ABSTRACT
International Relations (IR) uses history. It does so in the analysis of case studies and coded data sets of wars – yet IR lacks a theory of history on which to ground historical claims. Put bluntly, IR cannot answer the question: ‘how do we know what we think we know about the past?’ This is not to say that all IR historical research is for naught; important and useful historical analysis in IR spans theoretical and paradigmatic traditions, including noted works of realism (Gilpin 1981; Walt 1987, 1996); liberalism (Risse-Kappen 1995; Ikenberry 2000); Marxism (Wallerstein 1991); and constructivism (Finnemore 1996; Hall 1999; Kier 1999; Thomas 2001). But taken as a whole, most IR research is more interested in models and explanations of why things happened, rather than the equally significant issue of how we know about past events. In light of the profusion of historical research in IR but the lack of a theory on which to ground it, this chapter devises a Deweyan pragmatist response to the basic ontological question, ‘What is history?’ and its companion questions, ‘How can we comprehend knowledge of past events?’ ‘Why focus on historical epistemology and ontology?’ If the assumptions about historical knowledge on which IR scholarship is based are found to be flawed, then social scientific explanations that appear to account successfully for historical cases – but cases that are premised on flawed assumptions – might not be as valid as one would like to believe. In the following pages, I begin by reflecting on the claim that IR does, in
fact, have a problem coping with history. Although a Deweyan approach to grounding history is, I argue, a novel one, it hardly represents the first or last word on debates in history. This chapter thus also touches on some of the broader debates in the philosophy of history, including the so-called positivist versus postist wars and their related fallout. In particular, I take seriously the claim that there cannot be only one objectively true narrative that reflects the past in mirror-like fashion. In doing so, I offer a potential way out of the positivist versus postist debates via the pragmatist thought of John Dewey, which creates an intellectually coherent and socially useful response to the problems of historical ontology and epistemology. I argue that Dewey’s theory of knowledge has advantages over other philosophical approaches to
the question of historical knowledge, namely, historical positivism and postmodernism,1 broadly conceived. Dewey’s approach toward history is especially powerful in that it can explain both the social construction of historical knowledge and the fact that, once constructed, knowledge can be grounded on a set of intersubjectively shared norms and practices. To demonstrate preliminarily how a pragmatist approach to history might function in practice, I briefly evaluate a ‘real world’ case, namely some of the recent debates over Israeli history and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
