“The ability to predict outcomes in open systems is beyond all science” (52).“There are simply no epistemological or methodological divides to accept, defend or bridge. …the argument advanced in this book promises nothing less than a comprehensive reassessment and restructuring of the theoretical cleavages that divide the discipline” (1). The theoretical divisions that are currently a very real trend in IR are not, Wight claims, epistemological or methodological, but they are rather ontological. Wight attempts to right this mess by focusing on the ontological arguments that have been overlooked by many in the discipline.
The agent-structure problem is the medium whereby Wight attempts to “unpack” his argument. He chooses this for three reasons: firstly, this problem is essentially ontological; secondly, every theoretical approach posits a solution to the agent-structure problem whether explicitly or tacitly; and thirdly, is the intersection of politics and ontology whereby the assumption is that the agent-structure problem is a part of social ontology. From later in the book, “If ever the agent-structure problem were solved, in the sense of requiring no further discussion, then social theoretic activity would come to an end, and along with it political, economic, cultural and ethical dispute. In this sense, the agent-structure problem is political” (63).
Wight also rejects the possibility that a general theory of IR is even achievable. “The attempt to construct a parsimonious theory of IR is not only flawed and doomed to failure, but also politically and ethically dangerous” (8).
In the second chapter, Wight situates his own political position vis-à-vis that of positivism. He claims that the current IR theoretical mess requires one to orient themselves with this hegemonic approach. “According to the positivist model of science, there is a general set of rules, procedures and axioms, which when taken together constitutes the ‘scientific method’” (19).
“…positivism can be characterized in the following manner. (1) Phenomenalism: the doctrine that holds that we cannot get beyond the way things appear to us and thereby obtain reliable knowledge of reality—in other words, appearances, not realities are the only objects of knowledge. (2) Nominalism: the doctrine that there is no objective meaning to the words we use—words and concepts do not pick out any actual objects or universal aspects of reality, they are simply conventional symbols or names that we happen to use for our own convenience. (3) Cognitivism: the doctrine that holds that no cognitive value can be ascribed to value judgments and normative statements. (4) Naturalism: the belief that there is an essential unity of scientific method such that the social sciences can be studies in the same manner as natural science” (21).Positivists then use covering laws, instrumental treatments of theoretical terms, a Humean account of cause and an embrace of operationalism.
Wight rejects this positivism and instead embraces a scientific realism: “But it is not just the ‘covering law model’ which scientific realism rejects; it is the very attempt to demarcate a ‘scientific method’. For scientific realists there can be no single ‘scientific method’. Understood as the attempt to provide depth explanations of phenomena, it must be the case that differing phenomena will require differing modes of investigation and perhaps different models of explanation. Contra positivism, then, for scientific realists, the content of science is not the method” (19). “For scientific realists the productions of science are always open to revision and reformulation. The dialectic of science is never ending and no scientific discovery, or claim, is ever beyond critique” (24).
There is an account of the Kantian epistemological turn that arose from the catalyst that was David Hume. The scientific realists must always question epistemological claims and must revert back to ontology, though ontology will always require epistemology for further exploration.
“The empirical realist error is the conflation of three domains, or levels of realty, into one—that of the empirical. In contrast to this, scientific realists argue that in order to make sense of the scientific enterprise we need to distinguish between the domains of the empirical (experiences and impressions), the actual (events and states-of-affairs—i.e. the actual objects of potential direct experience) and the real or non-actual (the deep structures, mechanisms and tendencies)” (34-5).There is a continued critique of positivism in its many forms. The hope of Wight is the imposition of a science without positivist “residues”. For him, scientific realism is one way that this can become a reality.
He ontologically establishes three points about society: “First, societies are irreducible to people; social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional social act. Second, their pre-existence establishes their autonomy as possible objects of study. Third, their causal power establishes their reality” (46).
Wight then deploys the Bourdieu concept of habitus. He defines this as, “a mediating link between individuals’ subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born and which they share with others. The power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit and habituation, rather than consciously learned rules” (49). Society and the individual interact thought the medium of the habitus.
The remainder of the second chapter is a relatively rushed sketch of different theories and Wight’s classification of their position vis-à-vis the agent-structure problem and the issues surrounding either ontology, epistemology or methodology. He looks at Webber, Wallerstein, Waltz, Wendt, Cox, Carr and many others.
The third chapter’s aim is to, “identify what lies at the heart of the agent-structure problem and disentangle this from the other issues that surfaced during the debate surrounding this issue within IR, but which are not an integral part of it” (90). This debate is problematic because there are so many different theoretical approaches that have been taken and that must be disentangled. There is the standard levels of analysis approach, the micro-macro approach and the two structures approach. All of these are problematic on certain levels for Wight if they do not involve an understanding of full interaction between agents and structure where structure operates at all levels. The third chapter also has relevant, interesting and important things to say about emergence and deserves a more thorough read.
This abstract will stop at this point and should be taken up later with chapter 4-the end.
UPDATE:
Conclusion:
The agent-structure debate has provided the following to IR: it has brought forward the impossibility of focusing only on the international while ignoring the domestic; it has also rejected structural monism; it has also problematized methodological individualism; finally, it brought forward the difficulty of operationalizing this approach.
