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The Positivist Challenge, the Rise of Realism, and the Demise of Nationalism

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The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory

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Abstract

When scholars, commonly classified by International Relations today as classical realists, arrived as refuges in the United States from the mid-1930s onwards, they experienced a Methodenstreit in the social sciences which was similar to the one they had been intellectually socialized in on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, the rise of positivistic science in the United States was partly stimulated by debates that American students and scholars like John Burgess, Talcott Parsons, Charles Merriam, Harold Laswell, and Willard Van Orman Quine had experienced during their sojourns in Central Europe. Most classical realists, by contrast, promoted a hermeneutical scholarship that contextualized knowledge within the (transcendental) contingency, ephemerality, and unknowability of life. Consequently, this kind of scholarship remained suspicious about the promises of modeling social sciences after the natural sciences and cautioned against the possibilities of making absolute truth statements, as argued for by naturalist philosophy. Choosing International Relations (and politics) as their field is, therefore, to be seen as a deliberate move to acknowledge the complexity of human life and the relations between them, as initially the discipline was interdisciplinary. To discuss this argument, this chapter draws on the personal and intellectual cosmos of Hans Morgenthau, arguably until today one of the most well-known classical realists.

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  1. School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Felix Rösch

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  1. Felix Rösch
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  1. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Howard Williams

  2. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    David Boucher

  3. School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Peter Sutch

  4. Department of Philosophy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    David Reidy

  5. School of Psychology and Humanities, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

    Alexandros Koutsoukis

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Rösch, F. (2023). The Positivist Challenge, the Rise of Realism, and the Demise of Nationalism. In: Williams, H., Boucher, D., Sutch, P., Reidy, D., Koutsoukis, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36111-1_11

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