Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory

Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory
by
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
Associate Professor
School of International Service
American University
and
Daniel H. Nexon
Assistant Professor
Department of Government and School of Foreign Service
Georgetown University
Revised and Resubmitted Version of MS 20070308-637-2, International Studies Quarterly
Forthcoming, December 2009

Abstract: American scholars routinely characterize the study of international relations as
divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.”
Although most international-relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn’s account of
scientific continuity and change, many utilize Lakatosian criteria to assess the
“progressive” or “degenerative” character of various theories and approaches in the field.
We argue that neither specific areas of inquiry (such as the “democratic peace”) nor
broader approaches to world politics (such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism)
deserve the label of “paradigms” or “research programmes.” As an alternative, we
propose mapping the field through Weberian techniques of ideal-typification.
Acknowledgements: For helpful comments and criticisms, we thank the editorial team at
International Studies Quarterly, a surprising number of anonymous reviewers, J. Samuel
Barkin, Jeffrey Checkel, Raymond Duvall, Stacie Goddard, Peter Howard, Victoria Hui,
Yosef Lapid, Richard Ned Lebow, Jennifer Mitzen, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, as well as
also participants at panels at the 5th Annual Pan-European Conference on International
Relations, the International Studies Association, and a conference on “Realist
Constructivism” sponsored by the Mortara Center for International Studies at
Georgetown University. We are particularly grateful to Michael D. Gordin and Rom
Harré for general comments and suggestions. Finally, we extend special appreciation to
the late Steven Poe, whose careful consideration, honesty, and willingness to take a
chance on this manuscript made its publication possible.

“Paradigmatic Faults” 1 ISQ, December 2009
T.S. Kuhn’s notion of “paradigms” and Imre Lakatos’ concept of “research programmes”
continue to influence how international-relations scholars map our field. Some represent
international-relations theory, at least in the United States, as a three-cornered fight between
realism, liberalism, and constructivism (Walt 1998); they describe each as “paradigms” or
“research programmes” (Geller and Vasquez 2004). Others speak of distinct “research
programmes” such as analysis of the “democratic peace” (Ray 2003), “balance-of-power
theory” (Vasquez 2003), and “power-transition theory” (DiCicco and Levy 1999). In this essay,
we argue that none of these collections of theory qualify as Kuhnian paradigms or Lakatosian
research programmes.
Our core argument is as follows: To qualify as a paradigm, a set of theories must involve
not merely common assumptions and orientations but shared incommensurable content with
respect to some other paradigm. Although Lakatos rejects what he takes to be Kuhn’s
incommensurability thesis, his research programmes are also comprised of theories that share the
same sort of content that Kuhn described as sources of incommensurability.
The problem for the use of Kuhnian and Lakatosian frameworks to describe “theoretical
aggregates” (Elman and Elman 2002) such as “realism,” “constructivism,” and the “democratic
peace” is that the specific theories conventionally associated with them lack shared
incommensurable content; some of the better candidates for sources of incommensurability in the
discipline, in turn, cut across them. It follows that we should not use Kuhnian and Lakatosian
accounts of theory choice to evaluate these aggregates, and that treating them as “paradigms” or
“research programmes” distorts dialogue and debate in the field.
But if neither framework describes these aggregates, how should we understand their
place in international-relations theory? We argue that specific areas of shared research, such as
power transitions, can be labeled “research programs” so long as we stipulate that this does not
imply Lakatosian philosophical baggage (e.g., Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998, 646-
647). But more general aggregates such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism are better seen
as ideal-typifications of core wagers—sometimes implicit, other times explicit—about the nature
of international politics. These ideal-typifications, in turn, produce property spaces within which
many real theories reside. We expand on this argument in the second part of the paper.
Of Paradigms and Research Programmes
In this section, we argue against designating many theoretical aggregates in international-
relations scholarship as Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” First, the
specific histories of the natural sciences—and sometimes mathematics—supply the empirical
data for Kuhn and Lakatos. The history of the field of international relations departs markedly,
however, from the history of chemistry, physics, or biology. It lacks, for instance, the
background conditions of concrete, widely recognized, scientific achievements of the kind that
Kuhn and Lakatos take for granted in their analyses of the natural sciences. Whatever the merits
of international-relations scholarship, it has not allowed us to manipulate our environment in
ways equivalent to the natural sciences—it is not unquestionably “progressive” in the same way
as physics or chemistry. Therefore we confront no “puzzle” of scientific progress of the kind
Kuhn and Lakatos assume (cf. Chernoff 2002; Chernoff 2007).1
1
International-relations scholars also embraced Kuhn and Lakatos out of their aspiration for the
field to achieve the status of a “science.” Both provide (or provided) accounts of the nature of
science and scientific progress compatible with disciplinary practices in international-relations
and political-science scholarship. Thus, the familiar narrative that scholars gravitated to Kuhn
because his approach suggested that division into multiple “camps” is compatible with “science,”
but once they recognized his apparent relativism, they turned to Lakatos as a more “scientific”
alternative (see, e.g., Ball 1976). We thank one of our reviewers for raising this issue.
Second, collections of specific theories constitute a paradigm when they share common
content that renders them incommensurable vis-à-vis other paradigms. A Lakatosian research
programme also requires content that produces what Kuhn would call “local
incommensurabilities” with other research programs. Like the theories that comprise a paradigm,
those belonging to competing research programmes cannot be directly tested against one another.
In consequence, we must appeal to Lakatos’ Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
(MSRP) to provide second-order, or external, criteria of theory choice. But these conditions do
not obtain for most of the theoretical aggregates that international-relations theorists classify as
paradigms or research programmes.
 Most putative “research programmes,” such as power-transition theory and
democratic-peace theory, are commensurable and comparable.
 Many of the specific theories conventionally associated with the different “isms,”
such as realist and liberal theories utilizing rational-choice analytics, are
commensurable and comparable.
 The most plausible sources of incommensurability in the field involve much
larger debates about how to pursue social-scientific knowledge, complexes of
theoretical terms, and so forth; these sources of incommensurability are
orthogonally related to the “isms.”
It follows that neither such specific research programs nor the “isms” should be treated as
units—whether paradigms or research programmes—for the purpose of theory choice, and that
we need not appeal to second-order criteria to resolve many existing “inter-paradigmatic”
debates in the international-relations theory.

Kuhnian Paradigms
Kuhn (1970a, 154) sought to make sense of the historical development of science,
specifically the interruption of periods of “normal science” by “scientific revolutions” consisting
of “those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in
whole or in part of an incompatible new one.” Kuhn (1970a, 85) argued, at least initially, that the
changes in the history of science between sets of fundamental assumptions about the world and
how to study it are akin to “change[s] in visual gestalt” whereby something that previously
appeared one way to a research community subsequently appears in a different way. Kuhn
(1970a, 122) further suggested that these changes in fundamental worldview arise, contra many
existing accounts, from “a relatively sudden and unstructured event” by which our perceptions
are reordered. Hence, “no exclusively logical criteria can entirely dictate the conclusion” that the
scientist “must draw” from particular empirical observations (Kuhn 1970b, 19). The growth of
anomalies within a paradigm may, over time, lead to an epistemic crisis in the scientific
community and, given the right conditions, paradigmatic change.
Kuhn’s account challenged a number of views of science, but most notably the claim of
deducibility, i.e., that “earlier sciences are derivable from later.” The existence of
incommensurable content in paradigmatic cores precludes the deductibility of pre-revolutionary
theories from post-revolutionary ones (Shapere 1964, 389). A post-revolutionary theory
represents not a simple replacement for a pre-revolutionary theory, but rather a change in at least
some of a theory’s basic ontological categories (Sankey 1993, 770). For Kuhn, in fact, one
cannot unproblematically test paradigms against one another: “the very possibility of scientific
communication and dialogue becomes problematic and the process of theory choice can no
longer be reduced to the simple picture presented, for example, by the logical empiricists”
(Biaoligi 1993, 211; see also Wight 1996, 296).
Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (IT) accounts for why we might need to appeal to, for
example, sociological and psychological factors in order to explain the history of paradigmatic
shifts. It also occupies a central role in his distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary”
science. Without paradigmatic incommensurability, major changes in scientific knowledge
would simply be “breakthroughs” that progressively improved upon, or discarded, earlier
theories (e.g., Meiland 1974, 182; Sankey 1993, 761; Szumilewicz 1977, 346). But since for
Kuhn different paradigms divide up the phenomenal world differently, there can be no simple
empirical adjudication between them, and in order to account for the history of science we need a
division between moments of “normal science”—empirical work within a paradigm—and
“revolutionary science”—empirical work that establishes a new paradigm (Chernoff 2005, 181).
Forms of Incommensurability
Kuhn initially offered three sources of paradigmatic incommensurability, which Kitcher
(1982, 690) terms “conceptual incommensurability,” “observational incommensurability,” and
“methodological incommensurability” (see also Pearce 1982, 395; Sankey 1993; Sudhakar
1989). The first involves shifts in the linguistic elements of scientific theories, or what some term
meaning variance across theories (Sankey 1991). According to Chen (1990, 67), “two theories
are incommensurable if and only if they are articulated in languages that are not mutually
translatable or communicable without loss.” Such meaning variance, as Farrell (2003, 80) notes,
implies that “there can be no relations of strict deducibility between any two universal theories.”
This means that, for example, Aristotelian physics cannot be stated in the terminology of
Newtonian physics (Sankey 1993, 762; Szumilewicz 1977, 346).
The second kind of incommensurability results from differing assumptions about the
nature of evidence that counts for the evaluation of theories. Rejecting a paradigm involves, in
consequence, an often profound shift in scientists’ working observational theories. Thus, even if
“protagonists” in an inter-paradigmatic debate “could formulate their rival claims in a common
language, they could not agree on a shared body of observational evidence against which
competing claims are to be judged.” In the absence of such agreement, progress cannot proceed
through a smooth processes of testing and discarding theories (Kitcher 1982, 690).
Finally, paradigms may involve differences over the very methods that comprise
scientific investigation. Galileo’s opponents, for example, rejected many aspects of his claims,
including the early form of the hypothetical-deductive method he used to adjudicate the truth-
status of the Copernican and Ptolemaic models of the solar system (Kuhn 1957). “As a result,”
notes Kichter (1982, 690), “even given a common language for the formulation of rival claims
and a shared body of evidence, reasonable disagreement could still persist” among proponents
working in different paradigms (See also Meiland 1974, 183-184).
Kuhn faced intense criticism for his claims. Many of Kuhn’s critics reacted against the
implication that the history of scientific progress stemmed from irrational and non-rational
factors, particularly socio-psychological ones, and therefore that no “objective” criteria for
resolving inter-paradigm disagreements exist (cf. Chen 1990, 67; Laudan 1976, 596; Meiland
1974, 179, 184-185; Siegel 1976, 442, 448). These criticisms involved a multi-pronged attack on
Kuhn’s understanding of scientific change, as well as on his formulation of incommensurability.
For our purposes, one of the most important arguments centered on the relationship between
incommensurability and comparability. Many read Kuhn as arguing that incommensurability
rendered paradigms incomparable. His critics contended that paradigms might involve
incommensurable internal standards, but this did not preclude the existence of objective external
standards to judge between them. In other words, incommensurabilities between the internal
criteria of paradigms do not reflect “upward, in criterial differences at the second level.”
(Scheffler 1982, 84; also Shapere 1964).
Kuhn responded that his opponents deployed an overly narrow understanding of
rationality, chose to ignore the complicated history of the rise and fall of scientific theories, and
mischaracterized his views of scientific progress. In fact, Kuhn repeatedly stressed that the
emergence of a new paradigm owes a great deal to the scientific community’s widespread
recognition of its concrete achievements; Kuhn argued that incommensurability did not render
paradigms literally non-comparable (e.g., Kuhn, 1970c, 139, 143-146; Meiland 1974, 182-187;
Sankey 1993, 762; Siegel 1980, 363; Wight 1996, 305). Kuhn also increasingly shifted the focus
of IT toward a more limited claim about meaning variance, sometimes called “local
incommensurability” (e.g., Chen, 1990, 67-68). So “construed, incommensurability is the
limited ability to translate from a local subgroup of terms of one theory into another local
subgroup of terms in another theory. As such, language peripheral to the non-translatable
subgroup of terms constitutes semantic common ground between theories” (Sankey 1991, 771).
Kuhn notes, in this context, that linguistic-taxonomic architecture often changes in the
history of science and that “it is simply implausible that some terms should change their meaning
when transferred to a new theory without inflecting the terms transferred with them.” Thus, local
incommensurabilities still present problems for the deducibility of some scientific theories from
others (Kuhn 1982, 671). He illustrates this point though the example of phlogiston in
eighteenth-century chemistry. Although it “appears that modern-language phrases… might be
compounded to produce a modern-language translation of ‘phlogiston’…” this is not the case.
Among “the phrases which describe how the referents of the term 'phlogiston' are picked out are
a number that include other untranslatable terms like 'principle' and 'element'. Together with
'phlogiston', they constitute an interrelated or inter-defined set that must be acquired together, as
whole, before any of them can be used, applied to natural phenomena” (Kuhn 1982, 676).
Lakatosian Research Programmes
Some argue that Kuhn and Lakatos embrace “different epistemologies” or
“incompatible…metatheories” (Elman and Elman 2002, 59). Others claim that the two scholars’
practical accounts of scientific progress are indistinguishable from one another (e.g., Barnes
1983, 61-63; Kuhn 1970c; Nadel 1984, 447-448). Lakatos, in fact, “accepts Kuhn’s thesis that, in
the context of ‘normal science’ theories are relatively immune against falsification” but
“concludes that the immunization strategies that Kuhn had claimed for ‘normal science’ are
rational after all.” Lakatos’ MSRP thus seeks to “develop objective criteria for the appraisal of
various research strategies” (Radnitzky 1991, 277-278). As such, Lakatos rejects the claim that
scientific theories cannot be adjudicated via second-order criteria. But he accepts the claim that
scientific theories cannot simply be compared with one another solely on the basis of empirical
evidence. MSRP, then, is an attempt to preserve objective, if retrospective, second-order criteria
for scientific progress in the light of the difficulties Kuhn identified as stemming from
paradigmatic incommensurability (Vasquez 1998, 30).

The Architecture of MSRP
Lakatos’ research programmes, as most international-relations scholars know, involve
“leading ideas” that constitute their respective “hard cores.” As Larvor (1998, 51) explains, these
represent “a set of commitments which cannot be abandoned without abandoning the research
programme altogether.” Research programmes also contain a “protective belt” of auxiliary
hypothesis that shield the hard core from direct refutation. This protective belt, although subject
to major alterations and reformulations, remains guided by the research programme’s heuristic,
i.e., “a set of problem-solving techniques for scientists engaged in a particular research
programme.” Lakatos, argued that, for example, “the heuristic of Newton’s research programme
chiefly consisted in its mathematical apparatus: the differential calculus, the theory of
convergence and differential and integral equations” (Larvor 1998, 53).
The “negative” heuristic “instruct[s] us to modify auxiliary hypothesis” rather than to
“change the hard core” and to “rule out radically different sorts of explanatory attempts”
(Koertge 1970, 161). The “positive” heuristic functions to protect “the scientists from becoming
confused by the ocean of anomalies.” It lays “out a programme which lists a chain of even more
complicated models simulating reality: the scientist’s attention is riveted on building his models
following instructions which are laid down in the positive part of the programme.” In doing so,
the scientist “ignores the actual counterexamples, the available ‘data’” (Lakatos 1978, 135).
Lakatos’ MSRP framework therefore reformulates the architecture of Kuhn’s SSR (e.g.,
Koertge 1970, 161; Kuhn 1970c; Nadel 1984, 447). Scientific research programmes take the
place of paradigms. “The interplay of the positive and negative heuristic of a research
programme” operate “to account for Kuhn’s commitments and puzzle-solving of the normal
scientists while the concepts of progressive and degenerative problem-shifts” serve “to explain
paradigm changes as a result of rational decisions rather than with reference to Gestalt
Psychology [emphasis original]” (Kulka 1977, 325-326; also Lakatos 1970b, 175). Working
within a research program remains rational for Lakatos as long as the program as a whole
continues to generate progressive problemshifts, but becomes increasingly risky as these
problemshifts take degenerative forms. After a certain point, scientists abandon the research
program in favor of another one (Elman and Elman 2002; Yuxin 1990).2
Lakatos and ‘Remediable’ Incommensurability
Most proponents of MSRP in International Relations do not consider the identification of
incommensurable, or incommensurable-like, content as a basis for distinguishing between
research programmes (e.g., Elman and Elman 2002; Vasquez 1998). And not without good
reason: Lakatos rejects IT—as he understood it. Lakatos (1970a, 125n37), for example, explicitly
dismisses the “the psychological incommensurability of rival paradigms” on the grounds that
some scientists participated in multiple, but supposedly incommensurate, research programmes.
But, as Lakatos also argues, the empirical “content” of a theory “depends on our
decision as to which are our ‘observational theories’ and which anomalies are to be promoted to
counterexamples [emphasis original].” Indeed, if “one attempts to compare the empirical content
of different scientific theories in order to see which is ‘more scientific’, then one will get
involved in an enormously complex and therefore hopelessly arbitrary system of decisions about
2
Lakatos’ notion of “progress,” as Dessler (2003, 382) notes, fuses “the answers to the
demarcation and rationality questions in a single argument.” It allows us, in principle, to
differentiate science from pseudo-science: a “discipline is scientific so long as progressive
programmes triumph over degenerating ones” (Larvor 1998, 53).

their respective classes of ‘relatively atomic statements’ and their ‘fields of application.’” “Such
comparison,” he notes, “is possible only when one theory supercedes another…. And even then,
there may be difficulties (which would not, however, add up to irremediable
‘incommensurability’)” (Lakatos 1978, 111n8).
Here we find the crucial role that, in effect, local incommensurabilities play in MSRP and
Lakatos’ delineation of research programmes. First, although research programmes are not
irremediably incommensurable, we cannot adjudicate between specific theories found within two
different research programmes through a straightforward set of experiments (i.e., they remain
comparable via second-order criteria).3 Second, MSRP provides second-order criteria for
rendering the development of science rational and progressive, and therefore resolves the
problems Kuhn identified with paradigmatic incommensurability. Third, such local
incommensurabilities create sufficient difficulties, in fact, that only retrospective judgments by
the scientific community—along the lines of the criteria found in MSRP—allows it to account
for the failure of any given research programme. As Krasner (1985, 143) argues, “Lakatos,
despite his challenge to Kuhn, is not trying to restore the traditional view in which science is
seeking the one real world, sharply distinguishing between theory and observation, and readily
accepting or rejecting hypothesis on the basis of empirical testing.”
Translation problems between theories play an important role in Lakatos’ attempts to
reformulate Popper and provide an objective theory of scientific progress. Lakatos accepts the
3
Compare Lakatos’ solution, which accepts the difficulty of a direct translation between
theories, with Popper’s reassertion of methodological falsification as the solution to the problems
that Kuhn identifies. Also note that Lakatos, like Kuhn, accepts “normal science” as part of the
activity of science properly understood (Koertge 1970, 161), while for Popper Kuhnian “normal
science” remains just bad science.

lack of a theoretically neutral substratum of “facts” against which two theories could be
measured. Lakatos (1978, 110) “borrows…from conventionalism…the license rationally to
accept by convention not only spatio-temporally singular ‘factual statements’ but also spatio-
temporally universal theories.” He notes that institutional practices, rather than a firm grounding
in some set of empirical facts, arbitrate scientific truth on a day-to-day basis: “Popper’s great
negative crucial experiments”—which were supposed to have falsified theories—“disappear:
‘crucial experiment’ is an honorific title, which may, of course, be conferred on certain
anomalies, but only long after the event, only when one programme has been defeated by another
one” (Lakatos 1978, 111). Discussing the clash between Galilean and Aristotelian conceptions of
the cosmos, Lakatos (1978, 98) points out that “it was not Galileo’s—pure, untheoretical—
observations that confronted Aristotelian theory but rather Galileo’s ‘observations’ in the light of
his optical theory that confronted the Aristotelians’ ‘observations’ in the light of their theory of
the heavens.” There exists an irreducibly “conventional element” in deciding whether a
particular experimental trial falsifies the entirety of a substantive theory (Lakatos 1978, 107).
What Lakatos calls the “hard core” of a research programme, therefore, consists not
merely of substantive claims, but also contains commitments to particular kinds of observational
theory: ideas about how measurement works, how terms are to be defined, and how auxiliary
hypotheses derived from the theory’s hard core are to be evaluated. The genius of the Newtonian
research programme, Lakatos (1978, 133) suggests, came not merely from its substantive
assumptions about motion, but also from its novel way of “doing science,” which involved the
subsumption of empirical anomalies under a simple set of laws. Similarly, Bohr’s production of a
novel account of light emission involved a relaxation of the standard of theoretical consistency in
the short-term so that new phenomena could be predicted (Lakatos, 1978, 141-142).
It follows that the “hard core” of a research programme contains not merely a list of
variables that adherents believe to be relevant to their explanations and a set of favored
techniques for gathering and evaluating empirical data, but also epistemological and ontological
differences that preclude naïve falsificationism or other non-MSRP standards of inter-theoretical
adjudication. This produces, not irremediable incommensurability of the sort associated with
Kuhn, but rather something we might refer to as “remediable incommensurability”—that is, a
translation problem that can be worked around without recourse to the imagery of fundamental
discontinuity that incensed so many of Kuhn’s harshest critics.
This also explains why, for Lakatos, judgments about the progressive or degenerating
character of a particular problemshift are retrospective. Some interpreters of Lakatos argue that
the notion of progressive problemshifts between and within research programs “can be used to
advise scholars on how to respond to degeneration” (Elman and Elman 1997, 925). But Lakatos
(1978, 117) criticizes Kuhn (and others) for “conflat[ing] methodological appraisal of a
programme with firm heuristic advice about what to do [emphasis original].” Lakatos
distinguishes between the “internal” and the “external” history of a research programme, arguing
that “normative reconstructions” that provide an internal history “may have to be supplemented
by empirical external theories to explain the residual non-rational factors.”
The history of science is always richer than its rational reconstruction.…
External history either provides non-rational explanation of the speed,
locality, selectiveness, etc. of historic events as interpreted in terms of
internal history; or, when history differs from its rational reconstruction, it
provides an empirical explanation of why it differs. But the rational aspect

of scientific growth is fully accounted for by one’s logic of scientific
discovery (Lakatos, 1978, 118).
The rational reconstruction of a research programme—as well as its historical twists and
turns—can only be comprehended in hindsight. Only after the scientific community makes a
practical determination about the importance of a particular experiment or controversy can we
make judgments about whether their resolution amounted to progress or degeneration. We
cannot make such a determination in advance, because the answer depends on which research
programme’s terminology and concepts are used to make sense of the controversial issue. As
Lakatos (1978, 113) argues, one “can be ‘wise’ only after the event.”
The contents of a research programme, moreover, may not be identical with any of its
practitioners’ specifications of the research programme: “Prout never articulated the ‘Proutian
programme’: the Proutian programme is not Prout’s programme” (Lakatos, 1978, 119). Rather, a
research programme constitutes, in effect, an ideal-typical specification of how a series of
theories relate to one another; its utility is in the evaluation of that series, not in directing the
series as it evolves. We cannot easily know whether a problemshift was progressive or not until
we see the whole series of subsequent research projects that arose from it. Viewed prospectively,
science is a good deal messier than the abstract series that the philosopher derives from it. As
Lakatos (1978, 131) argues, “no set of human judgments is completely rational… no rational
reconstruction can ever coincide with actual history.” Hence Lakatos’ approach is best suited for
a retrospective, and (Popperian) third-world, account of the progress of research programmes
(Barnes 1983, 61-62).

(Mis)applications to International-Relations Theory
Our discussion of Kuhnian paradigms and Lakatosian research programmes supports the
two claims we advanced at the outset. Both scholars seek to make sense of the history of the
natural sciences, particularly with respect to how that history confounds earlier universal theories
of scientific progress. Thus, both argue about the specifics of the differences between, for
example, classical physics and quantum mechanics, phlogiston theory and modern chemistry,
and those separating Galileo from his critics. Both Kuhn and Lakatos ultimately appeal to the
judgment of scientific community concerning the existence of concrete, well-recognized
advances in scientific thought.4 We should, therefore, exercise caution when it comes to applying
their accounts of scientific progress to the field of International Relations. We should be
particularly reticent to apply them to contemporaneous theories in the field, as we lack the luxury
of retrospective reconstruction when assessing such putative “paradigms” and “research
programmes.”
But if we still desire to apply Kuhnian or Lakatosian metrics for theory choice, then we
must demonstrate that the theoretical aggregates we classify as “paradigms” or “research
programmes” qualify as such. We need to identify internal incommensurabilities that
differentiate them from other theoretical aggregates in the field and that require recourse to
second-order criteria of theory choice (cf. Vasquez 1998, 187-188). We next turn to a discussion
a number of putative paradigms and research programmes to demonstrate that many of them lack
such local incommensurabilities. But before doing so, we should note two considerations that
4
On this point, Radnitzky (1991, 277-278) notes that “Lakatos falls back on appraisals contained
in the 'normative basic judgments' of 'the scientific elite'. This again leads to a circle: in order to
determine who should belong to 'the scientific elite', we need objective criteria for appraising
past achievement.” See also Farrell (2003, 60-64).

further caution against deploying Kuhnian and Lakatosian accounts to make sense of the
divisions in our field.
On the one hand, recall that Kuhn largely dropped observational and methodological
incommensurability from his analysis. He “restricted incommensurability to semantic
differences,” i.e., the problem of meaning variance, and focused on the existence of “translation
failure between a localized cluster of interdefined terms within the language of theories” (Sankey
1993, 760). In Kuhn’s later reformulations, he abandoned much of the architecture of SSR
entirely and instead reconceptualized scientific revolutions in terms of the speciation of
disciplines and subdisciplines within the natural sciences (Kuhn 1990).5 This retreat raises doubts
about, at the very least, appeals to such differences (insofar as they are independent from
meaning variance, rather than follow from it) as a basis for identifying paradigms or, in
Lakatosian terms, the need to invoke MSRP to assess theoretical aggregates distinguished by
them.
On the other hand, we agree that some of the practices in our field track with those
identified by Lakatos and Kuhn. Advocates of so-called “research programmes” and
“paradigms” resist abandoning the assumptions associated with theoretical aggregates. They
doggedly insist on the relevance of their approaches while discounting the analysis and evidence
offered by rival scholars. They tend to ignore some phenomena in favor of others. 6 But these
parallels represent, in our view, insufficient warrants for adopting Kuhnian and Lakatosian
frameworks.
5
Adaptations of this later argument to international-relations scholarship might actually prove
interesting, but this is a topic beyond the scope of our analysis.

6
Vasquez (1998) documents this behavior quite well in his seminal work on realism and
paradigmism, but we disagree that it provides a warrant for calling realism a paradigm.
First, at least some of this behavior may stem from contamination effects. Political
scientists have been using SSR to make sense of divisions in the field since the 1960s, and have
appealed to Lakatos since the 1970s. It would be surprising, in fact, if our constant invocations of
Kuhnian and Lakatosian language failed to influence our scholarly practices.
Second, we can, in principle, explain this behavior through any number of disciplinary
and individual incentives, as well as through other sociological factors. The development of
intellectual cliques, the status that comes with staking out a new framework for understanding
world politics, and a reluctance to abandon modes of thought need not be explained by invoking
“paradigms” or “research programmes” with all their attendant epistemological and ontological
baggage.7
Third, our practices also depart, and in very significant ways, from that of scholars
genuinely operating in “paradigms” or “research programmes.” We frequently construct “two-”
and “three-cornered” tests of the “isms” utilizing common first-order criteria of theory choice.
Some supposed “research programmes,” such as inquiry into the democratic peace, are
comprised of participants from multiple “paradigms” without any serious difficulties of
translation. And scholars seem relatively unmoved by accusations that their research
programmes are degenerative, which, at the very least, lends support to the proposition that
Lakatosian metrics are best suited to rational reconstructions of our disciplinary history.
7
In this light, we might be interested in the pragmatic question of when, and why, scholars
invoke claims about incommensurability. Such claims may serve a number of strategic and
disciplinary interests irrespective of whether or not they involve genuine examples of
incommensurability. See Biagioli’s (1993, 211-244) discussion of “the anthropology of
incommensurability.”
In sum, absent the identification of the scope conditions for treating an international-
relations theoretical aggregate as a “paradigm” or “research programme”—the identification of
shared local incommensurabilities vis-à-vis some other theoretical aggregate—our practices
provide insufficient grounds for invoking Kuhn or Lakatos to make sense of many relevant
divisions in the field, let alone to assess the comparative merits of such theoretical aggregates
through a recourse to MSRP.
Putative “Paradigms” and “Research Programmes”
International-relations scholars, as we have noted, often describe inquiry into “the
democratic peace,” the study of “security communities,” and “power-transition theory” as
research programmes. If each of these were distinct research programmes, we would expect them
to be differentiated from one another by incommensurable-like content of the conceptual,
observational, or methodological kind in their hard cores. But we find scholars working on, for
example, the democratic peace and power-transition theory deploying the same kind of statistical
methodology and even using the same data sets in their analysis. Their conceptual apparatuses
are commensurable and comparable. One tradition simply claims that democracies are unlikely
to go to war with one another, the other that great-power wars tend to happen during periods of
power transitions. These both present straightforward empirical propositions—in fact,
propositions that need not even contradict one another.
DiCiccio and Levy (1999, 678), for example, use Lakatosian metrics to analyze power-
transition theory. They note that incommensurability does present a problem for comparing two
research programmes, but that they use MSRP for “the purpose of evaluating the development
and progressiveness of a single research programme.” And this is correct, insofar as meaning
variance presents a problem for any strict reliance on “content increase” as a basis for
determining whether one theory has superceded another (Farrell, 2003, 86-87). But it sidesteps
the crucial issue: which “set of common hard-core assumptions” of power-transition theory
(DiCicco and Levy 1999, 678) render it so theory-laden vis-à-vis other research programmes as
to force us to resort to MSRP as a method for evaluating its internal progress? Their list contains
entirely empirical propositions, such as “the international order is hierarchically organized under
the leadership of a dominant power” (DiCicco and Levy, 1999: 678). None of these reflect the
kind of differences among scientific theories that concern Kuhn and Lakatos; the translation
problems with which Kuhn and Lakatos are grappling are far more serious and severe than the
technical difficulties presented “because different theories have different dependent variables”
(Krasner 1985, 138).
Similarly, scholars sometimes invoke the “democratic peace” as an example of a
Lakatosian research programme (Ray 2003). But the lack of war between democracies is merely
an empirical proposition, and has very little in common with, for example, Prout’s contention
that the atomic weights of pure chemical elements are whole numbers or with Planck’s
calculation of an indivisible unit of action at the subatomic level, i.e., the Planck constant. The
latter both involve contentions about how to do science—about what kinds of evidence “count”
for or against a theory—in a way that the notion of a democratic peace simply does not. It
therefore makes little philosophical sense to speak of a “democratic peace research programme,”
and given the absence of any significant translation problems when trying to compare a
proposition positing a democratic peace with a proposition that does not, the appeal to Lakatos
seems misplaced.
The same could be said, we argue, of many putative “research programmes” in the field.
Consider Vasquez’s (1997, 903) attempt to delineate a “research programme” on balance-of-
power theory. The “hard core” of the research programme? The proposition that states balance
rather than bandwagon under conditions of anarchy. But this should not be regarded as a “hard
core” assumption any more than “objects fall to the ground when dropped” should be regarded as
a “hard core” assumption of the Newtonian research programme. Rather, both empirical
statements comprise auxiliary hypotheses derived from “hard cores” having to do with the nature
of empirical inquiry and the specific character of the phenomena under investigation.
“Balancing”—like “falling”—is a consequence of the application of broader assumptions, not an
assumption itself (Elman and Elman 1997, 925). There is no need to invoke second-order criteria
to resolve the dispute about whether international systems tend towards balanced power over
time.
The “isms”
Consider three other putative “hard core” assumptions often thought to generate local
incommensurabilities between the “isms”—realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, etc.—
and therefore requiring us to evaluate these theoretical aggregates as cohesive units vis-à-vis one
another, and to utilize second-order criteria in order to do so. These assumptions include claims
about the primary actors in world politics, about the decision-making logic followed by
individual people, and about the malleability of social reality.
Primary actors. On one side of this issue stand the state-centrists who argue that the legal
structure of sovereignty and the concentration of destructive capacity in the hands of state
governments mean that states remain the most important actors on the world stage at the present
time. This position is usually associated with realism (Forde 1995, 144; Harvey 1999, 866; Waltz
1979, 158-159), but state-centrism can also be found in neoliberal-institutional theory (Baldwin
1993; Lake 1996) and some variants of constructivism (Wendt 1992, 424; Wendt 1999). On the
other side stand those scholars whose work departs from a different set of assumptions: the
primacy of individuals and private social groups (Moravcsik 1997, 516-517), the influence of
international organizations (Finnemore 1996) and transnational social movements (Keck and
Sikkink 1998), and the importance of firms and other economic actors (Keohane and Milner
1996).
But claims such as “states are the primary actors in world politics” (Keohane and Martin
2003, 73) and that “the fundamental actors in international politics are rational individuals and
private groups” (Moravcsik 1997, 161) contain no special philosophical content of the kind
associated with any of Kuhn’s three forms of incommensurability—at least so long as “primary
actors” and “fundamental actors” are defined in an empirically testable way. Doing so would
simply require a precise operational definition of “primary actor” so that we could gather the
appropriate data (Vasquez 1998, 188).
Decision-making logics. Scholars sometimes treat the distinction between “logics of
consequences” and “logics of appropriateness” as the fundamental dividing line between
“rationalists” and “constructivists” (Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998, 679-680; Krasner
1999). Rationalists, particularly in the rational-choice camp, adopt models of decision-making
that stress logics of consequence: they hold that “most social action can be explained by goal-
oriented action on the part of actors… as opposed being motivated by habit, tradition, or social
appropriateness” (MacDonald 2003, 553). Constructivists, for their part, stress logics of
appropriateness: they view social action as governed by the rules, roles, and norms in which an
agent is embedded (e.g., Sending 2002).
At the same time, most constructivists who focus on this distinction also argue that it
does not sharply differentiate constructivists from rationalists. Thomas Risse (2000, 3), for
example, argues that while constructivism and rationalism are “metatheoretical orientations,”
their main point of disagreement is “how far one can push one logic of action to account for
observable practices and which logic dominates a given situation.” Similarly, James March and
Johan Olsen (1998, 952) write that “any particular action probably involves elements” of both
logics; in principle, one ought to be able to investigate the interaction between the two subsets of
voluntaristic decision-making.
Not only do we confront no translation problems, but we are looking at the same
linguistic-taxonomic architecture: the “logic of consequences” and the “logic of
appropriateness”, at least as conceptualized in this debate, 8 comprise partial specifications of a
single approach to the explanation of social action: as rooted in the subjective beliefs of
individuals, whether those beliefs stem from institutionalized norms or economic preferences.
The ontology of social life. Many argue that constructivists embrace a distinctive
ontology then scholars associated with other “paradigms.” Constructivists view international
politics through the prism of the “mutual constitution” of agents and structures, the
intersubjective character of both, and of the significance of social facts. Theorists often contrast
these ontological commitments with, for instance, realism’s putative denial of agent-structure
mutual constitution, its materialist ontology, and its conflation of social facts with objective
conditions (e.g., Dessler 1989; Wendt 1992).

8
As we argue below, social-choice theory may comprise a research programme due to the way it
embeds “logics of consequences” in a broader context of inquiry.

Many realists, however, accept the ontological co-constitution of agents and structures
but disagree with constructivists about how to cash this out analytically. Realists claims about
the causal priority of military power does not, in fact, imply a rigidly materialist ontology. And,
for many realists, anarchy amounts to a social fact. Realists often differ with constructivists,
rather, over both the plasticity of anarchical structures and whether anarchical environments
produce similar dynamics across time and space (e.g., Goddard and Nexon 2005; Sterling-Folker
2002).
Indeed, constructivism, at its heart, involves the claim that some phenomenon “X need
not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the
nature of things; it is not inevitable” (Hacking 1999, 6). With respect to any particular
international-political phenomena—German foreign policy, sovereignty, the ban of landmines,
the inevitability of certain consequences associated with anarchy—constructivist arguments
therefore amount to empirical wagers (e.g., Banchoff 1999; Price 1998). Most international-
relations theories involve some level of commitment to the social construction of world politics.
Almost no theorist believes that significant international political outcomes reflect the inevitable
consequence of the “nature of things”—such as the laws of physics or genetic determinism—
rather than the result of historical and agentic contingency (Guzzini 2000). Constructivist claims
concern the degree of social and historical contingency vis-à-vis specific arguments advanced in
the other “paradigms.” In this sense, although characterized by quite significant disagreements,
many constructivist and realist theories are commensurable and comparable.

Better Candidates
There are, however, better candidates for differentiating between approaches in ways that
produce local incommensurabilities. Robert Cox’s (1996) distinction between “problem-solving”
and “critical” approaches to the study of world politics—and, implicitly, between two different
kinds of knowledge about world politics that one might produce—represents something close to
a genuinely paradigmatic division. Similarly, distinctions between “scientific” and
“traditionalist” approaches to the production of knowledge (Kratochwil 2006; Vasquez 1998, 39-
41) generate sufficiently robust gaps between perspectives that something like MSRP might be
called for. The package of assumptions associated with rational choice theory also looks almost
paradigmatic, since it is not merely a substantive assumption about how people make decisions
but a comprehensive approach to investigating social life featuring such notions as “off-the-path-
equilibria” and a commitment to reconciling observed behavior with a presumption of rationality
(Hardin 1995; MacDonald 2003).
Notice, however, three things about these candidates. First of all, many of their disputes
revolve around epistemological questions about “how to do science” rather than centering on
substantive concerns.9 While this makes them better candidates for classification as paradigms or
research programmes, it takes them further away from the empirical content of most of the actual
scholarship in the field: few if any of us spend much of our time doing work designed to advance
the epistemological projects of “problem-solving theory” or “traditionalism,” and these divisions

9
It is important to regard these as debates about how to do “science,” and not simply regard any
particular intervention as an unproblematic application of the “principles of philosophy of
science” (Vasquez 1993, 43) to the subject-matter of world politics. It is precisely the character
and meaning of “social science” that is at issue in the distinctions that rise to the level of a local
incommensurabilities in international-relations theory.

only inform our substantive work obliquely. Second, they cut across our putative paradigms and
research programmes: it is easy to find adherents of each of these approaches in any of the
“isms,” to say nothing of the schools of thought revolving around specific empirical puzzles.
There are rational-choice and non-rational-choice realists and liberals (Walt 1999); likewise,
there are problem-solving and critical-theoretic constructivists (Price and Reus-Smit 1998).
Finally, the terms of these distinctions and debates go well beyond those investigated by
Kuhn and Lakatos. For all the seriousness and importance of the distinctions between the various
paradigms and research programmes disclosed by Kuhn and Lakatos, they could implicitly rely
on the notion that all of the natural scientists whose work they discussed were united in an
overarching goal: to increase knowledge of a world presumptively independent of their
awareness of it (Jackson 2008). But the debates within international-relations theory that come
closest to being paradigmatic in character often revolve around precisely this presumption,
raising further doubts about the utility of Kuhnian or Lakatosian assumptions for the evaluation
and adjudication of debates in the field.
The Costs of Misapplication
The terminology of “paradigms” and “research programmes” produces a number of
deleterious effects in the field. It implies that we need to appeal to criteria of the kind found in
MSRP in order to adjudicate disputes that require no such procedures. In order to do so, we
spend a great deal of time specifying the “boundaries” of putative research programmes and, in
effect, unfairly and misleadingly holding scholars accountable for the status of theories they
often view as rivals to their own.10
Perhaps the most well-known instance of this kind of boundary-demarcation occurs in the
debates surrounding “realism” in international-relations theory. The proliferation of countless
lists of the “core commitments” of a realist “paradigm”—by adherents and critics alike—shifts
the focus of scholarship away from any actual investigation of whether these commitments give
us meaningful leverage on the phenomenal world, and instead promotes endless border
skirmishes about who is and is not a realist (Legro and Moravcsik 1999), whether predictions of
balancing are central to the “realist paradigm” (Vasquez 1998, 261-265), and so forth. Such
debates and demarcations not only distract us from the actual study of world politics, but also
harm disputes over international-relations theory by solidifying stances that ought to remain open
to debate and discussion.
Besides the general problems associated with any attempt to delineate the principles of a
paradigm or research programme contemporaneously rather than retrospectively, a further issue
crops up in the misapplication of Kuhnian and Lakatosian language to debates in the field: the
conflation of specific causal factors and mechanisms with a particular, presumptively

10
Thus, for example, Vasquez (2003, 108) criticizes the realist “paradigm” for being at risk of
becoming “so broad and” containing “so many contradictory predictions” that it “becomes
impossible to falsify.” He then argues that “a critique of balancing cannot logically imply that
other parts of the realist and neorealist research agendas are degenerating or inadequate. These
other research programmes must be appraised separately and by the criteria most appropriate
them.” But one does not falsify a paradigm, one falsifies a specific hypothesis. And if various
realist “research traditions” comprise different units of analysis for the purposes of MSRP, then
realism writ large itself cannot plausibly be described as a paradigm or research programme.
autonomous, school of thought about world politics. Hence “balancing” and “threatening to use
force” become markers of a realist approach, while discussion of markets and profit are
sometimes annexed to (neo)liberalism.
But there is nothing inherently realist about a mechanism like “balancing,” which, as
recent scholarship demonstrates, self-identified realists actually borrowed from republican and
liberal thought (Boucoyannis 2007; Deudney 2006). One need not, moreover, be a liberal to
acknowledge that actors sometimes reach Pareto-improving compromises, and one need not be a
constructivist to take public diplomacy or symbolic language seriously. Indeed, it is only because
of the politics of knowledge in the discipline—a politics supported by the misuse of Kuhnian and
Lakatosian terminology—that we argue over whether scholars have violated their supposedly all-
important allegiance to their theoretical aggregates if they combine variables and mechanisms
associated with different schools of thought. It is one thing to insist on logical and analytical
coherence, or to identify and label intellectual communities in the field, but another entirely to
approach international-relations scholarship as a form of identity politics.
From Paradigms to Ideal Types
Some may read our earlier arguments as a call for dispensing with theoretical aggregates
entirely. But we believe that rejecting the language of Kuhnian paradigms and Lakatosian
research programmes does not require an abandonment of organizing the discipline into “schools
of thought” or other aggregates. International Relations remains an “eclectic discipline”
encompassing a variety of different methods, methodologies, and areas of study (Katzenstein,
Keohane, and Krasner 1998, 646).

Maps of the intellectual contours of a scholarly discipline serve several functions, not the
least of which is that they enable scholars to situate themselves and their work vis-à-vis
important conceptual disagreements and theoretical debates (Abbott 2001, 10-14). Casting the
field in terms of major contending approaches allows individual scholars to discuss their findings
with respect to broadly common questions of concern. It also serves important pedagogical
functions. For better or worse, it is difficult to make sense of the last few decades of
international-relations scholarship without teaching the “isms.”
International-relations scholarship needs such common questions, we submit, for two
reasons. First, the parameters of the field are enormous, and only likely to grow. Second,
growing methodological diversity constantly threatens to fragment the field. Thus, if we are to
have what Yosef Lapid (2003) calls “engaged pluralism,” we need some common points of
contention.11 In this respects, one of the chief virtues of dividing the field into camps such as
“realism,” “liberalism,” and “constructivism” is that it focuses us on “big questions” about
international-political processes, such as the relative importance of traditional power politics in
international relations. These kinds of issues are substantive; they are amenable to many different
tools of social-scientific inquiry.
11
We agree that pluralism is not an intrinsic good, i.e., that it is not a license for “anything goes”
and “indiscriminate tolerance.” Yet the existence of disciplinary pluralism, combined with a
recognition that all knowledge is inflected by theoretical perspectives, explains the attractiveness
of “paradigm” and “research programme” language. See Kratochwil (2003, 126).

Ideal Typification of Disciplinary Debates
For inspiration and guidance we turn to the remarkable methodological essay that Max
Weber (1999) wrote a in which he confronted a situation not unlike the one facing the field of
international relations at present: a diversity of objects of inquiry, and a diversity of analytical
approaches to those objects. Under such conditions, was it even possible advocate for the
specificity of social-scientific knowledge? Was there any difference between social-scientific
scholarship and the anything-goes anarchy of pure perspectivism? Weber strongly believed that
there was such a difference, and articulated a multifaceted solution designed to both preserve
diversity and rigor (Ringer 2004, 77-79).
The most relevant portion of Weber’s discussion for our purposes is the notion of the
“ideal-type.” Every scholarly presentation of empirical facts, Weber (1999, 170) argues, depends
on “special and ‘one-sided’ points of view, according to which—explicitly or tacitly, consciously
or unconsciously—they are selected, analyzed, and representationally organized as an object of
research.” Scholars operate with ideal-typical constructs, rather than with presuppositionless
descriptions. Researchers construct ideal types in order to create an idealization of a
phenomenon’s characteristics that can then be compared against other, related ideal typifications.
Ideal types will never accurately or exhaustively describe the concrete manifestations of a
specific phenomenon, but they do provide benchmarks for the comparison of real phenomena.
Ideal-typical maps, in other words, consist of asymptotic limits within which actual
phenomena reside. A political entity, institution, or other entity can occupy any point in the field
defined by ideal types. A concrete empirical object never occupies the ideal-typical position
itself, but the properties, dynamics, and relation to other objects can be parsed with reference to
how an object combines or depart from aspects of relevant ideal types. Although Weber himself
used ideal-typification as a procedure for interrogating social and cultural relations, there is no
reason why it cannot be applied to the orientations of disciplines themselves. Scholars regularly
treat the field itself as an object of empirical investigation. They assess the rise and fall of
approaches to international politics; the relative influence of journals, departments, and scholars;
trends in pedagogy; and so forth. In doing so, they make use of all sorts of typologies—whether
ideal-typical or categorical in nature—many of which involve “realism,” liberalism,”
“constructivism,” and other camps within the field.
An ideal-typical approach to the field would flesh out implicit organizing principles of
existing scholarly debates by distilling them to their essential characteristics. Ideal-typical maps
of the field never describe debates and controversies as “they really are,” but instead utilize a
relatively spare set of concepts to locate actual debates and controversies with respect to the
organizing principles tacitly contained within those debates and controversies. These organizing
principles are not ontologically and epistemologically exclusive of one another; rather, they are
more like wagers about how the world is put together—wagers that can give rise to different
sorts of empirical investigations, including ones driven by differing conceptual, observational,
and methodological orientations. The empirical challenge is to disclose a set of wagers animating
debates in the field; we generate these principles though a process of self-consciously
teleological reasoning, starting with existing schools and approaches and then pressing their
logic as far as possible in order to reach an purified, abstracted version of the approach.
Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism Reconsidered
We focus on ideal-typifying the relationship between realism, liberalism, and
constructivism for the simple reason that these camps currently predominate in mainstream
discussions of the field in the United States (Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak 2005). We also
believe that, properly understood, these positions capture a great deal of surplus argument in
contemporary debates stretching beyond American shores, but that is something best resolved
through further evaluation. Our basic argument is this: “realism,” “liberalism,” and
“constructivism” can be recast as ideal-typical positions on two debates of long-standing
significance to the study of world politics: first, the degree to which anarchy operates as a fixed
constraints upon actors; and second, the degree to which power politics can be transcended in
political interactions (see Figure 1). Understood in this way, the camps cease to be concrete
containers for theorists and theories; they represent wagers about world politics towards which
particular pieces of empirical research can be oriented.

Figure 1: Ideal-Typical Positions in the Field of International Relations
Many consider specific answers to these questions to be among the core claims of realism
(e.g., Schweller and Wohlforth 2000, 60). However, the two dimensions are usually collapsed in
practice, since structural realists (and many so-called “neo-classical realists”) consider anarchy to
be the primary reason, or at least one of the major reasons, why power cannot be transcended in
international politics. Disaggregating them helps make sense of the different wagers associated
with, for instance, neorealism and neoliberalism. It also elucidates emerging terms of debate
between positions a growing number of scholars identify as “realist” constructivism and “liberal”
constructivism (e.g., Barkin 2003). Finally, it does so without requiring that any particular study
or argument falls within a self-contained paradigm or research tradition.
Anarchy as parametric constraint
The concept of anarchy—the absence of a common authority to make and enforce rules
—has long been central to the discipline of international relations. One can plausibly trace the
development of “international theory” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to attempts to
understand what differentiates relations between sovereigns from relations within states; one of
the most enduring solutions has been to associate the former with the “state of nature” that exists
in the absence of a sovereign authority (Hobbes [1651] 1951; Locke 1960; Tuck 1999). The
assumption that anarchy leads to different forms of interaction than those found in other political
contexts provides the central justification for international relations as a distinctive discipline
(Schmidt 1998).
The claim that anarchy operates as a necessary constraint on actors in international
politics is most closely associated with realism (e.g., Snyder 2002). Waltz (1979) forcefully
articulates this position: that anarchy has a spare set of inexorable consequences for patterns of
relations in the international system: self-help, sensitivity to relative power, the lack of a robust
division of labor between actors, and the formation of recurrent balancing equilibria. Many of the
major disagreements within contemporary realism hinge on what the precise implications of
anarchy are for state-level and systemic outcomes. Defensive realists argue that anarchy inclines
states to privilege security over other considerations, offensive realists argue that anarchy
inclines states to maximize power and hegemonic-order theorists see recurrent concentrations of
power as the normal condition of anarchical orders (e.g., Gilpin 1981; Mearsheimer 2001) Some
realists also argue that domestic politics and state interests lead to greater variation in
international outcomes than many structural realists do, but they agree that anarchy strongly
conditions the range of state behavior. States that ignore the implications of anarchy do so at
their peril (Rose 1998).
None of these realists, of course, hold that anarchy overdetermines unit behavior. Even
structurally-inclined offensive realists, for example, adopt positions somewhere short of the
northern limit. Thus, many forms of contemporary liberalism also operate in the same general
domain. Neoliberal institutionalists, for example, also agree that anarchy is a relatively fixed
constraint with crucial consequences for state interaction. However, they contend that the range
of possible patterns of behavior under anarchy includes far more forms of cooperation than
realists suppose, and that such cooperation is more durable than realists admit (e.g., Baldwin
1993, 4-5). As Moravcsik (1997, 536) argues, neoliberal “institutionalism takes state preferences
as fixed or exogenous, seeks to explain state policy as a function of variation in the geopolitical
environment…and focuses on the ways in which anarchy leads to suboptimal outcomes.”
Those with a more constructivist orientation towards anarchy, however, view it rather
differently. Some argue that anarchy is an “empty structure.” In Wendt’s (1992) phrase, “anarchy
is what states make of it”: structural variations in the culture of anarchy give rise to different
logics and dynamics. Others disagree with the proposition that anarchy is, or ought to be treated
as if it were, fixed. Anarchy describes a particular, but not necessary, social formation that can be
transformed through norms, rules, and processes of agent-structure co-constitution. Indeed, some
kind of orientation towards this position cuts across most forms of constructivist scholarship,
whether critical, post-structural, or mainstream (e.g., Dessler 1989; Onuf 1989).
The status of anarchy as a focal point for ideal-typical disputes in the field follows from
an examination of disciplinary practice—for example, a lot of what realists and constructivists
argue concerns the degree to which anarchy is a fixed constraint. It also follows from an exercise
of ideal-typical reasoning. As we argued above, all (or, at least, most) political phenomena are, in
a trivial sense, “socially constructed.” At one extreme lies the claim that anarchy produces a
certain logic approximating a natural necessity. At the other, the denial that there is anything
natural or necessary about claims associated with anarchy.
Power and its transcendence
The second “big question” in the study of international relations concerns the degree to
which power can be transcended, or tamed, in world politics. The dispute about whether or not
power can be overcome in international relations was the primary marker of the so-called “first
debate,” and can be traced back at least to Machiavelli’s (1994) criticism of Christian ethical
interpretations of political processes
Realists adopt a relatively straightforward position on this point: power is the ultima
ratio of international relations. Attempts to limit the importance of power and capabilities in
world politics through law, institutions, or regimes may very well prove counterproductive to
state interests and the goal of generally peaceful interstate relations. To the extent that regimes,
law, and institutions are controlling in international politics, that is because they are sustained
and enforced by hegemons or a temporary confluence of interests among powerful states (e.g.,
Krasner 1999).
Liberals, for their part, argue that it is possible to establish international cooperation,
institutions, and regimes that limit the salience of power in world politics (e.g., Keohane 2001;
Moravcsik 1998). Indeed, one of the core wagers of philosophical liberalism is that the proper
design of governing institutions, whether domestically or internationally, can restrict arbitrary
power such that actors are free to pursue their interests and values (see, e.g., Johnston 1994).
No actual self-described “realist” or “liberal” (at least whom we are aware of) actually
believes that power is the only thing that matters or that power can ever be eliminated from
international politics, respectively. These represent, again, ideal-typical positions towards which
the two “camps” orient themselves in their debates. The top position is “realist” because it
combines the wager that power cannot be tamed with the wager that anarchy operates as a fixed
constraint on actors. The right-hand position is “liberal” because it combines the wager that
power can be transcended with wagers about inescapable consequences of politics in the “state of
nature.” In this ideal-typical view, anarchy can be overcome through a process of creating more
robust international institutions, but either only from within the constraints it imposes in the first
place or through transformation away from anarchy through various forms of interdependency
(e.g., Keohane and Nye 1989; Moravcsik 1997).
This axis maps onto contemporary constructivism in rather interesting ways. It creates a
lower corner we call “liberal-constructivist” and a left-hand corner we call “realist-
constructivist.” The ideal-typical liberal-constructivist wager is that the right distribution of
norms, identities, discourses, and rules can limit the importance of power politics. The ideal-
typical realist-constructivist wager, in contrast, is that the lack of determinate consequences
associated with anarchy does not limit the importance of power politics, because power itself is
productive or generative of social and political relations (Barnett and Duvall 2005). As we slide
“northwest” from the liberal-constructivist intersection we might also find claims that anarchy
lacks determinative effects, but that particular configurations of anarchy are insufficiently plastic
to allow actors to easily reduce the salience of power politics—a skepticism towards
emancipatory projects similar to that found within the English-School tradition (cf. Dunne 1998).
Indeed, whether in the form of Onuf’s emphasis on how agents make rules in order to
govern themselves, or Adler’s arguments about how “cognitive evolution” can produce a more
just and equitable world order, or in Keck and Sikkink’s discussion of how transnational social
movements can “civilize” world politics by enforcing human rights norms against recalcitrant
state leaders, one can find a liberal (or “progressive”) orientation towards the question of power
politics (Adler 1997; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Onuf 1989). In an early programmatic statement,
Wendt (1992) called for an alliance between “strong liberals” and constructivists on the precise
grounds of their shared rejection of the realist argument that self-help behavior was inevitable.
Other-regarding behavior can pave the way for a different way of behaving in inter-state
relations, effectively transcending power and coercion in favor of something more cooperative
(Wendt 1999, 359-360).
An increasingly liberal-constructivist position highlights how the diffusion of the right
norms and identities can orient states away from power-political concerns (Checkel 1998; Flynn
and Farrell 1999; Tannenwald 1999). It focuses on the ability of principled transnational
movements and interest groups to produce normative environments that privilege values over
power. The recent turn towards Jürgen Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality is
consistent with the liberal-constructivist impulse; it holds that, to the degree that contextual
factors (such as institutional design) approximate Habermas’ “ideal speech condition,” coercive
power can be displaced from interactions in world politics (e.g., Risse 2000).
None of the authors cited in the preceding paragraph would argue that power, and power
politics in particular, can ever be completely banished from international relations. Yet within
constructivism we find disagreement about the relative “pull” of the two ideal-typical poles.
Constructivists agree on the historical and social contingency of social facts and international-
political outcomes, but they come to different conclusions over the implications of this
contingency for the plasticity of power politics. A significant part of the disagreement between,
on the one hand, “post-structural” and “critical” constructivists and, on the other, “modernist” or
“liberal” constructivists turns on precisely this point (e.g., Bially Mattern 2004; Price and Reus-
Smit 1998). But an exclusive focus on the intra-constructivist dimension of this debate obscures
how it situates many self-identified constructivists in a similar domain to self-identified realists.

Conclusions
We agree that observations are theory-laden, that translation problems often operate
across the technical language of intellectual communities and their theories, and that some of
these problems may rise to the level of local incommensurabilities. But none of these
disagreements correlate with the boundaries of many of the aggregates we refer to as
“paradigms” and “research programmes.” Indeed, as we have seen, trying to turn “realism” and
“constructivism,” for example, into “paradigms” or “research programmes” demonstrates why
Lakatosian criteria are best suited to the retrospective, rational reconstruction of the history of
science: only after the fact can we make clear determinations about the content of a particular
research programme. Thus, at the very least, we confront no persuasive rationale for appealing
to MSRP to evaluate the status of the “isms.”
Recasting the “isms” as ideal-typical limits within which actual scholarship resides
captures many of the benefits of mapping disciplines, but avoids the costs of attempting to
compress various scholars and theories into “paradigms” or “research programmes.” In
particular, it decouples variables, processes, and mechanisms from the putative boundaries of
theoretical aggregates. A “paradigmatic” approach often leads to arguments about, for example,
whether or not integrating domestic political culture into analysis of how states respond to power
transition violates “realist assumptions” and affirms “constructivism.” Our approach implies a
focus on how the implications of the theory, not its inherent architecture, shape our assessment
of value-commitments associated with realism, liberalism, and so forth. All of this allows for
genuine “analytic eclecticism” insofar as scholars are free to interrogate and combine particular
mechanisms, processes, variables, and methodologies—subject to the constraints of logical and

analytical consistency rather than concerns about the coherence of particular “paradigms” (cf.
Katzenstein and Okarawa 2001/2002; Katzenstein and Sil 2008).
Other scholars may have, or implicitly operate with, different ideal-typical maps. A
continental European map of the discipline might, for example, look rather different than what
we propose. The existence of multiple, competing ideal-typical maps may actually be desirable,
inasmuch as the only scientific way to evaluate the outcome of an ideal-typical procedure is to
see how much insight into a empirical phenomenon it generates. Alternative ideal-typifications
help to make clear precisely what the strengths and weaknesses of each analytical “cut” into
reality are, and would help with what must ultimately be the pragmatic evaluation of diverse
perspectives.
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Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson

School of International Service

Department of Government and School of Foreign Service

Revised and Resubmitted Version of MS 20070308-637-2, International Studies Quarterly

Forthcoming, December 2009

divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.”

Although most international-relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn’s account of

“progressive” or “degenerative” character of various theories and approaches in the field.

broader approaches to world politics (such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism)

deserve the label of “paradigms” or “research programmes.” As an alternative, we

propose mapping the field through Weberian techniques of ideal-typification.

International Studies Quarterly, a surprising number of anonymous reviewers, J. Samuel

also participants at panels at the 5th Annual Pan-European Conference on International

Relations, the International Studies Association, and a conference on “Realist

Constructivism” sponsored by the Mortara Center for International Studies at

Georgetown University. We are particularly grateful to Michael D. Gordin and Rom

chance on this manuscript made its publication possible.

international-relations theory, at least in the United States, as a three-cornered fight between

programmes” such as analysis of the “democratic peace” (Ray 2003), “balance-of-power

same sort of content that Kuhn described as sources of incommensurability.

“research programmes” distorts dialogue and debate in the field.

as ideal-typifications of core wagers—sometimes implicit, other times explicit—about the nature

Of Paradigms and Research Programmes

In this section, we argue against designating many theoretical aggregates in international-

relations scholarship as Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” First, the

specific histories of the natural sciences—and sometimes mathematics—supply the empirical

of international-relations scholarship, it has not allowed us to manipulate our environment in

as physics or chemistry. Therefore we confront no “puzzle” of scientific progress of the kind

Kuhn and Lakatos assume (cf. Chernoff 2002; Chernoff 2007).1

In consequence, we must appeal to Lakatos’ Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

paradigms or research programmes.

 Most putative “research programmes,” such as power-transition theory and

democratic-peace theory, are commensurable and comparable.

such as realist and liberal theories utilizing rational-choice analytics, are

commensurable and comparable.

 The most plausible sources of incommensurability in the field involve much

larger debates about how to pursue social-scientific knowledge, complexes of

theoretical terms, and so forth; these sources of incommensurability are

orthogonally related to the “isms.”

we need not appeal to second-order criteria to resolve many existing “inter-paradigmatic”

debates in the international-relations theory.

specifically the interruption of periods of “normal science” by “scientific revolutions” consisting

of “those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in

community and, given the right conditions, paradigmatic change.

incommensurable content in paradigmatic cores precludes the deductibility of pre-revolutionary

theories from post-revolutionary ones (Shapere 1964, 389). A post-revolutionary theory

(Biaoligi 1993, 211; see also Wight 1996, 296).

science. Without paradigmatic incommensurability, major changes in scientific knowledge

would simply be “breakthroughs” that progressively improved upon, or discarded, earlier

division between moments of “normal science”—empirical work within a paradigm—and

Kuhn initially offered three sources of paradigmatic incommensurability, which Kitcher

(1982, 690) terms “conceptual incommensurability,” “observational incommensurability,” and

Newtonian physics (Sankey 1993, 762; Szumilewicz 1977, 346).

“protagonists” in an inter-paradigmatic debate “could formulate their rival claims in a common

working in different paradigms (See also Meiland 1974, 183-184).

Kuhn’s understanding of scientific change, as well as on his formulation of incommensurability.

incommensurability and comparability. Many read Kuhn as arguing that incommensurability

(Scheffler 1982, 84; also Shapere 1964).