Africa's True Size

This innovative map at The Economist conveys quite a lot in just a few frames. The article, "The True Size of Africa, November 10, 2010, makes reference to an earlier map produced by "computer graphics guru" Kai Krause. The one above reworks Krause's projections somewhat--I couldn't really tell the difference--but reaffirms Krause's main point: Africa is much bigger than it looks on maps drawn on the Mercator projection. The Economist explains:

A sphere cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another. Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas. You can read all the gory details on Wikipedia. 

Gerardus Mercator's projection, published in 1569, was immediately useful because it depicts a line of constant bearing as a straight line, which is handy for marine navigation. The drawback is that it distorts the shapes and areas of large land masses, and the distortion gets progressively worse as you get closer to the poles. (Africa looks about the same size as Greenland under the Mercator projection, for example, even though it is in fact 14 times bigger.) This was not a big problem for 16th-century sailors, of course, and the Mercator projection remains popular to this day.

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Thanks to Nick Pinto for sending this along.

The Classical Humanist Approach to IR

Robert Jackson’s The Global Covenant is a defense of a pluralist conception of international society, and one of the most important works in IR over the last generation. Jackson styles his own work as an elaboration of the work of Martin Wight and Hedley Bull, two of the seminal figures in the “English School” of IR. Like them, Jackson considers international studies to be a humanistic inquiry whose fundamental questions are normative in character: “Is there an international society? What is the institutional embodiment of that society? What are the core values upheld by a society of states? What is the main justification of state sovereignty? Is there a community of humankind? How can human rights fit into a world of sovereign states? Is there a morality of the global commons?” (61) Such are the questions that preoccupy Jackson and that he seeks to put at the center of the field.  

In the second half of his book, Jackson offers an assessment of the status of various contested norms in contemporary international society, including such questions as whether there exists a right or duty of humanitarian intervention. Jackson’s approach to these questions—and what he means by the term “global covenant”--are surveyed in an earlier entry on IR and All That; here I want to focus on Jackson’s extended discussion of methodological issues in the first part of his work.

His is an old-fashioned approach, one that he identifies with “classical humanism.” Like Bent Flyvbjerg, Jackson argues that approaches to social science knowledge resting on positivist techniques are seriously flawed. Human beings cannot be successfully studied as if they were natural objects; we need, he argues, an “inside-out” approach in which the attempt is made to get inside the heads of those we seek to understand. According to the classical approach, the student of human affairs “is always inside the subject and seeks to understand  it and interpret it by gaining insight into the mentality of the people involved and the circumstances in which they find themselves.” (71)  

[T]he ideas people have about their relations are crucially import­ant to understand. That applies as much to international relations as to any other sphere of human relations. It also means that interests, concerns, intentions, ambi­tions, calculations, miscalculations, desires, beliefs, hopes, fears, confidence, cau­tion, doubt, uncertainty, confusion, and related dispositions and inclinations must be at the centre of normative inquiry into world politics because they are part and parcel of human activity in that sphere. As it happens, these are among the most significant and enduring features of international relations which go a long way toward characterizing the subject. We can fully grasp those features in our accounts of the subject. We can get into the subject via our human understand­ing. But our academic accounts cannot be objectively true in the positivist sci­entific meaning. We cannot pin human activity down to that extent. (72)

Jackson is especially insistent on the importance of norms and values in understanding the social world. 

We could say that norms are the grammar or syntax of human relations. They are the practices and usages, the forms and modalities, according to which human activity in any sphere is assessed as to its correctness: its rightness or wrongness, its goodness or badness. The basic problem with positivism emerges at this point: it fails to discern, or it turns a blind eye to, this social arrange­ment by reference to which human activity is evaluated. In international rela­tions that shortcoming is clearly evident in the positivists' usual neglect of international law and diplomatic practices, which are important elements of the grammar of international discourse. It is also evident in their neglect of the pru­dential ethics of statecraft. Positivists seem to operate with an assumption that international relations can be explained satisfactorily without studying the norms by reference to which the international practitioners assess each other's foreign policies and international activities. (50) 

Sometimes [in political science] norms are handled as economists would handle them: i.e., as pref­erences. But preferences are not the same as norms. What we would prefer to do is not the same as what we ought to do. Preferences indicate latitude and choice; norms indicate restraint and constriction of choice. Preferences disclose a world of wants and desires; norms disclose a world of responsibilities which morally or legally limit what one can justifiably do in the situation. Sometime positivists try to come to grips with norms by reconceptualizing them as some­thing causal: that is, a norm is conceived to be an independent variable that has an impact on a dependent variable. Values and norms are considered to be important because they are seen to trigger or track behaviour. They can thus be employed to explain behaviour in cause and effect terms. . . . [But] norms and values, properly understood, do not lend themselves to any analysis which seeks to employ the philosophy and methodology of natural science. A norm is not an element of the physical or natural world. It is not something 'out there' that can be perceived by our senses. It cannot be unlocked by a study of sense perceptions. It is not a causal force or independent variable. Nor is it merely an effect of human interaction, an outcome. A norm is not an instru­ment. A value is not simply a goal that calls for instrumentally rational (that is, goal-seeking) behaviour. And it is impossible to translate a norm, in the usual moral or legal sense of the term, into a preference, without destroying the orig­inal idea. (49) 

Jackson contrasts positivist approaches in the social sciences with a classical humanist approach, which he defines as follows:   

It is the mode of scholarship that prevailed in political science prior to the behavioural revolution and was largely based on historical analysis, legal-institutional scholarship, and political thought. Traditional political science was part of 'civil science', the core of which was the 'humanist school of jurisprudence' which examined the norms of human societies from a historical and comparative perspective." Civil science was centrally preoccupied with discerning and understanding human conduct, its character, and its modus operandi, in various spheres of political life, especially that of law and the state. (56) 

The humanists were comprehensive or holistic in their approach to the study of human relations. They did not see themselves as narrow specialists. They did not understand the human sciences as technical subjects. They understood them as non-technical subjects. Political science was conceived as based on a combi­nation of classical political theory, history, and law. (56) 

The human sciences endeavored to interpret the living world of human rela­tions with the aim of giving an academic account of it. Donald Kelley conveys the gist of the approach: 'Central to all these concepts, of course, was the theory of law, including the practice of "interpretation", which transformed law into "civil science.”’ (57)

The classical humanist approach rests on a fundamental conviction: that there is much to be learnt from the long history of observation and reflection on inter­national relations and from the many theorists who have contributed to that tradition. Of course there will always be some theorists but only a select few who stand head and shoulders above the crowd: their theories speak to us from across the centuries. Thus we return time and again to Machiavelli or Grotius or Kant for insights into the problems of international relations not only in their time but also in our time. Yet even the greatest theorists can never have the final word on international relations or, indeed, on any other sphere of human rela­tions. Contemporary theorists working in the classical tradition are not impris­oned by the thought of past thinkers. They are intellectually free to engage in their own independent thinking and to make their own theoretical contributions, drawing where they can on the insights of earlier thinkers. There is always something more to be said about human relations. (75) 

The classical international society approach to normative inquiry is a pluralistic approach. By 'pluralistic' I mean that international human conduct, taken as a whole, discloses divergent and even contradictory ideas, values, and beliefs which must be recognized by our theories, and assimilated by them, if they are to be faithful to reality. If scholars of international society seek to carry out an empirical inquiry they must allow for the tensions and contradictions of human experience in that sphere of human conduct: contingency as well as rationality, intentions but also unintended consequences, ours as well as theirs, right and might, prudence alongside procedure, humanity as well as sovereignty, desire and duty, virtue and expediency, goals and rules, ideals and practices, and the rest. (83) 

Recovering the classical approach is not a return to the outmoded ideas and theories of the past. Rather, it is bringing our knowledge of those ideas and the­ories into contact and communication with our attempt to understand the present and the future. It involves acquainting ourselves with sophisticated and articulate ways of seeing and understanding international relations which have stood the test of time. It is not a current fashion that is in danger of disappear­ing tomorrow. Classical international relations scholars are the custodians of some very important theories of world politics which never become entirely obsolete and remain open to further elaboration and reformulation. Yester­day's normative theories are challenged by today's or tomorrow's experiences and by new theories which attempt to capture those experiences in academic terms. But old theories, certainly the most outstanding, are rarely superseded entirely by new theories. Old theorists still manage to communicate from across the centuries, and we read Thucydides not merely out of antiquarian curiosity. (76) 

One key objection to the consideration of such norms is that they are merely “window dressing.” Jackson puts that critique as follows:

According to that objection, the normative sphere is merely rhetorical camouflage to cover up, or dress up, or render palatable by clever civilized rhetoric, the hard and sometimes brutal realities of power and narrow self-interest in world politics. Thus, when statespeople claim to be acting out of con­cern for international peace or human rights or world prosperity or the global environment or any other important value it is only to mask their real intent and deceive others. In short, norms arc a convenient and commonplace way of obscuring selfish or ulterior motives and actions in international relations. (67-68) 

Jackson points out that the window dressing critique involves a serious anomaly: if states-people “perceived normative claims as merely window-dressing, presumably they would not make them for they would have no reason to do so.” In fact, however, such claims are made all the time and would be important to understand even if they were put forward cynically:  

[T]here is an elaborate normative discourse whose vocabulary is well-entrenched in foreign policy, diplomacy, international law, international organ­ization, trade, finance, aid, and other historical and contemporary activities and practices of international relations. The endeavors by states at moral justification are recurrent, vigorous, and virtually universal. Even war and intervention--which are often portrayed as paradigmatic instrumental activities--are expressed and carried on by means of not only instrumental language but normative lan­guage also. It would be impossible to discuss either war or intervention in purely instrumental terms because profound values are at stake: peace, freedom, secur­ity, survival. And once such values are raised about our activities we have entered into a normative world. (69) 

Jackson does not use Bent Flyvbjerg’s terminology, borrowed from Aristotle, regarding three ways of knowing (techne, phronesis, episteme), but it is clearly the study of phronesis that he seeks and that he commends to students and scholars. Though both observers find the search for episteme, understood as positivist laws of human behavior, of dubious merit, they differ in their understanding of the appropriate role for professors. Flyvgjerg wants to get us involved, bringing phronetic knowledge to bear in addressing the problems of our various communities. Jackson advises detachment. He commends pluralism, but insists that “to engage in classical international society scholarship is . . . not a question of selectively favouring either conservative values or revolutionary values. It is not a question of favouring any value. It is not the role of academics to promote values.” Much as I like Jackson's overall approach, this injunction seems rather severe, like leading a horse to water but forbidding it from drinking. Surely there is room for both engagement and detachment in academia.  

 

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Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States, Oxford University Press, 2000. There are cheap copies available on Amazon. A somewhat less formidable introduction to Jackson's thought may be found in his Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations: From Anarchy to Cosmopolis (2005). 

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If you were interested in pursuing an education in graduate school taking the classical humanist approach to international relations, you would definitely be pursuing a worthy intimation, but with two drawbacks. You would probably have to venture abroad to Great Britain or Australia (not so bad) and you probably couldn't find a university job in America on your return (not very good at all, though perhaps you might sneak in under false pretenses at a liberal arts college). Notes one document prepared by British academics, trying to assess the pecking order in the field: "In most universities in the US there is a dominant approach to IR which could broadly be defined as‘neo-positivist’, employing hypothetico-deductive models, formal theory and‘large ‘n’ quantitative studies. Because of the numerical dominance of US political science in the global scene, and the prestige of the leading North American academies, this dominance tends to be reflected in citation indices and the like. . . . In the US IR has generally been seen as a branch of Political Science and is taught in Political Science Departments; graduate students receive training in the methods of Political Science. In the UK the discipline developed in Departments separate from Political Science/Government (most notably at LSE and Aberystwyth, nowadays also St Andrews and Sussex) and with an orientation towards History, Law and Philosophy as well as Political Science."

Three Ways of Knowing

Nature, wrote Cicero, has given our minds an insatiable appetite for the truth. Truth, for Chaucer, “is the highest thing that man may keep.” Francis Bacon expressed the old yearning most beautifully: “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.” Knowledge of the truth is evidently a very good thing to have, and an excellent thing to seek, but not after all quite so easy to get. There is a vast literature among historians, philosophers, and political scientists on what might be termed the conditions of knowing. Knowledge is itself variable; there are different ways of knowing. (Article length: 2600 words)

In the view of Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish social scientist, the ways of knowing that have prevailed in the social sciences have fallen short: “social science never has been, and probably never will be, able to develop the type of explanatory and predictive theory that is the ideal and hallmark of natural science.” Like Richard Ned Lebow and others, Flyvbjerg believes that modern society took a “Rationalist Turn” with the Enlightenment, emphasizing instrumental reason. Also like Lebow, Flyvbjerg rests his intellectual strategy on recovering a basic distinction of the ancients and employing it to critique the methodology of contemporary social science. For Lebow, that meant recovering antiquity’s understanding of the psyche; for Flyvbjerg, it entails recovering Aristotle’s conception of three ways of knowing, the intellectual virtues of episteme, techne, and phronesis. As Flyvbjerg explains:

Whereas episteme is found in the modern words "epistemology" and "epistemic," and techne in "technology" and "technical," it is indicative of the degree to which thinking in the social sciences has allowed itself to be colonized by natural and technical science that we today do not even have a word for the one intellectual virtue, phronesis, which Aristotle saw not only as the necessary basis for social and political inquiry, but as the most important of the intellectual virtues. Phronesis is most important because it is that activity by which instrumental rationality is balanced by value-rationality, and because such balancing is crucial to the sustained happiness of the citizens in any society. (3-4)

Taking  Flyvbjerg as our guide, let us look more closely at each of these terms and then consider the implications for the role of the social and natural sciences.  

The term "epistemic science" derives from the intellectual virtue that Aristotle calls episteme, and which is generally translated as "science" or "scientific knowledge” . . .  Episteme concerns universals and the production of knowledge which is invariable in time and space, and which is achieved with the aid of analytical rationality. Episteme corresponds to the modern scientific ideal as expressed in natural science. In Socrates and Plato, and subsequently in the Enlightenment tradition, this scientific ideal became dominant. The ideal has come close to being the only legitimate view of what constitutes genuine science, such that even intellectual activities like social science, which are not and probably never can be scientific in this sense, have found themselves compelled to strive for and legitimate themselves in terms of this Enlightenment ideal.

Whereas episteme resembles our ideal modern scientific project, techne and phronesis denote two contrasting roles of intellectual work. Techne can be translated into English as "art" in the sense of "craft"; a craftsman is also an artisan. For Aristotle, both techne and phronesis are connected with the concept of truth, as is episteme. . . . Techne is thus craft and art, and as an activity it is concrete, variable, and context-dependent. The objective of techne is application of technical knowledge and skills according to a pragmatic instrumental rationality. . . .

Whereas episteme concerns theoretical know why and techne denotes technical know how, phronesis emphasizes practical knowledge and practical ethics. Phronesis is often translated as "prudence" or "practical common sense." . . . It focuses on what is variable, on that which cannot be encapsulated by universal rules, on specific cases. Phronesis requires an interaction between the general and the concrete; it requires consideration, judgment, and choice. More than anything else, phronesis require experience. . . . The person possessing practical wisdom (phronimos) has knowledge of how to behave in each particular circumstance that can never be equated with or reduced to knowledge of general truths. Phronesis is a sense of the ethically practical rather than a kind of science. Where rational humans for Plato are moved by the cosmic order, for Aristotle they are moved by a sense of the proper order among the ends we pursue. This sense cannot be articulated in terms of theoretical axioms, but rather, is grasped by phronesis.

Some interpretations of Aristotle's intellectual virtues leave doubt as to whether phronesis and techne are distinct categories, or whether phronesis is just a higher form of techne or know-how. Aristotle is clear on this point. Even if both of these intellectual virtues involve skill and judgment, one type of intellectual virtue cannot be reduced to the other; phronesis is about value judgment, not about producing things. (55-58)

Phronetic research, according to Flyvbjerg, entails taking as our point of departure the following questions: “1) Where are we going? 2) Is this desirable? 3) What should be done?” That was the classic phronetic approach, he writes, but he insists on the need for additional questions: “Who gains and who loses; by which mechanisms of power?” He wants to “use social and political studies not just as a mirror for society but also as society’s nose, eyes, and ears.” Flyvbjerg realizes that “there is no unified ‘we’ in relation to which the questions can be given a final answer,” but that does not prevent an analysis that consciously sets forth and weighs the competing values at stake.  (60-61)

What sort of activities in “political science” correspond with techne, episteme, and phronesis? Certain studies of ways of getting and holding power (as in the contemporary art of winning elections) might be seen as falling under the rubric of techne. Military professionalism—the knowledge of the application or threat of military power—might also reasonably be included under that rubric. An instance of episteme would be Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, in which Waltz made predictions of state behavior based on the position of states and the distribution of power within the international system. Another instance, but from the liberal rather than realist camp, would be the so called “law” that democracies don’t fight one another. Yet the search for phronesis does not go a begging, even in the academy.  In policy pronouncements and the mass of commentary that attends the conduct of foreign affairs, for instance, it is commonplace to confront the set of questions Flyvbjerg identifies with phronesis:  Where are we going? Is this desirable? What should we do? Political scientists, like other commentators, cannot avoid employing “value rationality” in addressing matters of public concern, but for many within the discipline such works do not count as political science. That is, it is precisely because they are phronetic in character that they do not count as episteme.  

In one sense, Flyvbjerg’s judgment regarding contemporary social science is bleak. He documents that social science has attempted to emulate natural science, an enterprise he sees as a cul de sac. “Mainstream social theory and social science methodology stand in need of reorientation.” (4)  By the same token, however, it has more to offer than the natural sciences in crucial respects:

[Richard] Lewontin and others are right, albeit perhaps not for the reasons they believe, when they say that social science has set itself an impossible task when it attempts to emulate natural science and produce explanatory and predictive, that is, epistemic, theory. [However,] this does not imply the oft-seen image of impotent social sciences versus potent natural sciences, which is at the core of the Science Wars. (3)

Just as social science has not been able to contribute with Kuhnian normal science and predictive theory to scientific development, so natural science has had little to offer to the reflexive analysis of goals, values, and interests that is a precondition for an enlightened development in any society. However, where natural science is weak, social science is strong, and vice versa. For Aristotle, the most important task of social and political studies was to develop society's value-rationality vis-à-vis its scientific and technical rationality. Aristotle did not doubt that the first type of rationality was the most important and ought to influence the second. Since Aristotle's time, however, this view has receded into the background, especially after the Enlightenment and modernity installed instrumental rationality in a dominant position in both science and society. Social thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas have pointed out that for more than two centuries value-rationality (Wertrationalitdt) has increasingly given way to instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitat). In the words of Richard Livingstone: "if you want a description of our age, here is one: the civilization of means without ends." (53)

We may pause here to query the adequacy of that description. Modern civilization, whether in the West or elsewhere, surely embraces ends as well as means, though this may include ends that not all of us approve of (or results that none of us like). It is virtually a condition of living that one has to employ value-rationality alongside instrumental rationality. The decision to build a nuclear plant, for instance, is inevitably bound up with value-laden questions from many different angles, and it would be impossible to justify a decision either way without attending to these questions as a matter of course. I take this as an example because nuclear power must be a sort of Exhibit A of a civilization that has substituted means for ends, but yet displays, in the way in which society argues about it, detailed attention to both instrumental rationality and value rationality. The collective mind or “global brain”—even knowledgeable individuals—can handle both of these inquiries at once. It's just not that difficult to think in these different categories, though it may be extremely difficult to arrive at a wise or even satisfactory answer.

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Altogether different is the claim that contemporary social science has set its sights on episteme at the expense of phronesis. In the self-understanding of much of the American political science profession (and even more so in neo-classical economics), the natural sciences continue to be a model. The announced search is for laws of political behavior that are parsimonious and express timeless truths. The method is deductive-nomonological versus historical-comparative.  Flyvbjerg rightly questions this approach. His reasons to prefer the latter are not too different from those of Francis Bacon. Objecting to the literature of the Scholastics, Bacon observed:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. This way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

Flyvbjerg notes that Aristotle linked phronesis directly with political science:

[Aristotle]: Political science and prudence [phronesis] are the same state of mind [They are not identical, however. Phronesis is also found at the level of the household and the individual] . . . Prudence concerning the state has two aspects: one, which is controlling and directive, is legislative science; the other . . . deals with particular circumstances . . . [and] is practical and deliberative.'

[Flyvbjerg]: Two things are worth noting in this context. The first is Aristotle's assertion that political science, as a consequence of the emphasis on the particular, on context, and on experience, cannot be practiced as episteme. To be a knowledgeable researcher in an epistemic sense is not enough when it concerns political science because "although [people] develop ability in geometry and mathematics and become wise in such matters, they are not thought to develop prudence [phronesis]." Aristotle explains that a well-functioning political science based on phronesis is imperative for a well-functioning society, inasmuch as "it is impossible to secure one's own good independently of . . . political science." (59)

The first step toward achieving a new perspective in social science is for teachers and students “to make explicit the different roles of science as episteme, techne, and phronesis."

Today's researchers seldom make explicit which one of these three roles they are practicing. The whole enterprise is simply called "science," even though we are dealing with quite different activities. It is often the case that these activities are rationalized as episteme even though they are actually techne or phronesis. . . . The oft-seen image of impotent social sciences versus potent natural sciences derives from their being compared in terms of their epistemic qualities. Yet such a comparison is misleading, for the two types of science have their respective strengths and weaknesses along fundamentally different dimensions. In their role as phronesis, the social sciences are strongest where the natural sciences are weakest. (61)

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It seems then that social science has a great superiority over natural science, but one it has failed to exploit because it chased after the harlot Episteme and gave up its once solid (if rather stolid) relationship with Phronesis. Social science therefore has, by Flyvbjerg's light, an entirely conjectural superiority, and could only improve itself by a repudiation of its current method. This seems rather unlikely: it is a safe bet that political scientists will continue to live in sin.

Flyvgberg’s approach has great implications for the role of scholars, teachers, and students.  Scholars may resist it because it threatens their methodological presuppositions or because it seems to augur a greater degree of political involvement than they would feel comfortable with.  In his concluding chapter, “Social Science That Matters,” Flyvgberg argues that we should “drop the fruitless efforts to emulate” the natural sciences and instead “take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live.” I think that that is a worthwhile undertaking, but it is surely not the only proper role for academics. A better way of putting the charge to social scientists is that they need to devote more time and attention to studying activities requiring phronetic reasoning, less to discovering (or rather attempting to discover) universal laws of political behavior. Teachers need to teach about phronetic reasoning, not shunt it aside as if were unworthy of deliberation and study.

I distrust Flyvgberg’s formulation a bit because it seems to lose the distinction between academic study and political practice, which surely must remain fundamental; we can study politics without being politicians. On the larger point, however, Flyvgberg is right. We need to put back in to social and political inquiry what had previously been hived off from it, at some considerable cost. As Lebow remarks, the dominant tendency in the social sciences striped away cultural and moral justifications to get at hidden causes and parsimonious laws. This entailed a sundering of the human personality and ultimately formed a barrier to understanding it. “Conventional paradigms of politics and international relations," notes Lebow, "are rooted in appetite. Liberalism and Marxism describe politics as driven by material interests, and realism acknowledges their primacy after security. Scholars who work in these paradigms attempt to penetrate what they believe to be the smokescreen of culture and ideology to get at the political, economic and military realities they are understood to obfuscate.”

“Constructivism” in IR theory, at least in some of its precincts, is all about the inadequacies of that theoretical enterprise. However, it should be noted that Constructivism’s strictures against Realism and Liberalism apply only to academics writing in the last couple of generations (as reflected especially in the ascendancy of "neo-realism" and "neo-liberalism" in IR); it should not be confused with a critique of older writers in these traditions, nor, of course, with political practice, which is especially identified with the need for phronesis.

A question for students: what kind of knowledge is the most worth having among the three? What way of knowing would you especially want to be excellent in?

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Bent Flyvgberg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Proper Attire for Writing Papers

This image can be found somewhere within the vast collection of Chris Mullen (but I couldn't find it when I went back to look).

Fear, Honor, Interest

Richard Ned Lebow’s A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008) is one of the most ambitious works of IR theory in this generation. It is also one of the most difficult. The second volume of what is planned to be a trilogy, it follows upon Lebow’s previous work, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge, 2003). He projects a third volume that will develop “a full blown theory of political order.”  At over 700 pages, the Cultural Theory is not the sort of work that can possibly be used for undergraduate instruction without inducing revolt among the students, yet it is, at the same time, a work of cardinal importance whose fundamental propositions deserve attention. Lebow mounts a full-scale attack on regnant theories of IR, and is especially cutting in his analysis of neorealism and liberalism. He argues that IR theory needs to reacquaint itself with the wisdom of the classical writers of ancient Greece, whose fuller version of the human personality—and, by extension, of state and society—offers an alternative and more persuasive framework for the understanding of social action. (Article length: 5400 words).

My purpose here is to bring to the fore central elements of Lebow’s approach without, one hopes, simplifying it excessively or criticizing it unfairly. Responding to Lebow's call to bring the ancients back in, let us begin with the Greek historian Thucycides and his history of the Peloponnesian War, which contains the basic germ of one of Lebow’s key insights. In the speech of the Athenian envoys before the Spartan war assembly, on the eve of the great war, the envoys explain why Athens would not give up its empire. 

That empire we acquired not by violence, but because you were unwilling to prosecute to its conclusion the war against the barbarian, and because the allies attached themselves to us and spontaneously asked us to assume the command. And the nature of the case first compelled us to advance our empire to its present height; fear being our principal motive, though honor and interest afterwards came in. And at last, when almost all hated us, when some had already revolted and had been subdued, when you had ceased to be the friends that you once were, and had become objects of suspicion and dislike, it appeared no longer safe to give up our empire; especially as all who left us would fall to you. And no one can quarrel with a people for making, in matters of tremendous risk, the best provision that it can for its interest. . . . [I]t was not a very remarkable action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honor, and interest. (I. 75-76) 

For Lebow, too, fear, honor, and interest are fundamental, and the Cultural Theory is an exploration of the worlds of thought and action that this one scary emotion and these two fundamental motives produce. Let us take each of these concepts in turn:  

Fear. The power of fear has been self-evident from the beginning of civilization, if not before, and is probably a component of most social orders. Tyrannies are the regimes most dependent on fear (p. 4) . . . Aristotle defines fear "as a pain or disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil in the future." It is caused “by whatever we feel has great power of destroying us, or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain.” It is the opposite of confidence and is associated with danger, which is the approach of something terrible. It is aroused by the expectation, rather than the reality, of such an event and encourages a deliberative response. It is often provoked by another actor's abuse of its power and is threatening to the social order, not just to individuals. (89). Fear is an emotion, not a fundamental human drive. . . . It arises from imbalance and the application of human imagination to its likely, or even possible, consequences. Fear triggers a desire for security which can be satisfied in many ways. In interstate relations, it is usually through the direct acquisition of military power (and the economic well-being that makes this power) or its indirect acquisition through alliances (90). 

Interest. The interest explanation is associated with Hobbes and is central to modern social science. It assumes that people are willing to accept relatively inferior positions and benefits in return for the greater absolute rewards they receive by belonging to a society in which their physical security and material possessions are protected. (5)

Honor. Honor refers to the seemingly universal desire to stand out among one's peers, which is often achieved by selfless, sometimes even sacrificial, adherence to social norms. Homer might be considered the first theorist of honor, and his account in the Iliad is unrivaled in its understanding of this motive and its consequences, beneficial and destructive, for societies that make it a central value. In modern times, the need for status and esteem is described as "vanity" by Hobbes and Smith, and for Rousseau it is at the core of amour propre. (5)  

Habit also explains some of the remarkable fact that “most people in most societies adhere to stipulated practices and rules,” but the force of habit, powerful though it is, “can ultimately be traced back to one or more of the other three explanations.” The relative importance of these universal drives (appetite and spirit) and a powerful emotion (fear) “varies within and across societies and epochs. Fear, interest and honor operate at every level of social aggregation. Each generates “different logics concerning cooperation, conflict and risk-taking.” They also give rise “to a particular kind of hierarchy, two of which—interest and honor—rest on distinct and different principles of justice."  

Lebow singles out honor as the neglected aspect of this triad. Incredible as it may seem, attention to the spirit and to its associated qualities of honor, standing, status, and prestige got practically expunged from IR theory over the last generation, as the false god of parsimony came to be worshiped among the denizens of that establishment. (It never went missing in diplomatic or international history, where attention to it and related factors arises naturally from consideration of the sources.) “Rational choice and other theories of strategic action, as Lebow argues,  

often derive preferences from substantive assumptions, as neorealists do when they stipulate that relative power must be the principal goal of states in an anarchic international environment. Deduction of this kind, whether in economics or politics, almost invariably leads to a single motive like wealth or power, or at least to its prioritization. By making human, institutional or state preferences unidimensional, theorists homogenize and oversimplify human motivation while divorcing it from contexts that give it meaning. 

Happily, Lebow can blame a widespread tendency since the Enlightenment, rather than one-eyed colleagues, for this baleful tendency. To recover a proper methodology, we need to go back to the Greeks and to their conception of the human personality.  

For Plato and Aristotle the psyche consisted of three drives: appetite, spirit, and reason, each seeking its own ends. They considered appetite dangerous and corrupting, valued the spirit because it motivated people to participate in civic life, but had the highest regard for reason. Reason sought to understand what made for a happy life and had the potential to constrain and educate appetite and spirit to collaborate with it toward that end. Moderns rejected the spirit altogether, largely because of its association with the aristocracy. They upgraded appetite, reconceiving it as the source of economic growth and political order. Reason was reduced to a mere instrumentality, "the slave of the passions," in the words of David Hume." (14-15) 

We cannot analyze means without knowing something about the ends they are intended to achieve. This truth was obvious to the ancient Greeks, who framed the problem of choice differently. Their principal concern was human goals, and from an early date they distinguished between two kinds of human motives: appetite and spirit. The former pertained to bodily needs, like food, shelter and sex, and the latter to the competitive quest for recognition as a means of building self-esteem. Plato and Aristotle maintained that reason also generates desires of its own, and was a third, independent motive. Reason had the potential to lead people to understand the nature of happiness and to constrain and educate appetite and spirit to collaborate with it toward this end. The ancients differ from the moderns in apportioning desires among three separate motives, each distinct in its character and consequences for human behavior and happiness. (47) 

If we need a modern analogy, fractals come closest to capturing the Greek understanding of human behavior. They replicate the same patterns at different orders of magnification. . . . Plato and Aristotle begin with a description of the individual psyche, whose categories and pathologies they then extend to the polis. People and poleis alike are motivated by appetites, spirit and reason. Order or disorder in either is attributable to balance or imbalance among these three motives. (52) 

Interest and fear are well-worn categories in IR theory, with the former being identified with liberalism and the latter with realism. Lebow gives detailed and insightful attention to the logic of interest-based and fear-based relationships, but his main innovation (which is also a throwback) is the importance he gives to the spirit and to reason. Here is what he means by these terms.  

Spirit.  A spirit-based paradigm starts from the premise that people, individually and collectively, seek self-esteem. Simply put, self-esteem is a sense of self-worth that makes people feel good about themselves, happier about life and more confident about their ability to confront its challenges. It is achieved by excelling in activities valued by one's peer group or society and gaining the respect of actors whose opinions matter. (61) 

Self-esteem is a subjective sense of one's honor and standing and can reflect or differ from the esteem accorded by others. Tension and conflict can arise, internally and socially, when actors' self-esteem is considerably lower or higher than their external esteem. Esteem and self-esteem can also be described as respect and self-respect. The opposite of esteem is shame, an emotion that arises in response to the judgments, or expected judgments, of others. (63) 

Self-esteem is closely connected to honor (timē), a status for the Greeks that describes the outward recognition we gain from others in response to our excellence. . . . Honor is inseparable from hierarchy. Hierarchy is a rank ordering of status, and in honor societies honor determines the nature of the statuses and who fills them. Each status has privileges, but also an associated rule package. The higher the status, the greater the honor and privileges, but also the more demanding the role and its rules. (64)  

Honor is also a mechanism for restraining the powerful and preventing the kind of crass, even brutal exploitation common to hierarchies in modern, interest-based worlds. Honor can maintain hierarchy because challenges to an actor's status, or failure to respect the privileges it confers, arouse anger that can only be appeased by punishing the offender and thereby "putting him in his place." Honor worlds have the potential to degenerate into hierarchies based on power and become vehicles for exploitation when actors at the apex fail to carry out their responsibilities or exercise self-restraint in pursuit of their own interests. (65) 

Reason. The Enlightenment constituted a sharp break with past thinking and practice. Its rejection of Aristotelian telos (the end something is intended to achieve, and how that end drives its development) helped pave the way for modernity. Rejection of telos required a corresponding reconceptualization of reason. It was reduced from an end in itself to a mere instrumentality. . . . Max Weber would later coin the term "instrumental reason" to describe this transformation, which he recognized had come to dominate the modern world and our approach to it. . . . The modern conceptualization of reason as instrumentality was part and parcel of the shift in focus away from the ends we should seek to the means of best satisfying our appetites. (45) 

In Lebow’s view, this is a basic mistake; the ancients were right and modern thought took a wrong turn with the Enlightenment. Without denying the importance of instrumental reason, without which modern civilization would collapse, he draws our attention to the importance of what Aristotle called phronēsis, which calls for an integrated consideration of facts and values to determine proper action, and which “restrains actors because they recognize the extent to which the advancement of their goals depends on the preservation of the system and its norms. When it loses its hold over either spirit or appetite, systems are likely to undergo a phase transition into fear-dominated worlds.” (32) 

Lebow acknowledges that “reason-based worlds” cannot be found in reality and that, as Machiavelli said, “philosophers have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist, because how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live.” Lebow instances the Kallipolis of Plato’s Republic and Magnesia of the Laws as purely imaginary (because purely reason based) constructions. (76) Plato’s Republic (as opposed to Socrates’ Athens) always seemed to me a dreadful place in which I would not want to live, but we are not obliged to make The Republic the standard of what reason can provide us. More agreeable is Aristotle’s idea of “homonoia, a community whose members agreed about the nature of the good life and how it could be achieved.” Yet more modestly, but indispensably, a reason-based world is one in which “reason is able to constrain and educate spirit and appetite to work with it to achieve a happy life.” Whereas Lebow finds that “such a state of balance is rare among individuals, hardly ever approached by societies and has never been seen in regional or international systems” (27)—a truly grim conclusion—I think this sort of reason is far more powerful than he allows.  

Surely Lebow is incorrect in thinking that regional or international systems never display such characteristics; it enters often, I should judge, into their warp and woof. Perhaps I misunderstand his terminology, but the whole thrust of modern international relations can easily be conceptualized as a continual argument over how best to tame and regulate, educate and enlighten, appetite and spirit, which in international affairs involves interest, spirit, and reason in every diplomatic negotiation. Sometimes the more rational course succeeds, sometimes it fails, but these elements, by his own demonstration, are always in play (just as are, usually, competing conceptions of what reason dictates). “Appetite and spirit are universal drives whose expression varies across cultures and epochs. Reason is also universal, and the degree to which it constrains and educates appetite and spirit varies enormously within as well as across cultures.” (28-29) Very well said, but it supports the conclusion that reason has had its victories as well as its defeats. What else is a useful and properly drawn piece of legislation, a wise judicial decision, the artful negotiation of a peace treaty? The very important question from Federalist No. 1—“whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice”—is not one invariably answered in the negative, at whatever level of human affairs we wish to consider.  

* * *

Lebow spends the first quarter of his book—about 165 densely packed pages--detailing his overall theoretical approach. He in effect acknowledges that he received criticism from readers as he circulated his manuscript, noting: 

Some readers may be troubled or confused by the use of several different but related typologies: the three-fold nature of the psyche, and the four kinds of ideal-type worlds, and, in my follow-on volume, four principles of justice. I struggled without success for ways of dispensing with the first or second of these typologies, or of merging them in some elegant manner. The typologies are related but different, and both, I am convinced, are necessary. All three psychic drives give rise to ideal-type worlds, but so does fear, which is not a drive of the psyche, but an emotion that comes to the fore in proportion to reason's loss of control over spirit and appetite. Dispensing with the psyche would eliminate reason, essential to explain balance and imbalance, and equally critical to account for learning. Doing away with my four-fold typology of ideal-type worlds would eliminate fear, which is the basis of the realist paradigm. (113-14) 

* * *

Taking due note, then, of the three-fold nature of the psyche—of appetite and spirit roiled by fear but capable of enlightenment through reason and experience, and of similar tendencies in larger human communities---the way is open to investigate the role in international history of fear, honor, and interest, each of them needing the application of prudence to limit the excesses of which they are capable, the descents described by Thucydides to which they are susceptible. That prolegomena puts us in a position to see the force of Lebow’s objections to conventional IR paradigms:  

Conventional paradigms of politics and international relations are rooted in appetite. Liberalism and Marxism describe politics as driven by material interests, and realism acknowledges their primacy after security. Scholars who work in these paradigms attempt to penetrate what they believe to be the smokescreen of culture and ideology to get at the political, economic and military realities they are understood to obfuscate. (15-16) 

Liberalism assumes that people and states seek wealth, and use reason instrumentally to design strategies and institutions conducive to this goal. Realism differs from liberalism in arguing that concern for security must come first in an anarchical world. . . . The spirit has not been made the basis for any paradigm of politics or international relations, although, as Machiavelli and Rousseau recognized, it has the potential to serve as the foundation for one, and Hobbes described "vanity" — his term for the spirit — as a powerful, fundamental drive and principal cause of war. (60) 

Any theory of international relations must build on or be rooted in a theory of society and must address the constitution of actors, not only their behavior. Existing paradigms are inadequate in this regard. Realism all but denies the existence of society at the international level and treats the character of international relations as universal, timeless and unchanging. Liberalism posits a strong two-way connection between the domestic structure state actors and the nature of their relationships. It says little to nothing about what shapes the structure of these actors, and is restricted to one historical epoch: the modern, industrial world. It is also wed to a parochial Anglo-American telos that assumes that only one kind of state structure (liberal democracy) is a rational response to this world. (2) 

Liberalism is the quintessential paradigm of politics and international relations based on the motive of interest. Theories and propositions rooted in this paradigm, including those associated with the democratic peace research program, do a comprehensive job of laying out the assumptions of an interest-based world and the behavior to which it gives rise. Many liberals nevertheless make the mistake of confusing their ideal-type descriptions of an interest-based world with the real world, in which interest is only one important motive. Liberals further err in thinking that the world they describe — one composed of capitalist democracies — is the only efficient response to the modern industrial world. A compelling argument can be made that it is only one of several possible interest-based responses, and that its emergence was a highly contingent outcome. (76) 

Realists do not think of their paradigm as an ideal type, but as a description of the real world of international relations. The validity of this claim depends very much on the formulation in question. Strong claims, like Waltz's assertion that "In international politics force serves, not only as the ultima ratio, but indeed as the first and constant one," describe few, if any, actual worlds, and can only be considered ideal types. Weaker claims bear a closer relationship to reality. Robert Gilpin contends that anarchy and the primacy of the state do not imply a world of constant warfare, only the recognition that "there is no higher authority to which a state can appeal for succor in times of trouble." By relaxing their assumptions, realist, liberal or Marxist theories can make a better fit between their claims and real worlds. In doing so, they must give up making determinant claims and acknowledge that there is more going on in the world than can be described by their respective theories. (94-95) 

Lebow does not press his claims against Marxism in this work, but instead presents a straight-forward tripartite scheme divided into fear-based worlds (realism), interest-based worlds (liberalism) and spirit based worlds (constructivism). Each has  

distinctive characters that give rise to a range of related behaviors, but real worlds only resemble such an ideal-type world in part and so do their behaviors. Real worlds generally contain some elements of all three, are unstable and are constantly in flux. Over time, they move toward or away from one or more of these ideal-type worlds. Reality is further complicated by the fact that these societies and the systems in which they interact almost invariably contain considerable local variation, making them "lumpy," more difficult to describe and correspondingly more volatile. (58) 

Those obstacles alone might seem enough to frustrate the theoretical enterprise, but there are other factors as well which increase the difficulty. For one thing, as Lebow acknowledges, appetite and spirit are often difficult to distinguish in practice.  

Plato describes appetite and spirit as two distinct drives or motives. He provides examples to show how they can come into conflict, as when someone is thirsty but drinking in the circumstances would be socially inappropriate. In this example behavior allows a culturally informed observer to determine which motive is dominant. In other instances this might not be apparent, as wealth and honor have been implicated with each other from the beginning of human history and are sometimes difficult to disentangle. In ancient Greece, as in many societies, wealth was a prerequisite for honor. In Europe, titles were not infrequently sold or awarded on the basis of wealth, and in seventeenth-century France conferred privileges that were a vehicle for increasing one's wealth. In much of Western Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, and earlier in some countries, aristocrats were primarily distinguished from the rich bourgeoisie by the age of their wealth. More confusing still is the seeming fusion of wealth and standing in our epoch. Rousseau describes amour propre, the passion to be regarded favorably by others, as the dominant passion of modernity. In contrast to savage man, who sought esteem directly, his "civilized" counterpart seeks it indirectly, though the attainment and display of material possessions." According to Adam Smith, we better our condition "to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation." Modernity, at least in the West, has arguably transformed wealth into an ever more instrumental good because it has become the chief source of standing. (74-75) 

The difficulty of distinguishing appetite and spirit is paralleled by some confusion of terms with regard to the relationship between spirit and the pursuit of power. Hans Morgenthau, in his Politics  Among Nations, famously made the pursuit of power the centerpiece of his theory, but as Lebow points out Morgenthau’s conception of ends was confused. States, Morgenthau wrote, seek to increase, maintain or demonstrate their power. The first, expanding power, mandated what he called a policy of imperialism; the second, maintaining power, called for “a policy of the status quo,” but when Morgenthau treated the third goal—a policy of prestige—he could only understand it as a means to either the increase or maintenance of power, not something pursued as an end in itself because intrinsic to respect and standing: 

Morgenthau's relegation of prestige-seeking from an end to a means is all the more surprising given his interest in Aristotle, who considered striving for recognition a fundamental human drive. He attended Weber's lectures at the University of Munich and made his conception of power the foundation of his own theory of international relations. Weber's understanding of the drive for power, which Morgenthau calls the animus dominandi, is best understood as an expression of the spirit. The lust for power “concerns itself not with the individual's survival but with his position among his fellows once his survival has been secured.” Committed to constructing a parsimonious theory, Morgenthau reversed the relationship between power and prestige, making the former subordinate to the latter, and theorized about how the power was achieved and maintained. He ignored Weber's admonition that power was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that any theory about politics must be rooted in some understanding of those ends. (21-22) 

This is an excellent and revealing critique, but in identifying the drive for power as an expression of the spirit Lebow implicitly provides further evidence of the difficulties of the theoretical enterprise. What seemed a coherent division between appetite and spirit, especially as these have larger theoretical significance, has gotten further muddied. The most famous realist of the twentieth century is now a constructivist.     

A third problem is that “appetite” is by no means equivalent to “interest.”  

Appetite is the drive with which we are all familiar. Plato considered wealth to have become the dominant appetite in Athens, a development that has found an echo in all societies where some degree of affluence becomes possible. There are, of course, other appetites, including sex, food, drink, clothing and drugs, but contemporary economists and liberals either ignore them or assume their satisfaction depends on, or is at it facilitated by, wealth.”  

Lebow, however, is unavoidably forced to basically ignore these other appetites as well, for the good reason that at the state level “the pursuit of plenty” does have a kind of instrumental primacy for the satisfaction of all the other appetites. It provides, too, a material basis in the search for standing. But the major difficulty is the huge gap that separates appetite from interest in the history of political and economic thought, a point that requires some elaboration.

The concept of interest, when it was introduced into the political lexicon by Renaissance theorists, covered a far wider domain than simply the pursuit of material well-being, bound up as it was with the concept of state interest, of which recognition, respect, and standing were surely a part. So it appeared in the vast literature of reason of state. Remarkably, Guicciardini emphasized that people should always keep their own best interests at heart, but condemned those who thought that such interests always lay "in some monetary advantage, rather than in honour and in knowing how to preserve one's reputation and good name." He used it, in other words, in a sense opposite to that of Lebow.

When the concept of interest was narrowed to the pursuit of wealth, as by the eighteenth century it was by many thinkers, it came to be associated with a set of qualities—predictability, honesty, constancy, good faith and reciprocity—that formed part of “the political argument for capitalism before its triumph,” as Albert Hirschman expressed it in his classic study of The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977). As Hirschman went on to show, the heroic ideal, with its associated ideas of glory, underwent severe criticism in the 17th century: "All the heroic virtues were shown to be forms of mere self-preservation by Hobbes, of self-love by La Rochefoucauld, of vanity and of frantic escape from real self-knowledge by Pascal. The heroic passions were portrayed as demeaning by Racine after having been denounced as foolish, if not demented, by Cervantes" (p. 11). Such writers scarcely denied the prominence of this spirit; their emphasis was on its perniciousness. In a long and roundabout intellectual development, by the eighteenth century thinkers were pointing to the possibiility of a more pleasant and profitable mode of interaction, founded on reciprocity and mutual interest, that held promise of a better pattern of relations among men and nations that would tame glory seeking and associated manifestations of an untractable spirit. Attesting to his own submerged liberalism and the attractions of an interest based paradigm, Lebow himself argues that this was a great achievement.  

Material well-being is generally abetted by the well-being, even prosperity, of other actors. This is a hard-won insight. Early efforts at wealth accumulation often involved violence, as it appeared easier and cheaper to take other people's possessions than to produce them oneself or generate the capital necessary for their purchase. Until recent times piracy was an honored profession, and slavery, often the result of raiding expeditions, was considered an acceptable means of acquiring wealth. Riches gained through conquest became an important goal of empires, and the norm against territorial conquest only developed in the twentieth century. Even trading economies (e.g. the Carthaginians, Portuguese and British) historically viewed wealth as a zero sum game and sought to exclude competitors from access to raw materials and markets they controlled. Recognition dawned only slowly that generating surplus through production and trade made societies and their rulers richer than obtaining it through conquest, that production and trade benefited from peace, and that affluence was as much the result of cooperation as it was of conflict. (72-73) 

* * * 

The last two thirds of the book are an ambitious tour through world history, beginning with antiquity and continuing to the contemporary period (from Homer to “Hitler to Bush"), tracing fear, honor, and interest across the centuries. This was truly a prodigious labor on the author’s part, requiring  familiarity with a vast historical literature.

At each juncture, Lebow assesses the cogency of explanations rooted in his three paradigms of interest, fear, and honor. The following portraits of Republican Rome, Louis XIV’s Europe, the European world that existed before the deluge of 1914, and Bush's America give the general thrust of an argument he makes throughout.  

For Polybius, the First Punic War was evidence that Rome "aimed boldly at universal domination" and that this was an end in itself. Roman historian Sallust and Church Father Augustine attribute Roman expansion to the passion for glory that animated almost every level of Roman society. So do many modern historians. William Harris, author of a highly regarded study of Roman conquests, attributes expansion to the warrior culture of Rome, and only secondarily to ways in which plunder could enrich tribunes, generals and their armies. Luxuria and avaritia, pronounced in the late Republic were unfairly read back into Roman history by Sallust, Livy and later historians to explain empire. In a case-by-case examination of Republican wars, Harris reviews alternative explanations for empire, including the desire for plunder, defensive imperialism and efforts by the aristocracy to protect or expand their wealth and power, and finds them wanting. For whatever reason, Rome underwent a transformation in the mid-fourth century which led to an increase in warfare, lengthier, longer and more successful confrontations with its enemies, and conflicts fought further away from home. (207)

During [the period in Europe between Westphalia (1648) and French Revolution (1789)], the quest for gloire was the dominant dynastic motive, and found expression in expansion and war, although economic considerations and security were of course present as well. Striving for standing and honor provides the basis for an alternative explanation for the rise of the state. Leaders extracted resources to fight wars, but for their initiators most of these wars had little to do with security; they were waged to gain territory to increase dynastic standing and served as a vehicle for individual combatants to obtain honor and wealth. Leaders also extracted resources and developed bureaucracies for purposes of display, another means by which they gained honor and standing. In the eighteenth century, there was an enormous increase in resources European states devoted to palaces and other kinds of display, and in some cases a corresponding decline in funds allocated for war. (30) 

Down to 1914 the majority of political leaders, diplomats and generals were aristocrats imbued with many of the values that had motivated their predecessors. The quest for honor and standing, initially a preserve of the aristocracy, penetrated deeply into the middle classes, many of whose members took their cues from the aristocracy and sought to assimilate its values and practices. . . . [T]he spirit offers a better account for the origins of World War I than explanations based on fear and interest. (30-31) 

American intervention in Iraq [in 2003] cannot be explained with reference to material well-being or security. We must look to spirit-based explanations that stress anger and the desire to exploit America's comparative advantage in military power to prevent or deter future challenges to its hegemony. (32-33)

* * * 

One curious omission in Lebow is any bow toward a principle of love, benevolence, or sympathy as also expressing, in addition to fear, honor, and interest, perduring aspects of humanity. Oddly, he does not seem to see law and morality as expressing devices by which reason proposes to both recognize and limit appetite and spirit. His reservation of certain questions to the third volume, dealing with four principles of justice, makes one hesitate to criticize him on the matter, but if we are going to delve deep into the nature of the human being cannot we have a bit more of the milk of human kindness?  The love of our fellow creatures is a command of "nature's God" that fear, honor, or interest may subordinate but cannot expunge. By adding love, benevolence, or sympathy to fear, honor, and interest, we might without guilt make reason the slave of the passions, to be employed not in building castles in the sand (a purely love based world) but to modify and restrict the asperities otherwise resulting from the untrammeled pursuit of self interest or honor.

Lebow's project is usually denominated as “constructivist.” He notes at the outset that “constructivist scholars have not as yet produced a full-blown theory of international relations," though he seems to be making great strides in providing one. Yet students should beware of pigeon-holing a thinker as rich as Lebow, who is open to insights from all three traditions. Once the peculiar neopositivist fixation on parsimonious laws is put aside, we have a rich vein of insights from realism as well as liberalism that he incorporates into his work. Thus, Lebow can be found denouncing realism, by which he largely seems to mean Kenneth Waltz and other writers in his vein, but loving Thucydides, fount of the realist tradition. Though sometimes harsh in his criticism of liberal verities—overly so, in my view—he acknowledges and treats almost as a gift the liberal insight that prosperity could not be achieved through plunder, but had to rely in its constituent articles on mutual interest and reciprocity. Cragged though the path may sometimes be, Professor Lebow is an excellent companion in the search for wisdom.

* * *

Unfrozen Voices from Antiquity

John Hale’s The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance is a marvelous work that can be dipped into at any point for illumination, "a landmark in the humanist tradition it describes." Here, at the beginning of his chapter on Transformations, Hale describes the intense interest in ancient words and deeds associated with the Renaissance (roughly, 1450 to 1620). These “unfrozen voices” were now heard with rapturous and purposeful intention, communicating a kind of fever to intellectual life.  (1210 words)

* * *

In the course of the voyage imagined by Rabelais in the 1552 version of the fourth book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Tantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet, and took a look about him. ‘Can you hear some-thing, comrades?’ he asked, ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can't see anything. Listen’. . . So as to miss nothing, some of us cupped the palms of our hands to the backs of our ears . . .; the more keenly we listened, the more clearly we made out voices, till in the end we could hear whole words.' Greatly alarmed, Pantagruel's party was told by the ship's captain that what they were beginning to hear were the sounds of a great battle which had been frozen by winter and were now beginning to thaw. Some, indeed, fell on deck; where they 'looked like crystallized sweets of different colours . . . when we warmed them a little between our hands, they melted like snow, and we actually heard them'.

This is no bad analogy for the recovery of the sounds of classical antiquity after the long medieval winter that closed in with the loss of Rome to the barbarians. It was the warming of texts by devoted editing from the fourteenth century onwards that allowed their authors' voices to speak clearly again, and the consequential extension of interest in the world they had lived in that made their battles real again. Though the preliminary work had been done in Italy, by the time Rabelais wrote educated men and women throughout Europe had come into repossession of an Old world — an instructive, recognizably relevant alter ego — that was to most of them of far greater interest than the New. Far in the past, but nearer to their own concerns than the medieval centuries, was a society like their own, lacking only stirrups, the compass, printing, gunpowder, the papacy and the Americas: a society which, thanks to time's tendency to winnow its trivial sources and monuments more thoroughly, appeared to have been peopled by an intellectual and creative master-race. Whatever there was to do, in philosophical speculation, political action or cultural achievement, appeared to have been done, and done with a supreme vigour and accomplishment, among a people whose history not only had the clarity of distance in time but the wholeness of a completed cycle, from obscurity through world empire to barbarian chaos.

Text by text, as the imaginative reconstruction of the ancient world proceeded, the relevance of this alter ego became clearer. Their words no longer obscure, their personalities restored, replaced in the context of their own society, the appeal of the authors the middle ages had read but not really heard — Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero and Ovid —became stronger than ever, and they were joined by a host of others. The impact of so many minds on men who read them not merely with admiration for their knowledge or their particular expertise, but as models from whom to learn about statecraft, the waging of war, the creation of works of art and the more important art of bearing up under adversity: this impact made the study of the ancient world into a cultural force. It was not simply the perusal of neglected manuscripts but purposeful communication with a race of illustrious forebears. . . .

The Greek Plutarch died around AD 120. Reaching down his volumes of Plutarch's Works fifteen and a half centuries after his death, Montaigne felt instantly, appetitively, at ease with him. He is 'so universal and so full', he wrote 'that upon all occasions, and whatsoever extravagant subject you have undertaken, he intrudeth himself into your work, and gently reacheth you a helpe-affording hand, fraught with rare embellishments, and inexhaustible of precious riches . . . He can no sooner come in my sight, or if I cast but a glance upon him, but I pull some legge or wing from him'. In 1600 Philemon Holland, a country doctor who spent more time with his books than his patients, dedicated his translation of Livy to Queen Elizabeth. 'Reach forth your gracious hand', he begged, as though introducing a foreign friend, 'to T. Livius, who having arrived long since and conversed as a mere stranger in this your famous island . . . humbly craveth your Majesties favour to be ranged with other free denizens . . . to live under your princely protection.' (189-91)

It was through the reinvigoration of already existing talent and sense of purpose that the revival of interest in the ancient past made its most creative mark. . . . It is striking that when Hernan Cortes set off with his small band of Spanish adventurers to the conquest of Mexico in 1519 he exhorted them not to model themselves on the heroes of the romances of chivalry, the staple reading of his noble class, but to imitate the deeds of the Romans. Whereupon, his chronicler Bernal Diaz (who was there, though he wrote after the event) recorded, ‘to a man we all responded that we would follow his orders, that the die was cast for good fortune, as Caesar said at the Rubicon.’ (192-93)

Though humanism presented the merits of a pagan civilization to a Christian one, it became naturalized with little strain. Yet Pico della Mirandola's assertion in 1487 that God had spoken as relevantly, if not as directly, through the mouths of pagan seers as through those of biblical prophets, led to his condemnation by Rome; when, after a period of tactful self-exile in France, he returned to Florence, it was on the understanding — rather as in the later case of Galileo — that he should stay at home and keep quiet.  . . . On the whole, however, there was felt to be little potential conflict. Humanist moral teaching emphasized the obligations of honourable individual conduct and the pursuit of the collective good in terms that contradicted neither the Ten Commandments nor the Sermon on the Mount. There was in any case a strong tendency among theologians themselves to divide the aspect of truth that was ascertainable by reason and community experience from that of spirituality and revelation. `Surely the first place is due to holy scripture', wrote Erasmus in his widely read dialogue The Religious Banquet, 'but sometimes I find some things said or written by the ancients, by pagans and poets, so chaste, so holy, so divine, that I am persuaded a good genius enlightened them. Certainly there are many in the communion of saints who are not in our catalogue of saints.’

Luther's gratitude for humanist studies as aiding a linguistic understanding of the Bible was such that he adopted a Providentialist view of this aspect of the rebirth of knowledge. `Formerly', he wrote, referring to the previous century, 'no one knew why God caused the languages [Latin, Hebrew, Greek] to be revived, but now for the first time we see that it was done for the sake of the Gospel . . . To this end He gave over Greece to the Turk in order that the Greeks, driven out and scattered, might disseminate their language and provide an incentive to the study of other languages as well. (197-98)

 

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John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994).