Ashley, Richard K., “The Poverty of Neorealism” in Keohane, Robert O.

, (ed), (1986), Neorealism and Its Critics,

pp255-300

N.B. Ashley’s essay is difficult to read but is probably the best short introduction to post-structuralist IR. (In the
expression ‘post-structuralism’, the structuralism referred to is not that of Waltz but rather that of a school of thought
based in psychological theory. Chomsky is a structuralist; Foucault a post-structuralist (and you can find a debate
between them on YouTube). The two ‘structuralisms’ (Waltz’s and the psychologists’) can nonetheless be linked at
certain common junctures: see pp 264-5.) My opinion is that it is worth it to engage with this chapter.

Althusser impoverished Marxism by seeking to make it positivistic. He took categories from Marx and tried to study
modern society with them, without paying attention to historical setting. In a sense, he subjected the dialectic Marx to the
positivistic Marx. (256) Similarly Waltz impoverishes the realist tradition by trying to make it scientific, positive, and
therefore recuperating its categories and granting them a trans-historical interpretation. This amounts to reifying and
crystallizing (lamely used as a lame transitive verb) the categories of realism. The categories of classical realist theories
were more flexible in that they did not pretend to be universal.

That this is not widely acknowledged in the field is partly due to the sociology of the field. Indeed, the discipline is a
society with rites of passage (e.g. generals) in which students must recount the field’s legitimating “lores”. The latest (in
1986) lores are those of the triumph of scientific realism (“neorealism is more objective (vs. subjective) and scientific
(vs. policy-oriented) than classical realism”) and of the structuralist promise (“neorealism is well grounded in social
theory and is more rigorous, like economics”).

(262) On the contrary, neorealism has in fact impoverished our potential for discovery, for instance by requiring from us
that we assume a fixed world order (that’s similar to Ruggie’s point).

Then, Ashley explains 5 key elements of structuralism in social theory. (264)

He then criticizes the following apects of Waltz’s theory:

- statism/state centricism: why is it that the state is totally unproblematic, neorealists make the assumption of
state centricism for their theories and do not question it, although they acknowledge that it is in fact
problematic.
- utilitarianism: the assumption that actors act based on expected utility, which assumes rationality. “Social
action is interpretable as instrumental coaction.” (274) Social order is a derivative relation. However (274),
if states are rational maximizers constituted by the structure (Ashley posits the constitutive priority of
structure over agents as a key element of structuralism), then they must be conceived of as automatons.
- positivist discourse is attacked and contradistinguished with eschatological discourse (281) Positivism
locks us in non-normative knowledge, and through it we cannot avoid reproducing the actors’ norms. When
we think as positivists, we cannot question ends, only means.
- structuralism: In the end, it is unclear in which side of the agent-structure problem Waltz wants to stand.
He espouses incompatible individualist and structuralist positions. Finally, Ashley takes another stab (from
a different perspective) at how structuralism imposes a static (as in stasis, not as in statism) lens, which
affects our interpretation of the world as well as our practices.

He then argues for a dialectical competence model, which would explain the conditions that make the unitary sovereign
state possible: it would discuss the current state of affairs as historically contingent, thus it would be critical, but would
arguably acknowledge the validity of neorealism for our era. Only a few pages of this discussion as it appeared originally
are reproduced in Neorealism and Its Critics.

Questions:

• What is (or can be) post-structuralism useful for?

• What place should post-structuralism have in the field?
• What do you make of the post-structuralist claim that all theory is normative?
• What criteria can be used to differentiate positive from normative theory?
• Is state-centricism justified? If not, what is left of IR – what is IR’s operative paradigm, what justifies our
considering IR as a separate field of social science?
• Are balances of power a trans-historical occurrence? (no!) Then are anarchy and lack of functional
differentiation necessary and sufficient for their occurrence?