Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-26T22:31:28.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Realism, Marxism and critical international theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review articles
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. See especially Pettman, R., State and Class: A Sociology of International Affairs (London, 1979)Google Scholar, and Cox, R. W., ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium, X (1982), pp. 126155.Google Scholar

2. Kubalkova, V. and Cruickshank, A. A., Marxism and International Relations (Oxford, 1985), p. 213Google Scholar. (With the exception of fn. 26 all further references to the authors' writings refer to this work.)

3. For examples of recent sociological literature which addresses a similar theme, see Zolberg, A., ‘Origins of the Modern-World System: A Missing Link’, World Politics, XXXIII (1980–1), pp. 253281Google Scholar; and the same author's ‘Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States: France and England’, International Social Science Journal, XXXII (1980), pp. 687–716; see also Skocpol, T., States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. For example, Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J. S., Power and Interdependence (Boston, 1977), p. ix.Google Scholar

5. Chase-Dunn, C., ‘Interstate System and Capitalist World-Economy: One Logic or Two’, International Studies Quarterly, XXV (1981), pp. 1942.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Morse, E., Modernisation and the Transformation of International Relations (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

7. Giddens, A., A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London, 1981), pp. 23 and 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. For useful guides to this literature, see especially Jessop, B., The Capitalist State (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar and Carnoy, M., The State and Political Theory (Princeton, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Giddens, A., The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 158159Google Scholar; Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), analyses the impact of interstate competition on the emergence of capitalism. (Unless stated otherwise, all references to Giddens refer to The Nation-State and Violence.)

10. Giddens discusses this failure in more detail in his essay ‘Classical Social Theory and the Origins of Modern Sociology’ in Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (London, 1982).

11. Giddens, note 9, pp. 22–31.

12. World-systems theory attempts to explore this relationship but is constrained by the presupposition that the states-system is the political organization of the capitalist world-economy.

13. Giddens, note 9, pp. 41–9.

14. A verdict first set out at length in Waltz, K., Man, the State and War (Columbia, 1959)Google Scholar, ch. 5.

15. Giddens, note 9, p. 25; Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, pp. 28–9.

16. Giddens, note 9, p. 222; Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 27.

17. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, pp. 39 and 118; Gallie, W. B. [Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar, ch. 2] considers Engels' military writings in detail.

18. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 120.

19. Giddens, note 9, pp. 328–9; Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, pp. 3 and 247.

20. Giddens, note 9, p. 30.

21. Ibid. p. 288.

22. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 248.

23. Ibid. pp. 64 and 71.

24. Ibid. pp. 2 and 14.

25. Giddens, note 9, pp. 328–41; for such a critique of realism, see Cox, op. cit., note 1.

26. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, Marxism—Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London, 1980).

27. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note.2, p. 71.

28. Ibid. ch. 8.

29. Ibid. pp. 160–78.

30. An exception is R. W. Cox, ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method’, Millennium, XII (1983), pp. 162–75.

31. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 174.

32. Wight, Martin, Systems of States (Leicester, 1977)Google Scholar, esp. p. 105; see also p. 153.

33. The works by Robert Cox cited above are important in this regard. See notes 1 and 30.

34. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 9.

35. Ibid. p. 173.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid. ch.9.

38. Brucan, S., The Dialectic of World Politics (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Anderson, op. cit., note 9.

39. Skocpol, op. cit., note 3. These authors are considered on pp. 23 and 226–7'.

40. The question is posed in Hall's, J. ‘Raymond Aron's Sociology of States, or the Non-Relative Autonomy of Inter-State Behaviour’, in Shaw, M. (ed.), War, State and Society (London, 1984), p. 72.Google Scholar

41. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, note 2, p. 2; but see also pp. 5–7, and pp. 17–18.

42. Giddens, note 9, pp. 8 and 325.

43. Wright, Erik Olin, ‘Giddens's Critique of Marxism’, New Left Review, no. 138 (03–04 1983).Google Scholar

44. Giddens, note 9, pp. 64–5.

45. Ibid. pp. 54 and 112.

46. Ibid. pp. 7–8.

47. Ibid. pp. 143 and 335.

48. Ibid. pp. 135–6.

49. Ibid. pp. 133—9. Giddens maintains that the constitutive feature of capitalism is the process of commodification while that of industrialization is an orientation towards the domination of nature. Over the past two hundred years, western capitalism has merged with industrialization, but not all forms of industrialization have merged with capitalism. Part of Giddens' quarrel with the traditional politics of the left arises from its failure to recognize that the abolition of capitalism will not necessarily reduce the possibility of ecological damage.

50. Ibid. pp. 335–41. See also the claim that Marxist thought ‘must be an essential point of departure for anyone wishing to defend an emancipatory polities’: Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, op. cit. note 10, p. 227.

51. E. P. Thompson, cited in Anderson, P., Arguments within English Marxism (London, 1980), p. 17.Google Scholar

52. Especially in Bull, H., ‘The Concept of Justice International Relations’, Hagey Lectures, University of Waterloo (1983).Google Scholar

53. This is a task which Kubalkova and Cruickshank fail to undertake.

54. Bernstein, R., The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (London, 1979)Google Scholar; see also Fay, B., Social Theory and Political Practice (London, 1975)Google Scholar, and Benton, T., Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies (London, 1977).Google Scholar

55. The best commentary remains McCarthy, T., The Critical Theory ofJurgen Habermas (Boston, 1982).Google Scholar

56. Ashley, R., ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’, International Studies Quarterly, XXV (1981), pp. 204236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Ashley's distinction between technical and practical realism corresponds with the more familiar distinction between realism and rationalism.

58. On the scale of forms see Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 1950).Google Scholar

59. For instances of this subjectivism see K. Waltz, Man, the State and War, op. cit. note 14, p. 190, and Bull, H., The Anarchical Society (London, 1977), pp. 78 and 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. For an appeal to Marx's thought in this regard see Linklater, A., Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chs. 7–8.

61. See p. 6 however.

62. Giddens, note 9, p. 325.

63. Ibid. pp. 310–41. It is significant that the same concerns underpin the World Order Models Project.

64. Ibid. p. 326.

65. Ibid. pp. 313–9.

66. Ibid. pp. 326 and 337–40. For an opposing view, see Anderson, P., In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, 1983)Google Scholar, postscript.

67. Giddens, note 9, pp. 334–5.

68. On the subject of vision, see Giddens, note 9, pp. 337–8, and Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, op. cit. note 66, pp. 97–9.

69. Horkheimer, M., Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1968), pp. 178 and 182.Google Scholar

70. For example S. Mendlovitz in Galtung, J., The True Worlds (New York, 1980), p. xvii.Google Scholar

71. Giddens, note 9, pp. 1 and 335.

72. Habermas, J., Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

73. Friedman, G., The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca, 1981), p. 35.Google Scholar

74. Horkheimer, M., Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York, 1972), p. 53Google Scholar; Dawn and Decline (New York, 1978), pp. 157–8.