The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectics for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

Globalizations, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 5, 605 –625, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.972138

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The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

BENNO TESCHKE & CAN CEMGIL University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

A BSTRACT Modes of dialectical reasoning were introduced into International Relations (IR) from the 1980s onwards in the context of the post-positivist debate as an alternative intellectual resource drawn from the philosophy of the social sciences. To the extent that the deployment of dialectics for IR drew upon Marx and the wider Hegelian Marxist tradition, it was challenged philosophically and substantively on two fronts. Philosophically, the problem emerged how to disassociate dialectics from the ‘systemic’ Hegelian legacy, which expressed itself in the naturalism and monism of dialectical materialism, and how to overcome a reading of capital as a self-unfolding conceptual category, expressed in systematic dialectics, which dehistoricised and de-subjectified capitalism as a social relation. Substantively, the problem remained how to anchor a Historical Sociology of international relations in a historicist philosophy of praxis to avoid the temptation of a relapse into structuralist modes of explanation. By addressing this double challenge, this paper identifies a central lacuna within the Marxist IR tradition—the gap between general Marxist theories of IR and the analysis of foreign policy-making. This gap persists in equal measure in the bifurcation between the fields of general IR theory and actor-specific foreign policy analysis (FPA). For general IR theories—Marxist and non-Marxist—tend to deploy structuralist versions of theory, which relegate the problem of foreign policy-making to lesser, possibly non-theorisable, forms of inquiry. FPA is thereby demoted and subsumed under wider structural imperatives capable of cross-case generalisation. The paper moves from a critical exposition of the wider debate in IR and FPA of attempts to close this gap, via a critique of dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics, to a re-statement of the dialectic of the concrete. It concludes with a reconsideration of how dialectical thinking may bridge this gap by incorporating foreign policy as the crucial site for the active drawing together and re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign into a Historical Sociology of international relations.

Correspondence Addresses: Benno Teschke, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK. Email: [email protected]; Can Cemgil, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK. Email: [email protected] # 2014 Taylor & Francis

606 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil Keywords: dialectic, foreign policy analysis, general IR theory, Marxism, Political Marxism, Historical Sociology of International Relations


1. Introduction: From Dialectics to Foreign Policy Analysis Dialectical thinking entered International Relations (IR) in the context of the rise of the postpositivist debate from the 1980s onwards (Alker, 1996; Alker & Bierstecker, 1984; Ashley, 1984; Brincat, 2009, 2011; Heine & Teschke, 1996, 1997, 2002; Krombach, 1997; Patoma¨ki, 1992; Roach, 2007).1 Responding to calls for greater degrees of theoretical self-reflexivity in an intellectual field still restricted by an uneasy alliance between the accumulation of practical knowledge and its positivistic formalisation into generalising statements, dialectics was introduced as an alternative meta-theoretical resource concerned with the construction, nature, and status of scientific knowledge—an epistemological tradition within the philosophy of science and the wider social sciences. Reflexivity meant not simply thinking with a theory, but rather thinking about the nature of theory. This implied the exposition of meta-theoretical principles that inform a particular theoretical tradition (epistemology), the explication of the substantive premises that these traditions hold about the social world (ontology), and the specification of research methods, which connect these premises to the empirical in non-randomised ways— the practice of research (methodology). Advocates of dialectics suggested epistemological principles to provide correctives not only to the prevailing positivism—and its demands for nomothetic generalisations—within IR, but also to structural-functionalist leanings within the wider critical and Marxist traditions. Similar to the analytical-positivistic, hermeneutic, or post-structuralist traditions, dialectics draws on its own and distinct conceptual vocabulary and epistemological principles. These include an emphasis on the processual, social-relational, and thus inter-subjectively constructed nature of all social phenomena, grounding the idea of historicity. In contrast to notions of action, behaviour, or conduct, dialectics privileges the category of praxis, understood as creative and purposive activity by sentient human beings. It suggests the notion of totality not in the sense of referring to societies or modes of production as totalising, autopoietic, and self-reproducing systems, but rather as a heuristic device for strategies of contextualisation within which phenomena become intelligible without being pre-determined. Contextualisation guards against the construction of social-scientific concepts as general abstractions by drawing attention to the non-correspondence between generic concepts and concrete social phenomena that are in constant motion. Dialectics thereby suggests strategies of historical specification and concretisation to narrow the gap between a concept and its empirical referent to avoid conceptual reification. By emphasising the dynamic and processual character of social reality, it insists on foregrounding relational (rather than logical) contradictions resolving themselves over time in unforeseen, indeterminate, and open-ended ways. And it defends a notion of social science as critique (the unity of theory and practice), which conceives of the scholar not as a disinterested, neutral, and autonomous observer outside politics, but as the situated subject of knowledge-production in a concrete socio-political context. Here, critical thought is less regarded as an objective representation of reality, but rather as a subjective intervention directed towards shaping reality as a social power in distinct ways. Together, this set of principles anchors, minimally, an alternative meta-theory for the conduct of social science. To the degree that dialectics drew on the Hegelian – Marxist repertory, critics in IR cast doubt on the possibility of dissociating dialectics from the perceived intellectual and political liabilities of Hegelian Marxism. This included the charges of a potential relapse into a secularised version


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of a concept of history as redemption and a philosophy of consciousness (Kratochwil, 1997, p. 440),—‘an anti-intellectualism that was apparent in the enactment, or practice, of dialectic in some forms of “really existing socialism”, and its generic association with the wider excesses of Marxist politics’ (Albert & Lapid, 1997, p. 409). Those objections were radicalised—and trivialised—by the suggestion that Marxism sought to reduce problems of social action and social order to material interests, embracing a ‘naturalistic monism—that is, the belief that the natural sciences embody the only valid model of science to which the social sciences should, therefore, aspire’ (Ruggie, 1998, p. 859). This rhymed with the general verdict in IR on Marxism’s epistemological status as holistic and objectivist, reducing action, interests, and rationalities to ontologically more primitive structures, degenerating into ‘functionalist modes of structural analysis’ (Carlsnaes, 1992, p. 173). Overall, dialectics was accused of carrying the ontological, historical, and political baggage of a monochromatically rendered Marxist tradition, as it could not be freed from the burden of Enlightenment versions of grand teleological narratives. By declaring Marxism en bloc as a kind of naturalism, the attempt to extricate dialectics as a mode of theorising for IR from Marx’s own body of writing and from a highly differentiated Marxist tradition (Jay, 1985) was declared futile. This amounted to a convenient strategy to close the debate, while simultaneously generating disciplinary space amply filled by Constructivism and its variants. These charges notwithstanding, a research programme emerged that sought to mobilise dialectics for a Historical Sociology of international relations. By neither passively relying on an orthodox reading of Marx’s concept of history as a necessitous, ascending, and linear succession of modes of production, nor an exegesis of Marx’s writings for IR, it invoked dialectical thinking for a re-interpretation of the implications of the rise of capitalism for the historical development of the European inter-state system, dislodging the Westphalian Settlement of 1648 from IR’s foundational ideas. This project was anchored in an engagement with the various state-of-theart debates in the extant historiographical and sociological sub-fields (Lacher, 2006; Teschke, 2003, 2008). Here, dialectics was neither understood in terms of any objective laws of motion that govern nature and history (dialectical materialism), nor in terms of an understanding of capitalism as a self-expanding logical category outside history (systematic dialectics). Both versions of dialectics disabled the task of historicisation. In contrast, history was reconstructed as a socio-politically contested and open-ended process, grounded in contextualised social praxes. This project drew on the tradition of Political Marxism (PM), for this literature offered essential resources for thinking about the historical origins and development of capitalism as a contested and ongoing social relation with regard to the formation of modern states and the inter-state system in a historicist mode (Brenner, 1985a, 1985b; Comninel, 2000; Wood, 1995). Overall, the emphasis was placed on the agential making of history. Still, among the remaining problems, a distinctive issue stood out. PM in IR delineates the analytical space for problematising the historicity of capitalism in relation to the variability of foreign policies between differentially developing states—without, it is suggested, closing it conceptually. Although PM’s historicist orientation renders it a prime candidate to capture ‘the making’ of foreign policy in its consequences for international history, the treatment of foreign policy remained still tied to a certain structuralist residualism that ultimately subsumed foreign policy-making under wider notions of capitalist geopolitics.2 This renders the active acts of diplomacy, statecraft, and grand strategy conceptually reliant on deeper logics. This problem remained however not only un-addressed in PM, but forms a wider lacuna in Marxist approaches—within and outside IR. Foreign policy, where it was thematised, was variously reduced to capitalist imperatives or other overriding socio-political determinations in structural-functionalist terms. It remained epiphenomenal. We submit that this constitutes a


608 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil problematique, which has been insufficiently resolved—or even recognised—in the Marxist IR literature, since it tends to fall back on structural and non-dialectical conceptions of theory or on broad and generalising macro-categories. Classical Marxist theories of imperialism relied on the concept of inter-imperial rivalry (Lenin, 1973); Neo-Leninists argue for the persistence or return of inter-imperial rivalry or the intersection of two independent logics—the political-territorial and the capitalist non-territorial (Callinicos, 2009; Harvey, 2003); Neo-Kautskyans for intercapitalist co-operation (Kiely, 2010); Neo-Gramscians for a succession of hegemonies (Arrighi, 1994; Cox, 1987); post-Leninists for a ‘global state’ or ‘American super-imperialism’ (Panitch & Gindin, 2012; Robinson, 2004), Neo-Trotskyists for ‘uneven and combined development’ (Rosenberg, 2006), and so on. In each case, foreign policy-making is not framed as an object of analysis in its own right—the active drawing together and purposive re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign—but as a derivative phenomenon, deduced from deeper social forces, if it is not declared aprioristically as un-theorisable.3 In short, these approaches are liable to the charge of developing theories of IR without international politics. This raises the question of how to move from a conception of foreign policy as passive and derivative to a more active conception of foreign policy-making as conscious and innovative praxes, which mediate and shape the course of capitalist international history in specific ways. This article suggests that a particular understanding of dialectics is capable of providing the meta-theoretical foundations for redressing this problem. For it submits that all social categories, including capitalism, the state, and foreign policies, remain historically open and subject to change, rather than theoretically closed and fixed. They are historical process-categories. We draw the conclusion that theories based on theoretically closed categories—either those that are empirically induced for the cumulative build-up of generalising statements, or those that are deduced and super-imposed on historical material—are misleading. Consequently, there can be no general theory of foreign policy, capitalist or otherwise. Pressing the historical complexities of actual international relations and foreign policies into parsimonious theoretical definitions and categories will render very thin abstractions through which no foreign policy can be captured, as the definition will have to abstract from a rich variety of very diverse cases, reifying very diverse praxes. Inversely, we suggest that a dialectical approach to foreign policy decisions as non-derivable and concretely contextualised inter-subjective acts will guard against compressing their rich history into reified and static formulae. This requires much closer attention to historical detail and praxes, as foreign policy actors never automatically enact a set of antecedent structural causes and are never endowed with a static and generic rationality, but respond to rich domestic and international contexts in specific and creative ways. This should be integral to the self-definition of a historicist IR approach. But this problem—the gap between the general and specific—remains not only un-addressed within the Marxist IR literature, it forms a larger problematique in the persisting disciplinary bifurcation between general IR theory and foreign policy analysis (FPA). This dualism is expressed in the reliance by the former on structuralist versions of theory applying to the international system as a whole, and by the latter on more agential versions of theory applying to more case-specific foreign policy contexts, even if the objective is to arrive at inductive generalisations to capture a wider set of cases. Kenneth Waltz, as is widely understood, explicitly excluded the analysis of the conduct of individual states from the remit of his conception of theory, focusing instead on the allegedly recurrent outcomes of systemically induced state interactions. A structuralist theory of international politics, Waltz admitted, ‘can tell us what pressures are exerted and what possibilities are posed by systems of different structure, but it cannot tell us just how, and how effectively, the units of a system will respond to those pressures and



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possibilities’ (Waltz, 1979, p. 71). And he concluded that ‘an international-political theory does not imply or require a theory of foreign policy (. . .)’ (Waltz, 1979, p. 72). Foreign policy was relegated to lesser, ‘non-scientific’, and presumably interpretative forms of inquiry. It was declared un-theorisable. In this sense, Marxist IR theory shadows general IR theory, as it tends to duplicate mainstream IR’s reliance on structural modes of explanation (even if the causally productive structures are re-grounded in historically specific social relations rather than in systemic inter-state relations), while demoting FPA to a secondary role (Teschke, 2014). This procedure amounts to the ex post ‘filling in’ of foreign policy into an aprioristic theoretical grid. It leads to the downplaying of foreign policy as a theoretical object of analysis in its own right as the central site where domestic and international influences intersect and become purposefully articulated as multiple foreign policy strategies. By exploring the nature of this IR theory – FPA divide and by proceeding through a critique of the understandings of dialectics in mainstream Marxism, the objective of this paper is to clarify how a specific understanding of dialectics—the dialectics of the concrete—may help to provide the missing epistemological foundations for bridging this gap within mainstream and Marxist IR approaches. The argument proceeds in four steps. We start with a brief review of the categorical distinction between general IR theory and FPA. We proceed by examining and rejecting two prevalent readings of dialectic in Marxism, namely, the ‘philosophical-logical’ and the ‘systematic’. The former views dialectic as a general law of history, whereas the latter understands it as constituting the underlying logic of the progressive unfolding of categories in Marx’s main work: Capital. This centres the question of the incompatibility between dialectic as a general logic of history and actual history, and the incompatibility between a more limited understanding of dialectic as applicable to the concept of capital and the historicity of capitalism—the making of capitalism. This pinpoints the tension between using dialectic for an understanding of capitalism as a totalising logical – theoretical category and as an empirically open historical –practical category. This leads us in step three towards a re-statement of the core elements of dialectical thinking and how they can assist in closing the gap between general IR theory and FPA on the one hand, and the gap between historicist versions of Marxism and FPA on the other. Central to this undertaking is an appeal for the recovery of the notion of praxis—in fact, an understanding of dialectics as a philosophy of praxis. This, in turn, can ground and render philosophically explicit the more implicit claim of a radical historicism (latently) present in the early works of Political Marxists. Step four draws out the implications of this rendition of dialectic for rethinking foreign policy as concrete praxes. The purpose of this paper is therefore to clarify how the mobilisation of dialectics can move PM beyond the structuralism in extant versions of Marxism for FPA, and to rethink a problem that characterises the dualism between general IR theory and FPA as a whole. 2.

Foreign Policy Analysis vs. General IR Theory: Bridging the Gap?

This dualism has been central to the ongoing attempt to integrate FPA and IR (Carlsnaes & Guzzini, 2011; Hudson, 2005; Rosenau, 1968).4 We quickly retrace the key steps in their historical co-evolution to show how this initial FPA – IR divide was driven, at least in one of the more sophisticated contributions, towards a quasi-dialectical resolution, even if the term dialectics was not self-consciously adopted. The controversy revolves, minimally, around three distinct analytical issues: the selection of the adequate ‘level of analysis’ (system, state, and individual), the prioritisation of either agency (subjectivism), or structural determinations (objectivism), and the reliance on either generalising explanation (positivism) or individualising understanding (interpretivism).


610 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil Rosenau’s new science of comparative FPA sought to overcome the prevalent genre of diplomatic histories and ideographic narratives of specific foreign policy episodes of great powers. Here, foreign policy ‘undertakings’, rather than ‘decisions’ or ‘policies’, were the explananda (Rosenau, 1980, pp. 60– 61), the method deployed relied on cross-national comparisons (Rosenau, 1968), and the explanans was identified as any variable that correlated with these ‘undertakings’. These correlations, formalised as testable and generalisable propositions, would accumulate and generate over time a general theory of foreign policy allowing the matching of certain types of states with certain types of policies in given issue areas. This behaviouralistic taxonomy, however, ultimately denied agency to actors in the foreign policy process by reducing their behaviour to a given combination of pre-existing variables. Contrasting with this neo-positivistic behaviouralism, an alternative strand in FPA pursued the subjective path by mapping the cognitive-psychological attributes and psycho-biographical dispositions of foreign policy-makers (Hermann, 1980; Holsti, 1976; Jervis, 1968). While this requires seeing the world through the eyes of agents, rather than admitting impersonal and systemic forces, institutional mediations, or domestic policy pressures, it reduced the complexities of the foreign policy process to individual-subjective dispositions that govern acts of foreign policy-making. Developing this subjectivism, Hudson’s ambitious re-articulation of FPA defines ‘human decision makers’ as the ground of IR theory, while dismissing the state as a ‘metaphysical abstraction’ (2005). FPA constitutes the ground for IR theory by embracing ‘agency-orientation’ and ‘actor-specificity’, which declares historically specific agents as ontologically primitive units of analysis. Still, this conception of agents turns problematic to the degree that foreign policy decisions are categorised as dependent variables caused by a set of independent and intervening variables. Here, agency is narrowed down to psychology profiles, leadership styles, and personality types, rather than being re-situated relationally in wider historical contexts. Contrary to FPA’s ‘actor-specific’ and ‘agency-oriented’ subjectivism, mainstream IR theories tend to abstract from the specificities of decision-making processes and are content to provide a general framework for understanding the working of the international system in shaping the behaviour of states. Waltz’s systemic treatment of international relations, despite allowing for variations in the capabilities of units that compose any international system, refrains from explaining why similarly located and constituted states with comparable capabilities act differently under similar systemic pressures (Hudson, 2005; Skidmore & Hudson, 1993, pp. 2– 4).5 From an FPA perspective, Liberalism and Constructivism are as guilty as Neorealism in subordinating agency to the structure of the international system (Hill, 2003, p. 3; Hudson, 2005, pp. 7– 13). In contrast to this ‘third image’ reductionism, others developed theoretical frameworks, which placed the explanation of state behaviour between the pressures of domestic politics and wider international dynamics, captured in notions of ‘two-level games’ and ‘the second image reversed’ (Gourevitch, 1978; Katzenstein, 1976; Putnam, 1988). This led to the acceptance of the idea of the reciprocal interaction between domestic politics and inter-state relations, even though the debate remained under-developed in terms of its meta-theoretical commitments. Such commitments were set out in Carlsnaes’ reconsideration of the FPA – IR dualism informed by the agent – structure debate (1992). Rejecting his earlier adherence to an ‘interpretative individualism’, Carlsnaes invoked Archer’s (1995) notion of ‘morphogenetic cycles’ of agent – structure interaction to formulate a ‘dynamic synthesis’ of the agent – structure conundrum. Both, agents and structures, are retained as analytically distinct (analytical dualism) to avoid the collapsing of agents into structures and vice versa in order to allow the examination of their respective causal efficacy. By introducing temporality into the agent – structure relation through the notion of sequential cycles, antecedently existing structures are perceived as



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constraining and enabling agents. Thus contextualised, agents produce intended and unintended consequences, which lead to structural change, generating an altered context of action for future agents. Citing Marx’s famous dictum that ‘men make their own history, even if not under conditions of their own choosing’, the conclusion is that this approach ‘encapsulates the ontological notion of a continuous cycle of action – structure interactions, a dialectical process ( . . . ) that can be penetrated analytically as a consequence of its essential sequential thrust in societal transformations’ (Carlsnaes, 1992, p. 261). Even if labelled dialectical, the solution remains unsatisfactory for two reasons: the ‘analytical dualism’ fails to reflect reality since the concrete set of relations that agents find themselves in—what appears as structures to them—do not wait their turn to respond to the actions of agents. A cyclical model of agent – structure interaction which assumes that this interaction moves in steps, despite attributing a degree of dynamism and temporality to the interaction, still fails to capture the continuous transformation of what is experienced as structural by agents. Secondly, although acknowledging that structures enable agents as well as constraining them, these are in the final analysis round-about ways of maintaining that they both determine the limits of the possible—one negatively and the other positively. But what are the limits of the limits? In short, by re-grounding agency in structural contexts, the approach fails to do justice to the potentially non-inferable, creative, and indeterminate praxes of agents, as structures are perceived to set the limits of the possible. This fails to appreciate that structures can manifest themselves differently to different agents at different times; that even if structures manifest themselves similar to different agents, they can be perceived differently by different agents; and, finally, that even if they are experienced similarly, different agents may respond differently to their pressures, as the same agent may respond differently to similar pressures over time. The ultimate pay-off of this meta-theoretical reformulation of the agency – structure problem for the resolution of the FPA – IR dualism consists, according to Carlsnaes, in the comparison of the foreign policy actions of states ‘to explain similarities and differences in terms of contingent empirical generalizations’ (1992, p. 270). But why launching into this dialectically enhanced interpretative epistemology for purposes of empirical generalisations, when the thrust of the argument points towards the conclusion of the contextually specific and unique nature of historical foreign policy praxes? For generalisations only hold if and when all the parameters of one context are present in another context. And why rejecting Marxist modes of meta-theory as irretrievably structural-functionalist, if a proto-dialectical approach is re-introduced through the backdoor via the intermediation of Archer’s ‘morphogenetic cycle’ approach? Integrating the more agency-specific concerns of FPA with the more structuralist orientations of general IR theory into a more dynamic meta-theory that speaks to history remains thus a pressing concern in the debate. We claim that a dialectical approach to foreign policy-making provides such foundations by suggesting that relations between polities should be examined as historically specific configurations of concrete relations between them, which result from historically indeterminate, concrete, and contradictory foreign policy strategies. We suggest that foreign policies of states are part of their context-specific reproductive strategies, and that these strategies can be captured meta-theoretically by dialectics as inter-subjective relations that mediate the nodal point between the internal and the external. What is required for this theoretical integration is not a limited conversation and mutual rapprochement between two separate fields—actor-specific FPA and general IR theory—that would lead to the recognition of each other’s potential contribution. What is needed is a rethinking of FPA and IR at the meta-theoretical level, since their respective epistemological and ontological assumptions are irreconcilable. This paper attempts to provide such meta-theoretical foundations to establish FPA as the concrete content for IR. The theoretical integration, it will be argued, cannot be

612 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil achieved by an additive combination of aspects of a pre-existing IR orientation towards macrolevel structures with an established FPA sensitivity to micro-level processes. In the end, the various proposals for a comprehensive IR – FPA framework remain deficient, as the artificial slicing of a rich and many-sided social-relational totality leads to the disaggregation of reality into manageable portions for partial analyses. Dialectical thinking suggests conceiving these two seemingly separate enterprises as aspects of a single social-scientific undertaking.


3. Dialectic and its Varieties We suggest that a useful understanding of dialectics, however incomplete and cryptic, can be found in the works of the early Marx. This understanding was subsequently distorted and problematically re-articulated in two distinct versions of dialectics: dialectical materialism and systematic dialectics. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx notes that political economy sees human beings only as workers and leaves other things that concretely constitute them as living human individuals to ‘criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics . . . ’ (Marx, 1988, p. 27). These different perspectives doubly abstract human beings: both from their concrete individual existence and from their relations with others. The problem is not that they abstract arbitrarily, for these abstractions are based on real, practical abstractions. The matter is more about the fact that once abstracted from themselves and their relations, and conceptually and theoretically refined and systematised, any attempt to re-establish their initially severed relations from themselves and others is futile, because in the process of logical refinement it is ignored that the concept itself was constituted by these concrete relations in the first place. So, in a word although dialectic too abstracts, it does this in a different way. ‘Dialectics is after the “thing itself” ’ (Kosı´k, 1976) much like any other view of the world. The ‘thing itself’, in the Kantian sense of the term, in essence, however, is not directly accessible. For the ‘thing itself’ itself is ‘a mental thing’, a conception of the mind, abstracted from its relations (Dietzgen, 2010).6 This implies that dialectical abstractions are made with the awareness that the ‘thing in itself’ is not something that exists independently, the essence of which is to be discovered upon investigation. When dialectical approaches abstract aspects of reality based on real abstractions such as state, money, capital, international system, and so on, they go on to re-concretise their abstractions step by step, but crucially non-deductively by adding their concrete relations with other things so as to reach a mental image of the real concrete (Marx, 1986, p. 38). Instead of climbing up ‘the ladder of abstraction’, dialectic uniquely ‘rises’ from the abstract to the concrete through this procedure (Marx, 1993, p. 101). The first difference between dialectical and non-dialectical approaches is their opposite conception of the abstract and the concrete for purposes of concept-formation. Secondly, while non-dialectical approaches deal with contradictions logically, dialectics sees contradictions as inherent in the complex existence of social life, and unlike non-dialectical methods it does not hold that abstractions require purification from their concrete contradictions in ideal-typical ways. On the contrary, dialectics sees contradictions as constitutive of the concrete existence of any phenomenon. While non-dialectical views recognise only formal-logical contradictions between two logical propositions, dialectics deals with real contradictions in the concrete relations between human phenomena, which resolve themselves over time in unpredictable ways, instead of wishing them away. Thirdly, while non-dialectical approaches reify real abstractions in the form of definitions, dialectical approaches have an inherent sensitivity to change. Concept-formation has to respond to



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constant changes that take place in the concrete existence of what it abstracts. Moreover, as distinct from any idealist dialectics, dialectics does not expect these contradictions to be resolved conceptually through the reconciliation of logical categories. For real, practical contradictions are not resolved, but temporarily settled in the form of social institutions following lengthy and conflictual processes of interaction between real agents. These are widely accepted properties of a dialectical perspective. Many differences exist between the extant dialectical approaches (Haug, 1995). Among these, two main versions stand out: logical-historical dialectics and systematic dialectics. Logical-historical dialectic derives largely from Engels’ interpretation of Marx’s method (Arthur, 2004).7 It found a wide following among Soviet Marxists (Jacoby, 2002). His admiration for the nascent modern sciences led him to formalise the general laws that govern the natural world (Marx & Engels, 1987). Reducing these to the three laws of dialectics—‘transformation of quantity to quality and vice versa’, ‘interpenetration of opposites’, and ‘negation of the negation’ (Marx & Engels, 1987, p. 356)—he sought to establish dialectics as the objective science of nature and society. Plekhanov (1972) continued this tendency and turned this positivistic and economistic version of dialectical materialism into the official ideology of the Soviet Union. This vulgarised version of dialectics blurred the lines of demarcation between dialectics and positivism (Levine, 1975).8 This variant of ‘dialectical materialism’ carried with it all the maladies of the positivist method in the social sciences. It held that everything in the natural and social worlds could be reduced to law-like general statements. This underlies all sorts of reductionism traditionally associated with Marxism including the belief that the ‘economic base’ in every instance or in the last instance determined the political, legal, and ideological ‘superstructures’, that the opposition between the forces and the relations of production would cause revolutions, that history would follow a (conceptually) pre-determined and pre-programmed course, and that every society would pass through the same sequence of developmental stages. The most serious implication was that historical events were regarded as instances of these laws. Thus, ‘dialectical materialism’ subordinated history to generic ‘dialectical’ laws of motion. This assumed a perfect correspondence between logic and history on condition that ‘disturbing accidental occurrences’ were excluded (Engels in Rosdolsky, 1977, p. 115). Dialectics was accepted as the nomological base-line of history. This view reached the apex of its notoriety under the rubric of ‘dialectical and historical materialism’ (Diamat), when Stalin (1940) pronounced historical materialism as an application of the dialectical materialist method to social life. The fact that the October Revolution of 1917 appears on this account as a ‘disturbing accidental occurrence’, defying the laws of development, did not cause too much consternation.9 When the ‘laws of motion’ did not match historical developments, history was made to conform to theory by the force of coercion as exemplified by the Soviet Union’s collectivisation programmes plus associated party purges. The core problem with the logical-historical view of dialectics is that although it regards theory and history in unison, this unity was forced since Diamat conceives them separately in the first place. This results in a search for concrete reality in logical abstractions, which in turn are imposed upon, rather than checked by, reality. Moreover, seeking causal geneses in history and logical geneses in theory are not reconcilable endeavours. While the former requires the identification of diachronic relations between human phenomena, the latter requires deriving conceptual categories from one another which are only related synchronically. As a result, the logical-historical notion of dialectics fails to overcome the problems of positivism, ultimately offering either a conceptual objectivism that Marx sought to dislodge from materialism or a radical subjectivism, which sees the world through the eyes of a single subject. This leaves the subjective historical analysis and objectivist conceptual architecture as two separate, but forcibly related accounts of reality.


614 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil In response to the problems generated by this logical-historical reading of Marx’s dialectical method, the last two decades saw a return to Hegel’s work in its relation to Marx’s writings. This new dialectical method is variously referred to as ‘systematic dialectics’, ‘new dialectic’, or ‘New Hegelian Marxism’ (Arthur, 2004, p. 1). It finds its most systematic exposition in the works of Christopher J. Arthur and Tony Smith.10 They distinguish between logical-historical and systematic readings of Marx’s dialectic. While the former examines the causal genesis or historical origins of capitalism, the latter tries to systematically represent the conceptual categories of capital as an organic totality to show its reproductive interrelations (Arthur, 2004; Smith, 1990). Relations between the moments or aspects of capitalist totality are presented synchronically. In this manner, argue systematic dialecticians, Marx followed a systematic route in presenting his concepts by starting from the most abstract category—the commodity—in order to introduce step by step more concrete categories, which result from the internal contradictions of more abstract categories (Arthur, 2004, p. 66; Reuten & Williams, 1989, pp. 19 – 20; Smith, 1990; cf. Sayer, 1979, pp. 96– 103). Arthur (2004, pp. 118 – 19) argues that Marx’s central research interest revolved around the exposition of the ‘ability of the system to constitute itself as a self-reproducing totality’, rather than its historical origin and course. Although this ‘totality is constituted out of its moments, . . . the totality reproduces itself in and through its moments even when the material reduced to such moments existed in some sense prior to the constitution of the totality’. Moreover, claims Arthur (2004, p. 9) as capitalist reality ontologically has ‘the shape of an ideality’, systematic-logical rather than historical-causal genesis explains current reality (Arthur, 2004, p. 116). For capital as a totality has to absorb historical material resistive to its reproduction by its internalisation as aspects of its reproduction. In other words, capital either generates or subsumes the conditions of its existence. It has to posit its presuppositions. This ‘positing’ of historical preconditions poses one of the most significant methodological problems of dialectical social theory (Psychopedis, 1992).11 For there is no obvious answer to the question to what extent capital is able to posit its presuppositions and ensure its total reproduction. Only in the logical realm can it become a closed totality where all the presuppositions of its reproduction are posited. Capital, in reality, has both internal and external ‘others’: labour and nature, respectively (Arthur, 2004, p. 77; see also Reuten & Williams, 1989, pp. 26– 27, 68– 69). These constitute for Arthur (2006, pp. 97– 98) the limits to its totalisation. In other words, although capital subsumes pre-capitalist forms under itself as moments of its reproduction, blocking their alternative uses, capital encounters them as externality. Labour remains capital’s other, since although it is more or less both formally and really subsumed under capital globally, it continues to be recalcitrant to the reproduction of capital in accordance with its presuppositions regarding the reproduction of labour as a technical input to the capital circuit. The same holds for nature: although land, natural resources, and raw materials appear to capital as replenishable elements of production, it does not as yet have the means to reproduce them (Foster, 2008, p. 78). In this sense, according to Arthur (2009, p. 171), although capital ‘really imposes itself’ onto what it has to subsume under itself, ‘capital as an ideal totality cannot account for what is in excess of its concept of itself, the concrete richness of social labour, not to mention that of nature’. There is an unbridgeable gap between form and content – the conceptual and the real. These qualifications, however, do not exempt the systematic-dialectical tradition from the charge of idealism (Saad-Filho, 1997). The claim that the real material world has taken an ideal shape under capitalism because of the real abstractive powers of capital does not provide licence to avoid the analysis of the real concrete. Systematic dialectic brackets time and space from its exposition along with history, since it deals with the conceptual categories



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that constitute the ‘ideality’ of capitalist totality only synchronically. This leads ultimately to the admission of an unbridgeable gap between the conceptual and the historical existence of capital. Paradoxically, this is interpreted as the ‘fatal flaw’ of the self-conception of capital itself, rather than of the approach (Arthur, 2005, 2009; Callinicos, 2005). These problems flow from the onesided view of reality from the ‘subjective’ vantage point of capital in toto. While Arthur acknowledges that capital finds its material conditions of existence outside itself, this is not driven home to afford possibility that these concrete conditions constantly constitute and re-constitute capital even in the abstract. Finally, human agency vanishes in systematic dialectic altogether. The only agent that remains is capital as a ‘ghost-like’ entity—the mega-subject of capitalist modernity—which is invested with the capacity to have transformed and keep transforming the rich diversity of human activity according to its reproductive needs. Logical-historical and Hegelian systematic dialectics remain therefore respectively mired in the problems of positivism and idealism. While logical-historical dialectic freezes its abstractions historically due to its focus on the causal genesis of its subject-matter, imposing theory upon history, systematic dialectic freezes its logical-conceptual abstractions and either disregards history altogether or absorbs history into theory by attributing a conceptuality to history itself. Accordingly, while in the former the concrete is divorced from the abstract and left unaccounted for, in the latter the concrete itself is claimed to be abstract and remains outside historical analysis. Finally, in the former agents exist merely as instances of abstract – logical relations or as absolute subjects without any relation to other agents, whereas in the latter nothing has agency apart from the unfolding Subject: capital. If dialectic is neither ‘logical-historical’ (not inhering in history itself) nor ‘systematic’ (a mode of representing the categories of capital), then how shall we conceive it differently? We suggest that dialectic is primarily a ‘mode of apprehension’—a way of appropriating reality in thought. This requires that we attribute a social-relational quality to history itself, which does not ‘unfold’ dialectically, but which can be comprehended dialectically. In this sense, dialectic amounts to an epistemological procedure that re-converts social phenomena as abstractions into their inter-subjectively constructed concretions. This re-invites historicity and restores agency. What stands at the end of these critical reflections of the uses of dialectic in Marxism is an appeal for a historical understanding of the origins of capitalism (not capital) as the result of inter-subjective conflicts and a conception of its course and relation to other macro-phenomena (state, inter-state system, foreign policy) as an ongoing social construction—and not as a selfreproducing totality or system. This turn to history, we suggest, is required to avert a relapse into structural-functionalist forms of logical reasoning and to fulfil the prospect of a radical historicity, which does not assume that foreign policies can be reduced to the imperatives of capitalist international relations. The recovery of dialectic is intended to rectify such a slide into a non-dialectical mode of narrating and conceptualising capitalist international history. 4.

Dialectic of the Concrete

Dialectic, above all, is about ‘change, all change’ (Ollman, 2003, p. 59). This simple claim establishes the onto-epistemological ground for the radical historicity of all social phenomena and the consequent claim of the radical historicity of conceptuality—the comprehension in thought of this ever-changing reality. This is not to say that dialectic deals with change as if it was one category among a set of other categories of being. Rather, at an ontological level it sees change as inherent in the constitution of things. Change takes manifold forms ranging from movement to


616 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil quantitative increase or decrease and qualitative transformation. The first ontological premise of dialectic is therefore that nature, including human beings and their creations, is in constant flux. This implies that the practical activity of people cannot be ‘frozen’ and subsumed under preestablished general categories at ever-higher levels of abstraction, requiring that their relational activity directs inquiry towards conceptual concretion. As everything is in a constant process of becoming, dialectical concept-formation accepts the non-identity between a phenomenon over time, between this phenomenon and another within a class of similar phenomena, and between its development and its conceptual abstraction. Secondly, dialectic recognises contradictions as the source of change. These contradictions are general existential properties of social relations. They arise from the simple ontological premise that phenomena as abstracted by human beings are non-identical with other phenomena. At the same time since phenomena are also always related to one another they also interact. Change occurs as a result of this interaction. In this sense, contra formal-logical view of contradictions, which holds that contradictions exist between logical statements, dialectic locates contradictions in reality and identifies them as practical. Contradictions are found not ideally or conceptually, but in the existence of practically abstracted aspects of reality. These contradictions cannot be resolved or even reconciled in thought. Any logical suggestion to resolve or reconcile contradictions can only point at one of the many potential resolutions or reconciliations. How contradictions unfold remains indeterminate. There are as many possibilities of becoming as there are contradictions and reconciliations. While the contradictory development of conceptual categories involves in Hegelian idealist dialectic the sublation of two concepts by a third, higher concept, historical materialist dialectic traces contradictions as they manifest themselves in concrete reality. Historical materialist dialectic may abstract contradictions one at a time as well in analysing them at a deeper level, yet this is less an ontological and epistemological than a methodological issue. Finally, historical materialist dialectic recognises that contradictions may be antagonistic (existential) or non-antagonistic, that is, they may continue to exist for prolonged periods of time without any resolution or reconciliation, and in the real world of real human agents whether they will be sublated or not depends on the activities of real human agents (Brincat, 2011, pp. 682, 686 – 688). Thirdly, the central category of historical materialist dialectic is, therefore, praxis, conceived as sensuous and ‘goal-directed’ human activity (Bernstein, 1999, p. 43). It is neither synonymous with the automatic ‘behaviour’ of conventional positivist sociology that emerges in response to external stimuli, nor the meaningful ‘action’ of individuals in Weberian social theory. Nor can the more recent notion of ‘practices’ match the philosophical depth of praxis. Inspired by the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001), Adler and Pouliot sought to reproduce this turn in IR. The idea of practices here is very limited in scope; however, it refers exclusively to the patterned meaningful social action of practitioners who act within ‘communities of practice’ (Adler & Pouliout, 2011a, 2011b) composed of diplomats, statesmen, bureaucrats, etc. These ‘transnational communities’ socialise their individual members into patterned ways of doing diplomacy, statesmanship, bureaucracy, etc. The difference between ‘praxis’ and a ‘practice’ is that while praxis refers to all human action, practice is only one class of action among others: patterned social action. The notion of praxis, in contrast, is resistant to an ontological definition—like the conception of humans as rational utility maximisers—as it has to remain historically open to its many-sided manifestations. Ontology needs to be historicised. Praxis is what bridges ‘the world and thinking’ (Kitching, 1988, p. 29). It is the relay point in the dialectic of subject and object. It constitutes the fusion of ontology and epistemology


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providing instead an onto-epistemology of human socio-historical reality. It establishes human beings firmly inside nature without reducing their active lives to its ‘laws’. Praxis before all else refers to all creative activity that human beings carry out in producing and reproducing their lives. But praxis is also what distinguishes humans as a species from other species in the animate world in that praxis is purposive activity (Bernstein, 1999).


A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. (Marx, 1976, p. 284)

Both positivists and constructivists establish the human subject as homo cogitus, thinking and contemplating about an external world. While in positivist epistemology this thinking subject is totally severed from her object of thought, in constructivism either her only relation to the material world is supposed to be the fact that her body has material, that is, physical, bodily, and existence (Wendt, 1999) or the object of thought itself is reduced to the thought of object (e.g. Kratochwil, 1991, 2006). Thinking in historical materialist dialectic is an integral aspect of any action. It is not a type of action among other types. Being purposive and objective, that is, directed to objects, human activity embodies thinking in action. It is this aspect of historical materialist dialectic that distinguishes it from all other philosophies on the one hand, and from other dialectical approaches on the other. It is in this light that Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx, 1998, p. 574) acquires another meaning: that philosophy always separated thinking and activity until the ‘philosophy of praxis’ (Labriola, 1903)12 showed their togetherness in praxis (Kitching, 1988). Marx, to some extent, and many Marxists later on failed to fully capitalise on this notion of praxis that informed his early writings especially in his Theses on Feuerbach and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In his later writings, Marx equated praxis with productive activity, limited to the role played by human beings in the completion of the circuit of capital, even though this reduction of praxis to production grates with Marx’s persisting embrace of a philosophical notion of praxis (Sayer, 1987). While we see praxis as productive, that is, purposeful and creative activity, we see production broadly as production and reproduction of life—not only physically but also a way that encompasses all social relations (Wood, 1995). In contrast, many Marxists concerned themselves with the sum total of human activity, most of the time expressed in the categories of the reproductive circuit of capital. This move was justified with reference to the real abstract nature of human labour under capitalism. We saw earlier the extreme version of this tendency in systematic dialectics, which attributed ‘ideality’ to capitalist reality. But ‘sum total’, ‘on average’, or ‘in aggregate’ treatment of human activity may prove to be useful only if the concrete praxes of human agents that constitute this conceptualised consequence are accounted for relationally. For human purposes show immense variation for a range of reasons. Any attempt to present an aspect of human social life in ‘aggregate’ terms without exposing its concrete existence necessarily produces an account of it which is structuralist to this or that extent. The rich diversity and the unintended quality of the aggregate results of human praxes emanate from the rich diversity of human purposes. Consequently, accounting for human social phenomena requires a relational, that is, inter-subjective analysis of contextualised praxes. The fourth aspect of a historical materialist dialectic view of human social reality refers therefore to its inter-subjectively constructed nature. Heine and Teschke (1996) emphasise inter-


618 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil subjectivity and state its importance in a historical materialist dialectic, yet they do not ‘expand upon’ it sufficiently (Brincat, 2011, p. 684). In the social sciences and philosophy, from phenomenology and hermeneutics to post-structuralism and constructivism, inter-subjectivity has almost always been used to refer exclusively to the cultural, linguistic, or ideational aspects of human existence. In this ideational sense, inter-subjectivity came to signify shared or common ideas and values. In IR, the notion of ‘communities of practice’ is reflective of this consensual understanding of the term (Adler & Pouliot, 2011a). This reserves the term inter-subjectivity to the artificially separated field of ideas in which the conception of the social remains solely ideational. The substance of social relations, however, is not exhausted by shared ideas, norms or values. What is separated out as ‘material’ by idealists remains part and parcel of human social relations, provided one accepts this arbitrary distinction between the ideal and the material. Brincat’s ‘social-relational’, that is, inter-subjectivist dialectical approach to world politics overlap with ours, even though he conceives inter-subjectivity more with reference to recognition theory following Hegel and Axel Honneth (Brincat, 2011). Notwithstanding his criticism of idealist dialectics, this comes close to a constructivist conception of inter-subjectivity, which separates the mental and the material. We suggest that it is not ‘mutual recognition’ but the temporary equilibrium of the contradictory praxes of human subjects that should underlie a historical materialist dialectical notion of inter-subjectivity. By ‘inter-subjectively constructed’ we refer at a very basic ontological level to a property of human reality, namely that it is formed as a result of the clashes, convergences, partial overlaps, and antagonistic conflicts between the praxes of differently situated and motivated subjects. Fifthly, then, dialectic sees concrete social phenomena as part of a complex of relations. This complexity, appears to be a mess of things where everything is related to everything else chaotically (Marx, 1986, p. 37). To ‘rise’ then from this chaotic abstract totality to the concrete, dialectic first abstracts the social phenomenon from this totality along the lines it really is practically abstracted by acting human subjects. Next, the activities of those who really constituted this practical abstraction and the relations between this and other abstractions should be historicised in order to concretely show how this abstraction came into being in the first place and how it is concretely related with other abstractions. This notion of dialectical totality rejects Hegelian forms of expressive or genetic totality (Lukaćs, 1971), whereby the social whole is organised around and express a central unifying principle—the so-called central contradiction of capitalist production between the forces and relations of production. Nor does it resemble an autopoietic system that reproduces itself self-referentially (Luhmann, 1982; Waltz, 1979). Both systems-theories and expressive notions of totality propose close and selfreproducing systems and deny the subjective capacity of agents to act. A hermeneutically informed dialectical notion of totality, on the contrary, is based on the ‘situational consciousness of acting individuals themselves’ (Habermas, 1976, p. 139). This ‘situational’ nature of human activity provides the context of analysis from the vantage point of the ‘acting individuals’. In this sense, theory building is also situational praxis. 5. States, Foreign Policies, International Relations When the aim is to explain a foreign policy decision of a specific state, the world around it is necessarily seen through its eyes, as the subjective activity of that state is requiring an explanation. Inversely, once the aim is to posit objectively how international relations work without taking into consideration the subjective actions of states that constitute it, later inclusion of this into the theoretical construct fails to serve the purpose. For both cases analytical



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abstraction of an aspect of reality is assumed to be an ontological abstraction, radically influencing the way reality is seen. If two things are assumed to be really separate, the relation between them is necessarily seen as a relation of causality. But as noted above, agents constitute and are constituted by what appears to them as ‘structures’, that is, the actions of other agents, both living and the dead. And as the primary agents of foreign policy and international relations, states are constituted not only by the actions of those over whom they lay claim to sovereignty, but also by those of other states and ‘external’ agents, who enter into contradictory intercourses in reproducing themselves. So are their foreign policies. In this sense, no foreign policy decision can ever be fully resolved back into its antecedent preconditions, as context never translates on a one-to-one basis into text. This requires the historian not to assume that an outcome was preordained by a ‘rational’ and ‘law-like’ reaction to context (international and domestic), but to take the option of a disjuncture between the totality (provided this could ever be established ex post factum) of causal conditions which preceded any event or decision, and the outcome of that event or decision seriously. Inter-state and intra-state determinations can never function as antecedent structural causes which determine a specific course of action, as they can maximally specify enabling conditions of possibility within which agency takes place. The efficacy or non-efficacy of structures is only revealed in and through social practices and cannot be pre-judged. Thus, subjectivity cannot be simply ‘read off’ structural configurations of socio-political relations in the sense of cause and effect, as situated agents—individually and collectively—attempt to modify, circumvent and ‘escape’ structural imperatives—often with unintended consequences (Knafo, 2010). In the process, innovation—or indeterminacy—is a constant possibility. Agency is therefore not something that enters the historical analysis from without—as a static and pre-defined agential rationality—but something that requires constant historicisation and specification in relational contexts from within. Both international relations and foreign policies, therefore, ontologically have an inter-subjective quality (Kratochwil & Ruggie, 1986; Ruggie, 1982; cf. Brincat, 2011). To reiterate, however, this inter-subjectivity is not based on some ideational criteria such as ‘convergent expectations’ (Krasner, 1983) or ‘recognition’ (Brincat, 2011). It is based on the interrelations of the concrete praxes of a variety of social actors, including states. At the same time, this inter-subjectivity is not only about ‘convergence’, but also about contradiction. Real abstractions, or ‘structures’ in the common social-scientific discourse, emerge when contradictory strategies of reproduction of different agents reach a temporary equilibrium, and they keep being contested, intentionally and unintentionally, even after they take entrenched institutional forms. Methodologically, this requires a research-question-guided and agency-based analysis in FPA and IR, since only such a procedure can remedy the problems associated with both structuralism and constructivism by providing a well-defined context around the agents identified by the research question. In the process, one may have to step out of the context-definition of the research question, but this should happen only in pursuit of the agents who constitute this context through their contradictory praxes. This has fundamental implications for the unit and level of analysis problem. For rather than committing a priori to a specific unit or level of analysis, the observation of practices itself helps to decide which units or levels need to be engaged to frame the object of analysis. This involves always a move towards historically specific contexts, rather than the imposition of pre-conceived categories of analysis. The contextualised praxes of social agents determine the unit and level of analysis. The demand for radical historicity is therefore in line with an understanding of dialectics that insists on the social-relational and inter-subjective character of reality in general—and in FPA in particular. For only a focus on the historically unique resolution of foreign policy conjunctures


620 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil allows us to grasp the specificity of what actors actually do, even when set within structural contexts. For diplomats and politicians do not negotiate with ‘structures’, but rather with other politicians and diplomats, who translate their own structural ‘imperatives’ into specific demands. These can be ‘settled’ or not, but no enumeration of antecedent ‘causes’ that shape foreign policy situations will allow us to derive ‘outcomes’ without centring the analysis of the intersubjective formulation and resolution of what are no longer causes, but a field of negotiation. The explanatory locus moves therefore to the inter-subjective quality of this resolution, grounding historical specificity. States as agents, then, also find themselves surrounded by historically inherited givens at any point in time. These givens constitute for them an externality upon which they act in reproducing themselves as states. Just like individuals, states abstract aspects of reality into manageable proportions as well. These abstractions manifest themselves, for example, in the form of state departments which are commissioned to deal with aspects of reality. What is external, or foreign, to a particular state appears as a structure, an ‘alien power’, or what is called in the literature ‘the international system’, from its subjective vantage point. Abstracted as the system this externality presents itself in different ways to different states generating particular conditions of reproduction in a given conjuncture. Through the same practical act of abstracting the external as ‘the international system’, states also abstract themselves from the ‘system’. That is by acting upon this externality in reproducing themselves states practically abstract their actions as ‘foreign policies’ from the ‘international system’, that is, the actions of others. Partly because of particular conditions of reproduction they find themselves in, partly because of other indeterminate subjective-conjunctural reasons, strategies of reproduction show immense variations. These differences generate contradictions as different states develop different strategies of reproduction. Purposive activities of states may or may not generate the initially intended consequences for individual states, but in the end they certainly change the conditions of reproduction by creating a new foreign policy conjuncture, or a new externality for every individual state. The disciplinary gap between FPA and IR is a reflection of this divergence between individual states’ purposive actions—past and present—and their cumulative consequences, and their practical abstraction in the process of their actions and the actions of others. The argument is simply that this gap is contextually generated and bridged in the concrete praxes of states. This dynamic and complex reality is presented in an extremely static manner by existing approaches in the field. Theory, however, must reflect this dynamism and complexity. Dialectics, in answering a question about an aspect of reality, starts from agents before all else. This enables a context-definition by reconstructing how the reality appears to that particular agent, in our case a particular state. Agents, however, are not taken as generic categories with abstractly conceptualised properties (such as ‘the state’, ‘the individual’, or ‘bureaucracy’). Rather their actions constituting them as agents should be of primary import. Therefore, the inter-subjective constitution of that particular state that establishes itself as an agent should be analysed through identifying how contradictory relations between social agents are resolved, reconciled, or set aside. In the process, the vantage point will have to constantly change, along with the specific agent the theory is dealing with. Nevertheless, like all purposive actions foreign policies are directed to ‘objects’ of action, that is, they objectify the subjective existence of other agents. Other states, however, find themselves in different sets of relations and conditions of reproduction, and therefore devise different ways of dealing with externality, namely different foreign policies. In view of this, theory must also represent how the world appears to other states objectified by the first state as subjects of the


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same conjuncture, since they also act upon what is external to them by devising their foreign policies. These strategic and objectifying moves are resolved, or not, inter-subjectively through diplomacy. The foreign policy conjuncture they create inter-subjectively for themselves, for one another, and for the reproduction of the concrete totality of inter-state relations has an unintended quality, precisely because of their inter-subjective resolution, creating a new context for praxes. In short, there cannot be a positive theory of FPA—holding across very diverse cases—as there cannot be a singular concept of capitalist international relations. It is rather the sui generis character of successive inter-subjectively constructed foreign policy encounters, contextualised but not purely derivable from or reducible to contexts, which should move centre-stage.

6. Conclusion: Explaining and Understanding—International Relations and Foreign Policy This article has argued that the widespread ascription within the field of IR of an indiscriminate epistemological naturalism to the Marxist tradition cannot be sustained. To substantiate this argument, we have explored the diverse understandings of dialectics within the Marxist literature. Moving from this meta-theoretical level to the theoretical level, we then suggested that general IR theories tend to fall back on structuralist modes of theorising, which downplay or externalise foreign policy-making as an object of analysis in its own right. This externalisation of foreign policy analysis from the remit of theory or, alternatively, the reduction of foreign policy-making to deeper structural logics is also visible in the sociological handling of foreign policy in many general Marxist IR theories, even if they are epistemologically committed to non-positivistic modes of theorising. In short, this general problematique is reflected in the persisting gap between IR Theory and FPA across the Marxist and non-Marxist divide. To rectify this gap, the article provided an alternative mode of theoretical abstraction informed by the dialectical approach. It then analysed two variants of the dialectical approach, namely, logical-historical and systematic dialectics. These remain un-dialectical ultimately, because while the former tries to graft theory onto history, the latter attributes a theoretical quality to history. This brings them closer to positivism and idealism, respectively, instead of dialectic. We suggested that PM contains essential resources for a proper historicisation of reality through its social-relational reading of history in which historical relations between agents, rather than logical relations between categories, move centre-stage. However, we argued that the early scholars in the PM tradition never fully emancipated themselves from a residual structuralism, while also remaining inattentive to the role of foreign policy-making in the history of capitalism. Finally, the article presented a third, historical materialist, version of dialectic which provides a unique view of reality with change, contradiction, praxis, inter-subjectivity, and totality constituting its central aspects. We then discussed the contemporary state with its general properties as a real abstraction. These properties are themselves historical and inter-subjective constructions inherited from different historical periods and constitute the state as a real abstraction. Contradictions arising from the differences in the ways the world appear to them and, following from this, from their different concrete praxes in reproducing themselves, constitute the context for action. It is through this inter-subjective encounter of praxes that states abstract foreign policy from international relations and bridge them. Theory must reflect this practical nature of relations among states in concrete historical conjunctures.


622 B. Teschke & C. Cemgil In IR ‘there are always two stories to tell’, remarked Hollis and Smith (1991): one inside and the other outside. These two, they claimed, were unbridgeable. We argue, on the contrary, that there are as many stories to tell as there are agents. For stories are but one-sided representations. There are always other sides to stories. However, the concrete content of the field is not exhausted no matter how many stories are told. These reflect merely how the world appears to singular agents and how that agent ‘ex-plains’ the world external to itself. This can only be the starting point of the investigation. If reality is inter-subjective, in order to mentally reproduce reality we need to take into account the ‘ex-planations’ and ‘understandings’ of other subjects so that we arrive at a fuller picture. We come to an understanding of reality only by identifying the relations connecting ‘ex-planations’. Praxis, as the unity of thinking and action, as purposive activity, is the most crucial aspect of this reconstruction. For it is not the contemplative ego, but real, flesh, and blood individuals who act in reproducing themselves.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11 12

This paper was presented at the 2014 ISA Convention in Toronto. We want to thank the panelists, the two anonymous reviewers, Shannon Brincat and Samuel Knafo for their constructive comments. This tendency is particularly visible in Wood (2003). This may explain the absence of a single Marxist entry in the recent 5-volume edition on FPA (Carlsnaes and Guzzini, 2011). Carlsnaes (2002, p. 332) notes how FPA was traditionally assumed to be part of ‘public policy’ rather than international politics. Although this has partly changed today, it is important to register the historical distance between IR and FPA as well as their later limited convergence. By self-consciously externalising foreign policy behaviour from the remit of his theory, Waltz (1979) designed a theory of international relations without politics (Wendt, 1999, p. 11). We note with Ollman (2003, p. 63) that dialectical abstractions cannot be completely different from non-dialectical abstractions, not only because it would constitute a Wittgensteinian ‘private language’ as Ollman says, but also because both dialectical and non-dialectical abstractions have to start with real, practical abstractions. Any radical diversion from real abstractions would only be an indication of poor skills of imagination and thinking. This is a controversial topic among Marxists. Engels’ interpretation of Marx has been seen as a distortion by some (Avineri, 1978; Lichtheim, 1961). Ollman (2003) suggests that it is implausible to assume that Marx did not know Engels’ arguments in the Dialectics of Nature and in Anti-Du¨hring. Labriola (1903) provides an excellent early critique of those who conflate Marx’s dialectical method with positivism, or social and political Darwinism. Not the Revolution itself (he did not live long enough), but the developments leading to it troubled Marx himself. In the drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulich, he questioned the uniqueness of the Russian developmental trajectory (Marx, 1989). Trotsky (1932) expanded later on this observation in his History of the Russian Revolution. Arthur (2004, p. 15) lists Robert Albritton, Chris J. Arthur, Jairus Banaji, Roy Bhaskar, M. Eldred, I. Hunt, Michael Lebowitz, J. McCarney, P. Murray, R. Norman, S. Sayers, B. Ollman, M. Postone, G. Reuten, T. Sekine, A. Shamsavari, F.C. Shortall, Tony Smith, H. Williams, and M. Williams within this current. For a well-articulated exposition of the conceptual pair ‘presupposing-positing’ and its Hegelian foundations see Bellofiore and Finelli (1998). See also Gramsci (1978).

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Benno Teschke is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex and an Affiliated Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Copenhagen University. His research interests comprise the historical sociology of international relations, critical IR Theory, and the philosophy of social science. Teschke is the author of The myth of 1648: Class, geopolitics and the making of modern international relations (London and New York: Verso, 2003), which was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004. He is currently working on a sequel to this book, which examines the making of geopolitical space and international relations in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, while also preparing a monograph on the international thought of Carl Schmitt. His more recent work on Schmitt has appeared in International Theory, the New Left Review, and The Oxford handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford: OUP, 2015). Can Cemgil is a doctoral student in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University. He teaches International Relations at the Institute of the Social Sciences at Bilgi University in Istanbul.

The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectics for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis

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