ABSTRACT
Parts II and III of this book have been concerned to explore approaches to the study of international relations at two different levels of analysis: the unit actor level, and the system level. The two levels, which in this book have been called micro- and macro-international relations, were distinguished by J. David Singer in a famous article, 1 following a study by Kenneth Waltz in which the writings of political philosophers about the causes of war were classified into those who saw it as originating in the nature of mankind, those who believed it to result from the ways in which states were constituted, and those who found its cause in the nature of international society. 2 In his article Singer emphasizes the danger in the two approaches: that the micro-level in concentrating on the reasons why actors behave in the way they do tends to exaggerate their differences, while the system-oriented model tends to produce a ‘black box’ concept 3 of the units and to imply a higher degree of determinism; but he was not concerned to consider the question whether the distinction was a valid one to make. ‘Valid’ in this context refers to the extent to which the field of international relations can be divided conceptually in this way without doing excessive violence to the reality which the study of international relations is concerned to examine.
