ABSTRACT
Rosenau’s new science of comparative FPA sought to overcome the prevalent genre of diplo-
matic histories and ideographic narratives of specific foreign policy episodes of great powers.
Here, foreign policy ‘undertakings’, rather than ‘decisions’ or ‘policies’, were the explananda
(Rosenau, 1980, pp. 60-61), the method deployed relied on cross-national comparisons
(Rosenau, 1968), and the explanans was identified as any variable that correlated with these
‘undertakings’. These correlations, formalised as testable and generalisable propositions,
would accumulate and generate over time a general theory of foreign policy allowing thematching
of certain types of states with certain types of policies in given issue areas. This behaviouralistic
taxonomy, however, ultimately denied agency to actors in the foreign policy process by reducing
their behaviour to a given combination of pre-existing variables. Contrasting with this neo-posi-
tivistic behaviouralism, an alternative strand in FPA pursued the subjective path by mapping the
cognitive-psychological attributes and psycho-biographical dispositions of foreign policy-makers
(Hermann, 1980;Holsti, 1976; Jervis, 1968).While this requires seeing theworld through the eyes
of agents, rather than admitting impersonal and systemic forces, institutional mediations, or dom-
estic policy pressures, it reduced the complexities of the foreign policy process to individual-sub-
jective dispositions that govern acts of foreign policy-making.
