Abstract
Over the last 20 years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of the broader field of International Relations (IR) theory, with advocates making a series of interventions in subjects as diverse as the origins and varieties of international systems over time and place, to work on the co-constitutive relationship between the international realm and state–society relations in the processes of radical change. However, even as historical sociology in IR (HSIR) has produced substantial gains, so there has also been a concomitant watering down of the underlying approach itself. As a result, it is no longer clear what exactly HSIR entails: should it be seen as operating within the existing pool of available theories or as an attempt to reconvene the discipline on new foundations? This article sets out an identifiable set of assumptions and precepts for HSIR based on deep ontological realism, epistemological relationism, a methodological free range, and an overt normative engagement with the events and processes that make up contemporary world politics. As such, HSIR can be seen as operating as an open society, a research programme and a vocation.
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Notes
This article is a revised version of a paper presented at a meeting organized by the BISA working group on Historical Sociology and International Relations at Goldsmiths College in September 2005 and a panel held at the BISA annual conference at St Andrews in December 2005. Many thanks to fellow panellists and participants at both events and, in particular, to Justin Rosenberg, Robbie Shilliam, Douglas Bulloch, Mike Levin, John Hobson, Bryan Mabee and Fred Halliday for comments on earlier drafts.
In this article, I use the term historical sociology interchangeably with ‘classical social theory’ to make the point that historical sociology is less a sub-field of sociology than its very core. As such, historical sociology is at the heart of what C. Wright Mills (1959) evocatively calls ‘the sociological imagination’. On the development of historical sociology as a self-aware body of work, see Abrams (1982), Skocpol (1984), Smith (1991), Delanty and Isin (2003), and Lawson (2005a, chapter 1). On historical sociology in IR, see Hobden and Hobson (2002).
Although isolated examples of self-aware HSIR had appeared before this point, most notably in the work of Raymond Aron (1986).
To some extent, this is a re-orientation towards sociology — many prominent classical IR scholars, including Stanley Hoffman (1960), Hans Morgenthau (1967) and Hedley Bull (1969) were scathing in their condemnation of economism. My thanks to Robbie Shilliam for making this point to me.
This is also a danger for the wider enterprise of historical sociology itself. There is, as far as I know, no department of historical sociology anywhere in the world. Rather, the division and subdivision of academic subjects into schools, faculties, departments and disciplines has served to spread historical sociology broadly but not deeply. Without its own institutional base from which to build, what at first appears to be a feast of historical sociology can begin on closer inspection to look more like a famine.
‘Let the buyer beware’.
This fuzziness can also promote a conservative bias — the grounds of John Krige's critique of Fayerabend's philosophy of science. Krige makes the point that, ‘if “anything goes”, then everything stays’.
It should be made clear from the outset that this exercise, as Rosenau points out, is performed with the intention of fostering ‘healthy fervent’ rather than reducing its participants to ‘hopeless confusion’.
Illustrative examples of fruitful interdisciplinarity include the concept of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, first mooted by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould to describe the switch-points in which long periods of stable reproduction within complex systems are punctuated by short, periods of rapid change. Gould's concept has been usefully transported into numerous ‘soft’ academic sciences. Another pertinent example is the concept of ‘path dependence’ which originated in economic history and has become used in many disciplines to describe how small initial distinctions are amplified over time, becoming substantial schisms that are then difficult to reverse.
For more on this, see Lawson (2005b) and Hobson (2005).
It is important to note that these categories are proposed as analytical tools rather than as concrete explanatory categories. As such, borders between them should neither be overstated nor pushed too hard lest they become artificial, superficial and ultimately, absurd.
Karl Popper led the 20th century assault on induction in numerous texts (see, e.g., 1957). Popper organized a range of figures to join him in this task, including Albert Einstein, who was supportive enough to write in a letter to Popper (1962, 492), ‘theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of the observations, but must be invented’.
The debate between the Austrian School and the German Historical School over scientific method became known as the Methodenstreit. In contrast to the former group, the German Historical School argued that, rather than focusing on universal truisms modelled on homo economicus, the line which was pursued by classical economists, economic processes operated within a social framework which was in turn shaped by cultural and historical forces. Hence, Gustav Schmoller and his associates favoured historical, comparative research that could uncover the distinctive properties of particular economic systems. The core debates of the original Methodenstreit continue to reverberate around contemporary social science: the degree to which people's actions are shaped by their social, historical and normative contexts as opposed to the view of individuals as universally driven homo politicus or homo economicus; preferences as exogenously generated by social institutions or the endogenous result of primal drives; rationality as a broad category embracing a range of motivations vs rationality as a narrow, limited realm of utility maximization.
Popper owes this analogy to the German poet, Novalis, ‘hypothesis are nets: only he who casts will catch’.
As Stanley Hoffman (1960, 44) warns, many such theories are ‘a triumph of form over substance’.
Of course, neorealism does contain a theory of systemic change, much of it originating in power transition theory, but only as this is carried through via great power war. On this, see Organski (1968), Organski and Kugler (1980) and Gilpin (1981).
See, for example, Wohlforth (1993).
On polarity, see Waltz (1979), Gilpin (1981), Walt (1987), Christensen and Snyder (1990), Layne (1993), Schweller (1998), Wohlforth (1999) and Waltz (2000); on soft balancing see Pape (2005), Paul (2005) and Brooks and Wohlforth (2005).
On neorealist degeneration, see Vasquez (1997); on its progress see Elman and Elman (2003). A parallel argument is made in Philip Tetlock (2005). Tetlock argues that specialists are actually less good at predicting events in their field as non-experts, having a tendency to over-extrapolate from the past to the future. This is, in many ways, unsurprising. After all, experts are not neutral observers but partisans who have a vested interest in explaining and predicting a certain chain of events. As such, they have an in-built tendency towards motivated bias and groupthink, a point well made 30 years ago by Robert Jervis (1976) and more recently by Michael Freeden (2003). For illustrative examples of the struggles of some IR hedgehogs to incorporate unhelpful evidence and to predict major events in world politics, see the article by Robert Kaplan (1994), which predicted the imminent dissolution of Canada, and those by John Mearsheimer (1990, 1995) who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, predicted the break-up of the EU and the dissolution of NATO, and advocated ceding nuclear technology to Germany so that it could act as a deterrent against Soviet aggression (despite Mearsheimer's concerns about the potential for a German invasion of Poland, and a war between Hungary and Romania).
On the poverty of the former, see Spruyt (1994); on the latter, see Rosenberg (2005).
Thanks to Justin Rosenberg for clarifying my reading of Giddens on this point.
Of course, induction can never be ‘pure’ — even historians work within general (deductive) categories that act as orienting devices for their research.
On causal narratives, see Suganami (1999); on superior stories, see Tilly (2005).
When asked what he considered to be the agents of social change, Braudel is said to have replied: ‘forests and rivers’.
Thompson (1965, 228) is worth quoting on this issue: ‘history is not a factory for the manufacture of grand theory, like some Concorde of the open air; nor is it an assembly line of the production of midget theories in series; nor yet is it some gigantic experimental station in which the theories of foreign manufacturers can be “applied”, “tested”, and “confirmed”. That is not its business at all. Its business it to recover, to explain and to understand its object: real history’.
For more on this, see Lawson (2005a).
On the benefits and difficulties of applying Lakatosian criteria to social science and, in particular, to IR, see Elman and Elman (2003).
But not, of course, outside human agency. Although social structures such as capitalism, patriarchy or time appear to exist outside or beyond us, they are nothing more than social relations, formed as concrete historical conjunctures according to a particular time and space constellation. At their heart, therefore, is human agency. A central function of a historical sociological research programme is to examine the production, reproduction and, potentially, the transformation of these historical conjunctures.
For Mann, this is the point in which ideology becomes transcendent (thereby containing the possibility of generating a radical alternative order) rather than imminent (concerned with legitimating the existing order). Karl Mannheim (1960) similarly writes that such a moment represents a potential shift from ideology to utopia.
An excellent collection of articles on third-wave historical sociology can be found in Adams et al. (2005).
For more on these issues, see Mills (1959) and Rosenberg (1994b).
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Lawson, G. Historical Sociology in International Relations: Open Society, Research Programme and Vocation. Int Polit 44, 343–368 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800195
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800195