9 - Writing Large (2000)

Summary

[M]ost students in the international field have not treated their subject as local politics writ large.

James Rosenau

Students in the international field see Turbulence in World Politics as a dramatic shift in James Rosenau's thinking about world politics, brought on by dramatic changes in the world of politics. Rosenau thinks about politics in dramatic terms. He has even written a publicly performed play. Despite decades of work in which he has developed and tested his ideas in the manner of normal science, Rosenau has proven himself better attuned to the dramas of the last few years than any other major figure in the field.

It does not do, however, to conclude that Rosenau has abandoned a magnificent body of work, or repudiated its conceptual underpinnings, in favour of a new ‘turbulence paradigm’. Even if Rosenau speaks in terms that suggest such a paradigm shift, we ought not to be fooled by his dramatic inclinations. Just before Turbulence in World Politics appeared, Rosenau claimed to be an unrepentant behaviouralist. So he remains [and did so until his death in 2011].

What then in Rosenau's thinking has changed so dramatically? I suggest that changes in the world forced him to formulate, for the first time systematically, the behavioural theory underlying all of his work. How can someone who counts thinking theoretically among his ‘longstanding habits’ not have done so long ago? After all, Rosenau's early study of ‘calculated control’ presents a tightly organized conceptual framework, elements of which occupy an important position in Turbulence in World Politics. Yet by Rosenau's own reckoning, this piece presents no theory: ‘it does not explain why international affairs unfold as they do’. Even with respect to foreign policy, Rosenau claimed to offer nothing more than a ‘pre-theory’. His modesty stems from the conventional positivist assumption that normal science conducted within the terms of an increasingly refined conceptual framework would eventuate in a general theory whose propositions had already passed the test of scientific scrutiny. When the world began to change far more dramatically than existing frameworks seemed to be able to account for, Rosenau was jarred from his theoretical slumber.