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International Institutions: Two Approaches (1988)

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International Theory

Abstract

Contemporary world politics is a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death. The members of this Association have chosen to study it because it is so important to our lives and those of other — not because it is either aesthetically attractive or amenable to successful theory-formulation and testing. Indeed, we would be foolish if we studied world politics in search of beauty or lasting truth. Beauty is absent because much that we observe is horrible, and many of the issues that we study involve dilemmas whose contemplation no sane person would find pleasing. Deterministic laws elude us, since we are studying the purposive behavior of relatively small numbers of actors engaged in strategic bargaining. In situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge.1 This suggests that no general theory of international politics may be feasible. It makes sense to seek to develop cumulative verifiable knowledge, but we must understand that we can aspire only to formulate conditional, context-specific generalizations rather than to discover universal laws, and that our understanding of world politics will always be incomplete.

International Studies Quarterly, 32(4) (December), pp. 379–396. Author’s note: This essay was written while the author was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1987–88. I am grateful for financial support to the Social Science Research Council Foreign Policy Program and to National Science Foundation grant #BNS-8700864 to the Center. My colleagues in the institutional theory seminar at the Center provided inspiration, advice, and literature references; and helpful comments on earlier drafts were received from James A. Caporaso, Glenn Carroll, Lawrence Finkelstein, Ernst B. Haas, Peter J. Katzenstein, Nannerl O. Keohane, John Kingdon, Stephen D. Krasner, Douglass C. North, Claus Offe, John Gerard Ruggic, Barry Weingast, and two editors of International Studies Quarterly, Richard K. Ashley and Patrick McGowan.

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Robert Keohane
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

    James Der Derian (Professor of Political Science) (Professor of Political Science)

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© 1995 International Studies Quarterly

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Keohane, R. (1995). International Institutions: Two Approaches (1988). In: Der Derian, J. (eds) International Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23773-9_11

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