‘The World Is Too Much with Us’: Reification and the Depoliticising of Via Media Constructivist IR

Happy Days: IR in the 1990s

That the late 1980s and early 1990s bore witness to a series of momentous political events has become something of a truism. With the Soviet Union committed to glasnost, perestroika and far-reaching arms reductions; the fall of the Berlin wall; the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe; the multilateral victory of the 1991 Gulf War; the end of Apartheid; the signing of the Maastricht treaty; the initial diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); and the emergence of information technologies and transnational economic processes that seemed to radically widen the vistas of global community, world politics seemed – to many, at least – to be freeing itself from an age-old struggle for power. Within academic International Relations (IR), sensibilities began to shift. Theorists sensed openings for thinking about world politics through identity, agency, language, norms, rules and culture; moving away from the notion that an unchanging currency of material power was the primary determinant of events in world politics. The ‘tragic vision of politics’ began to seem, for want of a better phrase, old-fashioned: ‘no one’, as one senior scholar lamented, ‘loves a political realist’. ²

Realism’s new-found ‘unlovability’ was not reducible merely to the facts of these events. It was also the manner in which they seemed to unfold: the larger narratives which they seemed to confirm, contrasted with the lacklustre response they seemed to elicit from IR’s ‘grey eminences’. The new states and political authorities that had either come into being or remade themselves – from South Africa’s experiment in multi-ethnic rule to the social democracies of Western Europe – seemed guided by a common thread. The stars of ideational convergence had quietly aligned: in the ‘third way’ politics of Clinton, Blair and Schröder; in a unified, but politically chastened, Germany; in an emergent ‘public sphere’ or ‘security community’ within Europe and North America; in a ‘Washington Consensus’ that promised stable economic growth for the global South and a ‘smoothing out’ of the business cycle in the North; in growing ‘epistemic communities’; and networks of transnational activists and ‘rooted cosmopolitans’. ³ The few discordant notes – such as the war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans – actually served to affirm this broad sensibility, by inviting flattering comparisons with the past. Who could deny that Europe had not changed profoundly in the eight decades since the last crisis in Sarajevo? When a coordinated response to ethnic cleansing did – finally – emerge, was it not motivated as much by a collective sense of historical guilt as by considerations of realpolitik? ⁴ In the face of all that, how could one ignore the possibility of moral and political progress, and the role of ideas in producing such progress? Were all these events nothing more than a ‘data point’? ⁵

It was thus a confluence of events and academic fashions that created the ‘market niche’ for new ‘post-structural’ (this term used interchangeably, in both a Waltzian sense and a Levi-Straussian/Derridean one) approaches to international theory. That is, the move to theorise the political and social malleability of state identity did not emerge from the imminent movement of ‘noumenal’ ideas or by mass, spontaneous conversion of theorists from ‘rationalism’ to ‘reflectivism’. ⁶ Rather, it was begged by events. Consider Alexander Wendt’s 1992 ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It’; that collective identity and interests could neither be antecedently given, nor reduced to ahistorical structural conditions, was important because ‘the European states of 1990 might no longer be the states of 1950’. ⁷ Only by teasing out changing norms of sovereignty and cooperation, and practices of state interaction, could that shift be accounted for. It is events in world politics that are doing the intellectual work here, not the inherent superiority or undeniable persuasiveness of ‘agent-centred theory’.

But if, as agent-centered theory seemed to suggest, international political outcomes were sensitive to ideational inputs, this raised important questions. What orientation of international political/economic/social/cultural change was/is being privileged within such literature? How was such change being conceived? Put differently, what were the normative assumptions intrinsic to the narratives that ‘post-structural’ theorists were using to generate their alternative accounts of world politics, and how did they account for those commitments, given that the ‘crossover’ could work the other way: from the theorist to the event? Lacking such an account, how would such theory avoid the ‘Baron Munchausen problem’? The Baron, it will be recalled, was said to have freed himself from the mud of a swamp by pulling on his own pigtail. Did not ‘post-structural’ IR face a similar problem: claiming, in effect, that its normative commitments were not ‘smuggled in’ (as Wendt and Friedheim had put it, vis-a-vis Waltz), but emerged spontaneously, from its ontological and epistemological starting points? ⁸

Our suspicions on these points may be straightforwardly summarised. Firstly, that what accounts for such theory’s emergence as a major alternative within IR has less to do with the victory of a coherent alternative account of world politics within the academy than with the ideologically transfixing effects of events from the outside: a triumphalist Western discourse about the transformation of political conflict into the realm of administration, management, cooperation and especially the supremacy of economistic modes of thinking (qua rational political action) that held much of the popular and intellectual culture of the era in its thrall. Secondly, that as such theory moved from the margins of the discipline – from the ‘language of dissidence’ to what has come to be called via media or ‘middle ground’ constructivism – it reified variants of that triumphalism. ⁹ In other words, a fundamental depoliticisation of constructivist IR took place: what Jenny Edkins has defined as a ‘reduction to calculability’ that reduced the possibility of political change to the space between a set of fixed normative axes or historical start and end points. Like Patrick Jackson and Iver Neumann, we suspect these normative assumptions, unconsciously perhaps, draw from that particular political and social narrative of Western modernity which the end of the Cold War seemed to confirm as consensual and non-ideological: a variant of Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis. ¹⁰ We think that such theory can do a better job of accounting for these commitments, and that there are important reasons for doing so.

This is not to suggest that theorists like Wendt and Adler accepted Fukuyama’s argument down to its last Kojevian detail – or even that they agreed with most of it. But there was a ‘take-home’ version that did enter into the common sense of via media constructivist IR:

The key element to that common sense was that normative divisions once considered to be both essentially contested and ahistorically given had, with the collapse of the USSR, been shown to be resolvable: discourse – ‘talking about facts and values together’ – could now, or so it appeared, dissolve ostensibly essential distinctions between ego and alter. ¹² Fukuyama stood at the right wing of this common sense, but he was hardly alone: from Ulrich Beck (who in the mid-1990s expressed wonder as Christian Democrats began to speak of a ‘risk society’), to Anthony Giddens’ alliance with ‘New Labour’, to Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative action (it was said) could be applied transnationally. ¹³

For constructivist IR, the effect of this common sense was – we suspect – to free the methods of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ from its generative normative-political agenda: discussions of identity and difference could be divorced from the problems of essential contestation and tragedy, and put to work instead in the service of post-national visions like Wendt’s ‘inevitable’ world state. ¹⁴ Put differently, if social constructivists had chided realist scholars at the end of the Cold War for being unable to forecast or make sense of a changing world, they themselves – through their attempts at rationalising their own framework – would lose the ability to see past the post-Cold War. It is in this sense that – following the lines from William Wordsworth that form this article’s epigraph – ‘the world’ might have been ‘too much with’ students of via media constructivism.

If so, constructivism would hardly have been alone; and we have no wish to point its leading promulgators out for particular calumny. Consider the appeal and prominence accorded to democratic peace theory, even as examinations of the data sets and coding norms upon which such theory relied revealed rather obvious, and indeed self-serving, normative-ideological commitments. ¹⁵ Reification is a necessary moment in thinking, and these theorists are no more immune to it than is anyone else – including the present authors! Our concern is thus less a matter of finger-pointing than a detective story about a limit case. Here is a body of theory whose beginnings – both in IR, and in social and political theory more generally – are inseparable from the self-consciously ‘dissident’ posture of its core promulgators: Walker and Ashley; David Campbell and William E. Connolly; the spirit of ’68 and Frankfurt. ¹⁶ How is it that this body of theory – one so closely associated with a particular critical-normative agenda as well as a practical one – abandoned the former in its appropriation of the latter? What lessons are to be learned from that loss?

We are concerned about this for two reasons: firstly, because it suggests that the ‘thinking space’ of IR may be far more permeable to political events, ideologies, sensibilities and contingencies – less ‘free-floating’ – than is commonly supposed. Much new critical international theory begins from a monistic position: the belief that we are not separate from the world we wish to study, but imbricated in it. ¹⁷ While we are generally sympathetic to this belief, it also significantly upends or renders superannuated most of the analytical and formal vocabulary of IR. Yet this vocabulary remains (for now, at least) all we have. New, and farther-reaching, approaches to reflexivity are needed if theorists are to avoid repeating the processes of reification and depoliticisation that they initially set out to undo: repetition without difference, Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ rendered in social-scientific idiom.

Secondly, we fear for the ability of constructivism to respond to events in world politics as the mood and sense of the post-Cold War ‘long decade’ falls away. Increasingly, students of IR speak of the discipline in terms of its ‘grand traditions’: united in difference to produce useful knowledge. ¹⁸ That understanding of the field risks falling into a notion of reflexivity as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which personal responsibility is ‘outsourced’ to a kind of disciplinary ‘hive mind’: each speaks for his or her own ‘school’. Yet these ‘grand traditions’ are not ahistorically given; theorists create them, and theorists must take responsibility for the normativity they embed, consciously or not, within them.

With these concerns in mind, the next section will set out the details of that political and intellectual moment which, we hold, provides the context for via media constructivism. The third section will explore the problem of depoliticisation through Jenny Edkins’ notion of ‘calculability’. The fourth section will set out normative foundations for another – more sustainable – mode of reflexivity, drawing on Levine’s notion of an ‘animus habitandi’.

What Is IR For? Constructivism, Practical Theory and the Problem of Reflexivity

In the second chapter of Social Theory of International Politics (STIP), Alexander Wendt draws a sharp distinction between his own brand of ‘via media’ constructivism and the earlier work of ‘postmodernists’ like David Campbell. As with Campbell’s Writing Security, STIP promulgated an ‘idealist’ theory of world politics; one that referred events or decisions not to apodictic material realities, but to a dynamic interplay of identity and difference, in which states and leaders engage in acts of interpretative construction. For each, the world must be made before it can be secured. ¹⁹

And yet, Wendt argues, Campbell’s ‘relational’ approach ²⁰ differs sharply from his own. A ‘relational theory of reference … cannot account for the resistance of the world to certain representations, and thus for representational failures or misrepresentations’. ²¹ This inability carries costs: in 1519, he explains, Montezuma had understood the Spaniards as gods; that misprision would cost him dearly. ‘[P]ostmodernism gives us no insight’ into how such misprisions emerge, nor does it provide reference points for their debunking; there is no ‘hook-up’ to practical politics. ²²

To be sure, Wendt is not denigrating reflexivity and the critical practices that generate it. ‘A reflexive, critical science of international politics needs every kind of knowledge it can get.’ ²³ Rather, Wendt and Campbell seem to disagree as to what (as Wendt would put it, elsewhere) IR is ‘for’ – in Weberian terms, its vocation. ²⁴ For Wendt, it was a practical enterprise: a means to ‘steer’ world politics, not an aesthetic or interpretative practice undertaken for its own sake. ²⁵ Critical speculation, on his account, served post-critical application; it was not a vocation in its own right. ²⁶ By contrast, Writing Security had no simple bottom line: it ‘d[id] not (and d[id] not desire to) constitute a discrete methodological school claiming to magically illuminate the previously dark recesses of global politics’. ²⁷ Following Foucault’s dictum about ‘making facile gestures difficult’, Campbell rejected the notion that ‘global politics’ represented a distinct sphere of human interaction, independent of human creation. ²⁸ The fact of self-other construction in the Cold War was Campbell’s main concern, and its ramifications for coming to terms with oneself ethically; a sensibility akin more to what Davide Panagia, drawing upon Bataille, has called the pantry. ²⁹ What one might do with that knowledge was secondary. Inanna Hamati-Ataya’s distinction between ‘applied reflexivity’ and ‘reflexivism’ captures the gap between these positions well. ³⁰

This disagreement over the vocation of critique in international theory had been building since the 1980s. It is not, as is sometimes supposed, that there is a radical difference between those who, with Robert Cox, view the vocation of theory as to ‘stand … apart from the prevailing order of the world and [ask] how that order came about’ and those, like David Lake, who seek ‘levers that when manipulated can facilitate progress toward more humane and normatively desirable ends’. ³¹ The starkness of that putative either/or choice perpetuates one of political science’s most widespread and deleterious fallacies: that the gap between ‘speculative, semi-philosophical, brooding texts’ and ‘doggedly empirical, social science treatises’ is so vast ‘that they inhabit separate universes’. ³²

And yet, here were students from the ‘bridge-building’ wing of IR’s ‘post-structural’ turn, claiming – as Checkel put it – to ‘have rescued the exploration of identity from postmodernists’. ³³ If the materialism of ‘neo-neo’ IR had caused it to overestimate the durability of the Cold War order, and if its excessive scientism had led IR’s leading lights to dismiss its end as merely a ‘data point’, then Campbell had (on their account) gone too far the other way: at some point, theory needed to be for something and for someone – without scare-quotes, provisos or apologies. Theorists, noted Price and Reus-Smit, ‘cannot help making truth claims about the world. The individual who does not do so cannot act, and the genuinely unhypocritical relativist … will struggle for something to say and write.’ ³⁴ Continental philosophy’s ‘relentless identification of every new social formation as yet another form of domination’ simply cannot, on this account, provide an adequate ‘resting place for theory’. ³⁵

A disagreement between two essentially distinct philosophical positions was thus turned into a ‘black-hat/white-hat’ argument: those with a serious interest in, and commitment to, politics and those for whom it was ‘turtles all the way down’. ³⁶ The effect was to trivialise a scholarly question that has endured since Weber’s writings on objectivity: while Campbell and Wendt might have disagreed on specifics, the former would surely not have denied the existence of a ‘rump materialism’ that was both independent of human thought and constrained the potential of intersubjective ‘world-making’. ³⁷ The disagreement was elsewhere: where that ‘rump’ was located, and whether (or how) scholars themselves were part of it. Can the theorist and her ability to speak in a detached manner about things out there simply be assumed, or is it an intellectual conceit that must be constructed, defended and subjected to its own forms of critique? If the latter, theorists would need to turn their reflexive tools not merely outward, but also inward: to ‘give an account of themselves’. ³⁸ Or to respond in the idiom of Price and Reus-Smit: it may very well be the case that there simply is no ‘non-hypocritical’ space from which to speak and write, that every new social formation is, in fact, yet another form of domination. If true, that would certainly be inconvenient; its possible consequences leave international theory on the horns of an impasse. But that does not disprove it.

Coming to such accounts is, admittedly, no small thing. Understood broadly, the project of critical and postmodern theory since the Dialectic of Enlightenment has been the attempt to provide it: to plumb, as Karl Mannheim put it, ‘the crater which is yawning beneath our western society’ – even as the relationship between that ‘crater’ and the ostensibly emancipatory power of thinking is to be acknowledged ‘all the way down’. ³⁹ Neither Checkel, nor Wendt, nor Price and Reus-Smit is to be faulted for having failed to resolve it. What does seem remarkable is that via media constructivists feel so little compunction to think through what that failure might mean, the limitations on thinking it might portend.

To pose this more compactly, ‘middle range’ constructivists seem to have excised the question of radical evil from their conceptual and epistemological vocabularies. Difference is a matter of appearance, not reality; an illusion to be overcome through progress. Certainly, theory is understood to be normative, and via media IR scholars do engage in a considerable degree of self-disclosure. Wendt recognises, by way of example, that his approach to world politics ‘reifies the state’, and he defends this choice in prudential and ethical terms. ⁴⁰ Emanuel Adler has written extensively about the roots of his ‘communitarian’ sensibilities. ⁴¹ And Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil speak of – and have sought to gather together – a community of scholars, united in the desire to support decision-makers with useful information – even as they recognise a responsibility in choosing which agendas to serve. ⁴²

Nothing in the foregoing is meant to denigrate these intrinsic normative positions, or their attempts to come to self-account. They reflect genuine scholarly good will, without which IR as an ethical pursuit would not be possible at all. But recognition of one’s own normative commitments is only one piece of the puzzle. The other is practical theory’s potential to detach itself from the normative agendas of its promulgators, particularly in an era of near-instantaneous global violence. To put the point rather too crassly: imagine a world populated with totalitarian dictators. Would we still be comfortable creating tools for ‘global steering’, without considering the separability of those tools from the purposes to which we might put them? And if we are aware of the fallibility of our own positions and commitments – as the normative impulse to self-disclosure seems to indicate – what is our obligation, given that academic theory remains ‘the slow drilling of hard boards’, while ‘out there’ so much harm can be meted out so quickly, to so many?

The exclusion of these questions from the bailiwick of via media constructivism bears some consideration. Consider Price and Reus-Smit: the attempt to elide forms of domination for the sake of theory-building is not new. Indeed, it is strikingly illustrated in the difference between Waltz’s account of imperialism in Theory of International Politics (TIP) and Wendt’s STIP. Chapter 2 of TIP is entirely devoted to critiquing early (Hobson, Lenin) and then-contemporary (1960s’ and 1970s’ Galtung and neo-Marxist) theories of imperialism as reductionist, and hence incapable of determining the systemic conditions for inter-state warfare. For Waltz, imperialism is as old as history and cannot be reduced to specific transformations in capitalist modes of production. ⁴³ That may have the effect of legitimising domination; nevertheless, Waltz acknowledges the durability of inequality and its centrality to world politics. When we turn to Wendt, this aspect of international politics essentially disappears. There is very little mention – let alone an attempt to theorise – empire or patterns of international hierarchy in STIP except for a brief acknowledgement that the European colonial project took place in a ‘Hobbesian culture of anarchy’. ⁴⁴

This obfuscation of relations of domination at the heart of STIP seems to us to be an extension of the critically anaesthetising effects of a particular historical moment to which we alluded earlier: the end of the Cold War, and the normative-historical narrative into which that moment had been fit. Empire had, it appears, become a thing of the past. With the revival of interstate cooperation and the transition to a ‘Kantian’ culture of anarchy, the leftovers of such relations would surely wither with the creation of the ‘world state’. Put differently, a new form of modernisation theory has been smuggled in here: the arc of Western history becomes global in scope and universal in application. ⁴⁵ The effect is to blind the theorist to conditions of structural violence that might yet permeate the post-Cold War international order, or that might emerge from it. ⁴⁶ In itself, Wendt’s position is no better or no worse than any other. The question is only where via media constructivists decided to draw the line in terms of their own reflexivity, and how particular events or historical moments might have seemed to validate those decisions.

Crucially, this naturalisation takes place not before the key texts of IR’s ‘critical turn’ are widely disseminated, but after. It was Robert Cox who had, in 1981, observed that knowledge is always for something or for someone. ⁴⁷ ‘Post-structural’ IR had used that claim to hack away at the reifications of structuralist and ‘neo-neo’ IR, arguing – as Adorno et al. had done some decades earlier in sociology – that they relied on a peculiar tendency in positivism to conceal the ‘reality’ of ideas and thus, potentially, the partisanship of thinking. ⁴⁸ Since one related only to the interactions of units, without regard for the social or political process of their composition – but also while striving to provide useful knowledge for those within the units – theorists both bypassed complex and normatively freighted constitutive questions (How did the units come to be?), and naturalised and depoliticised their own role within them. The problem, as Adorno had argued (and as Nick Rengger would point out for students of IR), is that such acts of concealment cannot be reduced to the contingencies or logical errors that inhere in particular instances of thinking. ⁴⁹ Rather, it inhered in thinking itself. That is to say, thought’s natural tendency is to appear ‘free-floating’, notwithstanding the thinker’s very real material presence: as a member of a particular polity, community, family, class, gender and so on. ⁵⁰ It was for this reason, Steve Smith had argued in 1995, that international theory had to pay attention not only to its claims, but also to its silences. ⁵¹ Via media constructivism had let that second term slip away.

IR in the 1990s and the Reduction to Administration

How this happened returns to the discussion with which this article opened. If our suspicions are correct, the contingencies of a specific historical and intellectual moment obscured the full depth of these reifications, and their intellectually dampening effects, from their promulgators. Constructivism emerged in the 1990s, an era in which political events – at least in the US and Europe – seemed to bear out a kind of liberal eudemonism. We believe that this mood – not a specific set of logical propositions, but a more generalised cultural sensibility, a kind of zeitgeist or common sense – either hid the fact of these reifications, or caused them to seem a good deal less dangerous than they actually were: as ‘reasonable bets’. ⁵² As Maja Zehfuss noted:

Essentially then, such reasonable bets or accepted ‘realities’ become vectors for the depoliticisation of social constructivist international theory by accepting as given, as essentially natural, a ‘scientific’/rationalist kernel rooted in a specific Western-conceived vision of the political. Sheldon Wolin, in his classic Politics and Vision, sees this turn to administration contra political theory as emblematic of the legacy of a specific scientific approach to theory. As he argues, administration is symptomatic of liberalism’s attempt to navigate the ‘social cleavages stemming from outmoded forms of economic organization’. As Wolin further writes:

Wolin’s image of the bookkeeper suggests a specific, unassailable consensus regarding the substance of the political and social order (or what it should be): the political becomes transformed into a set of social and economic processes whose foundational terms no longer need to be questioned. ⁵⁵

Whereas politics (la politique) remains the domain of empirically observed power or social relations among differing actors, studying the political (le politique) becomes instead a quasi-transcendental or metaphysical locus of inquiry into the constitution of the polity or regime. An inquiry into the political, as the French political theorist Claude Lefort notes, becomes an inquiry into the very fabric of the ‘social space, of the form of society, of the essence of what was once termed the “city”’. ⁵⁶ While we continuously regard political activity as that which constitutes politics, the realm of the political remains, as Ernst Vollrath describes, ‘the sphere or realm of politics and the specific modality according to which we may speak of phenomena – events, persons, actions, institutions, etc., – as to their political quality’. ⁵⁷ For those more familiar with an Arendtian idiom, this is captured in the distinction between political behaviour and political action; the former is activity within a polity, the latter is that which constitutes it. ⁵⁸

What we want to take from the term depoliticisation is, as Jenny Edkins argues, the act of transforming inquiries into the social space, forms of society and the like into a problem of calculability. By this we mean that international ‘problems’ are no longer deemed to be existential – a question of incommensurable values or political systems requiring some mix of political action, speculative reason and self-interested ratiocination – but rather involve mere steering or administration. As Wendt would have it: international outcomes guided towards a desired, normatively uncontested telos, be it a world state, a universal democratic culture, a Kantian ‘culture of anarchy’ or whatever else. In other words, depoliticisation acts as a naturalisation mechanism – by naturalising the ‘forms of domination’ mentioned above – that transforms or warps social inquiry according to a set of presuppositions or ‘reasonable bets’. Or as Zehfuss writes, ‘the representation of construction [i.e. the intersubjective constitution of the social world] in constructivism is depoliticized’. ⁵⁹ It further acts in a way to guarantee international social and cultural cohesion by focusing on necessity for the global percolation of political, economic and cultural norms as a way of socialising the rest of the world.

Our concern here is thus with the implication of moving theory away from crucial questions about the constitution of alternative socio-economic systems towards a convergence with a set of requirements for historical progress to occur. Via media social constructivism is depoliticised to the extent that the terms of debate shift from questions of constitution and the radical indeterminacy of moments of crisis and change to ‘problem-solving’: the political is reduced to (global) administration and management. ⁶⁰ This implicitly political notion of betterment, this normative goal, is singularly unproblematised, resting in part on Western liberal notions as to what constitutes the ‘good life’.

Keeping the World at Bay: Towards an Ethos of Sustainable Critique

We have suggested that a particular confluence of events and academic-scholarly predispositions served to strip constructivist IR theory of its critical sensibilities. Politically aware scholars in the 1990s found it difficult not to see in the events of those years a kind of external confirmation of pre-existing narratives regarding the primacy of Western reason and its relationship to moral progress. In this, students of world politics generally, and via media constructivists in particular, were in good company: many of those social theorists and philosophers who had been most closely tied to critical theory and the political left – Giddens, Beck, Habermas – seemed to have been caught up in a similar wave of eudemonism.

Yet IR theory differs from other forms of social and political theory, insofar as the propensity to extreme violence lies so close to its central problematique. ‘What for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution or civil war) is for international theory the regular case.’ ⁶¹ As such, these problematics carry with them what the theorists of the Critical Approaches to Security in Europe (CASE) collective have termed ‘a special kind of responsibility’. ⁶² Living up to that responsibility requires reflexive practices of a different order, and taken perhaps to a different degree than it would in other fields relating to politics and policy.

In other words, the proximity of IR to mass – and potentially world-ending – violence carries with it a need for a deeper, more sustainable, form of reflexivity: what Levine has elsewhere called sustainable critique. ⁶³ IR, that is, needs a mode of reflexivity that can both contribute meaningfully to essentially contested policy debates on the one hand, and yet be deeply self-reflexive on the other: that can keep ‘the world’ at bay, when it threatens to become ‘too much with us’. Such a mode of critique would build on the recognition that there are no spaces to which scholars can withdraw which seal them off hermetically from the philosophical and cultural horizons of their own moment; being part of the world, they are engaged constantly in a process of interpreting it from within, rather than knowing and explaining it from without. It would affirm that there can be no ‘progress’ in theory as such, only progress in particular theories, and it would attempt to divorce problem-solving from larger claims about the ‘rationalisation of the lifeworld’ or ‘the public and its problems’. It holds that theory relies on concepts that have natural (and often invisible) linkages to both larger normative traditions and contingent political events. It recognises that theoretical innovations with their origins in both positive and critical theory can reify into exclusionary ideology, world-abnegating moral resignation, or self-congratulatory ‘radical chic’, and therefore seeks tools, methods and commitments that would help the theorist check these tendencies in real time. The ability to develop such a mode of reflexivity will largely determine IR’s ability to be in the world, but not too much with it.

The challenge posed by sustainable critique is not, in the first instance, one of methodology. To be sure, methods matter. Antecedent to them, however, lies a particular ethos that must be rendered explicit. Sustainable critique requires a deeply chastened understanding of theory: one in which the theorist’s sense of vocation derives from – but never despairs at – the enduring paradoxes of late-modern political life. In distinction to Price, it views practical theory and existing social forms as always already ‘yet another form of domination’. ⁶⁴ It is aware of its own potential role in helping constitute partisan political discourses, and seeks to ‘do no harm’. It views academic prose as a kind of indirect political action, and thus tries to maintain awareness of its responsibility and fallibility. Without that ethos, no set of methodological innovations can suffice on their own – even if it is not itself a substitute for them.

A new ethos requires a new name. The animus habitandi – ‘the will to dwell within, or to abide’ – might suffice for such a name. The term (from the Latin habitare, to live within, inhabit or dwell) takes its rhetorical cue from Hans Morgenthau’s well-known animus dominandi – the ‘will to dominate’ – which he held to be a basic fact of political life that must be accepted a priori. Sustainably critical IR would have an obligatory a priori of its own. True to IR’s historic vocation, it would oblige theorists to accept their own vulnerability to reification as given: to assume, that is, that their concepts and understandings of the world are abstractions, the limits of which can never be entirely known, and whose outlines are constantly in danger of being forgotten. Hence the animus habitandi: IR theorists must strive to dwell within the world, rather than in their own thoughts; to abide in its undifferentiated complexity and indeterminacy.

While in practical terms that striving is impossible to realise, it is the yearning to do so – matched to the assumption of its impossibility – that gives the impulse towards caring and prudence a freely standing sense of moral force and personal obligation. It directs theory to question itself unceasingly, even as it seeks to create useful knowledge about the world.

The animus habitandi shares a family resemblance with Blaney and Inayatullah’s ‘sense of wonderment’, Jane Bennett’s ‘sense of enchantment’, William Connolly’s ‘faith’, Christine Sylvester and Laura Sjoberg’s ‘empathy’, Patrick Jackson’s ‘double hermeneutic’, and Brent Steele’s ‘irony’. ⁶⁵ It is an affective-intellectual disposition which ‘allows us a “critical distance” from our subject without requiring us to abandon our emotions’. ⁶⁶ It understands that the enterprise of theory is gravely threatened from the outset. It directs theorists to seek methods that check or critique themselves in real time; that highlight the essential partiality and contingency of practical knowledge; and that bring that knowledge into contact with the ‘more’ that its promulgators are ‘always already’ on the verge of forgetting. It encourages the view that knowledge emerges from historically contingent convergences of interest, identity and understanding. It assumes that the appearance of reality, while significant, is never identical with reality as such, and encourages methods which use that distinction to critique themselves. Just as safecrackers once used sandpaper to increase the sensitivity of their fingertips to the tumblers falling in a combination lock, the animus habitandi seeks methods to heighten our intellectual sensitivity to the reifying tendencies of our own thoughts. It functions as a kind of negative ‘regulative ideal’; it asserts the insufficiency of all theory, including itself.

It is this ethos, we maintain, which was lacking in the theoretical underpinnings of via media constructivism. Yet when viewed from a longer durée – as we can now do – such ‘middle ground’ thinking shows its limitations rather more clearly. The radical nature of late-modern experience places (at the very least) an extraordinarily high burden on it. If prudence is to be sustained through ‘tribunes of experience’, or found in knowledge practices, would not those experiences or practices have to submit themselves before the defining horrors of the age? Must it not include the practices of genocide, nuclear bomb-dropping, ethnic cleansing, the strategic manipulation of human hunger, and the intellectual, social and cultural practices implicated in them, or propaedeutic to them? No ‘progressive’ agenda for the study of world politics worthy of the name would seriously claim otherwise.

Yet there are serious obstacles facing such inclusions. How exactly are such experiences, in anything like their full, actual horror, to be conceptualised and transmitted? To dig a mass grave with the others of one’s village and then be executed with them in it; to be vaporised in a mushroom cloud; or to be killed with one’s family by one’s neighbours, wielding machetes, is also to be placed beyond the reach of interrogation. Perhaps it takes one beyond the reach of empiricism. One cannot prepare questionnaires for the dead; and to interrogate the living with an eye to fitting their responses into rubrics seems to diminish the inexpressible nature of their suffering. The very concept of testimony is beggared in such contexts, as political theorist Giorgio Agamben has evocatively shown. ⁶⁷ Even in conflicts where such possibilities are not directly implicated, the fact that such horrors have and do take place, that such realities have entered into the political-cultural lexicon, urgently points to the insufficiency of contemporary empiricism, and the need to view such empiricism with the kind of prudent, caring suspicion to which the animus habitandi gestures. ⁶⁸

In keeping with Wolin’s distinction between politics and administration, a ‘tragic vision’ is very much at work here: a recognition that, in the wake of the catastrophes of the 20th century, all moments of thought have been made suspect. ⁶⁹ The positive and the critical must coexist because both are necessary and neither is sufficient. Adorno best described this image of theory:

Elsewhere and more aphoristically, Adorno asserted that ‘the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass’; those tools are to be valued which scatter, disrupt or diffract one’s perspective precisely because of the fact of that scattering, disruption or diffraction. ⁷¹ Such a vision of theory takes reification as its point of departure; it strives to dwell within a world it cannot wholly know, and in which it is itself ambiguously implicated.

Conclusion: Happy Days Are Over?

Doubtless, 11 September 2001 marked a critical break in the conscious belief of many, including Fukuyama himself, that progressive world-historical change was inevitable. ⁷² That event revealed the ever-present possibilities of catastrophic violence reaching the world’s most powerful state. ⁷³ It revealed the potential for how long-standing structures of domination find ways of ‘blowing back’; the ‘human tendency to dominate or to hate’ that IR theorists so easily forget, or overlook. ⁷⁴ The turn from liberal triumphalism to deep-seated angst was the result not only of the terror attacks and a decade of violence, but more recently the financial and economic crises plaguing the industrialised North. The ‘normative power’ of the European Union – touted for so long as the post-historical/post- political/post-ideological answer to the problem of power politics – is reeling under the weight of its own economic and political fissures. ⁷⁵ Populations in industrialised states are more conscious of the fact that the preceding decades have not tamed the business cycle; have not ushered in a stable socio-economic condition promised in the Washington Consensus; and have not alleviated global poverty nor addressed the catastrophic consequences of global climate change: Western reason and moral progress can no longer be conceived as the lubricants of a perpetual motion machine leading to a specific telos.

In other words, events of the last decade or so have burst the bubble of the reigning zeitgeist of the post-Cold War ‘long decade’, revealing it for what it was: a confluence of events that were reified, naturalised and depoliticised. A historical moment took on millennial significance, carrying a body of international theory along with it. In retrospect, perhaps those who had insisted on the end of the Cold War as constituting merely a ‘data point’ were not utterly wrong. True, such formulations relied on scientistic worldviews inappropriate to the study of ‘social kinds’. But did they not also sustain a kind of humility that has eluded the theorists of the via media? To paraphrase Ranke: is not every generation ‘equally distant from God’?

What the end of the Cold War meant to via media social constructivism – the fulcrum-point from which to argue against the ‘timelessness’ of political realism – the decade of 2001–11 means for it: its own moment of truth. It calls into question the attempt to explain the world from a secure, rational and objective Archimedean point outside the world. It challenges the ideal of a world subject to reason, administration and objective Western norms and culture. As we have argued in the previous section, this attempt to elaborate theory beyond relations of domination – essentially beyond social and political relations of struggle and contestation – results in a ‘decaffeinated’ vision of the world; one reduced to steering and manipulation. This is not a romantic’s longing for a lost past of authenticity, heroism or mystery. It is the recognition that such ideal-types elide the violence that may be at work in the everyday processes of political self-reproduction. Some work must be done to underscore this elision.

And yet, while we have called for an ethos of sustainable critique – one that acknowledges theory’s fundamental imbrication with the world ‘out there’, that attempts to do no harm, that reveals as much as contests historical patterns of domination – we acknowledge the undeniable difficulty of putting this ethos into practice. We remain, despite ourselves, in the afterglow of 1991 even now.