Showing papers on "Realism published in 2000"

Structural Realism after the Cold War

Abstract: Some students of international politics believe that realism is obsolete.1 They argue that, although realism’s concepts of anarchy, self-help, and power balancing may have been appropriate to a bygone era, they have been displaced by changed conditions and eclipsed by better ideas. New times call for new thinking. Changing conditions require revised theories or entirely different ones. True, if the conditions that a theory contemplated have changed, the theory no longer applies. But what sorts of changes would alter the international political system so profoundly that old ways of thinking would no longer be relevant? Changes of the system would do it; changes in the system would not. Within-system changes take place all the time, some important, some not. Big changes in the means of transportation, communication, and war Žghting, for example, strongly affect how states and other agents interact. Such changes occur at the unit level. In modern history, or perhaps in all of history, the introduction of nuclear weaponry was the greatest of such changes. Yet in the nuclear era, international politics remains a self-help arena. Nuclear weapons decisively change how some states provide for their own and possibly for others’ security; but nuclear weapons have not altered the anarchic structure of the international political system. Changes in the structure of the system are distinct from changes at the unit level. Thus, changes in polarity also affect how states provide for their security. SigniŽcant changes take place when the number of great powers reduces to two or one. With more than two, states rely for their security both on their

Case research as a methodology for industrial networks: a Realist apologia

Abstract: Researchers most often employ a form of case research methodology when carrying out research into industrial networks Previously the basis for this choice has rested on the obvious common sense match between case research and the kinds of situations that industrial network researchers have chosen to study The paper describes four different epistemological orientations; positivism, constructivism, conventionalism and realism It is argued that only realism has properties which ensure a match with the particular characteristics of case research and thus provide a justification for case base knowledge claims The implications of, and constraints on, each of the other epistemological orientations for case research are described and, finally, the ramifications of realist based case research for programmes of research on industrial networks are described

Realism and International Relations

Abstract: Realism and International Relations provides students with a critical yet sympathetic survey of political realism in international theory. Using six paradigmatic theories - Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, the Prisoners' Dilemma, Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes - the book examines realist accounts of human nature and state motivation, international anarchy, system structure and the balance of power, international institutions, and morality in foreign policy. Donnelly argues that common realist propositions not only fail to stand up to scrutiny but are rejected by many leading realists as well. He argues that rather than a general theory of international relations, realism is best seen as a philosophical orientation or research program that emphasizes - in an insightful yet one-sided way - the constraints imposed by individual and national egoism and international anarchy. Containing chapter-by-chapter guides to further reading and discussion questions for students, this book offers an accessible and lively survey of the dominant theory in International Relations.

The Deleuze Connections

Abstract: The first book to present Gilles Deleuze's philosophy in language the nonphilosopher can understand. This book is a map of the work of Gilles Deleuze-the man Michel Foucault would call the "only real philosophical intelligence in France." It is not only for professional philosophers, but for those engaged in what Deleuze called the "nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy" in other domains, such as the arts, architecture, design, urbanism, new technologies, and politics. For Deleuze's philosophy is meant to go off in many directions at once, opening up zones of unforeseen connections between disciplines. Rajchman isolates the logic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy and the "image of thought" that it supposes. He then works out its implications for social and cultural thought, as well as for art and design-for how to do critical theory today. In this way he clarifies the aims and assumptions of a philosophy that looks constantly to invent new ways to affirm the "free differences" and the "complex repetitions" in the histories and spaces in which we find ourselves. He looks at the particular realism and empiricism that this affirmation implies and how they might be used to diagnose new forces confronting us today. In the process, he explores the many connections that Deleuze himself constructs in working out his philosophy, with the arts, political movements, even the neurosciences and artificial intelligence.

Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation

Abstract: The traumatic realism the demands of holocaust representation that we provide for you will be ultimate to give preference. This reading book is your chosen book to accompany you when in your free time, in your lonely. This kind of book can help you to heal the lonely and get or add the inspirations to be more inoperative. Yeah, book as the widow of the world can be very inspiring manners. As here, this book is also created by an inspiring author that can make influences of you to do more.

Identity and Persuasion: How Nations Remember Their Pasts and Make Their Futures

Abstract: Identity struggles are once again a salient problem in world politics. This article aims to throw light on the sources, dynamics, and consequences of identity formation and mobilization. It makes two theoretical arguments. First, because collective memory is both a seemingly factual narrative and a normative assessment of the past, it shapes a group's intersubjective conceptions of strategic feasibility and political legitimacy. This is why collective identity is above all an expression of normative realism: a group's declaration to itself and to others about what it can or cannot do; what it will or will not do. Second, at critical junctures competing actors assert or contest the normative realism underlying collective identity. They do this through rhetorical politics, deploying their powers of persuasion in order to engage the constitutive elements of the group's shared identity. In practical terms, rhetorical politics is structured by a dominant frame: a historically shaped discursive formation that does two things. It articulates in readily accessible ways the fundamental notions a group holds about itself in the world and allows or disallows specific strategies of persuasion on the basis of their presumptive realism and normative sway. Within this frame, rhetorical politics engenders a collective field of imaginable possibilities: a restricted array of plausible scenarios about how the world can or cannot be changed and how the future ought to look. Though circumscribed, this field is vulnerable to endogenous shifts, precisely because actors' rhetorical struggles introduce conflicts over the descriptive and prescriptive limits of what is “realistically” possible. Such conflicts may in fact produce a new dominant rhetorical frame and profoundly influence a nation's political and economic development. Two contrasting cases from Latin America offer empirical support for these arguments. The article shows that the sharp developmental divergence between Costa Rica and Nicaragua can be properly understood only through close analytical scrutiny of the different rhetorical frames, fields of imaginable possibilities, and collective identities that rose to prominence at critical points in these countries' colonial and postcolonial histories.

Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism

Abstract: Introduction: What Is Real in Realism? 1. The Prehistory of Realism 2. The World as Image 3. Foundational Photographs: The Importance of Being Esther 4. Race in the Age of Realism: Heathcliff's Obsolescence 5. Sexuality in the Age of Racism: Hungry Alice 6. Authenticity after Photography Notes Index

The English School's Contribution to the Study of International Relations:

Abstract: This article attempts to sketch the broad parameters of the English school's approach to International Relations. Rather than linking the English school to a via media and, in particular, to the id...

The Nature of Television Realism Judgments: A Reevaluation of Their Conceptualization and Measurement

Abstract: In this article, we review previous conceptualizations of perceived reality judgments of television content. We argue that the perceived reality literature suffers from conceptual inconsistencies that have the potential to interfere with understanding the research taken as a whole and with the success of future studies. We analyze 3 major variants in perceived realism judgments. The first consists of conceptual dimensions (e.g., magic window and social realism). We argue that labels and definitions have been assigned inconsistently in previous research. Redundancies and inconsistencies are addressed. Six primary dimensions are identified and described. The second is measurement features. We point out that perceived realism judgments may vary in specificity (e.g., the realism of television in general or the realism of a specific program) and object of judgment (e.g., the realism of characters or the realism of issues). The third variant is processing characteristics. Realism judgments may be made while ref...

Middle-range realism

Abstract: This paper proposes a liaison —‘middle-range realism’—between two long standing explanatory strategies in sociology— ‘middle-range theory’ and ‘realist social theory’. Each offers what the other lacks. Middle-range theory carries an acute sense of the function of theory within empirical inquiry but has left undeveloped any notion of its appropriate explanatory form. Realist social theory has propositional precision but has been unable, in the most part, to descend from a critical domain to the empirical plane. Middlerange realism thus offers a research strategy of the appropriate form and scope to lead and to federate empirical inquiry. Examples are provided of how middle-range realism can be applied to improve research using two different strategies (survey methods and evaluation research) in two contrasting substantive areas (voting behaviour and offender rehabilitation).

The Power of Ideas

Abstract: The essays collected in this new volume reveal Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid and accessible. He was constitutionally incapable of writing with the opacity of the specialist, but these shorter, more introductory pieces provide the perfect starting-point for the reader new to his work. Those who are already familiar with his writing will also be grateful for this further addition to his collected essays. The connecting theme of these essays, as in the case of earlier volumes, is the crucial social and political role--past, present and future--of ideas, and of their progenitors. A rich variety of subject-matters is represented--from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism--so that the truth of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. It is a warning that Berlin often referred to, and provides an answer to those who ask, as from time to time they do, why intellectual history matters. Among the contributions are "My Intellectual Path," Berlin's last essay, a retrospective autobiographical survey of his main preoccupations; and "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation," the classic statement of his Zionist views, long unavailable in print. His other subjects include the Enlightenment, Giambattista Vico, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, G.V. Plekhanov, the Russian intelligentsia, the idea of liberty, political realism, nationalism, and historicism. The book exhibits the full range of his enormously wide expertise and demonstrates the striking and enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas. "Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization."--Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958

Unipolar politics : realism and state strategies after the Cold War

Abstract: 1. Realism and International Relations After the Cold War, by Michael Mastanduno and Ethan B. Kapstein2. Realism and the Present Great Power System: Growth and Positional Conflict Over Scarce Resources, by Randall L. Schweller3. The Political Economy of Realism, by Jonathan Kirshner4. Realism Structural Liberalism, and the Western Order, by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberr5. Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy After the Cold War, by Michael Mastanduno6. Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy, by Eric Heginbotham and Richard J. Samuels7. Realism and Russian Strategy after the Collapse of the USSR, by Neil MacFarlane8. Realism(s) and Chinese Security Policy in the Post-Cold War Period, by Alastair Iain Johnston9. Realism and Regionalism: American Power and German and Japanese Institutional Strategies During and After the Cold War, by Joseph M. Grieco10. Realism and Reconciliation: France, Germany, and the European Union, by Michael Loriaux11. Neorealism Nuclear Proliferation, and East-Central European Strategies, by Mark Kramer12. Does Unipolarity Have A Future?, by Ethan B. Kapstein

Realism, causality and the problem of social structure

Abstract: Recent debate over the merits of various realist perspectives on society, mostnotably the critical realist approach developed by Roy Bhaskar, has focused onthe ontological status of social structure. Social structure, critical realists maintain,is ontologically irreducible to people and their practices. This belief differentiatescritical realists from those theorists, such as Rom Harre, for whom social structureis immanent to people’s practices. On the latter view, structure is so intimatelybound up with agency that to accord the former a distinct ontological status wouldbe to reify it.Central to the debate is the issue of the causal efficacy of social structure.Critical realists contend that although social structure is unobservable it cannevertheless be known to be real because it makes a difference to observablehuman behaviour. In making this argument critical realists invoke the so-calledcausal criterion for existence, according to which unobservable entities can beknown to exist through their impact on observable events. The critique advancedby Harre and his supporters, most notably in Harre and Varela (1996), main-tains that an appeal to the causal criterion is illegitimate in the case of socialstructure, implying that critical realism’s claim that the social world containsontologically irreducible social structures cannot be sustained.My aim in this paper is to cast a critical eye over the debate betweenthe two varieties of realist social theory. To this end, having first outlined thebasic critical realist position together with Harre and Varela’s critique, thepaper will attempt to develop a critical realist response to the charges levelledagainst it. The objective of the response is twofold. First, it aims to advancethe debate by clarifying the key issues which divide the two perspectives andevaluating where the balance of the argument over these issues lies. Second,by suggesting how the weaknesses in critical realism highlighted by Harre andVarela might be dealt with, the hope is that the paper will prompt critical realists

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)

Abstract: In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the aeld is crowded with apostates.1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike.

Realism and Educational Research: New Perspectives and Possibilities

Abstract: 1.Introduction Part One: Theorising Educational Research 2.The Contested Nature of Educational Research 3. Educational Knowledge 4.Mathematical Modelling 5.Theory into Practice Part Two: Disciplinary Knowledge 6.School Effectiveness Research 7.Education Policy 8.Biography and Autobiography 9.Researching 'Race' and 'Ethnicity' 10.Post-modernism 11.End-piece: Changing Knowledge of Relatively Unchanging Entities

Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics

Abstract: Efforts to develop a foundation for scientiac knowledge that would unite the natural and social sciences date to the classical Greeks. Given recent advances in genetics and evolutionary theory, this goal may be closer than ever.1 The human genome project has generated much media attention as scientists reveal genetic causes of diseases and some aspects of human behavior. And although advances in evolutionary theory may have received less attention, they are no less signiacant. Edward O. Wilson, Roger Masters, and Albert Somit, among others, have led the way in using evolutionary theory and social science to produce a synthesis for understanding human behavior and social phenomena.2 This synthesis posits that human behavior is simultaneously and inextricably a result of evolutionary and environmental causes. The social sciences, including the study of international politics, may build upon this scholarship.3 In this article I argue that evolutionary theory can improve the realist theory of international politics. Traditional realist arguments rest principally on one of two discrete ultimate causes, or intellectual foundations. The arst is Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that humans are evil. The second is grounded in the work

Realism and popular cinema

Abstract: Introduction Part 1 1. Realism and film: discursive formations 2. Realist moments: representation and reality 3. Realism and genre: realising fantasy 4. The epic of everyday: notes towards a continuum 5. Discerning viewers: cognitive theory and identification Part Two 6. Revisioning history: realism and politics 7. Space, place and identity: re-viewing social realism 8. Violent appropriations: realising death

Film and Theory: An anthology

Abstract: This anthology offers a collection of some of the most provocative and influential writings of film theory from the 1960s and 1970s, along with new directions from the last two decades. An introductory essay to the volume sums up developments in film theory from the beginning up through the 1980s, while introductions to specific groupings of essays summarize debates on those issues. Rather than look at film theory in terms of schools and allegiances, the editors investigate questions and problematics: What is the cinema? What is the cinematic apparatus? How do spectators differ in their desires? What is realism? Is realism desirable? Thus psychoanalysis, reception theory, cognitive theory, race theory, and feminism all provide partially valid answers to the question: What does the spectator want? This anthology's goal is to facilitate a polylogue among the theorists who have ignored or maligned one another and to deprovincialize film theory. Film Theory multiplies the perspectives and positions, the situations and locations, from which film theory is spoken.

Models of and models for : Theory and practice in contemporary biology : Metaphilosophy and the history of the philosophy of science

Abstract: The realism/antirealism controversy has gone on for centuries, and gives every indication that it will continue to go on for centuries. Dismayed, I take a closer look at it. I find that question it poses - very roughly, wether scientific knowledge is true (approximately true, put forward as true, etc.) or only useful (empirically adequate, a convenient method of representation, etc.) - actually suppresses socially critical thought and discussion about science (e.g., concerning whether scientific knowledge is useful for achieving the goals we have ot the goals we ought to have). I find, as well, that two of the most important responses to the realism/antirealism controversy - that which construes it as concerned with science's aims and that which construes it as concerned with science's results - fail to make sufficient empirical or normative contact with science. As a consequence, they provide representations of science that either do not help scientists (or non scientists) make informed decisions about science, or actually hinder these individuals from doing so. I conclude that we should either stop engaging in the realism/antirealism controversy entirely, or else engage in it in a more socially responsible way - by gathering the right kinds of empirical and normative data, and framing more helpful versions of the questions we want to ask. I end by responding to the strong objections sure to be voiced by my colleagues in philosophy of science.

Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research

Abstract: There are continuing difficulties within social science surrounding concepts of race. This book suggests that these difficulties stem from the uncertain ontological and epistemological status of ideas about race, itself a consequence of the recognition that concepts of race have all but lost their relevance as sociologically significant descriptions. This book surveys ways in which social scientists have attempted to come to terms with this situation, before developing an alternative approach based on recent work by realist authors. This approach offers a radical revision of orthodox debates about race concepts, about the possibility of a social science and about the nature of empirical research. This illustrated through two policy examples: an account of post war migration to the UK, and debates about trans-racial adoption in the UK and the USA.

Deconstructing the "Science Wars" by Reconstructing an Old Mold

Abstract: Human beings appear to have an innate tendency to describe the world in terms of inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives. A prime example is the current "science wars," which pit "realists" who uphold the objectivity and progressive nature of scientific knowledge against "relativists" who recognize the culturally embedded status of all claims for universal factuality. Gould argues that this dichotomy is false both as an interpretation of the nature and history of science and as a primary example of our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides. As evidence, he reconstructs an episode in the history of science that is typically viewed as a linear "march to truth," showing that it instead demonstrates that science advances within a changing and contingent nexus of human relations, not outside the social order and despite its impediments.

The present state of the scientific realism debate

Abstract: Once upon a time there was a feeling in the philosophy of science community that the scientific realism debate had run out of steam. Arthur Fine went as far as to declare that ‘realism is well and truly dead’ (1986a, 112) and to compose the obituary of the debate, aka the Natural Ontological Attitude. Fortunately, the allegations of premature death failed to persuade many philosophers, for whom the scientific realism debate has had a glorious past and a very promising future. In the last dozen of years only there have been a number of books which cast a fresh eye over the issue of scientific realism, such as those by Suppe (1989), Putnam (1990), Almeder (1992), Wright (1992), Kitcher (1993a), Aronson, Harre & Way (1994), Brown (1994), Laudan (1996), Leplin (1997), Kukla (1998), Trout (1998), Cartwright (1999), Giere (1999), Niiniluoto (1999) and Psillos (1999). Although these books differ vastly in their approaches and in their substantive theses, they can all be seen as participating in a common project: to characterise carefully the main features of the realism debate and to offer new ways of either exploring old arguments or thinking in novel terms about the debate itself.

Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war

Abstract: (2000). Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war. Security Studies: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 60-107.

Literatures of memory : history, time and space in postwar writing

Abstract: Part 1: postmodernism and the death of the past - history and postmodernity, everyday practices of history, fear of the past the ethics of historical fiction - postmodernism and historical fiction, postmodern history and ethics memory's realism -metamemory in Pat Barker's "Regeneration", identity and trauma, social memory practising spacetime - the relativistic physics of memory - Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye", science and social time, making time for diversity, the spatialization of history. Part 2: staged histories - radical theatre in Britain and America, 1968-1988 - staging history, "Hammering on the Pipes of the Tenement" -David Hare and Howard Brenton, agitprop versus realist history -John McGrath, herstories - Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, African-American theatre - August Wilson poetry as memory - the autobiographical lyric in contemporary British and American poetry - Sarah Maguire - "Spilt Milk", Robert Creeley -"I Keep to Myself Such Measures", Jorie Graham - "What the End is For", Lyn Hejinian - "Yet We Insist that Life is Full of Happy Chance", from "My Life" histories of the future - American science fiction after the Second World War - the future's relation to the present, governing the future - Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" fictional cities and urban spaces - contemporary fiction and representations of the city - architects of theoretical and social space, Thomas Pynchon's urban imaginary in "The Crying of Lot 49", Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy", simulation city.

The Configuration of Meaning: Learner-Centered Art Education Revisited

Abstract: As my title suggests, I want to revisit one of the most enduring of the 'chestnuts' that have given life and controversy to our field. I want to bring together some threads of new, and not so new, thinking in order to place the learner, whether child or adolescent, more securely at the heart of our discipline. I want to move from a child-centered to learnercentered position and suggest that the traditional theory of mind that has long informed the notion of child-centeredness is both too simplistic and too exclusionary to be useful. The concept of learner-centeredness, albeit in refashioned garb will, I hope, capture more fully the thrust of this article. This project is timely and raises questions about the theories we hold in art education and how they are rooted in the actuality of classroom experiences for many young people. As my colleague at Teachers College, Maxine Greene (1999),l has pointed out, young people are too often bored in schools because we do not offer them meaningful challenges, we do not invite them to bring their own experiences into the arena of learning, we do not ask of them the kind of reflection and exploration of possibilities that engages their thinking, and we do not offer them insights and skills in those non-verbal languages of the arts where imagination can open up new corners of reality. In short, we do not help them construct a continuity between their own creative efforts and the culture in which they live in a way that accords distinction and respect to each. Perhaps we do not offer them these things because we have lost sight of the learner-the child and adolescent; we have disengaged them from the heart of the educational enterprise. We have treated young people as the objects of education rather than as participants in a shared enterprise, involving exchanges between young and old, experienced and inexperienced. In losing sight of the needs of the learner, we may also have lost sight of the significance of learning in and through the arts. For the kinds of visual narratives youngsters construct not only make meaningful their own sense of self, but also establish a continuity between their personal lives and the experiences they share with others. It could be, thus, that in losing sight of the learner we have also abandoned the belief that the construction of meaning in visual form is a fundamental feature of being human and that art itself is a normative function of the human mind. Child Centeredness Theories about how children think and learn have been debated by philosophers, psychologists and educators for centuries. Indeed, historical influences that have shaped contemporary views of children and their artistic learning can be traced back to ancient Greece. We still debate, for example, whether the artistic content in children's works derive from historical precedent or individual experience, the degree to which sociocultural or psycho-dynamic forces determine artistic style, and the relative status of sensory against conceptual knowledge in the fashioning of visual images. We have also been endlessly perplexed about the outcome, or telos, of development and whether it assumes singular or multiple forms (Kaplan, 1994). Is there a normative strand to artistic development which stretches into adolescence and beyond? If so, how are the upper reaches of development constituted-by realism, abstractionism, or by less obvious underlying structures of thought, conceived in terms of complexity or simplicity? Threading through such debates has been the perennial question of "child-centeredness" in art education. Harking back 200 years to Rousseau and Locke, protagonists have inherited the dichotomous views that children are naturally creative if left alone and untrammeled by social and educational influences or, alternatively, are creative only if their predispositions are nurtured by the direct intervention of teaching. Variants of these two positions have emerged over time as the naturalist view found support from the emerging field of psychoanalysis and later psychology and, in education, became centered in studio practice and work with materials. …

The Interregnum Controversies in World Politics 1989–1999: Clausewitz Rules, OK? The Future is the Past—with GPS

Abstract: 161 1 Hedley Bull, ‘The Theory of International Politics, 1919–1969,’ in Brian Porter (ed.), The Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics, 1919–1969 (London, 1972), p. 39. 2 The scholarly literature on ‘realism’, now generally termed ‘classical realism’—with its modern devotees, such as this author, called neoclassical realists—‘neorealism,’ ‘structural realism’ (and one day soon, perhaps, neoclassical poststructural realism), is as large as it is largely aridly academic in a pejorative sense. For those inclined to intellectual masochism, I can recommend Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth-Century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980); Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York, 1986); Barry Buzan, Charles Jones, and Richard Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism (New York, 1993); Benjamin Frankel (ed.), ‘Roots of Realism’, Security Studies, 5, special issue (1995); idem (ed.), ‘Realism: Restatements and Renewal’, Security Studies, 5, special issue (1996); Scott Burchill, ‘Realism and Neo-Realism’, in Burchill and Andrew Linklater (eds.), Theories of International Relations (London, 1996), pp. 67–92; and Stefano Guzzini, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy (London, 1998). These few references are merely the tip of a mighty iceberg of professional activity. For an ‘approach’ to international relations long condemned by the cognoscenti as simplistic and theoretically severely challenged, ‘realism’ seems able to attract an endless succession of firing squads. Contemporary theorists of international relations are still looking for that stake to the heart that definitively would dispatch ‘realism’. 3 You know you are in trouble as a scholar when an issue as apparently mundane as the day-by-day working title of your field is widely contested. Each and every title to my field, and subfield, carries some unhelpful baggage. I propose to handle this fact by ignoring it. The text refers to international relations, international politics, international studies, and world politics, without fear, special favour, or subtextual meaning. With respect to my particular corner of the broad field just indicated, I am more particular. Reference in my text to ‘strategic’ studies, theory, or history, indicates matter connected quite directly to the threat or use of force. From time to time, to indicate my liberality of spirit and genuinely holistic perspective upon the subjects that concern me, I refer to ‘security’ studies. For the record, however, I would like to register a vote for the position that the concept of ‘security’ studies is unmanageably inclusive. To study ‘security’ would require the study of everything, a fact which would translate as a thoroughly unfocused study of nothing in particular. Clausewitz rules, OK? The future is the past— with GPS

Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Abstract: Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences

Measuring the intentional world : realism, naturalism, and quantitative methods in the behavioral sciences

Abstract: Scientific realism has been advanced as an interpretation of the natural sciences but never the behavioural sciences. This exciting book introduces a novel version of scientific realism-Measured Realism-that characterizes the kind of theoretical progress in the social and psychological sciences that is uneven but indisputable. Trout proposes a theory of measurement-Population-Guided Estimation-that connects natural, psychological, and social scientific inquiry. Presenting quantitative methods in the behavioural sciences as at once successful and regulated by the world, Measuring the Intentional World will engage philosophers of science, historians of science, sociologists of science, and scientists interested in the foundations of their own disciplines.