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2017 | Buch

Introduction: Politics All the Way Down Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

International Politics and Inner Worlds

Masks of Reason under Scrutiny

verfasst von: Kurt Jacobsen

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book takes radical aim at the conventional conduct of international relations analysis. It reexamines the role of ideas, the usefulness of psychoanalysis, the rage for and at rational choice, the influence of the public on foreign policy, counterinsurgency evangelism, and development orthodoxies at the national and genetic levels. Drawing a bead on conceptual blind spots prevalent both inside and outside the academy, the book urges scholars to reflect on how inner worlds shape the actions of their subjects—and their own research analyses, as well.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
Introduction: Politics All the Way Down
Abstract
Social scientists long have grappled with the influence upon their research of interest-driven or theory-derived ideas that can shape what they see and do. This nettlesome plight deepens when one allows for emotional affinities between theory and theorist too. ‘External reality has a way,’ as John Steinbeck literarily put it, ‘of not being so external after all.’ These tricky factors may well be unintended, so much so that the researcher is blissfully unaware of them. The search for knowledge, psychologist Abraham Maslow noted, validly can be viewed as an anxiety-allaying enterprise in which science is ‘considered a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth, to avoid, it, and to distort it.’
Kurt Jacobsen
Perestroika and American Political ScienceScience
Abstract
The controversy surrounding rational choice theory, and its ancillary apparatus of statistical techniques, is the most educational and entertaining debate in political science and perhaps in all the social sciences, though each one has their own rendition of it. The Perestroika movement, and how it played out, sets the stage for the remainder of the book. Rational choice theory is the application of economic methods and precepts to other fields. ‘Strictly speaking, formal theory involves the construction of specific mathematical models intended to represent particular real-world situations and the use of mathematics to identify the specific solutions (“equilibria”) for the model(s).’ There is nothing inherently objectionable with any of this. The more the merrier—except that sentiment was hardly the objective of the proponents. Hence, Perestroika.
Kurt Jacobsen
Dueling Constructivisms: A Post-Mortem on the Ideas Debate in Mainstream IR
Abstract
The ideas debate in mainstream IR/IPE was generated by cumulative dissatisfactions with rational choice theory and with Realist tenets. This article examines the contours of this debate and explains how it reached its limit in the form of “conventional constructivism,” a bowdlerised form of critical theory and Gramscian cultural studies. “Context” and Gramsci’s “common sense,” however, are sufficiently equivalent terms to enable productive conceptual connections across the intra-disciplinary divide. The overarching obstacle remains the resistance of mainstream IR to integration with other social sciences.
Kurt Jacobsen
Why Do States (Bother to) Deceive? Managing Trust at Home and Abroad
Abstract
This chapter asks why do democratic states even bother try to deceive their own citizens as to certain foreign policies they practice, their motives and their consequences. Surely, a population schooled in realpolitik, or just garden variety cynicism, would not need to be gulled in any way, except authorities always believe that they do. This question presupposes not only that states craft ‘stories’ to disguise activities abroad but that they do so because they are more constrained than they will admit by an audience of non-elite actors. Theories derived from realpolitik make little allowance for such domestic ‘interference.’ Yet there is evidence that in democracies the role of mass publics in driving, curbing or modifying the conduct of foreign policy is a force, and explanatory factor, to reckon with.
Kurt Jacobsen
COIN Flips: Counterinsurgency Theory and American IR
Abstract
This chapter examines the recent rehabilitation of counterinsurgency doctrine, especially as conducted by third-party interveners such as the USA. The advent of the refurbished US Army/Marine Corps Counter-insurgency Manual in 2007, a volume with a painstakingly scholarly self-presentation, is the focal point. This chapter is concerned with the dubious yet recurrent bases of the doctrinal justifications driving recent US interventions. The Vietnam War unsurprisingly persists as the crucial case for American scholars and policy makers who have toiled mightily to reconstrue the history of counterinsurgency there as an unacknowledged success, which has become the standard account in American international relations scholarship. The chapter examines this ominous development and its implications.
Kurt Jacobsen
Why Freud Matters: Psychoanalysis and IR Revisited
Abstract
I take scholars of international relations to task for eschewing the discipline of psychoanalysis. The renewed and fierce attacks on Freud and his fractious followers over the last generation evidently discouraged political scientists from exploring the considerable usefulness of psychoanalytic methods both in case studies and in wider methodological terms. This chapter demonstrates under what kinds of circumstances psychoanalysis can prove to be a valid and enlightening interpretive approach. What indeed is the significance in human behavior of the unconscious, that is, of motives and forces of which we are commonly unaware? The argument I make is that in most, if not all, cases, psychoanalytically attuned approaches will yield important insights that expose ‘masks of reason’ and illuminate motives for the way power is wielded in specific cases.
Kurt Jacobsen
The Mystique of Genetic Correctness
Abstract
I depart from IR concerns to deal with the realm of genetic research where researchers wed to a set of methods imagine that what those methods yield are the only true scientific products. Masks of reason are all too evident in the fast and loose way that sophisticated neoeugenic methods and techniques are used to serve underlying social agendas and prejudices.
Kurt Jacobsen
Loose Ends: Considerations on the Aftermaths of the Celtic Tiger and the Northern ‘Troubles’
Abstract
This chapter is an appraisal of the follies of Irish development strategy, the last and only word in economic reason according to many devotees, since my book on the topic several decades back. Groupthink ran ever more hysterically wild among elites in the Irish Republic right up to the great crash.
Kurt Jacobsen
Conclusion: Algren, Academe and Conformity
Abstract
From the imperially imposed destitution rued by aristocratic iconoclasts Tocqueville and Beaumont to the epic financial meltdown imposed by domestic quasi-aristocratic bankers and allied insiders is quite a rocky journey, but one with steady themes: deference to authority, comprador capitulation to external forces, celebration of the conventional, and exclusion or erasure of anyone the least bit critical of elite schemes.
Kurt Jacobsen
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
International Politics and Inner Worlds
verfasst von
Kurt Jacobsen
Copyright-Jahr
2017
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-54352-9
Print ISBN
978-3-319-54351-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54352-9

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