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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introduction: A Political Question

Author : Matthew Fluck

Published in: The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

The Introduction identifies a tradition of critical scholarship in International Relations (IR) according to which truth and knowledge are to be seen as social and political phenomena which play a key role in constituting international realities. There has already been extensive reflection on epistemic matters in IR, and many theorists now believe it is time to move on. However, wider societal concerns about truth, the interventions of Critical Realists, and the relative neglect of the work of early Critical Theorists suggest that there is much more to be said on this topic and about the ways it has been tackled in the discipline.

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next chapter The Parameters of Post-Positivism

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 133.

John Rawls rejects the idea that truth should play any significant role in liberal politics, an idea challenged by Joshua Cohen. Joshua Cohen, ‘Truth and Public Reason’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37, 1 (2005), pp. 2–42.

Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Reflections on the “Critical” in Critical Theory’, Review of International Studies, 33, Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory after 25 years (2007), pp. 25–45, reference p. 40.

The Guardian, ‘The Guardian View on Russian Propaganda: The Truth is Out There’, 2 March (2015), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/02/guardian-view-russian-propaganda-truth-out-there [accessed 7 June 2016].

Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1.

William Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 22, 3, (1996), pp. 301–321.

Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, p. 11.

Derrida states that ‘All the metaphysical determinations of truth … are more or less inseparable from the instance of the logos’ and includes within the latter ‘the sense of God’s infinite understanding’. Jacques Derrida, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, in Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, ed. José Medina and David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 207–225.

Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960); Bertrand Russell, ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’, in Truth, ed. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 69–82; Sextus Empiricus ‘Outlines of Pyrrhonism’, in Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches, ed. Paul K. Moser and Arnold vander Nat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 80–90; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003).

Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. xiv–xv.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 1.

Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979).

Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium 10, 2 (1981), pp. 126–155.

Ibid.; Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, 2nd Edition, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Richard Ashley ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’, International Studies Quarterly 25, 2 (1981).

Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. 28.

Cox, ‘Social Forces’.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

The best known Positivist reply is Robert Keohane’s International Studies Association Presidential address of 1988. Robert Keohane, ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly 32, 4 (1988), pp. 379–396.

Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36.

See e.g. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests; Max Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 407–443.

Ashley, ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’; Cox, ‘Social Forces’; Linklater, Men and Citizens.

Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 133.

David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Revised Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); James Der Derian, ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations’, in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (New York: Lexington, 1989), pp. 3–10.

Yosef Lapid, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly 33, 3 (1989), pp. 235–254.

Ibid.; Jim George, ‘International Relations and the Search for Thinking Space: Another View of the Third Debate’, International Studies Quarterly 33 (1989), pp. 269–279.; Steve Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, ed. Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–44.

See for example Nick Rengger and Ben Thirkwell-White eds., Review of International Studies, Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory After 25 Years, 33 (2007) and the contributions to the ‘Forum on Habermas’ Review of International Studies, 31, 1 (2005).

Nicholas Rengger and Ben Thirkwell-White, ‘Still Critical After All These Years? The Past, Present and Future of Critical Theory in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 33, S1 (2007), pp. 3–24, reference p. 21.

Thomas Diez and Jill Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue? Habermas and International Relations’ Review of International Studies 31, 1 (2005), pp. 127–140, reference p. 138.

Rengger and Thirkwell-White, ‘Still Critical?’, pp. 21–22.

Craig Murphy, ‘The Promise of Critical IR, Partially Kept’, Review of International Studies, Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory After 25 Years, 33 (2007), pp. 117–134, reference p. 118; Thomas Risse ‘“Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organization 54, 1 (2000) pp. 1–39.

Jürgen Haacke, ‘Theory and Practice in International Relations: Habermas, Self-Reflection, Rational Argumentation’, Millennium, 25, 2 (1996), pp. 255–259; Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 138; Friedrich Kratochwil suggests that Critical Theorists need to address the question of the nature of action, but unlike many IR scholars does not seem to believe that such an avenue is blocked by the concern with epistemology. Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36.

Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, ‘The End of International Relations Theory?’, European Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 405–425. See also Damiano de Felice and Francesco Obino eds. ‘Out of the Ivory Tower’, Millennium, Special Issue 40 (2012), 3.

David Lake, ‘Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 567–587; Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions’, Perspective on Politics 8, 2 (2010), pp. 411–431; Christine Sylvester, ‘Experiencing the End and Afterlives of International Relations/Theory’, European Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 609–626; Craig Murphy, ‘The Promise of Critical IR, Partially Kept’, Review of International Studies 33, Special Issue: Critical International Relations after 25 Years (2007), pp. 117–134.

Lake, ‘Theory is Dead’, p. 568.

Ibid., p. 580.

Sil and Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism’, p. 417.

Ibid.

Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Beyond Meta-Theory?’, European Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 589–608, reference p. 603.

Sylvester, ‘End and Afterlives’.

Ibid., p. 616; Milja Kurki, ‘The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Today’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, 1 (2011), pp. 129–146.

Matthew Fluck, ‘Theory, Truthers, and Transparency: Reflecting on Knowledge in the 21st Century’, Review of International Studies 42, 1 (2016), pp. 48–73.

Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36; Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 132.

Steve Fuller, The Knowledge Book, (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), pp. 82–87. Daniel McCarthy and Matthew Fluck ‘The Concept of Transparency in International Relations: Towards a Critical Approach’, forthcoming European Journal of International Relations.

Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests; Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Jacques Derrida of Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

See for example, Karl Marx, ‘The Holy Family’, in David McLellan ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 145–170; Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd Edition, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83–121.

Foucault, Power/Knowledge.

Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London: Verso 1972).

Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism? The Promises of Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly 44, 2 (2000), pp. 213–237, reference p. 217.

Colin Wight, ‘A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-Opener Won’t Work!’, Millennium 39, 2 (2007), pp. 379–398, reference p. 390.

Patomaki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism?’

Exceptions include Nicholas Rengger, ‘Negative Dialectic? The Two Modes of Critical Theory in World Politics’, in Critical Theory and World Politics, ed. Richard Wyn Jones (London: Lynne Rienner, 2001) pp. 91–109; Columba Peoples, ‘Theodor Adorno’, in Critical Theorists and International Relations, ed. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 7–18; Shannon Brincat, ‘Negativity and Open-Endedness in the Dialectic of World Politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34, 4 (2009), pp. 455–493; Daniel Levine Recovering International Relations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Levine, Recovering International Relations.

Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’, pp. 428–429.

Theodor Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’, trans. H Pickford, Yale Journal of Criticism 10, 2 (1997).

Adorno, Negative Dialectics.

David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

Theodor Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell 1978), pp. 497–511; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.

Title: Introduction: A Political Question
Author: Matthew Fluck
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Book: The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55032-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-55033-0

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_1