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ABSTRACT
Justin Rosenberg’s proposal of ‘multiplicity’ as a new grounding concept for IR aims at liberating the international from the perceived constraints of its dominant framing by Realism. Viewed from within the singular political entity, the international can only appear as absence and negativity, traditionally thematised in IR as ‘anarchy’. Recasting it instead as ‘multiplicity’, through a move from politics to sociology, is intended to change the understanding of the international from negative to positive: from conflict, tragedy and repetition to interaction, combination and development. This move, however, does not succeed in grasping the negativity of the international, and so as a result it remains within the limits that Realism enunciates: multiplicity complements anarchy sociologically rather than transcending it theoretically. A new concept of the international would result not from rejecting the negative in favour of the positive but from recognizing them as dialectically contained within each other.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Subsequently published as Rosenberg (Citation2016b).
2 An aspiration traceable right back to his earliest work (Rosenberg, Citation1994).
3 See Rosenberg (Citation1996, Citation2005, Citation2006, Citation2007, Citation2010, Citation2013a, Citation2013b).
4 ‘IR now seems to have settled into an uneasy truce on the question of theoretical pluralism/fragmentation. The question remains as to whether we simply embrace this fragmentation or attempt to work towards a more coherent view of global processes’ (Dunne et al., Citation2013, p. 415).
5 For a recent attempt to explore how the scope of IR might be determined, see Albert and Buzan (Citation2017).
6 The prevalent form of critique in the age of pluralization assumes a general logic of arbitrariness and artificiality, summated in the phrase ‘social construction’, that effectively rules out a priori any idea of objective validity.
7 Albeit, it hardly needs saying, an enormously differentiated and uneven One. The general dynamic of integration was of course widely noted but its specifically international quality was largely assumed or overlooked.
8 As can plainly be seen in, for example, Daniel Levine and David McCourt’s advocacy of it, pluralism is really an expression of the perennial liberal dream of restraint, tolerance and inclusion: the space as such is neutral, and so everybody can live harmoniously together within it provided that boundaries are respected (Levine & McCourt, Citation2018).
9 See Rosenberg (Citation2016a) for a summary statement.
10 For an example of the equal and opposite argumentative strategy, see Owens (Citation2015).
11 What reveals itself here is an irresolvable theoretical deficiency in Rosenberg’s general project: that the concept of the political can never be derived from essentially sociological factors (‘unevenness’ and ‘multiplicity’). This impossibility of reducing the political to the social is already event in the 2010 piece on ‘Basic Difficulties in the Concept of Uneven and Combined Development’ and necessarily recurs when multiplicity is explicitly put in the place of anarchy.
12 See, for a tacit recognition of this, Callinicos and Rosenberg (Citation2008, pp. 97–98).
13 Note that in Rosenberg’s account, the specificity of the novel form is assigned to ‘internal’ factors (the genre explores ‘the fate of socially constructed individuals adrift in a depersonalized world of commercial relations’ (Rosenberg Citation2016b, p. 147)) and its internationality is located only at the level of content (Brazilian experience comes to be expressed in it).
14 The possibility of conceiving the international purely quantitatively, as ‘multiplicity’, is in fact dependent upon the totalization: ‘unity is already contained in the Many in itself, as the element without which the Many cannot be considered’ (Adorno, Citation1982, p. 10).
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Andrew Davenport
Andrew Davenport is Lecturer in International Politics at Aberystwyth University. His research is in the fields of IR theory and the theory of capital. He has published in European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies and the Oxford handbook of international political theory.