ABSTRACT
Having delineated the meaning, attributes and types of Positivism, narrow and broad, after Comte, Leszek Kolakowski, Michael Nicholson, Steve Smith and others, this chapter traces the emergence of liberal-pluralist positivism in IR first to the Second Great Debate in IR (through the Decision-Making Approach, Systems Theory, and Integration Theory of the 1950s and its maturity in Waltzian neorealism in 1979) and its mature resurgence in the Third Great Debate or the interparadigm debate in IR along with (neo)realism and globalism/structuralism, all three of which, according to Smith, worked under the same positivist assumptions, and were indeed ‘three versions of one world, rather than three genuine alternative views of international relations’. After mentioning the contextual and disciplinary factors which facilitated liberal-pluralism’s emergence as manifest in theories of New Regionalism, Interdependence, and Regimes, the chapter shows how in the inconclusiveness of the Third Debate because of its ‘incommensurable paradigms’, in which Marxism’s potential as an alternative image of IR was seen in a new light, Marxism’s spin-offs registered their appearance in political-economic theories of IR, such as schools of Dependency Theory (particularly of the Frankian variety), World Systems Analysis of the Wallersteinian type, and some parts of International Political Economy.
