and symbolic representations that hinder the use of critical and judgmental capacities in social practices’. In the remainder of this chapter, I follow Celikates’s proposal to reconstruct reciprocal allegations of ideology as a social conflict while also pointing to some problems this approach runs into. In order to flesh out what this third option may consist in, let me first describe the reciprocal allegations between Ecovillagers and political scientists in more detail.

‘Our mechanistic worldview leads to disaster’ – the Ecovillage challenge The businessperson Ross Jackson made a fortune by developing a computerised tool for investment banking in the early 1980s when personal computers were being newly developed. When he sold his company at the end of the decade for several million dollars, he and his wife – a Danish feminist and environmental activist – decided to establish a foundation called ‘GAIA Trust’ that would connect, support and publicise examples of a better, more just and sustainable future for (human) life on the planet. They asked the British scientist-couple Robert and Diane Gilman – who had been publishing a journal about alternative lifestyles called ‘incontext’ – to write a report about such examples. Together with the Gilmans and other activists, the Jacksons coined and publicised the term ‘Ecovillage’ to refer to these examples. Thus, from the early 1990s onward, a number co-housing groups, back-to-the-landers, countercultural communes, living cooperatives and New Age Intentional Communities, ‘tribes’ and ‘families’, started developing a common programme and calling themselves ‘Ecovillages’ (for this story, see Jackson 2000). It is difficult to say how many Ecovillages there are today; a rough estimation, however, suggests that there may be some several hundred in Western countries.3 This brief description of the history of ‘Ecovillages’ or the ‘Ecovillage Movement’ – as the activists often call themselves – suggests why it is a difficult endeavour to reconstruct the belief system of ‘Ecovillagers’: The communities have very different histories and furthermore differ in terms of size and aims and are located in different countries of the Western hemisphere. In the following, I will nonetheless aim to explicate some broad common lines of belief. The following reconstruction of the Ecovillage worldview is based on a book series of four volumes called The Four Keys to Sustainable Communities, which is published

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by ‘GAIA Education’ – a subsection of ‘GAIA Trust’ and very closely tied to the Ecovillage Movement. The four edited volumes include roughly 140 pieces written by Ecovillagers and activists close to the movement. Already the conceptual design of the book series is an indication of the belief system of Ecovillagers. The four volumes cover different areas of knowledge. The ‘ecological key’ is called Designing Ecological Habitats – Creating a Sense of Place. The ‘economic key’ is called Gaian Economy – Living Well Within Our Means. The ‘social key’ is called Beyond You and Me – Inspirations and Wisdom for Building Community and the ‘Worldview key’ is called The Song of the Earth – a Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews. As is explained in the beginning of the book about economics (xiv), for Ecovillagers, all four areas of knowledge – social, economic, ecological and worldview – form part of ‘sustainable design’ and are understood as closely interlinked rather than distinct from each other. This interconnection is often represented by a circle of which each different area of knowledge occupies a quarter. To get a deeper sense of the Ecovillagers’ worldview, I read these pieces and noted their answers to four core questions: What are the Ecovillagers’ problem perceptions? What are the causes of these problems? What could solutions look like? What role do they play themselves in solving these problems? In order to represent my findings, I will describe the dominant answers which I have found by giving ‘anchor examples’. In order to adequately represent the style and tone of the arguments, I use long quotes. Since these examples stand for a general pattern, I do not reference the individual authors but only refer to book and page number when quoting. In order to represent that the heterogeneity of answers, at the end of this chapter, I point to a contrasting point of view which can also be found. What are the Ecovillagers’ problem perceptions? Ecovillagers perceive the world to be in a state of serious crisis. This crisis has different facets and culminates in the idea that ‘[t]he ecological fabric of our existence is being torn apart, as the violence of corporate globalization combines with the violence of war.’ (Economy, 2). To get a deeper sense of this diagnosis, it is helpful to distinguish between four problem areas that are often identified: First, Ecovillagers perceive grave environmental problems: ‘Serious issues’ such as ‘climate change and its impact, potential energy shortages, loss of biodiversity and arable land, depletion of fresh water sources, just to mention a few’ (Ecology, 2). Next to these ecological problems, they identify social problems, such as ‘the fear of growing old alone, the rise of clinical depression and other “industrial diseases” like cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart problems . . . rising crime, poverty, homelessness and unemployment’ (Social, 261). Third, Ecovillagers are concerned with economic problems, such ‘economic injustice and inequality’ as well as, fourth, political problems such as war, ‘the decay of democracy and the rise of terrorism’ (Economy, 3).

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 215 What are the causes of these problems? These problems are not simply and inexplicably there. Rather, Ecovillagers use three interrelated explanations for this crisis: First, it is believed that this crisis is due to our ‘economic system’, the growth of which is proclaimed a solution to poverty, underdevelopment and environmental degradation while the opposite is true: ‘It is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation. In other words, sustainable growth is impossible’ (Economy, 11). Second, Ecovillagers argue that the identified problems are due to people’s manipulated and uncontrolled desires: Our modern society is selling us the idea that if we could only fulfil our desires, we would be happy . . . The terrifying propaganda that happiness depends on what we get is . . . destroying our planet, it is destroying our mind. Third, and most important, Ecovillagers argue that the identified crisis is caused by our ‘Western worldview’, which subscribes to a mechanistic ontology of separation and analysis, instead of an organic ontology of communality and synthesis. It is argued that the identified threats can be traced to the same underlying cause. We are experiencing the shadow side of a centuries-old worldview that separates Man from Nature. This worldview sees the world as a mechanical machine made up of individual parts that can be manipulated separately. Nature is something outside of us, having no intrinsic value, and is to be conquered. This reductionist way of looking at the world has been the foundation of modern science and has provided us with an enormous increase in living standards. (Worldview, 26) What could solutions look like? Ecovillagers have identified a systemic crisis. In Western democracies, most people would usually look to the political or academic system for solutions to these grave problems: Either a new political agreement is needed, or a new technical fix can be invented. Ecovillagers, in contrast, see neither science nor political institutions – at least the way they work today – as promising candidates for solving this crisis: ‘Our political system seems unable to take coordinated global action to deal with the multidimensional crisis facing us [b]ecause our political organization reflects the same separatist worldview. Every country looks out for its own interests’ (Worldview, 27). States and politicians are often perceived to be part of a self-perpetuating and destructive system, driven by ‘the perceived self-interest of the most powerful states. They are locked into defending the status quo, even though it may lead to the worst possible result and disaster for all,

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including themselves’ (Worldview, 30). But also domestically, the ‘transition’, it is believed, cannot be driven or forced on people by government. The new local societies can only be built and made to work by the willing efforts of local people who understand why the Simpler Way is necessary and who want to live that way because they find it rewarding. (Ecology, 12) This disdain for politics and political institutions – as they are constituted today – is also apparent in the fact that the book series does not include a volume about the knowledge area ‘politics’, a ‘political key’. But science is also rarely seen as a promising candidate to bring about the necessary change. This is not surprising given that the root of the problem for Ecovillagers is the ‘Western scientific worldview’ which ‘has conditioned us to believe that the world and the cosmos are comprised of distinct, isolated, material objects – all separated from one another in space and set in dynamic motion according to rational, deterministic, mechanistic laws’ (Worldview, 3). Thus, science, which reifies this worldview and separates theory from praxis, also does not appear to be a promising candidate for bringing about or enabling positive change. What appears like a dire systemic diagnosis with little prospect for a solution looks different from the point of view of many Ecovillagers. From their point of view, the question is not about political solutions or technical fixes, but rather about a cultural shift: ‘How do we turn from the ruins of the culture of death and destruction, to the culture that sustains and celebrates life?’ (Economy, 2). Usually answers are given along the following lines. ‘We can do it by breaking free of the mental prison of separation and exclusion to see the world in its interconnectedness and non-separability, allowing new alternatives to emerge’ (Economy, 2). The strategy must hence be to replace it [the old worldview] with one that better reflects the realities of planetary life. Fortunately this is happening gradually. A new, holistic worldview of inter-connectedness and solidarity is emerging. We can call it the Gaian Paradigm for reference, reflecting the recognition of the earth as a living organism with humanity as an integral part, and having a very special role. (Worldview, 29) What role do Ecovillages play in solving these problems? Given this diagnosis, analysis of causes and solutions, Ecovillagers see themselves as important actors in the global realm: When the nature of the global predicament is understood, it is obvious that the alarming problems now threatening to destroy civilization cannot be

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 217 solved unless we move toward the ideas and practices evident within the global ecovillage and permaculture movements. Thus, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these movements. (Ecology, 8) To be more precise, Ecovillagers identify four different but interrelated ways in which they matter for a solution to the global crisis. First, Ecovillagers understand themselves to be communicating an alternative to the world: [R]ealizing true prosperity, security, and meaning depends on creating vibrant, caring, interlinked communities that support all persons in realizing their full humanity. Sharing the joyful news of our human possibilities through word and action is perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Work of our time. (Economy, 10) By showing what is already possible, Ecovillagers consider themselves to be ‘[c]ounteracting the virus of separation’ (Social, 267). While some activists believe that this communication is done through the internet, visits and magazines, others believe that meditations and ‘thoughts can affect and change matter’ (Worldview, 85). Second, Ecovillagers understand themselves to be prefiguring and testing a way of life for an uncertain future. The idea is that once the dominant way of life breaks down, established alternatives will be leading the way. They try to gauge how best to live in the future when [a]lternatives to war, non-sustainability and social and economic injustice are becoming a survival imperative. These alternatives need to combine our making peace with the planet and our making peace among people from diverse cultures. One is not possible without the other. (Economy, 2) Third, Ecovillagers consider themselves not only as drivers but also as expressions of change that is already going on. As our postindustrial civilisations begin to crumble, we are witnessing the limits of our natural resources and the inability of our economic and social systems to sustain themselves. At the same time there is a cogent global shift amongst the peoples of the world who are seeking new ways of living less materialistic, more connected lives . . . A new and powerful worldview is rapidly emerging today in response to this deep yearning, accompanied by a growing spectrum of ‘new-paradigm’ literature and websites. (Worldview, xi)4

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Fourth, Ecovillagers see themselves as creating a new worldview, practically as an incubator in which the potential for a different way of being can come about: Taken together, the ecovillages across the globe today are pioneering an unprecedented global community experiment – a living laboratory for birthing a new humanity. The worldview emerging from this larger movement is not mere philosophy. It is the new paradigm – alive and actively manifesting itself fully and beautifully on the ground – like a fractal seed, in miniature, of the coming civilization. (Worldview, xii) Ecovillagers understand these four ‘ways’ as intertwined in a holistic movement. Their role as players in the global realm can thus not be reconstructed from the ‘mechanistic’ perspective of political scientists which they often criticise. To get a grasp of their importance, Ecovillagers argue, we must understand that individuals ‘are an integral part of a living organism – Gaia – here every component is interconnected in ways we do not fully understand’ (Worldview, 27). This allows for a different idea of causation. Since individuals are understood to be at the centre of concentric circles, their actions ‘ripple out temporally’ and ‘spatially, [thus] connecting individuals, communities, ecosystems, bioregions, nations, all the way to the planetary scale (and beyond)’ (Ecology, 43). This understanding of causation and the role of individuals is also often explained through the metaphor of a ‘monarch caterpillar’ that turns into a ‘monarch butterfly’. This metaphor is so important to Ecovillages that the ‘Global Ecovillage Network’ has made the monarch butterfly its emblem. The story goes as follows (cf. Worldview, 92 – italics in original): While the caterpillar is an animal ‘gorging itself on nature’s bounty’, it enters in a state of crisis ‘when it has had its fill’ and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Then, guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillar’s still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders. The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibility, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine. To summarise: Ecovillagers believe that the world is in a state of serious crisis. They identify four areas of interlinked problems ranging from ecological, through social, economic and political problems. These problems are believed to be caused

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 219 by our economic system, by our desires and by our worldview that separates people from each other and from nature. Neither the political system nor academia are considered in good shape to solve this multiple crisis. Rather, Ecovillagers believe that a new culture is necessary and consider themselves already part of it. Since individuals are understood to be part of a larger network of living cells and organisms, they and their communities appear as important actors whose actions ripple out spatially and temporally in a global web of life. Thus, Ecovillagers put forward an image of the global that stands in sharp contrast to the understanding of ‘the international’ that political scientists and IR scholars usually rely on. Thus – and overstating the finding a little bit – from the perspective of Ecovillagers, political scientists analyse world politics as if it was a machine, ignoring Ecovillages as unimportant and reifying exactly that worldview which leads us straight into disaster. The straightforwardness of this reconstruction of the worldview of Ecovillagers should not, however, hide from view that the reality is much messier than I could paint with broad strokes. In order to reflect this ‘messiness’, in the following an example is described that does not fit well with the reconstructed frame. A counter-example: the Ecovillager who could be a political scientist In a contribution entitled ‘Descending the Energy Staircase’ (Economy, 40), Rob Hopkins – former inhabitant of an Ecovillage and founder of the Transition Town Movement – explains what needs to be done in order to reduce the worldwide energy throughput. The author starts with the claim that ‘[t]hinking about both climate change and peak oil requires new thinking and new mechanisms’. While this sounds like the analysis of other Ecovillagers presented earlier, as a solution he introduces a rather down-to-earth policy relying on financial incentives to steer the conduct of individuals who are assumed to act like rational utility maximisers. The term ‘mechanism’, which Hopkins uses in this description, also hints to the fact that his proposal stands in contrast to much of what Ecovillagers argue for. In his contribution, Hopkins recommends a proposal that includes an electronic system for rationing energy. Every adult is allocated an equal number of units whereas the government and industry have to bid for theirs at a weekly tender . . . If you use more energy than your quota you can buy units from those who haven’t used all of theirs. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), the author argues, ‘concentrate the mind; they make planning ahead a necessary business skill; they make it second nature.’ Overall, he summarises, TEQs can ‘create the basis for a collective motivation, a common purpose of living within an energy budget’. Such a view is not far away from what some political scientists would propose – a perspective which I elaborate upon in the following section.

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‘Gardening is not politics’ – the political science perspective As is pointed out in the introduction of this chapter, political scientists usually do not talk about Ecovillages or Intentional Communities (for the only exception I am aware of, see Litfin 2009, 2014). The reason for this negligence is not that political scientists would deny the diagnosis of a major ecological and social crisis consisting in global warming, dwindling natural resources, the destruction of arable land and drinking water and unequal development. While agreeing on this diagnosis, political scientists don’t consider Ecovillages relevant actors who would be addressing these issues. In order to understand, why this is the case, a detour is necessary. While I was able to reconstruct from explicit statements why Ecovillagers see political science as ideologically misled, the same cannot be done the other way around. Since political scientists usually ignore Intentional Communities – and Ecovillages for that matter – I can only attempt to uncover the (often implicit) assumptions which produce this ‘blind spot’. This means to digging deep into the self-understanding of the discipline(s). In the following, I attempt to uncover those assumptions which shape the perspective of IR and political science in such a way that Ecovillages are invisible. This move is inspired by Wendt and Duvall’s (2008) reconstruction of why political science does not talk about UFOs.5 First, Ecovillagers do not fit into a model of politics as conflictive interaction since they aim to break with the antagonistic worldview that underlies most of the political science literature. Ecovillagers follow a systemic and cooperative ideal of action. As was reconstructed earlier, they do not aim at taking over power (or hegemony), but merely at understanding, learning and teaching. Without clearly identifiable antagonisms, it is difficult to describe Ecovillagers as a political actor. Hence, from a political science perspective, life in Ecovillages often appears merely as a social phenomenon, for example, as religious activity or a ‘lifestyle’ (Haenfler et al. 2012). Second, Ecovillages are invisible through the lens of political science because they seem to be part of the private realm – where social interaction takes place. The private realm is understood to be the opposite of the public realm, where political interactions take place. Put differently: Ecovillages don’t seem – at least not primarily – to form part of what one would call a civil society – but rather to be part of the Lebenswelt (Schehr 1997). This is because Ecovillagers don’t engage primarily with states or with international organisations, whereas the political science discourse still largely equates all political identities – be they class, race, gender, religion, humanity or planet – with the idea of ‘citizenship’ and thus with the authority of sovereign states (Walker 1994, 675). To sum up, from a political science perspective, Ecovillagers seem to be withdrawing into the private realm rather than engaging with public affairs. Third, Ecovillagers are often overlooked because their impact seems negligible. From a mechanistic point of view, their actions don’t seem to reach very far in terms of physical space. From an institutional point of view, Ecovillagers don’t seem to have an impact because they engage primarily with neither the state nor international organisations. Putting this observation into the mechanistic language

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 221 of political science: The actions of Ecovillagers seem to have little ‘leverage’ and hence seem to be futile in contrast to the ‘big drivers’ of global politics. They simply disappear when judged from the perspective of the ‘levels of analysis schema’, which still plays a major role in IR (on this, see Bigo and Walker 2007). Fourth, Ecovillagers are usually overlooked by political scientists because they seem to act as individuals, whereas political scientists consider the action of collectives. Hirschman (1985, 31) already observed long ago that political science scholars register collective acts of claim-making as political expressions of interest only because they have conceptually confined their attention to situations in which the only alternative to a collective articulation of critique is ‘acquiescence’. Boltanski (2012, 169) goes even further, arguing that most social scientists build on a ‘fundamental opposition’ between individual and collective acts and ‘reject as outside their universe of competence manifestations of revolt or grievances whose authors act alone’ assuming these are not cases of critique but rather of insanity or pathology, which could be better addressed by psychoanalysis. Since the decision to move to an Ecovillage is primarily an individual one, from the perspective of political science, they appear as retreat-centres from mainstream society for those who have given up hope and for the mentally ill. Overall, Ecovillagers are invisible through the lens of political science: Ecovillagers appear as caring rather than antagonistic, the communities seem private rather than public, they reach out far neither spatially nor institutionally and they act individually rather than as a collective. Thus – and overstating the finding a little – from the perspective of modern IR discourse, Ecovillagers garden a little, meditate and spend their time in good company instead of engaging in real politics because they are ideologically misled about how politics really works. Just like in the previous section, the clarity of this reconstruction hides from view the heterogeneity of research in IR. In order to reflect upon this ‘messiness’ also in this case, in the following an example is described that does not fit well with the reconstructed frame. A counter-example: the scientists who would rather be Ecovillagers With their ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’, Burke et al. (2016) provide a piece of research that could have just as easily been published by Ecovillagers in their series about ‘sustainable design’. Burke et al. (2016) start with the diagnosis of a multiple crisis: We must face the true terror of this moment. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere now exceed those experienced for over a million years . . . This is a world of melted ice caps and permafrost, flooded cities, oceans so acidic they cannot support life, and the loss of the Amazon’s rainforests . . . All this is looming as much of the world suffers under a burden of extreme poverty and inequality. (Burke et al. 2014, 2)

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Following this dire diagnosis, the authors argue that our Western worldview seems to be a problem. They point out: ‘We exist in social nature. Both the discipline of International Relations, and international state practice, are underpinned by a silent Cartesian assumption that humanity and nature are radically separate’ (Burke et al. 2014, 12 – italics in the original). In contrast to this dualism, we should accept that ‘the Other is always already inside, so bound up with us in a common process that it no longer makes sense to speak of inside and outside’ (2014, 4). Hence, they argue, we need a new ontology and way of thinking about change in which everything is understood as connected: World itself is singular plural: what humans tend to refer to as ‘the’ world is actually a multiplicity of worlds at various scales that intersect, overlap, conflict, emerge as they surge across the Earth. World emerges from the poetics of existence, the collision of energy and matter, the tumult of agencies, the fusion and diffusion of bonds. (Burke et al. 2014, 20) Just like the Ecovillagers, Burke et al. (2016) condemn normal science for its ideology that keeps the scientists from seeing the world as it really is: ‘The naysayers will stand in the ruins and tell us we are dreaming; that a new world is not of our making’ (2014, 4). This last sentence leads back to the question which this chapter started with: What to do with reciprocal allegations of ideology? In the following; I attempt to make sense of these reciprocal allegations of ideology as a conflict over the dominant form of life.

From allegations of ideology to conflicts over forms of life While the discipline of International Relations poses as neutral and ignores Ecovillages as irrelevant, Ecovillagers pose as activists and argue that political science reproduces a problematic status quo. Both consider the other side to be misled about what is really going on in the world. What to do with these reciprocal allegations of ideology? As is pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, taking sides is barely justifiable. Even though one may not subscribe to some of the views put forward by Ecovillagers, it seems highly problematic to dismiss their point of view simply because it does not seem to fit the dominant scientific model of world politics. Despite the warm and fuzzy feeling this may provide to some, it seems equally problematic to side with the Ecovillagers simply because they are ‘the underdog’ and declare that, in fact, they are a force that is changing the world on the ground. However, the symmetrical option is also not convincing: Given that Ecovillagers understand their action to be in reaction to a crisis which is reified and constantly reproduced by political scientists and their worldview, taking a symmetrical point of view towards both sides would imply that the allegations of ideology are not taken seriously. The third option to deal

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 223 with reciprocal allegations of ideology, which Celikates describes, is to understand them as expressions of a social conflict involving critique and justification. However, even this third approach is not without its problems since it is precisely the nature of the relationship between both sides that is under contention in the described case. Those who side with the Ecovillagers, see a conflict – those who side with political scientists usually don’t. So what to do? Ecovillages as dissident forms of life The solution, I would like to suggest, lies in broadening the understanding of what the relationship between political scientists and Ecovillagers is. The described reciprocal allegations of ideology are not simply expressions of different valuefree theories about the constitution of the global, the functioning of global politics and the explanation of change – as the political science perspective would have it. At the same time, the described reciprocal allegations of ideology are also not simply expressions of a disagreement about what should make the global, how global politics should function, how change should happen and what should be done – as the Ecovillage perspective suggests. What is described here as reciprocal allegations of ideology may be better called a rivalry over forms of life. Put differently: The emergence of Ecovillages as a political subject for themselves is an expression of a tension in our modern Western ‘form of life’. The term ‘form of life’ can be loosely understood as an ensemble of practices, beliefs, attitudes, institutions, symbols and artefacts which structures our everyday experience and hence the way we understand the world, how we act and feel (for a similar definition, see Celikates (2015); Rosa (2003, 65); and Jaeggi (2018, 89)). They are the cultural sediments of how people interact with each other, how they work, what kind of relationships they have to themselves and to certain artefacts. To give an example: the Western form of life is structured by a distinction between private and public that separates (not least physically and architecturally) home and family from work and political life, by an ideal of a family as heterosexual couple with children, by timetables, cars and streets, to-go coffee-mugs and shopping-malls by a difference between nature and culture and by universities, which produce knowledge, and laypeople who mainly use that knowledge to produce and sell things. The described manifestations of our form of life are not accidental but are structured bundles of practices and institutions that solve specific problems, they allow us to do what we find valuable (Jaeggi 2018, 58). That is, roads and cars solve the practical problem that ‘home’ for many is in the green outskirts of cities while work is usually in the centre. The distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ guarantees individuals a space of ‘private autonomy’ while at the same time granting them the possibility to contribute to public concerns. Understood in this way, forms of life do not have a recognizable outside (Rosa 2003, 63): All the attempts to say what our form of life is, will itself be part of that form of life. Forms of life do, however, become visible in moments of crisis – when practical problems appear that can no longer be solved. It is at this point that the cultural background, the way of understanding problems and treating them,

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comes into focus and can be thematised. This is also the point when rivalling, experimental forms of life appear that claim to be solving the tensions which the ‘old’ form of life could not (cf. Jaeggi 2018, 338, FN 29). In this terminology, Ecovillages can be understood as a ‘dissident form of life’ that emerges in moments of crisis, which the old form of life recognises but does not seem to be capable of solving. Ecovillagers react to tensions that become more and more apparent in the dominant Western form of life. In the words of Ulrich Beck, Ecovillagers react to a crisis, in which Western modernity comes to reflect on itself as a problem in its own terms (1992). Just to name three examples of such tensions: Ecovillagers react to an ideal of sustainability, which is erected by Western scientific discourse, while being at the same time undermined by scientific progress in other areas (see Beck 1992, ch. 2). They react to an ideal of a family, in which both partners equally contribute to household work, which is at the same time undermined by pressures to be part of a mobile labour force (Beck 1992, ch. 4). They react to an ideal of political and human rights, which is propagated by Western politicians, while being at the same time undermined by a need for resources from war-torn regions and a dependency on autocratic regimes in order to sell goods. As these – very briefly mentioned – tensions exemplify, the problems which lead to the development and stabilisation of ‘dissident forms of life’ are not abstract, ‘big’ problems: They are less the problems of IR than the tensions that people confront on a day-to-day basis. Dissident forms of life arise when a bad conscience calls for the resolution of some of these tensions. Ecovillagers thus experiment with ways of relating to the world, in which some of the described tensions, which arise in the Western form of life, can be solved. They attempt to offer an alternative to academic knowledge production through life as experiment, an alternative to family through community, an alternative to human rights through love and empathy. This, to clarify, is not to say that the ‘dissident form of life’ is better or more rational than the dominant Western form of life; it is to say, however, that the dissident form of life is a reaction to the irrationalities, tensions and contradictions of Western modernity. Without going into further details, I would like to close by pointing to some advantages of the analysis which I have just presented. Advantages of this interpretation First, the concept ‘form of life’ is useful to describe what the reciprocal allegations of ideology between Ecovillagers and political scientists are an expression of. They express neither only a disagreement over theories of the world, nor a conflict over values. Rather, they are expressions of a conflict over the fundamental conditions, institutions and artefacts which regulate our lives, with which we – including academia – understand problems and try to solve them. The concept, in other words, renders visible that Western modernity becomes a problem for itself. Second – and related to this first argument – the concept ‘form of life’ makes a conflict decipherable that otherwise remains invisible. The term ‘form of life’

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 225 drags those structures to the stage, which shape our daily conduct while remaining in the shadow because – in Western, politically liberal and economically capitalist societies – they are treated as a product of ‘private’ decisions of citizens. Without a doubt, the aggregate of those ‘private’ decisions to use a car or technical devices like mobile phones and computers has (if only through infrastructure) massive effects on others and must hence be debatable in some way. The term ‘form of life’ points to the fact that the aggregate of private decisions in the Western world forms a structure that is relevant to a broader public while being difficult to address (cf. Brand and Wissen 2013). Third, Ecovillages – as an empirical phenomenon – I believe, are better understood as ‘a dissident form of life’ than as ‘collective action’ or a religion, sect and so on. This denomination may further caution us about judging their importance. As Walker (1994, 672) pointed out some 20-plus years ago: ‘It is futile to try to gauge the importance of social movements without considering the possibility that it is precisely the criteria of significance by which they are to be judged that may be in contention’. Fourth, by describing these reciprocal allegations of ideology as a conflict over forms of life, the seeming antagonism between International Relations and Ecovillagers turns out to be a struggle of Western modernity with itself. This also explains why some political scientists think like Ecovillagers while some Ecovillagers think like political scientists – as shown earlier. Hence, the concept allows for the description of tensions and contradictions without describing a conflict between seemingly fixed groups. Finally, the concept ‘form of life’ conceptually opens spaces to scientifically deal with reciprocal allegations of ideology without taking sides or treating both sides symmetrically. This may turn out to be very useful. With the current transformation of the nation state, criticism of media, science and elites – which go hand in hand with reciprocal allegations of ideology – conflicts over forms of life are up and coming.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have grappled with the question of how to describe the relationship between political scientists and Ecovillagers. Both accuse each other of being ideological. I described three options to deal with these reciprocal allegations of ideology: Picking a side, taking a symmetrical perspective and treating both sides as two parties in a conflict. I argued for the third option. In order to put this approach to work, I reconstructed the worldview of Ecovillagers. They are motivated by a diagnosis of a multiple crisis of Western society, which is caused by our desires, the economy and our Cartesian worldview. Ecovillagers see a solution to this crisis in a new worldview that overcomes the separations which are today built into our lives. They contribute to bringing about a new worldview through their actions in what they call the ‘web of life’. I then, however, noted that political scientists usually ignore Ecovillagers because their activity is non-antagonistic, because they seem to act only in the private realm,

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because their institutional and physical leverage seems small and because Ecovillagers act alone. Taking stock of this description, I argued in a last step that scientists should neither take sides in this constellation nor treat both allegations of ideology symmetrically. Since what is at stake between political scientists and Ecovillagers is nothing less than the question of what their relationship is, we can understand these reciprocal allegations of ideology neither as a theoretical disagreement nor as a practical conflict. Rather, they should be understood as the expression of a rivalry between forms of life. The emergence of Ecovillages hence points to fissures and cracks in our dominant way of life. As is suggested in the introduction of this chapter, some rivalries over forms of life had major effects on world politics. The monasteries and Kibbutzim shaped the world as we know it today. Other dissident forms of life disappeared without leaving traces. However, the question of whether Ecovillagers will have a major impact on world politics is not the most pressing. The more pressing question currently seems to be what our Western form of life transforms into, once its tensions and inner contradictions grow. International Relations needs to be equipped with concepts to understand this transformation: The concept ‘form of life’ may be one of them.

Notes 1 As a PhD student writing a dissertation about communes and Ecovillages, I have experienced many conversations about this topic. I am still surprised that even those scholars who find climate change a relevant threat, who don’t see a solution to this crisis and who find my research ‘intriguing’ in the end wonder, ‘whether this is still IR’. 2 www.ic.org/communities-magazine-home. 3 In the 1990s, Ecovillages existed more or less only in several Western countries, among them especially Germany, Denmark, Italy, the UK, the United States, Australia, Spain and others. Today, there are also communities in the Global South which call themselves Ecovillages. Their story, however, is often a different one from the one told in this chapter. Here I focus primarily on Ecovillages in the Global North. 4 Ecovillagers also provide different explanations for why they are still a niche phenomenon. One explanation functions along the lines that people are ‘awaking’ only very slowly. Another explanation goes like this: ‘I suspect that most people are terrified deep inside, but have shut off that terror because it seems hopeless and too painful. They are paralyzed and cannot even think of solutions. They feel it’s all too big and complicated for one person to have any effect. The forces of destruction are too powerful and too entrenched’ (Worldview, 180). 5 Thanks to Ben Kamis who pointed this article out to me.

References Beck, Ulrich (1992): Risk society: Towards a new modernity, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Bigo, Didier and Walker, Rob (2007): Political sociology and the problem of the international, in: Millennium 35 (3), pp. 725–739. Boltanski, Luc (2012): Love and justice as competences, Cambridge: Polity Press.

From allegations of ideology to conflicts 227 Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (2006): On justification: Economies of worth, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, Chamboredon, Jean-Claude and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1991): The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries, Berlin: de Gruyter. Brand, Ulrich and Wissen, Markus (2013): Crisis and continuity of capitalist society-nature relationships: The imperial mode of living and the limits to environmental governance, in: Review of International Political Economy 20 (4), pp. 687–711. Burke, Anthony, Fishel, Stefanie, Mitchell, Audra, Dalby, Simon and Levine, Daniel (2016): Planet politics: A manifesto from the end of IR, in: Millennium 44 (3), pp. 499–523. Celikates, Robin (2006): From critical social theory to a social theory of critique: On the critique of ideology after the pragmatic turn, in: Constellations 13 (1), pp. 21–40. Celikates, Robin (2015): Against manichaesim: The politics of forms of life and the possibilities of critique, in: Raisons Politiques 57 (1), pp. 81–96. Chiapello, Eve (2003): Reconciling the two principal meanings of the notion of ideology, in: European Journal of Social Theory 6 (2), pp. 155–171. Durkheim, Émile (1964): The rules of sociological method, New York: Free Press. Eagleton, Terry (2014): Ideology: An introduction, London: Routledge. Geertz, Clifford (2000): The interpretation of cultures, 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books. Geuss, Raymond (1981): The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haenfler, Ross, Johnsonn, Brett and Jones, Ellis (2012): Lifestyle movements: Exploring the intersection of lifestyle and social movements, in: Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 11 (1), pp. 1–20. Hirschman, Albert (1985): Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jackson, Ross (2000): And we are doing it! Building an ecovillage future, San Francisco: Robert D. Reed Publishers. Jaeggi, Rahel (2018): Critique of forms of life, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Litfin, Karen (2009): The global ecovillage movement as a holistic knowledge community, in: Kütting, Gabriela and Lipschutz, Ronnie (eds.), Environmental governance: Power and knowledge in a local-global world, London: Routledge, pp. 124–142. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203880104. Litfin, Karen (2014): Ecovillages: Lessons for sustainable community, Hoboken: Wiley. Metcalf, Bill (1996): Shared visions, shared lives: Communal living around the globe, Findhorn: Findhorn Press. Rosa, Hartmut (2003): Lebensformen vergleichen und verstehen. Eine Theorie der dimensionalen Kommensurabilität von Kontexten und Kulturen, in: Liebsch, Burkhard und Straub, Jürgen (eds.), Lebensformen im Widerstreit. Integrations- und Identitätskonflikte in pluralen Gesellschaften, Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 47–81. Roth, Jonathan (1994): Living in sin-cerity, in: Communities, No. 85, Winter 1994. Schehr, Robert C. (1997): Dynamic utopia: Establishing intentional communities as a new social movement, Westport: Bergin & Garvey. Shavit, Ari (2015): My promised land: The triumph and tragedy of Israel, New York: Spiegel und Grau. Walker, Robert (1994): Social movements/world politics, in: Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23 (3), pp. 669–700. Wendt, Alexander and Duvall, Raymond (2008): Sovereignty and the UFO, in: Political Theory 36 (4), pp. 607–633.

11 Microanalysis as ideology critique The critical potential of ‘zooming in’ on everyday social practices Sebastian Schindler

Introduction1 In recent years, microanalyses have gained increasing traction in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and in political science more generally. This popularity is reflected in a wealth of different theoretical approaches and labels, ranging from practice theory (Adler and Pouliot 2011) to relationalism (McCourt 2016), from ‘micro-moves’ (Solomon and Steele 2017) to ‘micro-politics’ (Chakravarty 2013), from political ethnography (Neumann 2012) to ‘performances of agency’ (Braun et al. 2019). The turn to microanalyses is commonly associated with two distinct promises (cf. Esguerra et al. 2017, 16). On the one hand, microanalyses are seen as complementary of grand theory, substantiating macro-theoretical claims and enabling exchange among different grand theories (Adler and Pouliot 2011). On the other hand, microanalyses are often cast as a (more or less radical) alternative to macroanalyses, bringing to the fore that which is ignored by grand theory – that which ‘escapes, overflows and exceeds’ macro-theoretical assumptions (Solomon and Steele 2017, 270). Yet while these two purposes – complement and alternative – seem to exhaust the possible uses of microanalyses, there is a third purpose that is less often acknowledged. This purpose is, in short, ideology critique – the critique of extant theory as ideology. The critical potential of ‘zooming in’ on everyday social practices is today largely ignored. This observation is particularly obvious for what is arguably the largest and most prominent field of microanalysis in IR today, namely practice theory. Originally, the case for studying practices was associated precisely with the purpose of studying theory in a critical manner (cf. Wille 2018). Consider the article by Iver Neumann that is widely heralded for introducing practice theory in IR: Neumann (2002) explicitly linked the turn to practices to an earlier critical literature in IR championed by scholars such as R.B.J. Walker (1993), Richard Ashley (1987) and Robert Cox (1981). Cox had argued that one important purpose of critical study was the examination of how ‘problem-solving theory’ was enmeshed in the reproduction of social order (Cox 1981, 128), and Walker famously claimed that IR theory was more interesting as an object of explanation rather than for what it explained. The main point of Neumann’s intervention had been that a focus on the details of everyday politics was able to make a crucial contribution to this critical project. By zooming in on ‘how politics is

Microanalysis as ideology critique 229 actually effected’, we would gain, Neumann argued, a better understanding of ‘how our own analyses of international relations may preserve a certain state of affairs’ (Neumann 2002, 627, 638). However, in current debates, practice theory is no longer associated with this endeavour and is instead framed – indeed also by Neumann himself – as an analytical rather than critical project (see, e.g. Adler and Pouliot 2011; Neumann and Pouliot 2011; critically, see Schindler and Wille 2019). This makes not only practice theory but also other so-called micro-moves vulnerable to objections by theorists that have either claimed the research programme lacks theoretical specification (cf. Ringmar 2014) or are concerned that attention to the small and contingent comes at the price of losing sight of the nature of social domination (Koddenbrock 2015; Schmid 2018). With this chapter, I seek to resuscitate the promise Neumann recognised in the move to studying the small and seemingly irrelevant details of everyday politics. I want to demonstrate that microanalyses are able to deliver a profound understanding of how precisely theory is practical and political. The ‘zooming in’ on the details of everyday practices can make obvious that specific theories reflect just one perspective among many. They can help us gain what Robert Cox termed a ‘perspective on perspectives’ (1981, 128). A case in point that substantiates this claim can be found precisely in Neumann’s early intervention on practice theory (2002). Neumann’s study concretely showed that IR theories were premised on a questionable notion of the international system, since this notion made IR theorists blind for ‘the key drama of present-day global politics’, namely, ‘to what extent state actors increasingly have to grapple with other actors in or even outside the system of states’ (2002, 639). In an in-depth examination of how sub-state actors in the border region between Russia and Norway tried to establish crossboundary cooperation, Neumann showed how the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs attempted to police the boundaries of the international state system, trying to prevent the sub-state actors from acting on their own. Zooming in on a seemingly unimportant struggle over who got to have a say in the construction of interregional cooperation, Neumann revealed that the larger question of who could claim to be a legitimate actor in the international system could not be defined on the level of theory but instead was deeply political. Struggles such as the one Neumann studied might look unimportant if judged by IR theoretical assumptions, but they actually had the potential to challenge and transform the very categories on which IR theory was based (for microanalyses that follow the spirit of Neumann’s early intervention, see Schindler 2014; Braun et al. 2019). Microanalysis is a useful tool for thinking critically about theory as ideology. I use the term ‘ideology critique’ here with the meaning of demonstrating that a certain kind of (theoretical) knowledge is false yet nonetheless productive.2 Microanalysis can show that there is, on the one hand, something false and delusional about theory; its claims of validity are more contested and less certain than assumed. On the other hand, microanalysis shows that theory is performative and productive of reality. Microanalysis achieves this double aim by zooming in on the fact that theoretical claims are constitutive of concrete social practices and situations. Theories are the thinking tools not only of academics but also of ‘lay’

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participants in social life. In this chapter, I introduce four concrete strategies that use the examination of ‘lay’ theories for the purposes of ideology critique. I take these strategies from an in-depth discussion of four seminal interventions in different disciplines – one authored by a sociologist (Donald MacKenzie), two by anthropologists (Marshall Sahlins and Lila Abu-Lughod) and one by a historian (Paul Schroeder). All four interventions demonstrate that a focus on seemingly small and unimportant details is able to speak in a critical manner to broad and general theoretical questions – neither by underwriting abstract hypotheses, nor by theorising an alternative to them, but by raising direct questions about the uses, limits and effects of macro-theory. In each text, macro-theory is itself a direct object of critique, and a distinct feature of macro-theory is subjected to critical attention: Its translations into practice (MacKenzie), its cultural limitations (Sahlins), its conceptual inadequacies (Abu-Lughod) and finally its problematic effects (Schroeder). In sum, what is gained through this discussion is a view on four viable strategies of critique that can add in a useful manner to the repertoire of micro-moves in IR today. The subsequent sections of the chapter introduce these four strategies one after the other; the first section begins with an exploration of the general and basic condition that enables the use of microanalysis as ideology critique – the so-called double hermeneutic.

Criticising translations of theory Anthony Giddens’s classic The Constitution of Society begins with a reflection on the distinct characteristics of the social sciences. Giddens makes a strong case for seeing the enterprise of social science as different from (classical) natural science. The key difference, Giddens argues, is that the objects of social science are themselves subjects who interpret and explain what they and others do. There is, in other words, a ‘double hermeneutic’: ‘[A] mutual interpretative interplay between social science and those whose activities compose its subject matter’ (Giddens 1984, xxxii). In social science, the boundary between scientific observer and observed phenomena is not usefully conceptualised as one between subject and object.3 The subject matter of social science is itself composed of reflexive agents with interpretations and thoughts. Interpreting and thinking about what these agents do in this sense doubles what the agents themselves already do (cf. also Adorno 1997). This is why Giddens criticises an objectivist understanding of social science that he ascribes to, for instance, Talcott Parsons. If there is a double hermeneutic, then academic concepts and ideas are not fully separated from ‘lay’ concepts and ideas. In fact, Giddens argues that ‘reflections on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of events that they describe’ (1984, xxxiii). Social science has an influence on – and is itself transformed by – the subject matter it studies. In more recent research, this specific phenomenon has been captured with the expression ‘performativity of theory’. For instance, in his celebrated An Engine, Not a Camera, economic sociologist Donald MacKenzie (2006) demonstrates how theories of financial markets that were originally

Microanalysis as ideology critique 231 developed in university departments came to have an influence on trading practices in these very markets. The theories transformed the world they claimed to explain, because the inhabitants of this world themselves began to use the theories to orient their own actions. This performative effect either made the predictions of the theories more adequate, since social actors began to act precisely in the manner that theoretical assumptions expected of them, or it had the adverse consequence of making the theories less adequate, since agents began to attempt to trick the theory, for instance, by using it to predict the decisions of other traders and then preventing these decisions from becoming effective. For the latter case, MacKenzie speaks of ‘counter-performativity’, an effect that made the academic theories less useful and ultimately led to further theoretical innovation. One implication of the double hermeneutic is that the tracing of how academic concepts travel into practice (and vice versa) yields considerable potential. In IR, such tracing is undertaken for instance in studies of the ‘translations’ between science and practice (Berger and Esguerra 2018; Schindler 2018) or of the ‘trading zones’ between academic and international practices (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). The examination of these translations is a critical enterprise in that it demonstrates the performative effects of analytical constructs, or shows how these constructs stem from specific societal concerns and ideas and are thus historically contingent. The study of translations is, however, not the only way in which the double hermeneutic allows for critical studies of theory as ideology. By pointing out alternative perspectives on the social that are ignored by the most widespread forms of theorising, enquiries into lay theories can uncover the cultural limitations of extant theories.

Criticising the cultural limitations of theory The enterprise of studying other forms of making sense of the world is associated notably with the study of other ‘cultures’, other social contexts in which different cultural categories order the world and interpret actions and events. One example can be found in the work of historical anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. The central topic of Sahlins’s research is the history of Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean. In many writings and books, Sahlins has developed a deep, ethnographic understanding of this history – an understanding of Polynesian culture, and of how it was transformed through the encounter with European discoverers and colonisers. In one much cited essay, entitled Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History, Sahlins (1985, ch. 2) shows that Polynesian peoples had their own sense, their own theory, of this encounter with the Europeans. Sahlins’s essay focuses on a Maori uprising in New Zealand, during which a Maori chief, of the name Hone Heke, resisted British colonisation. Hone Heke and his warriors’ resistance against the British was not primarily directed against British settlements and fortresses. Instead, it was directed in particular against a British flagpole, a pole that the British had erected somewhere on the coast, with the Union Jack on it. Hone Heke and the Maori rebels tried, time and again and with considerable success, to cut down this flagpole – and, to quote Sahlins:

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‘Heke’s persistence in downing it was matched only by the British insistence on resurrecting it’ (Sahlins 1985, 60). How can one make sense of this fight against a flagpole? Had the Maoris understood that it symbolised, for the British, their sovereignty over the land? In a sense, they had understood it, but as Sahlins shows, in a sense quite different from the British. The flagpole had a meaning within the concepts of Maori culture, and in particular within a Maori and Polynesian theory of history. For the Maori rebels, the fight against the flagpole reproduced a fight that had been going on for many generations, and actually, since the creation of the world, when the God of the Heaven penetrated Earth and thus created life. The flagpole symbolised, or rather was, a penetration of the Earth, a seizure of the land – and indeed the Maori rebels were much more interested in downing the pole than in getting the flag. The specific practices of the Maori rebellion against the British become intelligible only within this Maori theory of history, a theory that explains and links together many past historical events – including the creation of the world and the first landing of the Maori on New Zealand (when, according to myths, a pole was erected) as well as many subsequent battles in which the erection of poles again played a crucial role. The theory made possible a reproduction of these past events in present action, in the fight against the British colonisation. The encounter between European colonisers and Polynesian people is an encounter between two different cosmologies, two different ways of sorting the world and theorising what goes on within it. Crucially, Sahlins argues that an adequate understanding of the Maori cultural consciousness can make us more aware of the limitations of our own. By understanding how other people theorise the world, we can better understand that also our own theories are culturally and historically formed. He argues: Capitalist society does have a distinctive mode of appearance, therefore a definite anthropological consciousness, pervasive also in the theoretical dispositions of the Academy. The native theory is that social outcomes are the cumulative expression of individual actions . . . The impression is given that the whole culture is organized by people’s businesslike economizing. This impression is doubled by the democratic political process in which Everyman counts as ‘one’ (vote), so representing the governing powers as ‘the people’s cherce.’ The prevailing quantitative, populist, and materialist presuppositions of our social science can then be no accident – or there is no anthropology. (Sahlins 1985, 52) The presuppositions of social science are, Sahlins argues, ‘no accident’. They are derived from and play a role in a specific cultural consciousness – the capitalist, individualist consciousness of our own time. This critical, reflexive awareness is created through a ‘micro-move’, through Sahlins’s in-depth grasp of highly specific acts, such as the setting up – and the cutting down – of a flagpole in New Zealand in the eighteenth century. By revealing that the erection of this flagpole doesn’t simply mean a taking possession of the land according to rituals

Microanalysis as ideology critique 233 of European rules of sovereignty, and that the Maori are not fighting the Union Jack but rather the pole itself, Sahlins creates an awareness that inter-cultural encounters are not simply about different but compatible interpretations of the same world, but that instead two quite different ways of theorising the world are in disagreement, and that the same acts thus are explainable in quite different terms, with different consequences.

Criticising conceptual inadequacies of theories In 1990, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod published an essay on ‘The Romance of Resistance’ in the American Ethnologist. The starting point of this essay is the observation that the relationship between power and resistance had become a central concern in the human sciences, and that there was a tendency in many studies to celebrate resistance – a certain ‘romance of resistance’, in Abu-Lughod’s words. Her essay shows that the conceptual distinction on which this attempt was based – the one between power and resistance – is difficult to establish when one begins to understand the perspectives of participants in social situations. AbuLughod’s focus lies on the role of women in a Bedouin society in Northern Egypt, between Alexandria and the Libyan border. Abu-Lughod at first points out that the traditional Bedouin, patriarchal society leaves spaces for resistance by women. While men officially have certain decision-making powers, such as the decision on whom to marry their daughters to, this does not mean that no resistance is possible. Resistance takes the form of songs, poetry and jokes, in which certain male attributes are ridiculed. It takes also more active forms, such as direct interventions by mothers and aunts, or daughters who appear to get crazy as the marriage date approaches, thus preventing the marriage from taking effect. Abu-Lughod concludes that this situation poses certain ‘analytic dilemmas’ (1990, 47). Notably, it implies that several analytical categories are difficult to apply. Thus, one cannot attribute a feminist consciousness to these women, since theirs is clearly not a struggle for emancipation, but it is equally inappropriate to simply treat their practices as ‘prepolitical, primitive, or even misguided’ (Abu-Lughod 1990, 47). The Bedouin women both support and resist the extant system of power; they accept, for instance, the practice of veiling, but they do not unquestioningly accept male power. In this situation, analytical concepts such as ‘false consciousness, which dismisses their own understanding of their situation’ or ‘impression management, which makes them cynical manipulators’, are misleading, since they cannot grasp the simultaneous presence of resistance to, and support for, existing power hierarchies (Abu-Lughod 1990, 47). The situation has become even more complicated with the entry of modern (Westernised) Egyptian society and values into the Bedouin context. These values imply a certain form of liberation for the Bedouin women, but they also bring with them new forms of domination. In particular, they threaten the bases of the forms of resistance just described, namely intra-gender support and in general the strong intra-gender ties among the women. Abu-Lughod illustrates this development through an examination of how marriage practices change, and in particular

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by analysing the role of a ‘deceptively frivolous issue: lingerie’ (1990, 49). By buying lingerie for their weddings, younger women achieve a degree of freedom from their traditional role and from the control of elder women. Traditionally, marriage rituals stage a ‘dramatic contest between kin groups and between men and women’ (Abu-Lughod 1990, 51). They not only bring two individuals into a relationship but also create ties between groups demarcated by kin and gender, and that they do so is symbolised through staged contests between these groups. It is these ties that come under pressure through a different (Western) set of marriage practices that emphasise the uniqueness of the relationship between man and women. And, as Abu-Lughod points out: In resisting the axes of kin and gender, the young women who want the lingerie, Egyptian songs, satin wedding dresses, and fantasies of private romance their elders resist are perhaps unwittingly enmeshing themselves in an extraordinarily complex set of new power relations. (Abu-Lughod 1990, 52) Through their resistance against traditional society, the young women are not simply liberating themselves but also entering a new set of power relations. They are now bound to the Egyptian economy and to the Egyptian state, ‘many of whose powers depend on separating kin groups and regulating individuals’ (Abu-Lughod 1990, 52). And, here, the elder women’s attempt to ridicule their youngers’ lingerie becomes itself a form of resistance: resistance against the Egyptian economy and state and its attempts to control individuals. By looking closely into how resistance unfolds in a social situation, AbuLughod becomes aware that certain analytical distinctions are less clear than they may appear at first sight. As she concludes, ‘If systems of power are multiple, then resisting at one level may catch people up at other levels’ (Abu-Lughod 1990, 53). Power and resistance cannot be clearly separated on a theoretical basis. The very acts that allow the young Bedouin women to emancipate themselves from the traditional ties to elder generations are simultaneously acts that immerse them in new relations of power, relations that, in turn, the elder women resist.

Criticising problematic effects of theories The historian Paul W. Schroeder is widely credited for having achieved a fundamental transformation of our view of European politics before and after the Congress of Vienna in 1814. In his monumental study The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Schroeder (1994) corrects a widespread misinterpretation of the ‘European Concert’ of Great Powers established at Vienna. The Concert period was – and still is – often associated with the notion of balance-ofpower. This association is not as such false: The term was used by statesmen (they were basically all men) at the time of the Congress. However, the term does not imply that the practice of the Concert was predominantly one of balancing power, in the sense that state leaders were preoccupied with maximising their own power

Microanalysis as ideology critique 235 in order to keep the power of other actors in check. Quite on the contrary, the Congress period was, as Schroeder shows, marked by a crucial departure from an earlier concept of balance-of-power according to which balancing power meant little else than furthering one’s own interests. Schroeder argues that leaders and diplomats in the eighteenth century had a tremendously destructive understanding of inter-state politics. To achieve a balance meant, for them, only to maximise their own share of the cake. This understanding led, for instance, to various partitions of states, such as the divisions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. Whenever one actor gained, the others sought ‘compensations’ for themselves, so that – allegedly – the balance was kept. The result was a period of unceasing conflict and war: ‘Balance-of-power rules and practices were not a solution to war in the eighteenth century (if they ever have been) but a major part of the problem’ (Schroeder 1994, 6). In order to overcome the condition of a nearly permanent threat of violent conflict, state leaders had to overcome their misguided theoretical understanding of the balance-of-power. Schroeder argues that this is precisely what they learned at Vienna. Schroeder explicitly treats the eighteenth-century balance-of-power doctrine as a ‘belief system, an ideology’ (1994, 9). He is critical of a specific understanding this concept as it manifested itself in historical practices before the Congress of Vienna. The main thrust of Schroeder’s book is a detailed reconstruction, written in the style of classical diplomatic history, of who made a specific decision when and where, and for what reasons. Schroeder zooms in on event after event, war after war, battle after battle, from 1763, the end of the Seven Years War, to 1848. But Schroeder does so for a critical purpose. His argument is that decisionmakers before 1814 lacked a conception of a durable peace. To structure and orient their relations to each other, they had only the notion of balance-of-power, which endured not only because of its ‘surface plausibility and consistency’ or its political advantages (Schroeder 1994, 10). Rather, Schroeder asserts, ‘the chief attractive power of this balance-of-power doctrine, then as now, was its apparent inescapability, the absence of a practical alternative’ (1994, 10). What Schroeder’s study of a large number of specific political actions and decisions – his book is 894 pages long – shows is that the balance-of-power doctrine worked as an ideology precisely in the sense Robert Cox has described it: A theory that concealed its own standpoint in space and time (Cox 1981, 128). The doctrine made to appear something as natural and inevitable that was, in fact, not without alternatives. Among IR theories, the concept of balance-of-power is often associated with the theories of realism and neorealism. While the claim that the pursuit of power is rooted in human nature is indeed sometimes associated with classical realist thinkers, this does not imply that they understood the balance-of-power doctrine precisely as state leaders understood it in the eighteenth century. Still, there are textbook versions of realism that narrow it down to claims about the inevitability and permanency of the struggle for power and the resulting need to further one’s own power in turn. Moreover, the neorealist Kenneth Waltz in particular has emphasised the inevitability of the pursuit of self-interest in an anarchical political

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system – not because of human nature, but because of systemic conditions. As Waltz emphasises, ‘self-help is necessarily the principle of action in an anarchic order’ (1979, 111). Schroeder’s study demonstrates the enormously destructive consequences of such a theoretical claim if it becomes an ideological belief held by political decision-makers. Take, as an example, Schroeder’s analysis of the Austrian leadership’s choice to abandon its ‘longstanding principle of preserving Poland’ (1994, 146). As Schroeder analyses it, Austrian reasoning was guided by the idea that this measure would serve Austria best in securing its own existence and power – in other words, it would be its best strategy for ‘helping itself’: It would enhance its relative position vis-à-vis Prussia and Russia by securing the acquisition of territory for Austria in Southern Poland and by bringing Prussia and Russia into an agonistic relationship. These aims exemplify, writes Schroeder, ‘how balance-of-power thinking escalates conflicts’ (1994, 147). Moving to the micro-level and analysing in-depth specific justifications for a decision, Schroeder mounts a critical challenge to a specific theoretical idea: Namely, that in international politics, only the seeking of ‘compensations’ (self-help) will lead to survival and success. On the contrary, Schroeder argues, this theoretical idea leads not to survival, but to destruction. The ideological character of the balance-of-power doctrine becomes apparent in particular through Schroeder’s analysis of the transformation that was achieved in 1814. Schroeder claims that, through trial and error, and through the experience of enormous destruction, European political elites learned to value the existence of an international order in its own right. They ‘managed to concentrate on creating a political coalition for the purpose of durable peace rather than victory’ (Schroeder 1994, 581). The peace that followed the Congress of Vienna – a peace, it should be noted, that primarily concerned the relations between European sovereigns but ignored relations between them and their peoples and between them and extra-European polities – was neither the result of ‘favourable circumstance, war-weariness, ideological uniformity, or other contingent factors’ (Schroeder 1994, 577–578). Instead, it ‘came by effort and design’ and resulted from ‘consciously confronting structural problems and conflicts’ (Schroeder 1994, 578). European decision-makers learned that peace required both action and effort, that it required the deliberate choice to focus on how to stabilise relations rather than pursue only one’s victory – they learned, after all, what peace is, and that peace cannot exist as long as there is belief in the theoretical principle that everyone needs to help themselves.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed how microanalysis – by ‘zooming in’ on the details of specific social situations – can deliver a challenge to extant theoretical categories and assumptions. It can do so in at least four ways: First, it can show how theoretical models travel into practice, where they are used by practitioners to shape and change the world that is explained by the models. Second, it can create awareness about the cultural specificity of theoretical concepts by pointing out

Microanalysis as ideology critique 237 how the same events can be interpreted quite differently if different cultural categories are applied. Third, it can demonstrate that certain analytical distinctions or concepts deliver inadequate impressions of the complexity of social action. Finally, it can reveal concrete problematic political effects of specific theoretical assumptions. The motivation for this intervention is to encourage those scholars who are interested in the details of social situations – in the detailed unfolding of very specific happenings and events – to think about how their own research relates to certain broader, more general assumptions, ideas or hypotheses that are held in streams of social science. The study of politics engages with a matter that is difficult to predict or fashion into boxes. From the viewpoint of Hannah Arendt (1958), politics deals with the unpredictable, as such. One cannot predict what happens when people act in common, since in their acting they appear in their uniqueness. This appearance is, for Arendt, the very purpose of political action, and it may be one reason why theories must fail to predict what will happen in the future. Events make their own theories – this is a view that Marshall Sahlins would also subscribe to, and we have witnessed the phenomenon in IR, where social constructivism took a specific turn and gained influence only when the Cold War ended. The point here is that we need to better understand what theoretical assumptions do in the world they aspire to explain. Given the inevitable double hermeneutic of social science, there is no way to isolate practice from (social) science. Practitioners think about what they do and interpret their own and others’ behaviour. This is, of course, no new insight. However, IR would much benefit from studies that enquire into the practical and political role of certain basic ideas that are widely held to be ‘merely’ or ‘purely’ theoretical (Schindler 2014). Most fundamentally, this has implications for macro-theory’s claim to be able to identify the main driving forces of international history, a claim that Kenneth Waltz formulated in his famous book Theory of International Politics which still yields considerable influence in the discipline, if not for its contents, then for its style of theorising. Waltz describes abstraction – the moving away from reality – as the fundamental task of theory, and he attempts to identify propelling principles and driving forces that are invisible to the ‘naked eye’ (1979, 10). But this very attempt stands in an uncanny relationship to the conspiracy theories that proliferate today, which are equally based on the premise that the conspiratorial forces they identify are invisible to the naked eye, but nonetheless enormously powerful (Fluck 2016; Aistrope and Bleiker 2018). Understanding this kind of macro-theory which claims to know forces that nobody can see or perceive with her own senses, but that allegedly has enormous ‘explanatory power’ (Waltz 1979, 7), is a pressing political concern today. We need to understand the historical origins and the political uses of specific theories. We need to make theories the subject matter of our studies, in order to understand how they impact the world when people begin to use their assumptions and operations. This does not imply a renunciation of our own engagement in theory. The implication of this specific ‘micro-move’ is, rather, that theorising

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is a continuous task and that this task is not conducted in an ivory tower. The link to practice is not only that theorists educate students but also that we – academic theorists – gain our insights by reflecting on experiences we share with others who equally live in this world. No wonder, then, that we can use an analysis of the structures of our own thinking for a diagnostic of the world. It is R.B.J. Walker who famously argued that IR theories may be more interesting as ‘phenomena to be explained than as explanations’ (Walker 1993, 6). Walker himself never considered studying everyday practices and ‘lay’ theories to achieve this goal, but this is the promise Neumann clearly recognised – a promise that is, it seems to me, still largely unfulfilled when it comes to the study of international relations.

Notes 1 I thank Benjamin Martill, Alejandro Esguerra and Frank Nullmeier for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this text. I also thank Tobias Wille, to whom I owe knowledge of several of the texts discussed extensively in this chapter. 2 Ideology is a complex and contested theoretical concept (see, in particular, the contributions by Herborth and Edelmann in this volume). For this understanding of ideology critique, see for instance Jaeggi (2009) and Lepold (2018). 3 Also in the natural sciences, and notably in physics, this understanding has been questioned with the emergence of quantum science. See Wendt (2015).

References Abu-Lughod, Lila (1990): The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women, in: American Ethnologist 17 (1), pp. 41–55. Adler, Emanuel and Pouliot, Vincent (eds.) (2011): International practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adorno, Theodor (1997 [1969]): Soziologie und empirische Forschung, in: Adorno, Theodor (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften. Band 8. Soziologische Schriften I, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 404–434. Aistrope, Tim and Bleiker, Roland (2018): Conspiracy and foreign policy, in: Security Dialogue 49 (3), pp. 165–182. Arendt, Hannah (1958): The human condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ashley, Richard (1987): The geopolitics of geopolitical space: Toward a critical social theory of international politics, in: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 12 (1), pp. 403–434. Berger, Tobias and Esguerra, Alejandro (eds.) (2018): World politics in translation, London: Routledge. Braun, Benjamin, Schindler, Sebastian and Wille, Tobias (2019): Rethinking agency in International Relations: Performativity, performances, an actor-networks, in: Journal of International Relations and Development, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41268-018-0147-z. Chakravarty, Anuradha (2013): Political science and the ‘micro-politics’ research agenda, in: Journal of Political Science & Public Affairs 1 (1). DOI: 10.4172/2332-0761.1000e103. Cox, Robert (1981): Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory, in: Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10 (2), pp. 126–155. Esguerra, Alejandro, Freistein, Katja and Groth, Stefan (2017): Micro observations and international organizations, Paper presented at the conference of the IR section of the German Political Science Association, Bremen, October.

Microanalysis as ideology critique 239 Fluck, Matthew (2016): Theory, ‘truthers’, and transparency: Reflecting on knowledge in the twenty-first century, in: Review of International Studies 42, pp. 48–73. Giddens, Anthony (1984): The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jaeggi, Rahel (2009): Rethinking ideology, in: de Bruin, Boudewijn and Zurn, Christopher (eds.), New waves in political philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 63–86. Koddenbrock, Kai (2015): Strategies of critique in International Relations: From Foucault and Latour towards Marx, in: European Journal of International Relations 21 (2), pp. 243–266. Lepold, Kristina (2018): An ideology critique of recognition: Judith Butler in the context of the contemporary debate on recognition, in: Constellations 25 (3), pp. 474–484. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12368. MacKenzie, Donald (2006): An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCourt, David (2016): Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism, in: International Studies Quarterly 60 (3), pp. 475–485. Neumann, Iver (2002): Returning practice to the linguistic turn: The case of diplomacy, in: Millenium: Journal of International Studies 31 (3), pp. 627–651. Neumann, Iver (2012): At home with the diplomats: Inside a European foreign ministry, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Neumann, Iver and Pouliot, Vincent (2011): Untimely Russia: Hysteresis in Russian-Western relations over the past millennium, in: Security Studies 20 (1), pp. 105–137. Ringmar, Erik (2014): The search for dialogue as a hindrance to understanding: Practices as inter-paradigmatic research program, in: International Theory 6 (1), pp. 1–27. Sahlins, Marshall (1985): Islands of history, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schindler, Sebastian (2014): Man versus state: Contested agency in the United Nations, in: Millenium: Journal of International Studies 43 (1), pp. 3–23. Schindler, Sebastian (2018): What is wrong with the United Nations? Cynicism and the translation of facts, in: Berger, Tobias and Esguerra, Alejandro (eds.), World politics in translation, London: Routledge, pp. 95–113. Schindler, Sebastian and Wille, Tobias (2019): How can we criticize international practices?, in: International Studies Quarterly 14 (2). DOI: 10.1093/isq/sqz057. Schmid, Davide (2018): The poverty of critical theory in International Relations: Habermas, Linklater and the failings of cosmopolitan critique, in: European Journal of International Relations 24 (1), pp. 198–220. Schroeder, Paul (1994): The transformation of European politics: 1763–1848, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon, Ty and Steele, Brent (2017): Micro-moves in International Relations theory, in: European Journal of International Relations 23 (2), pp. 267–291. Walker, Rob (1993): Inside/outside: International Relations as political theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, Kenneth (1979): Theory of international politics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Wendt, Alexander (2015): Quantum mind and social science: Unifying physical and social ontology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wille, Tobias (2018): Practice turn in International Relations, in: James, Patrick (ed.), Oxford bibliographies in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conclusion From the politics of knowledge to knowledge of politics Beate Jahn

Introduction This volume responds to the current crisis in world politics – a crisis that is not just political but also theoretical. For the political crisis of the end of the liberal world order (Duncombe and Dunne 2018) could not have occurred without the liberal theories that provided it with its guiding principles and practices – and with the broken promises of freedom, prosperity, dignity and peace. Liberal theories, in short, turned out to have been ideologies: Hiding contradictions and tensions while serving the interests of powerful actors. Knowledge thus played a crucial role in bringing about the current political crisis (Martill and Schindler, this volume). Knowledge, moreover, constitutes one of the major battle grounds within this crisis. The radical disjuncture between (liberal) theory and practice has given rise to populist movements in all parts of the world, paving the way for a resurgence of nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and power politics – including anti-intellectualism and a ‘post-truth’ style of politics. While the populists therefore dismiss the truth claims and general utility of science per se, others accuse particular approaches like ‘relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique’ of providing the basis for the emerging post-truth political culture (Edsall 2018). ‘Trump is the first president to turn postmodernism against itself’ (cited in Hanlon 2018). And while some academics worry that their work may, in fact, have been complicit in creating a ‘slippery slope’ leading to ‘the Trump administration’s ‘alternative facts’ (Whooley 2017), others highlight the gap between academia and politics: Populists don’t read Derrida and Foucault (Hanlon 2018). There is then a politics of knowledge at work in the current crisis: A political struggle over the relationship between politics and knowledge and its implications. And in its essence, I will show in these concluding remarks, this volume successfully demonstrates that a focus on the politics of knowledge has the potential to produce intellectually and politically fruitful knowledge of politics. The current conjuncture raises two challenges for academics: First, to explain how liberal theories have turned into ideologies and, second, to ascertain whether theories can be distinguished from ideologies, truth from lies and ‘fake news’. The need to separate knowledge and politics, or theory and ideology, is generally regarded as one of the core tasks of the sciences (e.g. Behr, this volume).

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Yet the chapters in this volume suggest that reflecting on the intimate connection between theory and ideology provides the basis for a highly constructive research agenda. I will draw out this argument in four steps: First, I will show empirically that the studies in this volume exemplify the theory-as-ideology paradox: The analysis of theory as ideology by distinguishing between theory and ideology. Second, I will provide a theoretical explanation of this paradox by returning to the historical origins of the relationship between theory and ideology and its role in the constitution of modern politics. Third, I will derive the methodological implications of a theory-as-ideology approach from this theoretical account and demonstrate the fruitfulness of its application in the contributions to this volume. I will conclude by sketching a theory-as-ideology approach to the current politics of knowledge – resulting in an original conception of the current crisis.

The theory-as-ideology paradox – in practice Exploring the relationship between theory and ideology, the contributions to this volume exhibit the theory-as-ideology paradox: The performative contradiction of having to use separate terms – theory and ideology – to describe their inseparability, theories as ideologies. In the abstract, theories are associated with contemplation, argumentation, discourse and openness to ambiguity; they can, therefore, be distinguished from ideologies, which are linked to activism, propaganda, essentialism, truth claims and the attempt to resolve tensions (Behr, this volume). While these conceptualisations of theory and ideology are broadly shared by the authors in this volume, the analysis of particular theories/ideologies highlights the complex ways in which theory and ideology appear to be intertwined. A first set of studies suggests that theories tend to turn into ideologies and vice versa. Thus, Benjamin Martill (this volume) shows that the British liberal politician Jo Grimond translated many of the particular interests of his party into more general liberal academic theories. Similarly, C. Wilfred Jenks, inspired by his practical political work in the International Labour Organization (ILO), turned international welfarist ideas into academic theories based on interdependence, and David Mitrany began his career as a journalist whose functionalist ideas were taken up by officials in international organisations and turned into the most popular academic approach to international organisations (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). Here, ideologies – ideas arising from particular perspectives and political interests – are transformed into theories with a claim to general, rather than just particular, validity, and relevance. Conversely, theories are frequently translated into ideologies. James T. Shotwell turned his academic theories on international organisation into an ideology designed to sell the idea of the ILO to a wider, and suspicious, American public (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). Academic theories of neoliberalism, too, Philip Cerny (this volume) shows, were translated into an ideology and economic and political practices. Theories and ideologies, these examples suggest, cannot be clearly distinguished because they exist on a developmental spectrum.1 Thus, Holthaus and Steffek investigate these ‘trading zones’ between academia and politics in which theories are turned into ideologies and vice versa.

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A second dimension of this intimate connection between theory and ideology lies, as Sebastian Schindler (this volume) shows, in the constitutive role of theory for practice. Irrespective of their intentions, economic theories have a performative effect on market actors; Maori cosmology leads to conflict over an English flagpole; an eighteenth-century understanding of balance-of-power shaped (highly detrimental) policies; and a particular understanding of power and resistance shapes practices and thus the subject matter to which it is applied. All these cases demonstrate that theories cannot help but shape practices – and therefore turn into ideologies even where they do not pursue any particular political purpose. A third set of studies identifies the ideological dimensions internal to theory production. Thus, Albena Azmanova (this volume) analyses the theoretical moves that turn one of the most influential theories of the post–Cold War era – democracy theory – into an ideology. Tracing the development of critical theory into democracy theory in the work of Jürgen Habermas, Azmanova identifies a crucial shift in the status of capitalism. While the first generation of critical theorists treated capitalism as the social basis of modern society, Habermas turns capitalism into a sub-system of modern society, on a par with the private and public spheres. This allowed him to present democracy as emancipatory despite the fact that it could democratise only the political organisation of capitalism but not capitalism itself. Similar moves characterise Habermas’s theory of communicative action which more generally relies on the separation of communication from power (Hutchings 2005, 165), the lifeworld from the system (Schmid 2018, 204; Weber 2005, 203), the subject from the object (Fluck 2014, 57), emancipation from an analysis of existing injustices (Jahn 1998, 615, 622). The separation of different dimensions of politics underpins, as Azmanova shows, a conflation between democracy as object of analysis, normative horizon of critique, social ontology and tool for progressive change. Such essentialising moves also play a role in establishing democratic war theory – itself meant to critique the ideological nature of the democratic peace thesis (see Ish-Shalom 2013; Smith 2007) – as an ideology. As Valerie Waldow (this volume) shows, democratic war theory uncritically associates the core concept of democracy with liberal ideals that tend to override it. It also uses the same datasets as the democratic peace thesis without questioning the conception of democracy underpinning it. Hence, by failing to recognise the essential contestability of all concepts more generally and by failing to apply this insight to the core concept of democracy in particular, Waldow shows, democratic war theory not only imports and confirms core elements of the democratic peace thesis it initially set out to criticise but also removes the emancipatory potential of a contested concept of democracy from its theory. In these cases, in sum, ideological elements are embedded within and a constitutive element of theories – and cannot easily be removed if all concepts are contestable (Waldow, this volume). Philip Wallmeier’s analysis (this volume) of dominant political theory and the belief system of Ecovillagers highlights a fourth dimension of the intimate connection of theory and ideology: Namely, that a dominant theory/ideology tends

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to generate other, competing theories/ideologies. First, Wallmeier points out, each of these sets of ideas is regarded by their proponents as theory and by the other side as ideology – highlighting the wider point that one party’s theory is another party’s ideology, and vice versa. More important, however, the dominant theory/ideology appears to generate its own competitors. The worldview of the Ecovillagers, Wallmeier shows, is formulated in direct contradiction to the core assumptions of the dominant ideology. Similarly, it was the dominant theory/ ideology of liberalism that generated, from the nineteenth century onward, a whole host of competing theories/ideologies: Conservatism, communism, fascism, anti-imperialism, religious fundamentalism have all been defined in direct opposition to liberalism (Jahn 2019). The dominance and widespread acceptance of a particular theory therefore does not lead to a settled distinction between theory and ideology but rather to the production of new theoretical/ideological challenges. In sum, then, the empirical studies in this volume dramatise the theory-as-ideology paradox: That even while all authors distinguish between theory and ideology in the abstract, once confronted with concrete cases, this distinction becomes impossible. Theories tend to morph into ideologies, ideologies are translated into theories, theories constitute practice, ideological moves are embedded within theories and a dominant theory/ideology begets its own competitors. Instead of being able to draw a line between theories and ideologies, these studies identify fluid spaces in which one turns into the other – scholar-practitioner ‘trading zones’, morphological dynamics, mixed identities and mutually constitutive dynamics. They suggest, in sum, that the terms ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’ are normative concepts expressing deeply held aspirations that are never quite realised in practice. But they also suggest that theory-as-ideology is a ubiquitous feature of modern political life.

The theory-as-ideology paradox – in theory This theory-as-ideology paradox is generally regarded as a problem. Confronted with potentially dangerous political ideologies – such as historical or current forms of populism – academics are searching for ways to distinguish between ‘unsubstantiated, distorting and distorted’ claims and valid ones, for a distinction between theory and ideology that provides the means to ‘ceaselessly’ deconstruct invalid claims (Behr, this volume). And, yet, the historical origins of this theoryas-ideology paradox suggest, I want to argue, that rather than being a problem to be overcome, it provides the essential grammar of modern politics – and therefore also the necessary basis for fruitful academic practice. The term ‘ideology’, as Benjamin Herborth (this volume) shows, was ‘invented’ at the end of the eighteenth century by French intellectuals who argued that ideas were ultimately rooted in physical nature – and not derived from God or authoritative scriptures. Ideology was thus originally simply the logic or science of ideas. And right from the start, the French idéologues used this epistemic claim for political purposes: Denouncing religious thought as prejudice and superstition serving

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the interests of a corrupt clergy – in contrast to liberal principles like individual freedom, private property, constitutional government and free markets that the idéologues derived from an empirical (material) grasp of the nature of society (Wokler 2006). Yet while this epistemic claim itself was not new (Herborth, this volume; Juergensmeyer 2009, 19), it radically changed the nature of politics once liberal forces had made their way into the centre of power during the nineteenth century. For now, the exercise of political power was no longer justified with reference to God’s law but with reference to an accurate grasp of the nature of society itself. These liberal forces, hence, did not just replace conventional actors in power; they replaced the epistemic basis of political power itself – which is why, as Herborth shows, Napoleon perceived them as dangerous and returned to religion. Political rule was now justified with the promise of realising society’s empirically derived natural laws and principles and could be challenged only by demonstrating that the reigning political principles and institutions did not ‘fit’ the nature of society. In other words, political power was based on a ‘theory’ of society; challenging it required an exposure of this ‘theory’ as ‘ideology’ and the development of a new and better ‘theory’ of society to replace it. These historical developments highlight the mutually constitutive nature of theory, ideology and modern politics. Once political power was justified with reference to an accurate model of society and the realisation of its natural laws, the development of such models – theories – became indispensable for politics. Moreover, these theories had to justify the exercise of power per se, that is, in the interests of society as a whole. They could not just serve particular interests. The challenge therefore lay in producing models of society, theories, that could not be accused of representing particular interests or perspectives. And the solution to this problem lay in the establishment of modern research universities in the second half of the nineteenth century. These institutions were funded by the state, thus expressing the direct political interest in knowledge production, but they were provided with academic freedom in order to ensure that theories could be developed independent of particular political interests and pressures. Modern politics, in sum, requires theory – and the ultimate aim of theory is to serve politics (Jahn 2017). This political raison d’être of academic work finds expression in the worries of academics about their lack of political relevance (Jahn 2017; Jentleson 2002; Turton 2015; Wallace 1996) as well as in the concrete efforts to translate academic work into political practice – whether as public intellectuals like Jürgen Habermas (Pensky 2001; Reed 2014) or by serving in government like James T. Shotwell (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). Meanwhile, the dependence of government on academic work finds expression in calls for ‘useful’ academic work and proof of ‘impact’ (Bastow et al. 2014; Avey and Desch 2014). ‘Theory needs ideology to become socially meaningful’, as Florian Edelmann (this volume), following Luhmann, puts it. Hence, it is the mutually constitutive nature of theory and politics that turns the former inevitably into ideology. The exercise of political power in the name of natural laws, after all, entails a performative contradiction: Where power has

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to be imposed, it does not conform to the natural forces of society. The exercise of power thus generates resistance which exposes the dominant theory as an ideology – as serving particular and not common interests – and generates new and competing theories of society or ideologies. This is why the ascent of liberal forces into positions of power generated a host of new ideologies (Jahn 2019) – including today’s populisms and ecological thought (Wallmeier, this volume). Similarly, in the academic context, the democratic war theory sets out to demonstrate the ideological nature of the democratic peace thesis – only for itself to turn into an ideology precisely because of its ultimate commitment to serve political ends (Waldow, this volume). But this dynamic is not a one-way street. Jo Grimond (Martill, this volume), C. Wilfred Jenks or David Mitrany (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume) were political actors who translated their particular interests into academic theories in order to widen their appeal and justify the power exercised by their respective party or international organisation. Theory is thus able to establish hierarchies precisely because it abstracts from particular contexts and claims to serve general interests – a dynamic that also operates within academia, as Katarzyna Kaczmarska (this volume) shows. In sum, the theory-as-ideology paradox arises from the fact that in the modern context, the exercise of political power requires a justificatory theory or model of society even while this same political purpose turns any such theory into an ideology. This explains the performative contradiction outlined earlier: If academics want to support the exercise of power in the common rather than in particular interests, they are forced to develop theory – to abstract from particular contexts and interests, to use universal concepts such as humanity as the normative standard, to distinguish theory from ideology (Behr, this volume) – even while this political purpose turns each theory into an ideology. Political actors, meanwhile, are confronted with the same dilemma of requiring theories that sell their exercise of power as being in the common interest. Yet recognising that this theory-as-ideology paradox is constitutive of modern politics, suggests, first of all, that it is not a problem that can be solved by the one or other theoretical move. Overcoming it would require the wholesale transformation of modern politics – including the social forces underpinning it and serving as the ‘empirical’ basis of modern theories (Horkheimer 1986). But, second, the very fact that theory-as-ideology plays such a constitutive and pervasive role in modern politics also suggests that it can provide the basis for highly fruitful analyses of modern politics. It suggests, in short, that the recognition of theory-as-ideology may not constitute a problem but offer a solution – which I will explore in the next section.

Theory-as-ideology – methodological implications If theory-as-ideology is a constitutive feature of world politics, it opens up a distinctive approach to political studies. The exercise of power, as shown earlier, requires theory as a justificatory model and policy guide; in playing this political role, however, theory turns into ideology and it generates competing ideologies/

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theories. Theoretical/ideological struggles thus drive the development of modern politics, and the research agenda suggested in this project takes this insight as a starting point for studying world politics. The theory-as-ideology assumption paves the way for at least three analytical moves. The first takes the claim that ideas arise from particular social relations seriously. Ideology is an organised ‘social deception’ and theorising ‘ideologyin-use’ therefore means to theorise ‘a conception-of-social-forces-in-use’ (Herborth, this volume). One of the core tasks of analysis therefore lies in identifying the social forces underpinning theories/ideologies. Behind the personal interests of politicians like Jo Grimond, officers of international organisations like Jenks or economic actors lie social forces that spur on the development of particular theories and their role as an organised deception. Thus, it was the crisis of the 1970s – including the fiscal crisis of the state, the breakdown of social partnerships and neocorporatist arrangements, economic stagnation and the decline of the Bretton Woods system – that led to the development of neoliberal theory, ideology and practice (Cerny, this volume). And it was economic interdependence that produced high levels of domestic and international inequality – and thus the danger of revolution and war – that motivated ideas about new forms of governance through international organisations in general and welfare internationalism in particular (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). Similar concerns about the social forces behind the political and military Cold War stand-off between communism and capitalism lay behind Jo Grimond’s arguments for the simultaneous pursuit of European integration and collective deterrence (Martill, this volume). By explicitly focussing on the social forces giving rise to particular theories/ ideologies, the theory-as-ideology approach provides an analysis of world politics even while it repoliticises dominant theories. The second analytical move builds on the insight that theories are ideologies. Students of world politics can, therefore, take particular theories and investigate the concrete theoretical moves that turn them into ideologies. In the case of democracy theory, as Azmanova shows, it is the removal of capitalism as constitutive of society as a whole – and its reconceptualisation as one dimension next to others – that paves the way for an identification of democracy with emancipation. In the case of democratic war theory, Waldow (this volume) shows, these moves consist in the failure to treat democracy as a contested concept and the use of data based on the dominant conception of liberal democracy, leading to an identification of democracy with liberalism and obscuring the emancipatory potential of a contested concept of democracy. What is more, democratic war theorists justify these ‘shortcuts’ explicitly with the desire and need to inform and shape political practice (Waldow, this volume). Investigating these theoretical moves identifies the issues, concepts and dimensions of social life – such as capitalism or alternative conceptions of democracy – that a particular order needs to obscure, essentialise, decontest, depoliticise; this constitutes the first step in repoliticising them. The third analytical move consists in tracing the practical or performative role of theories as ideologies. That is, to identify their intended and unintended

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audiences, to investigate the uptake of particular theories, to analyse the changes that turn particular theories into political propaganda, to identify the political projects they justify and guide, as well as the reactions and responses they instigate. Thus, Holthaus and Steffek (this volume) show, for example, how James T. Shotwell managed to generate support for the ILO amongst a highly suspicious American public – by arguing that it was confronted with a choice between the ILO and revolution. Similarly, David Mitrany’s functionalism was not taken up by officials in international organisations and by IR scholars just because it provided a justification for the exercise – and indeed expansion – of the power of international organisations or liberal institutionalist theories: It also promised management and control of the tensions produced within capitalism and between capitalism and communism in the Cold War era (Holthaus and Steffek, this volume). Neoliberalism, too, Cerny shows, creates a myth with a deep hold on economic and political actors as well as the public at large – leading to anachronistic economic and political practices that remain unchallenged (Cerny, this volume). Sebastian Schindler (this volume) also investigates the constitutive role of theories as ideologies for political practice. Thus, the eighteenth century understanding of the balance-of-power theory generated war and conflict. Economic theories – though in no way intended as a practical intervention – nevertheless shape the behaviour of actors in the market, for better or for worse. Different cosmologies lead English settlers and Maoris into conflict over a flagpole and stand in the way of its resolution (Schindler, this volume). And the negative social and ecological effects of dominant political theories also lead, as Wallmeier (this volume) shows, not only to the development of alternative and competing ecological theories as ideologies but also to the constitution of entirely new lifestyles in Ecovillages. In all these cases, theory-as-ideology shapes reality – often unbeknownst to the relevant political actors; it drives political development from the behaviour of individuals in the market to the establishment of international organisations, from conflicts over flagpoles to those over forms of life. The analysis of these translations of theory into ideology and practice therefore opens up new forms of engagement with the relevant issues and actors. Recognising theory-as-ideology thus paves the way for a systematic analysis of world politics: Of the social forces that at any time give rise to particular theories, of the theoretical moves that turn these theories into ideologies and of the way in which these theories as ideologies shape political practice. And this approach reveals issues other approaches do not. It is only when we conceive of theoryas-ideology that we study the social forces that give rise to theories – rather than establishing their empirical veracity or their internal logic. It is only when we are alert to the inevitable translation of theory into ideology that we search for, identify and challenge those theoretical moves that aim to resolve tensions, essentialise concepts and establish truth claims. And it is only when we see theoryas-ideology that we analyse the practical political work of theories – and thus establish the possibility of change. Recognising theory-as-ideology constitutes a politically and intellectually fruitful research agenda – as I will indicate in the last section.

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From the politics of knowledge to knowledge of politics This volume provides the empirical, theoretical and methodological basis for a theory-as-ideology research agenda. In doing so, however, it also offers an analysis of the current crisis that triggered renewed discussions of the utility of critique. It shows that the origin of this crisis lies in the disjuncture between the promises of liberal theories and the results of their practices, in their operation as ideologies: Obscuring particularities and contradictions, justifying the exercise of power, guiding practices that led to economic inequality, political oppression, insecurity, ecological crisis and the constitution of competing populist ideologies (Jahn 2019, 2013). The theory-as-ideology approach, in other words, reveals the ideas that (mis-)guide actions and the actions that (mis-)guide ideas. To demonstrate its promise, I will end these comments by briefly sketching a theory-as-ideology approach to the politics of knowledge mentioned in the introduction. Today, higher education, universities, academic knowledge in general and specific types of knowledge like natural sciences, social sciences or critical theories are the subject of accusations, regulations, privatisations and so on. From a theory-as-ideology perspective, the analysis of this battle over knowledge first asks the question, Which social forces are responsible for turning knowledge into such a battleground? And the answer, arguably, lies – as the term suggests – in the recent shift towards a knowledge economy (Powell and Snellman 2004). Technological development has transformed production which increasingly requires skills and information – and hence enhances the importance of knowledge in society. Under these circumstances, academic knowledge plays a twofold role: On the one hand, it is directly involved in the development of technology and information and, on the other, it provides the necessary skills and training for work in the knowledge economy. And this means that access to knowledge – both in the form of economically valuable research and in the form of university education – engenders deep divisions in society, between those who benefit economically from this research and those who don’t, between those with prospects for ‘good jobs’ in the knowledge economy and those who drop into the precariat. The second question suggested by a theory-as-ideology approach is, What are the essentialising, decontesting, depoliticising moves that turn the current debate into an ideological struggle? And the most fundamental of these moves surely lies in the starting point of the entire debate: In the unchallenged claim that academic knowledge per se is economically, politically and socially useless. Economic actors deny the fact that much of the knowledge that powers the knowledge economy was initially produced in universities and by publicly trained scientists and present only its subsequently privatised version (protected by intellectual property rights and owned by private companies) as valuable (May 2000). Populists question the value of academic knowledge because it is the means by which social inequality – access to economic and social recognition – is constituted. And governments curry favour (and votes) with capitalist interests and popular discontents by accusing academics of squandering public funds by lazing around in ivory towers satisfying their intellectual interests instead of making a constructive

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contribution to the community. In fact, this ideological move of simply denying the crucial economic, social and political role of academic knowledge is so powerful today that academics themselves often fail to recognise its value (Jahn 2017). The third question suggested by a theory-as-ideology approach is, then, What kind of political projects and practices do these ideological debates constitute? Denying the value of public knowledge production enables economic actors to call for the privatisation of knowledge – whether in the form of intellectual property rights or the privatisation of higher education. By denying the intrinsic value of intellectual knowledge, populists undermine the theoretical/ideological justifications for the exercise of power by the establishment in a knowledge economy – as well as specific intellectual approaches like gender studies that appear to facilitate upward movement for some groups while keeping others out (Evans 2019). And by denying the positive economic and social contributions of academics, governments justify the expansion of political control over universities – or the restriction of academic freedom. This involves subjecting higher education to economic forms of discipline and competition – through (partial) privatisations, the introduction of various forms of ranking exercises, the channelling of funds into ‘useful’ STEM subjects while starving humanities and social sciences, extensive levels of surveillance, auditing and regulations. For academics, finally, this denial of their economic, social and political contributions leads to the constant need to justify their work – often in the ideological terms provided by this debate (see Jahn 2017). A theory-as-ideology analysis of the current politics of knowledge thus produces a knowledge of politics that goes beyond the conventional debate. It suggests that what constitutes populist movements and their anti-intellectualism is not the nature or substance of particular theoretical approaches but rather the fact that knowledge has become one of the most important divisive features in society. It suggests that what constitutes the struggle over academic knowledge today is not its inherent ‘uselessness’ but the exact opposite. It is the fact that knowledge is economically and socially so valuable in today’s society that economic actors want to privatise it, that publics want access to it and that governments want to control it. It also suggests that a constructive social and political role for academia does not require the separation of theory from ideology but the recognition of theory-as-ideology.

Note 1 See also Michael Freeden (2013) and the discussion by Benjamin Herborth (this volume).

References Avey, Paul and Desch, Michael (2014): What do policymakers want from us? Results of a survey of current and former senior national security decision makers, in: International Studies Quarterly 58 (4), pp. 227–246.

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Bastow, Simon, Dunleavy, Patrick and Tinkler, Jane (2014): The impact of the social sciences: How academics and their research make a difference, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Duncombe, Constance and Dunne, Tim (2018): After liberal world order?, in: International Affairs 94 (1), pp. 25–42. Edsall, Thomas (2018): Is President Trump a stealth postmodernist or just a liar?, in: New York Times, 25.01.2018, [online] www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/trump-postmodernismlies.html [accessed: 06.09.2019]. Evans, Jennifer (2019): The new war on gender studies, in: The Conversation, 06.01.2019, [online] http://theconversation.com/the-new-war-on-gender-studies-109109 [accessed 25.07.2019]. Fluck, Matthew (2014): The best there is? Communication, objectivity and the future of critical International Relations theory, in: European Journal of International Relations 20 (1), pp. 56–79. Freeden, Michael (2013): The morphological analysis of ideology, in: Freeden, Michael and Stears, Mark (eds.), The Oxford handbook of political ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 115–137. Hanlon, Aaron (2018): Postmodernism didn’t cause Trump: It explains him, in: The Washington Post, 31.08.2018, [online] www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/postmodernismdidnt-cause-trump-it-explains-him/2018/08/30/0939f7c4-9b12-11e8-843b-36e177f30 81c_story.html?noredirect=on [accessed: 06.09.2019]. Horkheimer, Max (1986): Traditionelle und Kritische Theorien, Vier Aufsätze, Frankfurt: Fischer. Hutchings, Kimberly (2005): Speaking and hearing: Habermasian discourse ethics, feminism and International Relations, in: Review of International Studies 31 (1), pp. 155–165. Ish-Shalom, Piki (2013): Democratic peace: A political biography, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jahn, Beate (1998): One step forward, two steps back: Critical theory as the latest edition of liberal idealism, in: Millenium: Journal of International Studies 27 (3), pp. 613–641. Jahn, Beate (2013): Liberal internationalism: Theory, history, practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jahn, Beate (2017): Theorizing the political relevance of International Relations theory, in: International Studies Quarterly 61 (1), pp. 64–77. Jahn, Beate (2019): The sorcerer’s apprentice: Liberalism, ideology, and religion in world politics, in: International Relations 33 (2), pp. 322–337. Jentleson, Bruce (2002): The need for praxis: Bringing policy relevance back in, in: International Security 26 (4), pp. 169–183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/016228802753696816. Juergensmeyer, Mark (2009): Global rebellion: Religious challenges to the secular state: From Christian militias to al Quaeda, Oakland: University of California Press. May, Christopher (2000): The political economy of intellectual property rights: The new enclosures?, London: Routledge. Pensky, Max (2001): Editor’s introduction, in: Habermas, Jürgen (ed.), The postnational constellation: Political essays, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. vii–xvii. Powell, Walter and Snellman, Kaisa (2004): The knowledge economy, in: Annual Review of Sociology 30 (1), pp. 199–220. Reed, Matt (2014): The new public intellectuals, in: Inside Higher Ed., 17.02.2014, [online] www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/new-publicintellectuals [accessed: 06.09.2019].

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Schmid, Davide (2018): The poverty of critical theory in International Relations: Habermas, Linklater and the failings of cosmopolitan critique, in: European Journal of International Relations 24 (1), pp. 198–220. Smith, Tony (2007): A pact with the devil: Washington’s bid for world supremacy and the betrayal of the American promise, New York: Routledge. Turton, Helen (2015): Please mind the gap: Policy relevance and British IR, in: Perspectives on Politics 13 (2), pp. 399–401. Wallace, William (1996): Truth and power, monks and technocrats: Theory and practice in International Relations, in: Review of International Studies 22 (3), pp. 301–321. Weber, Martin (2005): The critical social theory of the Frankfurt School and the ‘social turn’ in IR, in: Review of International Studies 31 (1), pp. 1195–1209. Whooley, Owen (2017): Are we complicit? Talking social constructionalism in the age of Trump, in: SKAT: The Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, 23.02.2017, [online] https://asaskat.com/2017/02/23/are-wecomplicit-talking-social-constructionism-in-the-age-of-trump/ [accessed: 23.07.2019]. Wokler, Robert (2006): Ideology and the origins of social science, in: Goldie, Mark and Wokler, Robert (eds.), The Cambridge history of eighteenth century political thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 688–709.

Index

Adorno, Theodor 104–107, 113n4, 113n5 alternative facts 240; see also post-truth anthropology 27, 61, 64, 111, 145, 230–233 Arendt, Hannah 9, 20–22, 28–29, 74, 237 Ashley, Richard 5, 7, 59–60, 228 Bourdieu, Pierre 51–52, 67n2, 189, 212; see also Bourdieusian Bourdieusian 188, 212 Brexit 19, 34 Britain 168–169, 174, 197–198, 203 Buzan, Barry 53, 55, 58, 67n15 capitalism 35, 103–104, 106–112, 113n5, 114n9, 114n14, 147, 153–154, 191, 195, 242, 246–247 China 3, 65, 100, 147, 153, 179, 202 citizenship 10, 107–110, 220 classical realism 8, 193, 200, 235 climate change 4, 151, 214, 219 Cold War 3, 8, 10, 34, 165–166, 168, 171–173, 176, 178–181, 246–247 communicative rationality 10, 108–109, 242 communism 59, 100–103, 172–178, 181, 243, 246–247 conservatism 58, 243 cosmopolitanism 3, 173, 177 Cox, Robert 2, 7–9, 20, 24, 30n5, 73, 187–188, 191–192, 201, 228–229, 235 critical theory 26, 86, 101–107, 110–111, 114n8, 114n10, 210, 213; see also Frankfurt School democracy promotion 100, 119, 124, 131, 134n4 democratic capitalism 101, 104, 108–110, 114n14, 114n16, 115n18 democratic institutions 124, 133, 179

democratic peace 10, 114n7, 118–125, 127, 130–133, 173, 180, 195, 242, 245 democratic theory 1, 99–102, 111–112, 126, 130–133, 193 depoliticisation 36, 44, 49, 248 Derrida, Jacques 31n16, 128–129, 133, 240 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 36–38, 44, 48, 49n3, 113n3 double hermeneutic 8, 11, 30n4, 230–231, 237 Doyle, Michael 120, 123–124, 126, 177, 204 Durkheim, Émile 141, 212 Eastern Europe 100, 171–172, 174 Engels, Friedrich 35, 40–44, 103, 114n13 English School 55, 60, 76, 89 epistemology 5, 19–24, 27–28, 30n13, 46, 73, 87, 134n1, 190 essentially contested concept 102, 104, 128–129 Eurocentrism 79, 202 Europe 99, 106, 146, 148, 169, 195–196, 199, 202, 209, 231–234, 236 European Union 147, 153, 165, 169, 172, 246 false consciousness 39, 46, 100, 108–109, 112, 233 feminism 7, 20, 24, 213, 233 First World War 6, 194, 196 Foucault, Michel 114n8, 135n8, 155, 240 Frankfurt School 8, 25, 48, 74, 87–88, 101–106, 108, 110, 114n8; see also critical theory Freeden, Michael 44–46, 134n1, 189–190 functionalism 48, 87, 108, 198–200, 203, 247

Index gender 57, 64, 101, 113n5, 143, 220, 233–234, 249 Germany 19, 40, 113n4, 115n17, 147, 153–154, 156–157, 172, 226n3 globalisation 2–3, 10, 78, 80, 89, 90n6, 140, 145, 148, 151–153, 158–159, 190, 214 Gramsci, Antonio 7, 46–47, 73 Habermas, Jürgen 8, 10, 30n9, 72–74, 77, 86, 89, 101–102, 105–111, 114n17, 115n18, 242 Hayek, Friedrich 143, 154, 158, 159n3 Hobbes, Thomas 7–8, 89 Horkheimer, Max 22, 25–26, 31n15, 103–107, 113n4, 113n5, 114n16, 114n17, 245 human rights 3, 58, 119, 127, 177, 188, 200, 224 identity 26, 31n16, 79, 84–85, 89, 114n5, 130 ideology: allegations of 3, 11, 124, 210–213, 222–226; construction of 10, 102, 110–112, 115n18, 188; French ideologists 37, 113n3, 189; functions of 2, 22, 37, 46–47, 74, 100, 103, 190, 204; Ideologiekritik 102–103, 111, 114n6, 115n18, 213; morphological approach to 45, 243; theory-as- 1–2, 8–9, 11, 119, 134n1, 135n8, 241, 243, 245–249; thin variants 190–191, 203 International Labour Organization (ILO) 187, 193–196, 198, 200–203, 241 international law 118, 122, 130, 194, 201–203 international relations 36, 51, 53–54, 58–63, 65, 118, 124, 134n4, 165, 168, 171, 187, 189, 191, 194, 197, 209, 222, 225–226, 228, 238 international society 59–60, 79, 197 Israel 118, 209 Jenks, C. Wilfred 189, 200–203 Keohane, Robert 30n8, 55, 57–58, 63, 67n10, 166, 177, 191 Keynes, John Maynard 197, 199; see also Keynesian Keynesian 146, 154, 157; see also Keynes, John Maynard Laclau, Ernesto 44, 46–48, 49n7, 129 laissez-faire 36, 145, 152, 170

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late capitalism 72–73, 107 late-modernity 72–73, 78, 82, 85–87, 89; see also modernity Latour, Bruno 4, 87 League of Nations 192–194, 203 legitimacy 49, 83, 87, 101, 109, 122, 125, 133, 178, 180 liberalism: embedded liberalism 145, 148, 167; liberal democracy 100, 104–106, 110–112, 123–127, 133–134, 246; liberal internationalism 8, 166, 168, 177, 179; neo-liberalism 1, 7, 10, 63, 140–150, 152–154, 156–159, 241, 247; Ordoliberalism 140, 143–144, 152–153, 155–157, 159n3 lifeworld 73, 84, 89, 110, 242 Locke, John 24, 36–37 Luhmann, Niklas 46, 72–89 Mannheim, Karl 8, 20, 22–24, 30n10, 30n14, 46, 134n1, 212 Marcuse, Herbert 9, 20, 22, 25–26, 29n2, 31n15, 31n16, 104–105, 113n4, 114n16 Marx, Karl 35–36, 38–44, 46, 101–105, 108, 110, 113n5, 114n10, 114n12, 114n13, 114n17, 134n1; see also Marxism Marxism 36, 100, 189–190, 193–194; see also Marx, Karl materialism 36, 39–40, 42, 44 Mitrany, David 168, 189, 194, 198–200, 203, 241, 245, 247 modernity 72, 74–75, 84–88, 107, 140, 142, 210, 224–225; see also latemodernity Morgenthau, Hans 9, 20, 22–24, 29n2, 30n10, 30n11, 30n12, 30n14, 57, 61–62, 165 Mouffe, Chantal 47–48, 129, 133 Napoleon 36–38, 49n3, 189, 244 nationalism 190, 197, 240 NATO 3, 175 Nazism 21, 154, 189 neoliberal capitalism 100, 106, 153 nuclear weapons 171–172, 175, 179 political science 37, 61, 141, 209–210, 212, 220–223, 228 political theory 22, 24, 44, 99–102, 111–113, 119, 134n4, 142, 167, 242 post-Cold War 100, 118, 237, 242 postmodernism 4, 240

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Index

post-truth 3–4, 87, 240; see also alternative facts privatisation 150, 157, 248–249 Prussia 38, 194, 236 Putin, Vladimir 3, 19 racism 188, 240 realism 3, 6–8, 24, 30n14, 57, 60–61, 63, 165, 178–181, 192, 200, 235 Russia 3, 58, 148, 172, 174, 176, 179, 209, 229, 236 Second World War 146, 171, 194, 199–200, 203 Shotwell, James T. 189, 193, 194–198, 200, 203, 241, 244, 247 Smith, Adam 41, 144 Soviet Union 173, 177–179, 200 state, the 6, 41–42, 78–79, 108, 126, 140, 142, 144–146, 150, 153–156, 170, 197, 220, 244, 246

Trump, Donald 19, 240 United Nations 176, 178, 180, 191, 194, 198, 200, 203 United States 3, 65, 67n16, 113n2, 147, 149, 153, 156, 172, 194, 200, 209, 226n3 Voegelin, Eric 9, 20, 22, 26–27, 29n2, 31n18, 31n19 Walker, R.B.J. 7, 30n8, 30n14, 55, 58–59, 67n10, 220–221, 225, 228, 238 Waltz, Kenneth 5–7, 54–55, 63, 67n10, 235–237 welfare state 146, 148–149, 152–154, 167, 170, 188, 197 West, the 165, 172–176, 180, 213, 223–225 Zimmern, Alfred 192, 197