The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

Abstract

Modes of dialectical reasoning were introduced into International Relations (IR) from the 1980s onwards in the context of the post-positivist debate as an alternative intellectual resource drawn from the philosophy of the social sciences. To the extent that the deployment of dialectics for IR drew upon Marx and the wider Hegelian Marxist tradition, it was challenged philosophically and substantively on two fronts. Philosophically, the problem emerged how to disassociate dialectics from the ‘systemic’ Hegelian legacy, which expressed itself in the naturalism and monism of dialectical materialism, and how to overcome a reading of capital as a self-unfolding conceptual category, expressed in systematic dialectics, which de-historicised and de-subjectified capitalism as a social relation. Substantively, the problem remained how to anchor a Historical Sociology of international relations in a historicist philosophy of praxis to avoid the temptation of a relapse into structuralist modes of explanation. By addressing this double challenge, this paper identifies a central lacuna within the Marxist IR tradition—the gap between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making. This gap persists in equal measure in the bifurcation between the fields of general IR theory and actor-specific foreign policy analysis (FPA). For general IR theories—Marxist and non-Marxist—tend to deploy structuralist versions of theory, which relegate the problem of foreign policy-making to lesser, possibly non-theorisable, forms of inquiry. FPA is thereby demoted and subsumed under wider structural imperatives capable of cross-case generalisation. The paper moves from a critical exposition of the wider debate in IR and FPA of attempts to close this gap, via a critique of dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics, to a re-statement of the dialectic of the concrete. It concludes with a reconsideration of how dialectical thinking may bridge this gap by incorporating foreign policy as the crucial site for the active drawing together and re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign into a Historical Sociology of international relations.

EXTRACTO

Modalidades de razonamiento dialectico fueron incorporadas a las Relaciones Internacionales (IR por sus siglas en inglés) a partir de los 1980s, dentro del contexto del debate post-positivista, como un recurso intelectual alternativo tomado de la filosofía de las ciencias sociales. En la medida que la diseminación de la dialéctica para Relaciones Internacionales tomó elementos de la tradición Marxista y más aún de la tradición Marxista-Hegeliana, fue desafiada filosófica y substancialmente en dos frentes. Filosóficamente, el problema emerge de cómo desasociar la dialéctica del legado sistémico hegeliano que se expresaba a sí mismo en el monismo y naturalismo del materialismo dialéctico y de cómo superar una lectura de capital en una categoría conceptual auto-desarrollada, expresada en una dialéctica sistemática quitara lo histórico y eliminara los sujetos capitalistas en una relación social. Substancialmente, el problema queda en cómo anclar una Sociología Histórica de relaciones internacionales en una filosofía de historicidad de prácticas para evadir la tentación de una recaída en las modalidades estructuralistas de explicación. Enfrentando este doble reto, este documento identifica un vacío central en la tradición marxista de las relaciones internacionales –la brecha entre las teorías generales del marxismo y el análisis de la construcción de la política exterior. La brecha persiste en igual medida en la bifurcación entre los campos de la teoría general de las relaciones internacionales y el análisis de actores específicos del análisis de política exterior (“FPAs” por sus siglas en inglés). Puesto que teorías generales de relaciones internacionales –marxistas y no-marxistas-tienden a desplegar versiones estructuralistas de teoría, que relegan el problema de creación de política exterior a posibles formas no-teorizables de cuestionamiento. Los FPAs son, en consecuencia, depuestos e incorporados bajo imperativos estructurales más amplios capaces de una generalización cruzada. El documento pasas de una presentación crítica del más amplio debate sobre los intentos de IR y FPAs para cerrar esta brecha vía una crítica del materialismo dialéctico y la dialéctica sistemática, para llegar a una re-definición de la dialéctica de lo concreto. Concluye con una reconsideración de como el pensamiento dialéctico puede cerrar esta brecha incorporando la política exterior como el sitio para la activa mezcla y re-articulación de múltiples influencias domésticas y externas en una Historia Sociológica de relaciones internacionales.

Keywords:

• dialectic
• foreign policy analysis
• general IR theory
• Marxism
• Political Marxism
• Historical Sociology of International Relations

Notes

1 This paper was presented at the 2014 ISA Convention in Toronto. We want to thank the panelists, the two anonymous reviewers, Shannon Brincat and Samuel Knafo for their constructive comments.

2 This tendency is particularly visible in Wood (2003).

3 This may explain the absence of a single Marxist entry in the recent 5-volume edition on FPA (Carlsnaes and Guzzini, 2011).

4 Carlsnaes (2002, p. 332) notes how FPA was traditionally assumed to be part of ‘public policy’ rather than international politics. Although this has partly changed today, it is important to register the historical distance between IR and FPA as well as their later limited convergence.

5 By self-consciously externalising foreign policy behaviour from the remit of his theory, Waltz (1979) designed a theory of international relations without politics (Wendt, 1999, p. 11).

6 We note with Ollman (2003, p. 63) that dialectical abstractions cannot be completely different from non-dialectical abstractions, not only because it would constitute a Wittgensteinian ‘private language’ as Ollman says, but also because both dialectical and non-dialectical abstractions have to start with real, practical abstractions. Any radical diversion from real abstractions would only be an indication of poor skills of imagination and thinking.

7 This is a controversial topic among Marxists. Engels’ interpretation of Marx has been seen as a distortion by some (Avineri, 1978; Lichtheim, 1961). Ollman (2003) suggests that it is implausible to assume that Marx did not know Engels’ arguments in the Dialectics of Nature and in Anti-Dühring.

8 Labriola (1903) provides an excellent early critique of those who conflate Marx's dialectical method with positivism, or social and political Darwinism.

9 Not the Revolution itself (he did not live long enough), but the developments leading to it troubled Marx himself. In the drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich, he questioned the uniqueness of the Russian developmental trajectory (Marx, 1989). Trotsky (1932) expanded later on this observation in his History of the Russian Revolution.

10 Arthur (2004, p. 15) lists Robert Albritton, Chris J. Arthur, Jairus Banaji, Roy Bhaskar, M. Eldred, I. Hunt, Michael Lebowitz, J. McCarney, P. Murray, R. Norman, S. Sayers, B. Ollman, M. Postone, G. Reuten, T. Sekine, A. Shamsavari, F.C. Shortall, Tony Smith, H. Williams, and M. Williams within this current.

11 For a well-articulated exposition of the conceptual pair ‘presupposing-positing’ and its Hegelian foundations see Bellofiore and Finelli (1998).

12 See also Gramsci (1978).

Additional information

Benno Teschke is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex and an Affiliated Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Copenhagen University. His research interests comprise the historical sociology of international relations, critical IR Theory, and the philosophy of social science. Teschke is the author of The myth of 1648: Class, geopolitics and the making of modern international relations (London and New York: Verso, 2003), which was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004. He is currently working on a sequel to this book, which examines the making of geopolitical space and international relations in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, while also preparing a monograph on the international thought of Carl Schmitt. His more recent work on Schmitt has appeared in International Theory, the New Left Review, and The Oxford handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford: OUP, 2015).

Can Cemgil is a doctoral student in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University. He teaches International Relations at the Institute of the Social Sciences at Bilgi University in Istanbul.