The Closing of The American Mind

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EJT0010.1177/1354066114530010European Journal of International RelationsLevine and Barder
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The closing of the American 2014, Vol. 20(4) 863–888
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state of grand theory
Daniel J. Levine
University of Alabama, USA
Alexander D. Barder
American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
Senior ‘American School’ International Relations theorists — John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt, Robert Keohane, and others — have evinced a growing concern about a
rise of technocratic hypothesis-testing, and a parallel decline in grand theory. We share
many of their concerns; yet, we also find such discussions deeply unsatisfying. Grand
theory descends into ‘technocracy’ because of reifying and depoliticizing processes
deeply woven into both thought and the academic vocation. While confronting such
processes is possible, these same scholars are among those who dismiss — and have
long dismissed — the key intellectual moves that would sustain such a confrontation.
That infelicitous combination, we argue, is unlikely to produce a renaissance of grand
theory; indeed, past precedent suggests that it will further stifle it. To suggest how these
theorists might better revalorize grand theory, we develop disciplinary-historical case
studies around two key research programs: neo-functionalism and structural liberalism.
Both were the product of an abiding commitment to grand theory; yet, both fell into
reified and depoliticized stances that left little space for such theory. Breaking that
cycle of reification and depoliticization might yet be possible; but it will require thinking
beyond the call for ‘more grand theory.’
Keywords
Depoliticization, ‘end of International Relations theory,’ grand theory, hypothesis-
testing, International Relations theory, reification
Corresponding author:
Daniel J. Levine, University of Alabama, Box 870213, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0213, USA.
Email: daniel.j.levine@ua.edu
864 European Journal of International Relations 20(4)
Powerful professional incentives encourage an emphasis on simplistic hypothesis-testing,

and the rise of think tanks and consulting firms has reduced demand for academic scholarship
on policy issues. IR [International Relations] scholars are less inclined to develop, refine
and test theories … and we are not optimistic that this situation will change. (Mearsheimer
and Walt, 2013: 449)
Introduction
In an article appearing in this journal’s recent ‘End of IR theory’ special issue, John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt lament what they see as the ‘triumph of methods over
theory’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 429). By that, they mean a particular shift in IR
research, away from what they call ‘grand theory’ and toward ‘hypothesis-testing.’ The
latter, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, represents attempts at determining ‘plausible’
covariations; determining ‘statistically significant relationship[s]’ in larger-scale phe-
nomena while downplaying explanations or understanding causal relations inferred from
collected data (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 438). Such approaches lend themselves to
statistical methods, determining dependent and independent variables, and, as a conse-
quence, result in ‘little attention to specifying the mechanisms linking independent and
dependent variables and virtually no attention to exploring them directly’ (Mearsheimer
and Walt, 2013: 438). Put differently, they argue, the question of why such variables are
associated or correlated remains beyond the scope of mere hypothesis-testing. Only
grand theory can lay the groundwork for understanding and explaining how patterns and
practices emerge in world politics. Such theory, as they understand it, provides maps that
simplify and interpret reality. They guide scholars by identifying which variables in par-
ticular are significant enough in their explanatory potential to merit sustained hypothe-
sis-testing by providing larger explanations as to how things work.
Mearsheimer and Walt are not alone in their concerns. Recently, Robert Keohane
admonished the community of IR theorists to ‘be … aware of the uncertainty of our
inferences’ (Keohane, 2008: 710). International theory has, Keohane avers, tended to
focus on establishing ‘static conditional generalizations’ that are not amenable to height-
ened periods of change; IR scholars need to ask ‘big questions’ about changes in human
history and the international system. At risk of getting caught up in the particularities of
a present condition or a particular historical moment, Keohane implicitly recognizes that
methods will not, on their own, be able to determine the substance of what is ‘political’
about IR. ‘To my taste,’ Keohane continues:
there has been an overemphasis recently on tools at the expense of reflection about which
questions are most important for the human race and for the ecosystem. Focusing on major
problems can help us to figure out which insights from the broad approaches to the field
are valuable, and which analytical tools yield genuine insights or evidence. (Keohane,
2008: 714)
What has caused this turn away from grand theories and big questions? Mearsheimer
and Walt seek their answers in the institutional workings of the American academy: the
growth of second-tier graduate programs; shortening publication and training timeta-
bles; the professionalization of funding; and the growing influence of think tanks
Levine and Barder 865
(Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 445–448). Keohane, too, has alluded to ‘professional’
constraints, though his focus remains more overtly normative (Keohane, 2002: 9–10).
‘The way we think about practical issues such as institutional design,’ Keohane has
argued, ‘will necessarily be shaped by our answers to these fundamental normative
questions’ (Keohane, 2008: 713). The merit of asking ‘big questions’ (‘How has world
politics been affected by changes in capitalism?’; ‘Is there any plausible sense in which
progress has taken place?’) lies precisely in their potential to unsettle profound assump-
tions about what constitutes the array of political, economic, and social forces that hold
a particular epoch together (Keohane, 2008: 710–713). Keohane is forthright in his
cosmopolitan democratic liberalism and how it connects his theoretical motivations to
his normative ideals (Keohane, 2002: 10).1 What is less clear, however, is the extent to
which he admits the radical potentialities of distinct socio-political arrangements
beyond his own normative inclinations; the degree to which those same inclinations
may generate resistance, insofar as they may, for example, offer only limited horizons
to those most disadvantaged by them.2
Despite a very different disposition to ‘grand theory,’ David Lake reveals a similar
ambivalence. Methodological rationalism, he asserts, is the equivalent of the philoso-
pher’s stone, dissolving all ‘isms’ — mutually exclusive grand-theoretic worldviews and
essentially contested sensibilities — together. But, if so, then surely rationalism is itself
an ‘ism’: a point made by IR theorists from Stanley Hoffmann (1977) to Brian Rathbun
(2012, 2013). Overlooking this allows Lake to dismiss the unsettling possibility that IR
theories and theorists must contend with worlds that are radically morally incompatible
with one another; moreover, that this incompatibility is not an epistemological artifact or
a matter of intellectual sectarianism, but an inherent, enduring feature of political life.
The question of ‘hav[ing] something constructive to say to policymakers’ who wish to
engage in broad processes of global steering must, presumably, depend upon what those
policymakers wish to steer us toward: the moral quality of their goals and the cultural-
contextual value systems from which those moral considerations spring (Lake, 2011:
472). As Anne Norton — and, before her, a line of philosophical inquiry stretching from
Nietzsche to Foucault — has pointed out, those values will always be relative and con-
textual; and they will, accordingly, always engender resistance (Norton, 2004a: 60–65:
2004b). Yet, on this point, Lake — and, like him, Mearsheimer, Walt, and Keohane — is
silent. Nor are they alone: varying degrees of that silence can be discerned in ‘American
School’ IR, from Alex Wendt to Richard Price, Rudra Sil, and Peter Katzenstein.3
A certain mismatch is at work here. For Mearsheimer, Walt, and Keohane, the demise
of grand-theoretical inquiry in the contemporary academy is attributed to the purely
‘hypothetical’ study of events in world politics. Yet, all three were instrumental through-
out the 1980s and 1990s in idealizing research agendas that proceeded from just this sort
of hypothesis-testing. All three, that is, called in various ways for more ‘scientific’ means
of determining notions of validity: developing ‘cumulative knowledge’ based on ‘stand-
ard canons of scientific research’ — as if the purpose of those canons was not specifically
to isolate political ‘science’ from cross-cutting contested values and contingent forces
and dynamics in order to carefully pose, and test, hypotheses.4 Further, they specifically
rejected — and continue to reject — those approaches to IR that aimed to bring such
factors into a space of critical and methodological reflection.
For Keohane, this argument was parsed in normative-disciplinary terms as to what

constituted good social science (Jackson, 2011: 66–68). Two-and-a-half decades of
‘great debating’ later, Mearsheimer and Walt take a different path, but end in the same
place. If they eschew ‘critical theory, interpretivism, hermeneutics, and some versions of
constructivism,’ it is not because they are bad science (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013:
430). Rather, the claim is now academic and sociological: since TRIP data affirms the
dominance of neo-positivism within ‘American School’ IR, they argue, it makes sense to
confine their views to this slice of the field (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 431). But that
field is peer-driven, and Mearsheimer and Walt are among its leading lights. Neo-
positivism’s dominance did not emerge from nowhere (Gunnell, 2009). Could not a gen-
eration of scholars condemning everything else as ‘bad science’ have played at least a
part in the dominance they now observe (Jackson, 2011: 9–10)? If so, are not Mearsheimer
and Walt simply taking a more circuitous route back to the same old pattern of paradig-
matic exclusion and disciplinary infighting?
Whatever the path taken, the effect remains the same: to seal ‘American School’ inter-
national theory off from the need for sustained reflection on ‘big questions.’ To borrow a
phrase from Roy Bhaskar, it is the epistemic fallacy of neo-positivist IR — the mistaken
belief ‘that ontological questions can always be reparsed in epistemological form’ — that
allows questions of essential contestation, and therefore of reflexivity, to seem unimpor-
tant (Bhaskar, 1989: 13; see also Wight, 2006). For its effect is to reduce essentially
contested and mutually exclusive value systems of the sort that often contend in world
politics to ‘isms.’ That, in turn, is what drives the field toward technocratic problem-
solving and narrow hypothesis-testing: why bother with normative perorations on the
limits of one’s epistemological tool kit if those limits do not affect our ability to faithfully
represent reality?
So viewed, discussions like those undertaken by Mearsheimer and Walt begin to seem
more like disciplinary performances than substantive theoretical interventions, despite
protestations to the contrary.5 There is a rhetorical and disciplining effect that follows
when senior scholars from prestigious universities both decry a particular set of estab-
lished intellectual practices and then ignore, exclude, or disqualify precisely those theo-
retical alternatives that have emerged in response to them. Intentionally or otherwise,
such moves disclose and reaffirm the power relations within a discipline: which projects
and approaches merit engagement, citation, discussion, and access to scholarly resources;
which do not; and who gets to decide.6 Such moves, as scholars like Randall Collins,
Pierre Bourdieu, Nicolas Guilhot, and Jack Gunnell have shown in a variety of contexts,
are not without broader disciplinary consequences (Bourdieu, 1988, 2004; Collins, 1998;
Guilhot, 2011; Gunnell, 1998, 2011).
Given the particular meaning we attach to the word performance, it is important to
tread carefully here. We do not assert consciously cynical motives on the part of Walt,
Mearsheimer, Keohane, or Lake. Rather, we mean to underscore a distinction first made
in Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus between a scholar’s empirical self and her epistemic
one (Bourdieu, 1988: 21–35).7 The work that a living, breathing person does in conceiv-
ing ideas and disseminating them is one element of academic production. The work those
ideas do, as it were, ‘on their own’ — as commodified bits of value within a discursive
field that accords status, authority, and prestige differentially, and as concepts that live
within the mind of scholars and subtly structure their thinking — is quite another. The
latter is not reducible to the former: the work a body of theory does is not reducible to the
conscious intentions or desires of the theorist.8 One of the reasons that critical, herme-
neutic, and reflexive theorists at times make themselves and/or their disciplines the
object of their study is precisely to elucidate those processes systematically, so as to bet-
ter respond to those effects and act responsibly in light of them (Dauphinee, 2013;
Guilhot, 2011; Guzzini, 1998; Inayatullah, 2011; Ish-Shalom, 2013; Löwenheim, 2010;
Oren, 2003; Robin, 2001; Waever and Tickner, 2009).
In that vein, when Mearsheimer and Walt both reflect on the state of the field and
exclude precisely the kind of scholarship that subjects such disciplinary and cognitive
reflection to its own brand of normative and epistemological rigor, they carry out a very
particular kind of scholarly performance: one that, we suspect, contributes to the very
outcomes their article means to describe. There are two reasons for this. First, because
any given approach to theory has its own inner dynamics, traditions, and myopias, the
aim of systematic critical reflection is to acquire a deep awareness of those dynamics,
traditions, and myopias. By dismissing such theory outright, Mearsheimer and Walt
deprive themselves of the fruit of that reflection — and free themselves from having to
grapple with whatever conclusions—inconvenient or otherwise—might follow from it.
Second, and no less important, since we are given no means of subjecting their
impressions to what would otherwise be generally accepted social-scientific standards
— ‘unbiased measurement of critical concepts, and public documentation of theoretical
and empirical claims,’ as Walt (1991: 222) has elsewhere put it — we must take what are
often far-reaching, but thinly substantiated, anecdotal claims as given.9 That such claims
are then published in well-regarded journals suggests an exception to those standards: a
prerogative that underscores their privileged, authoritative status as expert arbiters. That,
in turn, adds prestige to their epistemological and methodological preferences — which
are precisely the same ones that excluded systematic theoretical-disciplinary reflection
in the first place: a ‘charmed circle.’
Pointing out such instances of privilege and authority, Bourdieu notes, can easily
descend into polemic: for one has no choice but to call theorists out by name, implying
that the ‘empirical’ individual consciously intends the work of her ‘epistemic’ self.10 As
individual scholars, we regret this. As students of an academic discipline, however, we
are aware of no other way to argue what we suspect is the case: that an article intended
to decry the decline of grand theory is both symptomatic of, and may be contributing to,
that same decline.
Our aim in the remainder of this article is to substantiate that suspicion. We will pro-
ceed in three steps. First, we will undertake a conceptual discussion of reification and
depoliticization: those cognitive, psychological, social, and political processes that, we
hold, cause grand theory to degenerate into technocratic hypothesis-testing. Second, we
will survey previous efforts to revitalize such theory by leading IR theorists — Ernst
Haas and G. John Ikenberry — assessing their success or failure in light of the problems
that reification and depoliticization pose. Finally, we will suggest how a broader engage-
ment with the field might succeed where earlier attempts have failed.
Two key points of clarification follow. First, we share Walt’s, Mearsheimer’s, and
Keohane’s concern as to the decline of grand theory. Like Lake, moreover, we worry that
reified ‘isms’ can, indeed, sometimes be ‘evil’ (Lake, 2011). Yet, we also suspect that the
reflections these theorists offer are so posed as to be fundamentally self-defeating: that
they will not suffice to ‘reopen’ the ‘mind’ of ‘American School’ IR. For that, a deeper
engagement with the field’s critical, reflexive, and interpretive literature would be
needed. We suspect, further, that the prominence these theorists enjoy as leading figures
in the discipline allows them to evade such engagements. While these theorists are, of
course, entirely free to write and think how and with whomever they choose, our aim
here is to argue forcefully for what we believe will be the effects of that non-engagement:
to perpetuate precisely the decline that these theorists decry.
Second, like Mearsheimer and Walt’s article, this article is perforce largely specula-
tive. After all, our claim is future-oriented: we are suggesting that a certain theoretical
intervention will fail on the basis of past experience. Obviously, one cannot prove a
future claim, nor is the past necessarily prologue. Yet, we cannot avoid an abiding sense
of déjà vu: leading IR theorists have been down this road before. Our hope is that a close
reading of such efforts might engender a degree of more careful reflection among con-
temporary theorists with similar concerns: to persuade them to see critical, reflective,
and interpretive work as a necessary ally in the asking of ‘big questions.’
Reification, depoliticization, and the decline of grand

theory
If the current mode of framing a return to grand theory remains, from our point of view,
deeply problematic, it is because we believe that the notions of theory that Mearsheimer,
Walt, Keohane et al. authorize undercut its basic intellectual conditions of possibility.
‘Grand theories’ emerge in IR around particular sets of normative, ontological, and meth-
odological abstractions: they are enabling assumptions about the world that necessarily
elide and simplify so as to allow theorists to say useful things about it. Those assump-
tions can be considered partial in at least two senses: first, they obscure a whole in order
to bring certain details into sharp relief; and, second, they do this with an eye to serving
antecedently given practical agendas. It is in this sense that Mearsheimer and Walt are
correct in thinking of such theories as maps, for they exist to orient their users and pro-
vide them with useful information (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 430).
That notion of use, moreover, has a particular historical context. As scholars like
Michael C. Williams, Keohane, Ernst and Peter Haas, and Ira Katznelson have vari-
ously noted, both IR and political science more generally derive their particular sense
of usefulness from the catastrophes of the middle of the 20th century: high- and late-
industrial warfare and the ‘twenty years’ crisis’ (Barkawi, 1998; Haas and Haas, 2002;
Katznelson, 2003; Keohane, 2009; Williams, 2013). It is from that vantage point,
moreover, that ‘simplistic hypothesis-testing’ can, indeed, be said to be bad for IR, for
the promise of international theory lies precisely in the potential of such maps to do
more than gratify the theorist’s personal curiosity or demonstrate her methodological
finesse. ‘We study politics not because it is beautiful or easy to understand, but because
it is so important to all fields of human endeavor,’ as Keohane has noted; accordingly,
there is no neutrality ‘with respect to order vs. chaos [or] war vs. peace’ (Keohane,
2009: 362–363).11
The problem is that without ‘thinking critical theory thoroughly,’ theorists tend to
forget the artificiality of the simplifying assumptions on which their grand theories are
predicated. Over time, the maps become more than a guide through which a complicated
and essentially indeterminate world is disclosed; they come, rather, to be conflated with
that world. This process is known as reification: the tendency to forget that concepts and
theories cannot capture the full, dynamic, constantly changing nature of things-as-such.12
Such forgetting has particular consequences. When the contours of a conceptual map can
no longer be held distinct from the world that map purports to describe, its partiality falls
out of view: the theorist no longer sees what is excluded from it, nor feels any need to
reflect on what might fall under erasure by that forgetting. Yet, that forgetting is not, in
the first instance, accidental: since theories are always ‘for someone and for some pur-
pose’ (Cox, 1981: 128, emphasis in original), the exclusions within them reflect the pri-
orities of those whom the theory is meant to serve. In this way, reification gives particular,
contingent, and contestable agendas a false sense of necessity, inevitability, scientific
objectivity, or naturalness. Reification thus drives the turn to hypothesis-testing: why
reflect on the embedded assumptions of a particular worldview if that worldview no
longer appears as anything less than the world as such?
Reification works in tandem with another intellectual process, which, following Jenny
Edkins (1999: 1), we call depoliticization: the tendency to reduce the deeply and persis-
tently contested nature of the world to problems of calculation. So understood, depoliti-
cization conflates the two senses with which students of IR understand the term ‘politics’
— ‘day-to-day decision making and ideological partisanship’ with the conditions of pos-
sibility for ‘phenomena [to] acquire political status in the first place’ (Edkins, 1999: 2;
see also Dallmayr, 1995). By this, we mean that international ‘problems’ are no longer
deemed to be existential — a question of incommensurable values or normative orders
requiring some mix of political action, speculative reason, and self-interested ratiocina-
tion — but rather involve mere steering or administration.
The specific conjunction between reification and depoliticization is conceptually and
historically predicated upon a distinctly ‘modernist’ perspective, according to which the
world is perceived to be amenable to calculative or instrumental reason in the first place
— this is what both encourages the creation of simplified mental maps such as those that
Mearsheimer and Walt seek and facilitates their reification. The early 20th-century soci-
ologist Georg Simmel’s (2002 [1903]) essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’ explores
this conjunction. As Simmel put it:
The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The calculating exactness of
practical life … corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of transforming the
world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical
formula. (Simmel, 2002 [1903]: 13)
Simmel thus describes a distinct, modern process of cultural objectification whose

meaning lies beyond mere individual subjectivity and where such objects are perceived
to have ontological properties beyond their physical structure (Simmel, 2002 [1903]:
19). Or, as Timothy Mitchell (2002: 98) explains, ‘The new “organization of things and
powers” [that Simmel was diagnosing] … were redistributing ideas and values in a
simplified way, to manufacture the apparent separation of objects and values, things and
powers.’13
Key here, for us, is this very process of ‘transforming’ and ‘manufacturing’ that comes
to be occluded and excluded within the mental maps that Mearsheimer and Walt believe
constitute grand theory. In other words, the continuous emergence of sophisticated meth-
odological tools to uncover the general patterns, causal relationships, or recurrent prac-
tices that largely constitute neo-positivist epistemologies and methodologies already
presuppose an entire set of cognitively and historically constituted objects that remains
unproblematized. To ask ‘big questions’ of the international system does not necessarily
mean undoing all of these reified historical associations; but one needs to be cognizant
of them if one is to begin questioning them trenchantly. That is the point at which advo-
cates of grand theory ignore critical, reflexive, and interpretive scholarship at their peril,
for such theory exists specifically to pose and complicate such questions.
Are those questions, in turn, not precisely what students of ‘simplified hypothesis-
testing’ are faulted for overlooking? That is, is not the fault of such theory that it smug-
gles in — but never directly considers — key ontological assumptions to the effect that
the world and the political can be described in terms of ‘covering laws’ that are then
assumed to be timeless and ahistorical? Is this not what both critique and the systematic
positing of alternative grand theories seek to contest? If, as Colin Wight (2006: 2) argues,
‘Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies,’ then what Mearsheimer, Walt, and
Keohane diagnose as simplistic hypothesis-testing is, at bottom, a moment of unchecked
reification or depoliticization that has taken hold of a swath of post-Cold War IR theory
(Barder and Levine, 2012; Edkins, 1999). That moment implies a more or less implicit
— but not necessarily self-aware — consensus in terms of facts and values, stemming
from a tendency to forget the multiplicity of ways in which those facts and values can be
mutually exclusive, and, indeed, wholly orthogonal.
What these scholars decry, in other words — the ‘simplistic’ testing of interactions,
data analysis as the primary means of knowledge production — are symptoms of a larger
conceptual-theoretical problem. But why would such modes of knowledge production
not take over the field if nothing is done to keep the horizons of modern American liber-
alism from being projected globally, and if the theorists engaged in that projection are not
themselves actively attempting to critique it? Put differently, IR theory reflects or repre-
sents an ‘outside’ world in relation to thought that is self-evident, natural, and not subject
to a necessary problematization of truth claims. Big questions fail to emerge because
such an image of thinking seals itself off from them, even if this is not the theorist’s spe-
cific intention.
Our goal is thus to take Mearsheimer, Lake, Walt, and Keohane at their word. That is,
we aim to take their dissatisfactions with IR theory seriously — perhaps more seriously
than they do themselves. For theory to change in the manner that they seem to suggest it
must, however, students of IR will need to do more than simply declare the need for that
change. Specific attention will need to be paid as to how theory can confront the problem
of forgetting that underpins reification and depoliticization. The failure to do so, we
mean to show, pushes IR theory toward technocratic questions and historical theodicies.
What drives the decline of big questions is, on our account, the reification of implicit
assumptions that render them superfluous: that make the world appear as a single,
historical, and normative whole. Once that happens, what ‘big questions’ remain to be
asked that will not automatically appear as either self-indulgent or scholastic? Such
questions oblige theorists to remain ecumenical as to what the world actually is: to leave
our ‘cookbooks’ (to borrow a phrase from Guzzini and Leander) unfinished (Guzzini,
2013). That is, it turns out, much harder to do than it is to call for.
In demonstrating this, we will develop two historical-methodological case studies in
the following sections. First, we will consider Ernst Haas’s work on post-national inte-
gration. Haas, it will be recalled, would boldly declare in the mid-1970s that existing
integration theory — including his own — was ‘obsolescent.’ It was not that such theory
could not generate testable hypotheses based on data; it was rather that the concepts upon
which these hypotheses were built reified the big questions of his day: predicated upon
notions of state and political community with their roots in the 19th century, they were
unequal to the emerging political forms and orders of the 1970s. Haas wanted to break
free of that circle: to create a thinking space from which new concepts might emerge. He
sought to do so by defining politics as a ‘turbulent field’; coming to terms with turbu-
lence, he held, would force the scholar to turn her attention to the contingency and inde-
terminacy of the objects under her study, their essential resistance to reductive
conceptualization. Thus could theory retain both reductive/conceptual precision and an
openness to big questions.
The originality of this approach will not be disputed here; Haas remains one of IR’s
most accomplished scholars (Rosamond, 2005; Ruggie et al., 2005; Schmitter, 2004;
Slaughter and Mattli, 2006). Yet, his work, it must be said, did not entirely succeed in its
own terms. While rich in data, and distinguished by breadth and nuance, Haas’s work
ultimately repeated the very reductionism it set out to avoid. Our aim is not to ridicule
this attempt, but to show the magnitude of the problem it identifies — with an eye to
developing traction over the contemporary problem of grand theory and its decline, as set
up in the arguments surveyed earlier. Developing a thinking space for such theory — one
that does not degenerate into depoliticized scholarly common sense and reductive
hypothesis-testing — is, we mean to show, an intellectual challenge of rather greater
magnitude than Mearsheimer and Walt, Keohane, or Lake admit.
We next turn to the recent work of G. John Ikenberry in order to illustrate how a nega-
tion of incommensurability operates to preclude questions surrounding the longevity of
the contemporary international liberal order. In his recent book Liberal Leviathan: The
Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Ikenberry, 2011),
Ikenberry argues that:
the crisis of the old order transcends controversies generated by recent American foreign policy
or even the ongoing economic crisis. It is a crisis of authority within the old hegemonic
organization of liberal order, not a crisis in the deep principles of the order itself. It is a crisis of
governance. (Ikenberrry, 2011: 6)
Ikenberry essentially takes for granted the longevity of a particular historical moment,
the post-Second World War American liberal hegemonic order. He papers over histori-
cal moments of hegemonic crises. But his arguments raise important questions regard-
ing the meaning of ‘crisis’ and what constitutes a crisis in the ‘deep principles’ of an
international political order, something international theorists have largely ignored and
left to historical sociologists. Our point here is that liberal international theory, as it
stands, has no epistemological way to address this question because it largely rests on
the assumption that all international actors basically agree on constitutive ends — open
markets and trade, a particular human rights regime, and so on. It is that inability, in
turn, which leads grand theory down the path to simplistic hypothesis-testing.
Ernst Haas and the progress of reason

In 1975, Ernst Haas would declare neo-functionalist IR theory — the very theory he had
spent the past two decades building up — obsolete. The context of that moment of obso-
lescence was France’s ambivalent relationship to European unification. Neo-
functionalism had, it will be recalled, staked out its departure from the earlier
functionalism of David Mitrany by critiquing its reliance on ‘terminal’ concepts:
European unification was asserted by paleofunctionalists to be an essentially technical/
administrative problem, since the common will and desire for unification was — at the
elite level at least — already there. Close empirical study, Haas argued, showed that this
consensus was nowhere in evidence; unification took place because savvy nationalists
saw European unification as a means to advance particular national interests. Accordingly,
integration theory had to place actors ‘in history’ and not ‘rely on some elusive general
will to do the job for us’ (Haas, 1964: 464). The ability of individuals to identify and
realize their own interest was driving European integration: only thus could ‘order …
develop from chaos, the general good … from the compounding of ruthless egoism’
(Haas, 1964: 32–33).
Neo-functionalism’s key move was, thus, to recast political integration in rationalist
terms. ‘Political actors’ were, on Haas’s account, ‘persuaded to shift their loyalties,
expectations and actions toward a new and larger center, whose institutions possess or
demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states’ (Haas, 1961: 366–7; see also
Haas, 1958: 13–14; 2004: xiv–xv). The expectation was for a ‘spillover’ effect — as
transnational interactions grew, linkages between issues would create a demand for the
expansion of supranational governance and a withering away of the national state as the
actor of consequence in European inter-state politics (Haas, 1958: 297; Rosamond, 2000:
59–68; Slaughter and Mattli, 2006).
In practice, however, things were stickier — and perhaps closer to paleofunctionalism
than Haas had earlier understood. Pragmatic interests and rational persuasion did not
capture the full meaning of the integrationalist project. Indeed, Haas argued, they could
not, almost by definition: ‘De Gaulle has proved us wrong…. Pragmatic interests, simply
because they are pragmatic and not reinforced with deep ideological or philosophical
commitment are ephemeral. Just because they are weakly held they can be readily
scrapped’ (Haas, 1967: 327–328). An affective center, Haas had come to realize, remained
part of any process of political integration. As Ronn Kaiser noted in 1972: ‘efforts at
building gesellschaft alone will not succeed…. What is required is changes in society
which serve to build community at the same time’ (Kaiser, 1972: 225). Neo-functionalism
was ill-suited to guide this task, and spillover did not entirely capture the affective ele-
ments of community-building. Alongside gesellschaft, integration theory needed
something like a theory of gemeinschaft, but one compatible with an emerging political
body that was not reducible to any of the old political concepts drawn from the copybook
of the 19th century — federations, confederations, national states, and so on.14
The problem for Haas, then, was not simply that a prediction was not borne out empir-
ically. Nor was it that neo-functionalist theory could not generate useful knowledge:
viable research programs, new hypotheses, and innovative standards of measure were
emerging all the time. Yet, that flurry of activity, he explained, concealed a depoliticizing
or reifying tendency: however one might theorize political unification, one did so on the
basis of concepts, which were themselves historical derivations. Neither existing ‘politi-
cal’ nor ‘economic’ notions of interest and affinity were sufficient; indeed, the distinction
tended to obscure complex integrative processes, rather than clarify them.
This realization brought Haas, in the 1970s, to consider complexity and incomplete-
ness as part and parcel of the process of theorizing. Neo-functionalism was attempting to
discern order within an enormously complicated set of ongoing processes — processes
into which the theory itself was feeding back (Pentland, 1975: 19). The question was
whether, in these conditions, such theory could simultaneously preserve awareness of
this complexity and develop concepts sufficiently capacious to bring order to it. As early
as 1970 — with his realization that the term ‘integration’ conflated ‘processes’ with ‘con-
ditions’ — Haas had begun to suspect that it could not (Haas, 1970; Kaiser, 1972;
Rosamond, 2000: 85–92). The field’s self-contradiction was a symptom of that inability.
‘A different conceptualization,’ was needed: one that did not simply recycle 19th-century
modes, institutions, and orders back onto contemporary realities as reified ideal-types
(Haas, 1975b: 17). Almost four decades before Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s death of grand
theory, Haas was attempting to push forward: from hypothesis-testing to a new grand-
theoretical big picture.
Essential to that ‘different conceptualization’ was the notion of turbulence. A turbu-
lent field, Haas noted, was ‘a policy space in which … confusion dominates discussion
and negotiation. It can be sub-national, national, regional, inter-regional or global — or
all at the same time’ (Haas, 1975b: 18). Not only did integration theories fail to resolve
the problem of turbulence, they actually exacerbated it, ‘because [such theories] provide
certainty for parts of the field while further confusing an understanding of the whole’
(Haas, 1975b: 18; see also Haas, 1975a: 839–840). Coming to terms with such turbulent
fields — developing theories that incorporated understanding of their own essential
incompleteness — was ‘emerging as the key political task in what remains of this cen-
tury’ (Haas, 1975b: 19). The extant network of supranational and intergovernmental
institutions that made up the European Community was ‘a half-way house’ (Haas, 1975b:
87). The challenge facing integration theory was to develop such concepts as could
describe its workings, without obscuring the ongoing political processes that were
remaking it: processes into which its own actions were feeding.
Haas’s discussion of the political and its relationship to theory goes only so far, how-
ever. It acknowledges in greater detail a problem to which Mearsheimer, Walt, and
Keohane allude only in passing: that grand theory cannot stand outside of the processes
it means to explain if it is to take its rightful place alongside the close testing of hypoth-
eses. Yet, his approach remains just as depoliticized as is theirs. New grand theories —
‘wholes,’ as he called them — suggest new political forms, modes, and orders: different
understandings and experiences of power, affiliation, and interest. One must suppose
— as with Machiavelli — that this theory is as much prescriptive as descriptive: that is,
that the theory means to describe those institutions that exist and are emerging so as to
better guide those who must live within them. At that point, he had to choose whether to
reflect on the assumptions and beliefs that will be structuring those descriptions and their
related prescriptions, or to make an argument that — as with Mearsheimer, Walt, and
Keohane — justified the excision of such concerns from the work of international theory.
He chose the latter:
it is as unnecessary as it is misleading to juxtapose as rival explanations the following: science

to politics, knowledge to power or interest, consensual knowledge to common interests.…
When knowledge becomes consensual … we should not suppose that [it] is opposed to interest.
(Haas, 1990: 11–12)
Some forms of power-knowledge, Haas held, were better than others. The difference lay
in consensus: ‘generally accepted understandings about cause-and-effect linkages about
any set of phenomena considered important by society, provided only that the finality of
the accepted chain of causation is subject to continuous testing and examination through
adversary procedures’ (Haas, 1990: 21).
Theorists schooled in classical critical theory would be quick to poke holes in such an
argument. How could one speak, they would have argued, of anything like freely given
consensus in a world where personal sensibilities were subject to constant, unremitting
manipulation? A ‘one-dimensional man’ might accede to this or that social measure; but
was not that achieved by radically impoverishing his social, moral, and emotional hori-
zons (Marcuse, 1964)? Nor do ‘adversary procedures’ and other social-scientific conven-
tions — from peer review to public discussion and access to data — necessarily overcome
the academy as a site of agonistic contestation in both ideological terms and in terms of
access and prestige.15 Haas’s own work on the indeterminacy of knowledge reveals,
moreover, awareness of such concerns, at least in broad terms (Haas, 1970, 1975a, 1982).
Yet, he turns away from their full consideration; consensus, he seemed certain, could
prevent knowledge from becoming domination:
I make no claim that consensual knowledge is absolutely different from political ideology; on
the contrary, the line between the two is often barely visible. Some will say that consensual
knowledge is merely science-derived transideological and transcultural ideology. I would
contest such a claim with only a mild amendment … that political choice infused with
consensual knowledge is different from, and more pervasive than, choice informed exclusively
by immediate calculations of material interest or by the availability of superior power. (Haas,
1990: 21)
This was hardly a ‘mild’ amendment: moral ideals could thus be asserted to exist; knowl-
edge could thus uncover them; the historical arc of reason and history could be saved.
Truth could still be truth, even if ‘what eventually becomes truth may well [have]
originate[d] as someone’s ideology’ (Haas, 1997: 13).16
This was parlous ground, and Haas knew it. If consensus was achieved through a
process of reflection upon the past, and yet one’s ability to reflect upon that past was
mediated through one’s own present-day experiences, how was one not projecting one’s
own worldviews backwards? Would not the past simply become prologue? How would
one gain the perspective to distinguish between ‘consensus’ and conditioning? The
answer lay in science. ‘History has no purpose’; even so, ‘the language of modern sci-
ence is creating a transideological and transcultural signification system’ that has a pro-
gressive trajectory (Haas, 1990: 46). This held good even if the form of that convergence
was only visible in retrospect: did not Hegel’s ‘owl of Minerva’ take flight only with the
setting of the sun? It held, too, even if the scientific method was itself a mode of intel-
lectual activity with a particular intellectual-historical provenance (Haas, 1990: 46–49).
It is important to acknowledge that Haas pushed well past the kind of rationalism and
neo-positivism that Lake, Mearsheimer, Walt, and Keohane address exclusively. His pro-
posed path had family resemblances to Deutsch, to Morgenthau, to Weberian interpretiv-
ism, and to the German idealism of the liberal-nationalist school. Haas was well aware
of the problem posed in the closing pages of Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic: instrumen-
tal reason led ‘to the loss of affect, the death of emotional ties among people, to [Weber’s]
Iron Cage’ (Haas, 2000: 4).
Yet, for all that, Haas’s own push for a new grand theory proved unable to avoid the
same kind of reifying-depoliticizing moment described in the previous section. The
reflexive sensibility that drives Haas’s turn to declare his own theory obsolescent does
not end in a reflection on the limits of facts and values as such, but rather in the adoption
of new values (or, in his case, a return to old ones), which will then themselves be reified
and depoliticized. In his two-volume magnum opus, Nationalism, Liberalism and
Progress (Haas, 1997, 2000), Haas would come to assert that when nested within the
correct set of political cultures and institutions, social science could produce progress
toward political consensus. Social science, he now argued, had a particular ‘elective
affinity’ for ‘the practice of pluralistic democracy and of liberal nationalism’ (Haas,
2000: 415). The workings of liberal nationalism, Haas argued, balanced rationalization
against the emotional resources of nationalism: finding spaces for those marginalized by
scientific progress, while, at the same time, promoting society’s progressive, consensual
‘re-rationalization’ — ‘[L]iberal nationalism, more than any other, favors reason and
progress’ (Haas, 2000: 4). Knowledge, on this view, could remain progressive in some-
thing like absolute terms: ‘Was Kant right after all, if for the wrong reasons?’ (Haas,
2000: 454). Haas’s answer was a conditional ‘yes,’ but a yes all the same — ‘The enlight-
enment wins either way’ (Haas, 2000: 454).
That Haas recognized the need to produce grand theories and pose big questions is
thus not to be doubted here; his declaration of his own theory’s obsolescence demon-
strates that. Yet, Haas does not, for all that, actually manage to pose them. For all its
richness and nuance, Nationalism, Liberalism and Progress generates not new questions,
but a return to old ones: the same ‘terminal concepts’ that Mitrany and his colleagues had
embraced — and that Haas himself had earlier eschewed. His notion of progress, while
carefully attenuated, seems no less absolutist or terminal. Indeed, it mirrors precisely the
same kind celebratory depoliticization we have elsewhere identified in the constructiv-
ism of the 1990s — a body of theory that Haas himself saw specifically as a continuation
of the logic of his own work (Haas, 2001; Levine, 2012). As with Mearsheimer and Walt,
Keohane, and Lake, if it is to emerge, grand theory must not only be called for; its
intellectual conditions of possibility must be thought into being. For Haas to have gone
so much farther than these theorists — and yet still to have faced difficulties — underscores
both the magnitude of the challenge surrounding the decline of grand theory and the
poverty of contemporary conversations about it.
The logics of hierarchy: Lake, Ikenberry, and a missing

theory of crisis
Undoubtedly, the concept of anarchy is central to the field of IR. Since at least the work
of E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, if not earlier in international law and diplomatic his-
tory, there existed a recognition that the lack of a central mechanism for adjudicating
international disputes revealed the unique political character of inter-state relations.
Nowhere has this concept become more central than in Waltzian and post-Waltzian —
neorealist, neoliberal, via media constructivist — approaches, which take anarchy, fol-
lowing Art and Jervis, as the ‘fundamental fact of international relations,’ arguing that it
defines the essence of the field (Art and Jervis, 1986: 7; see also Waltz, 2010 [1979]).17
That said, whether anarchy forever conditions states to remain mired in a self-perpetuat-
ing competition for power and security or whether the possibilities arise for inter-state
cooperation as a result of rationally defined self-interest has long been a matter for debate.
Nonetheless, IR scholars of late are recognizing that expanding theoretical inquiry to
historical and contemporary periods of international hierarchy has merit for questions
related to political ordering and relations of authority and legitimacy. While such ‘big
questions’ may appear novel in light of the dominance of studies revolving around anar-
chy, Stanley Hoffmann argued as early as 1959 that historical-sociological questions
such as ‘the international relations of non-Western civilizations, and world politics of
periods other than those of city or nation-state’ needed to be addressed (Hoffmann, 1959:
368). ‘The relations between empires, the complex hierarchy within empires, the rela-
tions between empires and peoples at their borders are worth study’ (Hoffmann, 1959:
368). This turn to rethinking the importance of hierarchy through historical-sociological
approaches, Hoffmann asserted, was set against the predominance of Morgenthau’s
political realism, with its unproblematic reification of a particular 19th-century European
experience, and the systems theories of Morton Kaplan that would influence Waltz’s own
decisive contribution.18 By 1986, Hoffmann would again call for a more theoretical
examination of international hierarchy: ‘Another zone of relative darkness is the func-
tioning of international hierarchy, or, if you prefer, the nature of relations between the
weak and the strong’ (Hoffmann, 1986: 58).
Both David Lake and G. John Ikenberry have attempted to shine a light on the func-
tioning of relations of hierarchy at a global level. For both, moreover, theoretical com-
mitments dovetail with normative ones. On the one hand, as Lake argues, his is not a
‘triumphalist American’ account of contemporary ‘“new imperialism” seeking to bolster
US power’; yet, ‘[t]o the extent that the United States biases its international orders,’
Lake confesses, ‘I share its preferences for democracy, economic liberalism, and politi-
cal freedom’ (Lake, 2009: xii). That preference is couched in an ostensibly rationalist
explanation for why states bind themselves to superior powers to create an international
political order, but it is there all the same. Legitimacy emerges out of this distinctly
political order when other members acknowledge the authority of the dominant power to
‘restrict their behavior and extract resources necessary to produce that order’ (Lake,
2009: 8–9). In the case of the US, its effective ‘anticolonial stance’ reveals a limited
ambition to dominate other states in neo-imperial ways (Lake, 2009: 40). The effect of
that framing is to repeat precisely the same set of logical moves that led Haas to declare
the ‘obsolescence’ of integration theory: the attempt to strip legitimacy of its normative-
political content, leaving only the bare husk of rational choice.
For his part, Ikenberry is quite clear that the post-Second World War liberal interna-
tional order shaped by a predominant US is inherently consensual, based on ‘shared
interests and the rule of law’; further, that this makes it entirely novel in the history of
international politics (Ikenberry, 2011: 61). While past ‘logics’ of international order
tacked back and forth between ‘balance’ (the traditional realist/neorealist notion of the
balance of power) and ‘Empire’ (reflective of outright domination), the long-standing
liberal public goods provided by the US during the Cold War and the post-Cold War
period transcend the vicissitudes of this or that political conflict. Ikenberry admits that
US hierarchy is, perhaps, waning; what he calls liberal internationalism 3.0 would be less
hierarchical, ‘flatter,’ and expressive of a group of states that ‘collectively provide the
various functional services previously provided [only] by the United States — providing
security, uphold[ing] open markets, and so forth’ (Ikenberry, 2009: 82).
The problem with both Lake and Ikenberry is not their obvious commitment to a par-
ticular US moment — granting that Ikenberry is willing to entertain the possibility of that
moment’s transience. Nor is it that both authors present an image of US benevolence in
the wake of the Second World War world that many critical and post-colonial theorists
would reject (Barder, 2013). Nor is it, finally, that both Lake and Ikenberry seem to
believe that they have ‘discovered’ the importance of international hierarchy, despite
decades of research by imperial historians and historical sociologists (Arrighi, 2007,
2010 [1994]; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Wallerstein, 2004).19
Rather, the problem lies elsewhere. For Ikenberry in particular, the ubiquitous assump-
tion that the ‘substantive character of [the] liberal order’ continues to be fundamental to
the constitution of international politics never comes in for sustained critical examination
(Ikenberry, 2009: 83). The key theoretical questions advanced in theorizing international
hierarchy are not, if they ever were, the potential reconstitution of global order along
non-liberal lines. For example, in discussion of the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and
China (the BRICS), Ikenberry notes in passing that China and India may ‘actually see
that their interests are well served within a liberal international order’ (Ikenberry, 2009:
83). Here, then, we observe a form of depoliticization insofar as claims about the future
possibilities of global order reflect only changes in the rational constitution of interest:
the theorization of hierarchy transforms itself into a methodological question, of deter-
mining, as Lake does, the ‘effects of hierarchy on international behaviors of dominant
and subordinate states’ (Lake, 2009: 16). Or, in Ikenberry’s case, how the ideal-types or
‘logics of hierarchy’ translate into a historical-empirical case study of US order genera-
tion. As with Robert Keohane in 1990, liberalism as a theory of right is here purged of its
normative and political content, being understood merely as a series of propositions
about how order can be rationally propounded out of interest (Keohane, 1990: 174). But
in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Keohane would acknowledge the
limits of that purging: it blinded scholars both to the political content of particular con-
ceptions of interest and to the forms of resistance and resentment that those conceptions
generated.20
By contrast, no such reconsideration is evident in Ikenberry; his ‘logics of hierarchy’
elide any possibility for a sustained consideration of political crisis. Recall, from the
earlier quote, Ikenberry’s claim that the contemporary crisis, whatever that may be, is
‘not a crisis in the deep principles of the order itself. It is a crisis of governance’ (Ikenberry,
2011: 6). What is remarkable about Ikenberry’s own history of US hegemony up to the
present is his elision of moments of deep structural crisis (Barder, 2013). There is virtu-
ally no discussion of the consequences of the Vietnam War, the unraveling of the inter-
national financial systems under Bretton Woods, and the general economic crises
sweeping the developed and developing world throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Arrighi,
2007). And, as with Haas in the 1970s, there is no systematic attempt at theorizing what
a crisis in the ‘deep principles of the order’ could mean or even what an epistemological
starting point for determining whether one is present could be. Even the global financial
crises of 2008/2009 do not engender this consideration: Ikenberry glosses over their
potential consequences, focusing instead on the ‘resilience’ of the liberal ‘organizational
logic of world politics’ (Ikenberry, 2011: 6; see also Sorensen, 2011: ch. 5).
The lack of theorization of systemic crisis is, in fact, ubiquitous here. Gilpin was one
of the few realists to attempt to theorize the relationship between systemic change, sys-
tems change, hegemonic crisis, and the emergence of political order (Gilpin, 1983).
Nonetheless, his rejection of the ‘Hegelian/Marxist’ emphasis on conjunction and con-
tradiction in determining the systemic conditions of crisis became symptomatic of a field
that attached itself to a vision of post-Cold War liberal-rationalist triumphalism. In con-
trast to critical historical sociology, American School IR and international political eco-
nomics (IPE) has focused almost exclusively on rationalist methods for explaining
inter-state institutions, practices of cooperation, and world order.
Hence, in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order
After Major Wars, Ikenberry’s institutional bargain theory is predicated on a rationalist
understanding of mutual interest between ‘leading’ and ‘weaker’ states to reduce ‘com-
pliance costs’ and assure the possibility of a mutually beneficial order (Ikenberry, 2001:
258). As Ikenberry further writes:
Additional calculations reinforce this potential bargain. The leading state has an interest in
locking in gains over the long term. It has received a windfall of power and it wants to use it
efficiently over the long haul. Weaker states receive early returns on their power even if they
give up full capacity to take advantage of their rising power in the future. (Ikenberry, 2001:
259)
Note first the remarkable usage of financial terminology to describe the rationalist under-
pinning of state behavior: bargain, interest, gains, windfall, efficiency, returns. State
behavior is firmly rooted in ‘calculations’ of interest and profit derived from a seamless
usage of a micro-economic language of utility. Second, what potentially unravels or
becomes a systemic crisis of the institutional bargain model, and that of the liberal inter-
national order, is not in any sense a difference in value, incommensurable ontology, or
political worldview, a contradiction in the economic order, or a systemic crisis. What

potentially unravels this model are changes in interest defined in terms of utility. So long
as the liberal international order maximizes state utility under hierarchical conditions
— (i.e. unless the ‘leading’ state exhibits irrational propensities of coercion, pace Lake
and Ikenberry) — a rational theory of state behavior would then stipulate the persistence
of international institutions as inherently effective, efficient, and, for Ikenberry, ‘legiti-
mate’ (Ikenberry, 2001: 259). In their respective ways, Lake and Ikenberry reify and
depoliticize an opening meant to rethink the significance of hierarchical relations
between states. What emerges instead are legible ‘mental maps’ of the Mearsheimer/Walt
variety that remove the very questions and contingencies of international political
existence.
Conclusion
and Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re
gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit
through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it. (Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters)
The point of this article is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with bounded meth-
odological assumptions about rational actors who share a basic, constitutive consensus
over goods and interests, nor with using the fruits of those methodologies to make sense
of what states and leaders do. Nor is it specifically against either those ‘American School’
theorists who favor the rigorous testing of hypotheses against the open-ended specula-
tion of ‘big questions’ or those who — with good reason — bemoan the fate of such
speculation. Rather, it is with what strikes us as the staleness of a series of scholarly and
intellectual performances that have repeated themselves, and which seem set to continue
to repeat themselves: an IR-inflected version of Nietzsche’s eternal return, Deleuze and
Guattari’s repetition without difference. For these philosophers — popularized in repre-
sentations like the quote from Hannah and Her Sisters that forms the preceding epigraph
— thinking was understood to have both a particular, and a historically contingent, shape
to which thinkers could not themselves be entirely aware. Left unexamined — through
reflexive moves from genealogy to critique — those contingencies produce a closed
intellectual circle in which the same arguments would repeat themselves, over and over
again, with only enough variation to conceal their essential sameness.
The nut of that repetitive performance is captured in Mearsheimer and Walt’s article
on grand theory. Grand theories are, the authors assert, simplifying road maps that are
meant to guide theoretical inquiry. It is the work of such theory to reduce a complex,
effulgent world of many causes and factors — the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’ of a
reality in which ‘everything is related to everything else’ (Waltz, 2010 [1979]: 8–9) — by
defining simple narrative points of reference. That work inevitably excludes much more
than it admits of, but that is the point of simplification. It is justified by the practical
insights that such theories offer either to policymakers or in the service of broader human
interests — or, as it appears for Haas, Lake, and Ikenberry, both at the same time.
Since conceptions of what constitutes ‘broader human interests’ can follow from
any number of mutually exclusive value-systems, it is perhaps not surprising that so
many IR theorists have preferred to confine themselves to the ‘normal scientific’ work
of testing hypotheses. Consider the divergent value-claims that underpinned the vari-
ous ideologies that contended in the middle portion of the 20th century. Given commit-
ments as divergent as these, and lacking any clear path to their discursive reconciliation,
was it not natural for so many students of IR to seek shelter either in pragmatism or in
value-freedom? Who would not tire of ‘recurrent debates over metatheoretical issues that
defy resolution,’ as Katzenstein and Sil (2008: 120) aptly put it? Such moves would,
indeed, impede the asking of big questions; and Keohane, Walt, and Mearsheimer are not
wrong in wondering what is lost in that exchange. But then Keohane, Walt, and
Mearsheimer do very little to think through the kind of reflexivity that would make it
possible to consider that exchange systematically. These theorists are, we reiterate, free
to make any combination of arguments they wish; but this particular one — or so we
have sought to argue — seems unlikely to produce a renaissance of grand theory. In the
final analysis, Mearsheimer and Walt themselves realize this: it is why they evince so
little optimism for change. What they may not have considered — and what we have
tried to suggest here — is that they are part of the process that they have sought to
uncover and describe.
The difficulty inherent in asking big questions is not unconnected to the problem of
reified ‘isms’ and their deleterious effects on theory and on thinking. The challenge both
face is a broad resistance within a given line of thought to remembering what lies beyond
itself. It is one thing to say, with Hamlet, that there is more ‘in heaven and earth than is
dreamt of’ in any one conceptual schematic or normative-political sensibility; it is
another thing to rearrange one’s thinking such that those other things remain present to
mind. What defines American School IR is not rationalism or economistic worldviews
per se — for, as we have seen, Haas resisted both. Nor is it an unwillingness to consider
that particular ideas about hierarchy and power might be historically contingent —
Ikenberry discussed such views extensively in the 1990s (Ikenberry, 1993). It is rather
the belief that such a rearrangement is effected merely by asserting that it is needed, and
that nothing more need be done; that thinking itself need not be critically assessed. It is
because that belief is never questioned, we suspect, that Haas’s notion of ‘progress’
winds up not merely explaining the resilience of liberal nationalism, but celebrating it.
Hence, too, Ikenberry and Lake move steadily from explaining how to avoid crises in
international order to, in effect, defining them out of existence — and thus embracing
precisely the ‘isms’ that Lake would have us avoid.
To actually ask big questions while also thinking productively about how to test and
operationalize them — to pose possibilities without reifying them — requires a degree
of reflection as to: how such a rearrangement of thought might be effected: how concepts
both occlude the real-world things they mean to describe and emerge from them; and
how methodological questions are structured by normative and ontological commit-
ments that are present and active, even if not consciously felt by scholars. In surveying
theorists working in diverse idioms, across different decades, and in response to different
problems in world politics, we have attempted to show that such considerations are not
new, and that the challenges facing those who would overcome them is profound.
Whether those whose calls we have surveyed here will internalize that need is beyond
our ken. We might note in passing, however, that elements of those practices were offered
by other authors participating in the same EJIR special issue as Lake and Mearsheimer
and Walt, and in a variety of idioms (Epstein, 2013; Guzzini, 2013; Tickner, 2013).
Mearsheimer and Walt end their article with a call for humility; a call that echoes, in
many respects, one made by Keohane in 2002 (Keohane, 2002: 9; Mearsheimer and Walt,
2013: 449). Those calls are, as the preceding case studies mean to show, entirely apt. It is
very difficult to work through mountains of data and endless contingencies to make sense
of a world that is deeply and persistently complex. Yet, those calls seem to hang in mid-
air; there is nothing onto which they can anchor. In part — as Keohane himself hastens to
note — the academic vocation itself actually militates against such humility: ‘a certain
arrogance’ is needed to trumpet the broad applicability and deep importance of our find-
ings; if we do not do so for ourselves, who will do so for us (Keohane, 2002: 9–10)?
Yet, the need for humility does not rest merely with the inner obligation to regard one’s
results and achievements with dispassionate remove. It must be extended to the very
power of thinking itself: its ability to adequately capture the world in concepts and then
say meaningful things about that world; and to remain aware of the precariousness of
those statements and their debt not only to operational assumptions, but to deep, pro-
foundly contestable, and only partially visible ontological commitments. That humility
might pose challenges to Walt, Mearsheimer, Lake, Ikenberry, and Keohane that might, in
turn, oblige them to change how they go about their work, and how they think about it.
In the process, these theorists might find that they are themselves imbricated in the
processes that lead to ‘simplified hypothesis-testing’; that the approaches to theory that
they advocate work precisely to negate such considerations. If they do, they will find a
very large field of scholars eager to engage with them. Together, we would undoubtedly
produce new mistakes, new myopias, and new failures alongside whatever small suc-
cesses we manage to ‘notch’ in the attempt to steward an increasingly crowded, persis-
tently diverse, and deeply contested world; and those will, in their turn, require new
forms of reflection. Together, however, we might have a chance — however small — at
actually creating something new. Whatever else that might or might not be achieved, it
would likely be more interesting than the same debates, replayed over and over again.
Like Woody Allen’s protagonist, we have seen the Ice Capades already; we do not want
to sit through them again.
Acknowledgments
Our thanks to Andreas Behnke, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and most especially to the editors and
our anonymous reviewers for their challenging comments on earlier versions of this article. The
usual proviso applies.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. ‘My own liberalism, while resolutely anti-utopian, nevertheless offers normative as well as
positive guidance for public policy.’ See also Keohane (1988: 380–381; 2005 [1984]: 12).
2. Keohane (2002) provides a useful example here. Defending the bounded version of rational
egotism developed in After Hegemony (Keohane, 2005 [1984]), Keohane (2002: 256)
acknowledges that international institutions often favor ‘the vested interests of the power-
ful and privileged.’ Yet, such institutions may be the best ones possible, he notes, and moral
perfectionists would do well to take care before appealing to more ‘altruistic’ alternatives.
The point is correct; but how might we expect those most grievously harmed by concessions
to ‘the powerful and the privileged’ to respond to them? Would we not expect them to resist
those concessions — perhaps violently? If not, are they expected to draw comfort from the
claim that despite their personal suffering, the greatest practical good has been achieved for
the greatest number? If the latter, Keohane winds up assuming precisely the altruism that he
earlier abjured us to forswear.
3. On Wendt, see Wendt (2001) and Barder and Levine (2012); the key move is to declare a
‘post-critical’ moment in IR after which substantive normative disagreement ceases. Price
(2008: 38) makes a similar move: continental philosophy’s ‘relentless identification of every
new social formation as yet another form of domination’ must be dismissed because if true,
then theory is impossible. Yet, this position constitutes a wager, not a demonstration of philo-
sophical or theoretical necessity. It might be the case, after all, that the world is agonistic
in nature, and that every new social formation is in fact a form of domination. On Sil and
Katzenstein (2010, 2011), see Levine (2012: ch. 5) and Reus-Smit (2013): the key move is to
tie analytical eclecticism to a ‘foundational’ pragmatism, which while methodologically anti-
foundational, nevertheless contains ‘unacknowledged metatheoretical assumptions, making it
one kind of project and not another’ (Reus-Smit, 2013: 591; see also Kurki, 2009, 2013).
4. ‘Security studies seeks cumulative knowledge about the role of military force. To obtain it,
the field must follow the standard canons of scientific research: careful and consistent use of
terms, unbiased measurement of critical concepts, and public documentation of theoretical and
empirical claims. Although no research enterprise ever lives up to these standards completely,
they are the principles that make cumulative research possible. The increased sophistication
of the security studies field and its growing prominence within the scholarly community is
due in large part to the endorsement of these principles by most members of the field’ (Walt,
1991: 222, emphasis in original). While Walt is specifically addressing security studies here,
the substance of his claim is prescriptive for IR (and, indeed, for social science generally): the
renaissance of security studies is explained, in part, by its practitioners’ adoption of the same
principles that ‘make cumulative knowledge possible’ anywhere. Later, Walt (1991: 223) dis-
misses ‘postmodern’ IR for the same reason: it is ‘bad’ IR because it is bad social science.
5. ‘[W]e are far from nostalgic about some by-gone “Golden Age” where brilliant theorists
roamed the earth’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 430).
6. And, indeed, this was precisely the critique made of Keohane’s engagements with both femi-
nist and post-structural IR, and of Waltz’s studied ‘non-engagement’ with Richard Ashley (see
Ashley and Walker, 1990; Der Derian, 1990; Hamati-Ataya, 2010, 2011a; Keohane, 1988,
1989, 1998, 1999; Tickner, 1997, 2005).
7. For key readers of this strand of Bourdieu’s thought in IR, see Hamati-Ataya (2010, 2011a,
2011b, 2013) and Eagleton-Pierce (2011).
8. As Bourdieu (1988: 29) states: ‘any … discourse is bound to be situated in the space of pos-
sible discourses about the social world, and is bound to receive a part of its properties from
the objective relations which unite it to them, especially to their style. And it is within the
framework of this relation, in ways largely independent of the wishes and the knowledge of
the authors, that its social value, its status as science … is defined.’
9. For an example of such anecdotal claims, see Mearsheimer and Walt (2013: 445–446). The
pervasive adoption of King, Keohane, and Verba (Where? By whom? Alongside which
texts?) may have resulted in a shift away from grand theory; the proliferation of second-tier
graduate programs (Which?) may have caused a decline in creativity (Understood in what
terms?), as may have ‘the professionalization of academia’ (In what sense?). To be clear, we
do not dispute these claims — indeed, at the level of intuition, we agree with many of them!
But there is no reason for these intuitions to be accepted as fact, save the personal status of
the authors.
10. ‘If it is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent utterances from containing proper names, or
individual examples from assuming a polemical value, it is because the reader almost inevi-
tably substitutes for the epistemic subject and object of the discourse the practical subject and
object, converting a neutral utterance … into an ad hominem polemic’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 24).
On the ‘clinical–cynical’ distinction, see Hamati-Ataya (2012).
11. Or, following Mearsheimer and Walt (2013: 448): ‘When academics lose interest in theory …
they relinquish one of their most potent weapons for influencing critical policy debates.’
12. This discussion is necessarily foreshortened, but see Levine (2012). For broader discussions
of reification, see Bewes (2002), Habermas (1984: ch. 4), Honneth (2008), Lukács (1971),
Ollman (1971), Pitkin (1987), and Said (1983: ch. 10).
13. Thanks to Ali Fuat Birol for referring us to this citation.
14. For more on the gemeinschaft–gesellschaft distinction used here, see Levine (2012: ch. 4).
15. For the locus classicus of this argument, see Bourdieu (2004). On peer review, see Nexon
(2013), Sides (2013), and Walt (2013).
16. ‘[F]acts can be distinguished from values, but only in retrospect. Only after truth claims asso-
ciated with a given research tradition have passed an appropriate reality test’ (Haas, 1997: 13).
17. For critiques, see Milner (1991), Axelrod (2009), and Deudney (2008).
18. On Kaplan, see Hoffmann (1959: 360); and on Morgenthau, see Herz (2005).
19. As Lake intimates when he writes: ‘Uncovering now-hidden international hierarchies …’
(Lake, 2009: xiii).
20. ‘[T]he attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relent-
lessly secular with respect to motivation.… Most of them tend to assume that the world is run
by those whom Joseph Schumpeter called “rational and unheroic” members of the bourgeoi-
sie’ (Keohane, 2002: 272).
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Author biographies
Daniel J. Levine is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, USA. He
is the author of Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford,
2012).
Alex Barder is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the American
University of Beirut, Lebanon. With François Debrix, he is the author of Beyond Biopolitics:
Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (Routledge, 2012).

The Closing of The American Mind

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530010

Powerful professional incentives encourage an emphasis on simplistic hypothesis-testing,

For Keohane, this argument was parsed in normative-disciplinary terms as to what

Reification, depoliticization, and the decline of grand

Simmel thus describes a distinct, modern process of cultural objectification whose

Ernst Haas and the progress of reason

it is as unnecessary as it is misleading to juxtapose as rival explanations the following: science

The logics of hierarchy: Lake, Ikenberry, and a missing

political worldview, a contradiction in the economic order, or a systemic crisis. What

Bhaskar R (1989) Reclaiming Reality. London: Verso.

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