Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

“To have mastered ‘theory’ and ‘method’ is to have become a conscious thinker, a man at work and aware of the assumptions and implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by ‘method’ or ‘theory’ is simply to be kept from working.” The sentence applies nicely to the present plight of political science. The profession as a whole oscillates between two unsound extremes. At the one end a large majority of political scientists qualify as pure and simple unconscious thinkers. At the other end a sophisticated minority qualify as overconscious thinkers, in the sense that their standards of method and theory are drawn from the physical, “paradigmatic” sciences. The wide gap between the unconscious and the overconscious thinker is concealed by the growing sophistication of statistical and research techniques. Most of the literature introduced by the title “Methods” (in the social, behavioral or political sciences) actually deals with survey techniques and social statistics, and has little if anything to share with the crucial concern of “methodology,” which is a concern with the logical structure and procedure of scientific enquiry. In a very crucial sense there is no methodology without logos, without thinking about thinking. And if a firm distinction is drawn—as it should be—between methodology and technique, the latter is no substitute for the former. One may be a wonderful researcher and manipulator of data, and yet remain an unconscious thinker.

Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

Inequality and concentration are central concepts in all the social sciences. Economists study inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, productivity, or goods. Sociologists may be concerned with social mobility-inequality of opportunity-or with inequalities in living conditions-the degree to which minority groups are concentrated in particular residential areas. A political scientist must be concerned with political inequality-concentrated, unequally distributed power. He may, for instance, need a measure of legislative malapportionment. Though the variables may be different, the basic question is the same: What is the degree to which wealth, or good living conditions, or power, are concentrated in a society? Since the questions are conceptually similar, it is reasonable to expect that the problems of quantification might be similar, and that the tools of measurement developed in one social science might be applicable to studies in another field. Yet there has been little interchange across disciplines, and scholars in each field persist in using techniques which are in some respects inferior to those used other fields. This article examines a number of measures of inequality, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, and compares the results given by some of the measures when they were applied to data on representation state legislatures and on land distribution.

On measuring inequality

Challenging boundaries : global flows, territorial identities

Generated by an intent to write an internationally useful text on the theory and practice of world politics in the twentieth century, this paper represents a preliminary attempt to review and make sense of that field.’ Our focus will be on the contending world order concepts, designs or doctrines embodied within the recent history of globally oriented political practices, as well as the evaluative criticisms, alternative explorations and theoretical rationalizations occasioned by such practices. The search for order in and beyond contemporary world politics has repeatedly transcended or redefined the boundaries of the political. Hence International Relations, rather than its major subdiscipline World Politics, is the most generally relevant academic field for studying contending world orders.

The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction: voyages of rediscovery Part I: Recovering Western Antiquity: 1. The dialectical logic of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue 2. Aristotelian political methodologies 3. Toynbee's Jesus: computational hermeneutics and the continuing presence of classical Mediterranean civilization Part II.The Humanistic Science of the Modern Classics: 4. The humanistic moment in international studies: reflections on Machiavelli and Las Casas 5. Can the end of power politics be part of the concepts with which its story is told? A Leibnizian reply 6. Rescuing 'reason' from the 'rationalists': reading Vico, Marx and Weber as reflexive institutionalists 7. An Orwellian Lasswell: humanistic scientist Part III. Contemporary Humanistic Reformulations: 8. Fairy tales, tragedies and world histories: testable structuralist interpretations 9. Beneath Tit-for-Tat: the contest of political economy fairy tales within SPD protocols 10. Emancipatory empiricism: toward the renewal of empirical peace research 11. The presumption of anarchy in world politics: on recovering the historicity of world society 12. The return of practical reason to international theory References Index.

Hayward R. Alker

Papers

On measuring inequality

Challenging boundaries : global flows, territorial identities

The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire

Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies

Mathematics and politics