4. Hegemony and Challenge in International Theory

This text was first published as: “Hegemony and Challenge in International Theory,” Chap. 1, pp. 1–14 in The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory. Boston: Allyn & Unwin, 1985. The copyright was returned to the author.

Some readers may be unfamiliar with this use of the word ‘problematic.’ It is a translation of the French noun problematique and was imported first by structural anthropologists, I believe. It refers to a subject area of study and the particular means of inquiry employed to analyze it.

A variety of Marxists, in positing classes rather than states as the critical actors in international life, and in claiming the unity of domestic and foreign policy, really made the first concerted attacks on the classical paradigm of international politics. Historically this is accurate, but since international theory as part of a discipline has mostly ignored Marxist views of international life until recently, the Keohane-Nye volume represents an initial systematic critique of one of the main features of the classical paradigm; more implicit critiques are observed in nineteenth-century liberal thought and in the works of Karl Deutsch in the 1950s and 1960s. See the introductory and concluding essays in Keohane and Nye 1972.

There are numerous definitions of paradigms, but for our purposes the notion of their functions is most important. They are basically selecting devices which impose some sort of order and coherence on an infinite universe of facts and data which, by themselves, have no ‘meaning.’ C.R. Mitchell discusses some of these functions and suggests that paradigms “focus attention on a particular level of analysis, different units and unit attributes in order to explain a problem which-is also, to some degree, determined by the paradigm” (Mitchell 1980, 40–1). While war and peace as the core subject derive from normative concerns, they also derive from the third criterion, the image of the system of states. Hence, the normative concern is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for international theory. But most peace plans which did not take into consideration the essential characteristics of the states system were doomed to failure. I realize this use of the term paradigm is somewhat narrower than the meaning developed by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). To him, paradigms are rooted not just in rationally analyzable differences, but in transrational perceptions, or gestalts.

For example, the comment by J. David Singer, “How much longer will we believe that if one person thinks such and such is true, that this constitutes useful knowledge” (italics in original), quoted in Rosenau 1980, 209, n. 16.