and what cannot. This is the principle of nominalism. It proposes that general statements
about the world that do not have their reference in independent, observable, atomised
objects, should not be afforded real knowledge status. Objects, therefore, that are not
referable to the senses cannot, by nominalist logic, be assumed to exist outside of the
senses. Rather, from the perspective of a phenomenalist/nominalist based theory of
knowledge, the real world, the world we can "know" must be centred on "individual,
observable facts
" .65Most significantly, from this perspective, theorising, however
complex in nature, can only be a cognitive retrospective enterprise. It must take place,
this point see Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy, pp.43-50; Scruton, A Short History of Modem Philosophy, pp. 121-124; and Cowley, A Critique of British Empiricism, pp.56-78.
63See Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy, pp. 11-17.
6 4 See ibid, pp. 13-17. See also M. Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1970), ch. 6.
^K olakowski, Positivist Philosophy, p. 15; see also Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, pp.203-205.
literally, after the (experienced) fact. Theory or the process of "theorising" is in this sense detached from (experiential) "practice". Theoretical knowledge can, thus, be acknowledged only as part of a cognitive (subjective) attempt to organise, categorise and give meaning to (already existing) reality. This leads to a third principle of positivism, that which "refuses to call value judgem ents and norm ative statem ents [real] know ledge".66 This principle asserts that it is not possible to speak meaningfully of (for example) "truth", "goodness", "harmony", "morality", and/or '"justice" in the world, because such categories, if they are said to exist at all, must be empirically observable and verifiable. It maintains that while we "are entitled to express value judgements on the human world...we are not entitled to assume that our grounds for making them are scientific".67 The fourth principle of positivism, invokes a commitment to the unity of the scientific method, and something more will be said on this issue in the next chapter when Popper's positivist status is considered.
The more immediate point, however, is that on the basis of these positivist principles, Hume stands as the quintessential Enlightenm ent philosopher, intent on constructing a secular, scientifically based philosophical foundation for modem society. H ow ever, it is Hum e's scepticism concerning the inherent lim ita tio n s of any positivist/empiricist approach which is also of significance here. This scepticism led him to a series of conclusions about em piricist based thinking which have continuing relevance for this discussion of the "unwritten preface", as points of critical entry into a largely closed discourse. This, primarily, is because Hume's major conclusion was that empiricist based claims for real knowledge could not be defended, except in metaphysical terms.
Hume's scepticism on this issue owed something to Locke's treatment of the question of how immediately sensed knowledge of external objects are transformed into
^Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy, p.17.
meaningful "fact" by the individual subject.68 Developed further by Hume the proposition was that while human knowledge is originally derived from immediate sense experience - the objects of cognition by which we come to "know", understand, give meaning to and make judgements about reality, are not external to the mind at all. We can, according to this logic, never actually "know" the nature of any externally existing reality, as early inductivists suggested, all we can finally know are the objects subjectively constructed within our own minds.69
The crucial question then becomes, o f course, how do we "know" that these sense impressions, these mediated copies of real things, are in fact derived from the physical world of reality, external to us. The empiricist answer, of course, pointed to "experience". But this, Hume suggested, was not logically possible because:
the mind has never anything present to it but perceptions and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects. The supposition of such a connection is therefore without any foundation in reasoning.70
The point is that if we only know the world via (mediated) perception, we cannot possibly know a reality, external to the mind, by perception alone. Nor can memory provide the answer, for our memory is of that which we have perceived, and a priori inference is ruled out by Hume because, as with all rationalist formulas, it refers only to relations between "internal" ideas. What then of the basic argument of modem science, i.e. that we understand the real nature of the world via experiment and the knowledge derived from the conjunction between cause and effect? W ell, here too Hume undermined the "givens" of his age, and of those to follow. Hume's position, on this issue, is explained by Bruce Aune, in this way:
6&On Locke's contribution in this regard see the discussion by Masters, "Hobbes and Locke"; and those by Comforth, Science Versus Idealism, pp.27-30; Cowley, A Critique of British Empiricism, pp. 1-11; Schact, C lassical M odem Philosophers, pp. 179-184; Gupte, Origins and Theories of Linguistic Philosophy, pp.31-48; Fitzgerald, Comparing Political Thinkers, pp.l 17-140.
b^See the discussion in Aune, Rationalism. Empiricism and Pragmatism, p.64. 7^Hume cited in ibid, pp. 65-66, emphasis added.
To infer that A is the cause of B we must have experienced a constant conjunction between cases of A and cases of B. Hence to infer that external bodies cause our sense impressions we must have experienced a constant conjunction between such bodies and our impressions. But to experience a conjunction of two things we must experience both things. Since we never
directly experience external bodies, we cannot experience a correlation
between those bodies and the impressions they are believed to cause.71
The implication of this argument is clear enough. It is that there is no logical basis, in empiricist terms, for the proposition that knowledge of reality is directly derived from of an independent, world "out there".
Hume's critical attention was, of course, turned with devastating results on the other great pillar of m odem ist thought - the rationalist notion of a "mind" centred foundation for knowledge, in modem cogito man. For Descartes of course this was the indubitable basis of certainty - that which could not be doubted. In Hume's work doubt abounded, primarily because of his insistence that it was not possible to actually perceive the "thing" (man) that thinks, or to "know" its real (objectified) nature. All that is ever known, he argued, are mediated perceptions of thinking man, even of the " s e lf as cogitator. Consequently:
when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch m yself at any time without perception and never can observe anything but the perception [consequently] I may venture to affirm o f the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle of or collection of different perceptions.72
And in a passage that has all kinds of implications for the confident articulations of sovereignty in Realist logic and the associated invocation o f identity in a world of difference, Hume proposed that:
The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time
71 Ibid, p.66.
nor identity in [its] differences-whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.73
This uncompromising approach to questions of knowledge led Hume to his condem nation also of the "supersensible" elements of Liberal social contract theory, which he argued, could not be "justified by history or experience, in any age or country o f the world".74 Rather, he charged, any proclaimed correspondence between an external law of human nature, and the Whig notion of social progress, was nonsensical in both epistem ological and political terms. The "naturally" endowed social contract was, he maintained, an entirely secular phenomenon centred on political elitism, which saw a change only in "the regal part of government...[a]nd it was only the majority o f seven hundred, who determined the change for ten millions".75
There is then in Hume's sceptical position a glimmer of modernist "thinking space". It is, however, a glimmer that has been virtually ignored by orthodox social theory, and by International Relations scholars committed to the simpler, unifying features of the Humean contribution to modernism. This is perhaps not so surprising, in Hume's case, when one recalls that the potential for openness in Hume's critique of empiricism and rationalism was ultimately undermined by a process of self-closure based on the very positivist foundationalism his own logic condemned as inadequate.
There is no work that I am aware of that explains Hume's final decision to remain committed to a positivist approach other than his own in which he suggested that finally, logic and reason must always remain secondary to "belief", to "passion". More pertinently, Hume, it seemed, for all his scepticism, remained incarcerated within the
73Ibid.
74This is taken from Hume, Essays Moral. Political and Literary as cited in Paul Corcoran, "Rousseau and Hume", in Comparing Political Thinkers ed. Fitzgerald, p.168. Its significance for International Relations is explained, for example by Robert Cox in his, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory", in Neorealism and Its Critics edited by Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) in terms o f the Realist propensity to analogise the Liberal distinction between civil society and the state to the domestic/intemational distinction.
modemist (Cartesian) dualism of either/or, which in his case was represented either as the pursuit of "assurance and conviction", on the one hand or a situation in which:
all discourse, all action, would immediately cease, and men would remain in a total lethargy until the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, would put an end to their miserable existence.76
In this acquiescence before the foundational power of the "Cartesian anxiety" Hume was, perhaps, after all, the quintessential modernist, searching even at the critical m argins for "assurance and conviction" in the face of the "necessities of nature". W hatever the case, if there is one theme that can be said to characterise the Western story o f m odernity in the period since Hume, it has been the search for "assurance and conviction" centred on a series of ingenious attempts to construct a scientific philosophy which avoided the paradoxical consequences exposed by Hume.
This is not all there is to the story, of course, for between Hume and the reign of Logical Positivist certainty and behaviouralism, there was the "Kantian turn" in the Western narrative. The significance of Kant for International Relations will be discussed in relation to inter-war "idealism" in Chapter Five, in regard to Weberian thought in Chapter Six, in relation to the critical Theory of Andrew Linklater in Chapter Eight, and from another angle, in Chapter Nine, via Richard Ashley's Foucauldian reading of Kantian influence on the question of sovereignty.77 At this point, however, my concern is to establish, in more conventional terms, the discursive connections between Kant and the dominant strain of modemist theory and practice located, by the Eighteenth century, in the space between early Humean positivism and rationalism.
7^Hume as cited in Aune, Rationalism. Empiricism and Pragmatism, pp.66-7. 77Ashley, "Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War".
The Kantian Tum: Towards a Modem Philosophy of Certainty
Kant sought to redeem philosophical thought from the scepticism of Hume in proposing a new variation on the Classical-cum -m odern dualisms. Hume, as indicated above, ultimately advocated a positivist/empiricist approach to knowledge and society, even while the scepticism remained in his work about claims to have found the missing link in Western philosophy (i.e. between the laws of thought and reality). Kant perceived a way out of the dilemma by acknowledging the futility of all empiricist based claims to "know" the world in a direct, unmediated form, via "experience". Rather, he argued, the universal axioms of science are already presupposed in empirical analysis and thus cannot be logically derived from a process o f experience as empiricists argued. More precisely, argued Kant, the basis of knowledge was derived from a set of synthetic a priori categories of the m ind.78 All knowledge consequently involves the application of these categories (e.g. time, space, cause) to "experience". All objects, in this sense, require (apriori) concepts derived from the basic mind categories. This includes the objects of science, thus all scientific explanation presupposes the (apriori categories of) the thinking subject.79
A new sense of (modem) scientific philosophy was possible on this basis because it was now acknowledged that factual scientific knowledge, derived from "experience", must ultimately conform to the philosophical categories of mind, without which it is impossible to "experience". This gave added impetus to the search for a modem scientific philosophy centred on Cartesian "cogito man", because, as Richard Rorty has pointed out:
7^On the Kantian argument in this regard, see Scruton, A Short History o f Western Philosophy, ch. 10; Aune, Rationalism. Empiricism and Pragmatism: Aronowitz, Science as Power. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests trans. J. Shapiro (Boston; Beacon Press, 1971), part 1; and from a different angle, Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: and Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?", in The Foucault Reader edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Kant put philosophy "on the secure path to science" by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting activity of the transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the inner for the laws of what had previously been thought to be outer.80
In this way, with the notion of modem man as both part of the (natural) world, yet "autonomous" of it (as the site of knowledge) Kant added a profound dimension to the modernist notion of the autonomous (sovereign) rational actor, able to "transcend" objective structures and finally "know" itself and the world. Importantly, thus, while Kant severely undermined the proposition that knowledge was grounded in "experience", the "Kantian turn" (toward transcendence and emancipation) remained objectivist, in its dualised acknowledgment of a world of rational subjects and "things in themselves". A ccordingly, as Bernstein has explained, Kant did not "question the need for an ahistorical permanent matrix or categorical scheme for grounding knowledge", but, instead, and to a far greater extent than some of those he criticised, Kant insisted on "an a priori universal and necessary structure of human knowledge". Moreover, in seeking to establish an objective "moral" knowledge, autonomous of the is/ought framework, Kant, sought "to demonstrate once and for all that there is a basic universal, objective moral law for all rational beings".81 One more theme requires brief comment here in order that the significance of the Kantian reformulation of the modem story be more fully appreciated. It relates to the general direction of modem philosophy in the post-Kantian period, and to its new intellectual and institutional status in Western social theory.
The im portant issue here is that, following Kant, W estern philosophy was effectively transformed into the paradigm o f the "knowing" subject, as questions of "meaning" and "knowing" were increasingly centred on the study of epistemology. This was of major significance to post-Enlightenment historians and philosophers now able, with confidence, to "fit" the great thinkers of the past into a particular kind o f discursive framework in which each asked - how is our knowledge possible? The attempts to find
S^R oily, Philosophy and the Mirror o f Nature, p. 137.
answers to this question now began to dominate the modem Western story. The answers (or attempted answers) of the great thinkers now become the intellectual building blocks to the present. Consequently, a particular discursive process drawn from Greek/Christian sources, energised by the Cartesian introduction of the rational subject, the Humean positivist intervention, and the a priori premise drawn from Kant, became, in the age of Western expansion and power politics, the universal mode of progressive thought, the process of framing all human history and thought. This regime of framing, based upon the paradoxes and ambiguities surrounding the new man/god of modernity, now became modernity, it gave new and more certain "meaning" to its reality. It became the "meta- narrative".
Following the framing of the modem "meta-narrative" in this way, at least three distinct though (metatheoretically) connected approaches to knowledge and society have been discernible in the post-Kantian period, all o f which have been integral to the modernist framing of social theory. One, influenced by interpretivist themes drawn from Kant's apriori premise, has treated with some sensitivity the inherent problems of an empiricist approach to knowledge and society as outlined by Hume. It has, accordingly, centred its search for a modem scientific foundation for real knowledge in the realm of historically constituted social behaviour and accumulated cultural experience (in the "retrospective" realm of memory, habit and conventional wisdom). As such it has contributed to Anglo-American thinking a more critically inclined modernism with a more lim ited, less progressivist notion of science than that com m only associated with Enlightenm ent based thinking. This tradition is described by Susan Hekman as "positivist humanism" (Verstehen theory, phenomenalism, ordinary language analysis, etc) and more will be said about it in Chapter Three.82 A second post-Kantian tendency, privileging the Kantian "emancipatory" dimension, has, of course, been a major influence
^ S e e Susan Hekman, Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986); and Weber, the Ideal Type and Contemporary Social Theory (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). The approach has tended to privilege rationalist themes in Kant, focusing attention on the apriori categories o f the mind, seeking the source o f real foundational knowledge in intersubjective understanding. Its connection with hermeneutic thought (e.g. through Weber) will be considered in Chapter Three.
upon modem radical thought, via its reformulations by Hegel and Marx, and this will be the focus of attention in Chapter Four and in direct International Relations terms, in Chapter Eight. For now, it is the third and dominant post-Kantian tendency that I am most concerned with, that characterised in the Nineteenth century by its privileging of the