ABSTRACT
Setting out to compare terms such as constructivism, as used in the field of International Relations (IR), and pragmatism presents a number of difficulties: the terms mean different things to different scholars, including those identifying themselves by either label. For our purposes, pragmatism is a movement dominated by three figures – C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey – who worked out a more or less coherent position on important and continuing philosophical issues and, in doing so, had a substantial impact on social and legal theory. Some movements have leaders who articulate goals, issue manifestos and advance programmes. Other movements emerge less self-consciously as a reaction or even a revolt against prevailing assumptions and practices. Pragmatism was a movement of the latter sort – an integral feature of the ‘revolt against formalism’ in American social thought (White 1957). In Europe, Henri Bergson’s intuitionist philosophy and Emile Durkheim’s functionalist social theory joined in this revolt, as did that extraordinary upheaval in art, architecture and literature at the turn of the twentieth century, commonly called ‘modernism’. Few scholars in the field of IR have considered the impact of modernism
on the way they think (but see Onuf 1989: ch. 7), no doubt in part because the many linked revolts from the turn of the century subsided before the field took shape. In this case, at least, appearances are deceiving. Formal analysis has reasserted itself in philosophy and social theory, over the decades drawing sustenance from positivist science. Over those same decades, resistance continued as antiformalist movements combined and permutated, waxed and waned. Most constructivists do not see themselves as latter-day participants in an
ongoing revolt. Instead, they tend rather to construe their movement as a practical response to an unprecedented struggle between modern formalists and postmodern antifoundationalists. In this view, constructivism offers a ‘middle ground’ (Adler 2005: ch. 4), a via media between formal theory’s unduly restrictive view of admissible knowledge and the sweeping postmodern rejection of ‘the modern project’. In our view, constructivism is hardly a novel response to an unprecedented situation, because pragmatism and modernism had already offered an alternative to formalism without
rejecting the possibility of reliable knowledge. Indeed, constructivism is a third way (or bridge; cf. Onuf 1989: ch. 1) because it is capable of assimilating some aspects of the postmodern critique of modern epistemology without having to disavow a century of discussion about form and function, structure and process, things and their relations. Constructivism represents an ontological turn, embracing as it does an antiformalist heritage that draws attention to function and process, yet continuing to be concerned with the form things take. Pragmatism is, or should be, considered an integral part of constructivism’s
antiformalist heritage. Yet constructivists reveal at best a casual familiarity with pragmatism’s philosophical premises and perennial concerns.1 They are somewhat better in addressing the social and legal theory that pragmatism inspired, but mostly as a matter of selective appropriation (considerWendt 1999: 327-35 on symbolic interaction). With pragmatism’s fall from philosophical fashion so many decades ago, it could hardly be otherwise. As this volume attests, the recent reaction against analytical philosophy
and renewed interest in pragmatism in many fields of study has attracted some attention in IR. Moreover, some constructivists are beginning to realize they have been pragmatists all along – if by pragmatism we mean an antiformalist sensibility emphasizing complexity, intersubjectivity and contingency in social relations. Implied in this position, however, is also a resistance to systematic, conceptually rigorous scholarship: to be systematic is to succumb to formalism. We reject this implicit claim. As we hope to make clear, pragmatist philosophy had systematic elements from the beginning, and so does legal theory influenced by pragmatism. Furthermore, we firmly believe that constructivism offers a framework subject to systematic development. The constructivist framework to which we subscribe emphasizes language,
rules and rule in the social construction of reality. As such, it is indebted to the revolt in the philosophy of language now widely referred to as ‘the linguistic turn’ (Rorty 1967) – an episode in the antiformalist revolt that came too late to affect the classical pragmatists.2 Language depends on rules, and linguistic philosophers have given the formal properties of rules their full attention. This has never been the case with pragmatist philosophers and their followers in social theory, despite the obvious relevance of rules to concrete social practices. Legal theorists with pragmatist inclinations saw rules as provisional reflections of ongoing social processes. Emphasizing the fluidity of social context, they took little interest in the stable arrangements of rules through which some people gain, sustain and justify control over others. Indeed, none of the pragmatists and few of their followers have ever shown an interest in the conditions of rule. We argue that rule-oriented constructivism shares with pragmatism a
concern with the conditions of knowledge underlying social experience, and that it reaches similar conclusions. Yet pragmatism is a philosophical position and not a social theory. Insofar as pragmatism fosters social theory, the
result is incomplete because major pragmatist thinkers gave so little attention to normative phenomena as such. Nevertheless, pragmatists offered important guidance on the vexing question of the relation between facts and values, is and ought, the domain of the empirical and the domain of the normative. In effect, they ignored the epistemological puzzle that David Hume made famous (Hume 1739: 469). Instead, they treated the fact-value distinction as a messy ontological condition with practical (methodological) implications. Rule-oriented constructivism fulfils the social theoretical potential of pragmatism, not as a normative theory (which constructivism expressly is not), but as a framework anchored in a pragmatic understanding of the conditions of knowledge and a pragmatic awareness that values are facts in themselves, and yet values always suffuse those things and relations we hold to be facts. In the first section of this chapter, we consider how pragmatists treated the
conditions of knowledge. Turning from epistemology to pragmatist ontology, we assess philosophical realism’s shortcomings as an alternative ontology, before we develop the pragmatist position on facts and values. As we have remarked, the classical pragmatists had little to say about rules. Pragmatism’s expositors in legal theory, the legal realists (whose realism is not be confused with philosophical realism or, for that matter, with political realism) inherited the pragmatists’ chariness about rules and rule-talk. Seeking an alternative to formal legal theory, they had much to say about legal processes. In the second section, we ask if this sort of antiformalist scepticism goes too far, and we demonstrate that the constructivism we prefer offers a balance between rules as such and the processes neglected by formal legal theories. In the final section, we turn to the conditions of rule. Here again, the
classical pragmatists had little to say. A good deal more is to be inferred from legal realism, but only as it came to be developed systematically in the field of international law. However incongruously, the so-called New Haven School associated with Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell combines rulescepticism and a normative commitment to world public order. We conclude by suggesting that rule-oriented constructivism complements New Haven’s pragmatic emphasis on context and process, and clarifies the conception of rule implicit in claims about world public order.
