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Medieval tales: neorealist “science” and the abuse of history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Rodney Bruce Hall  and
Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Rodney Bruce Hall
Affiliation:
candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Affiliation:
Lawrence B. Simon Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
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Extract

Markus Fischer characterizes his recent article in this journal as an “empirical contribution” to the debate among neorealist scholars and those whom, ignoring the diversity of their research interests and theoretical perspectives, he subsumes under the rubric of “critical theorists.” Fischer's piece requires a response because of (1) its tendentious reading of the work of other students of international relations theory and (2) its misuse of history.

Type
Dissent and Debate
Information
International Organization , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , Summer 1993 , pp. 479 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1993

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References

1 Fischer, Markus, “Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 426–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The cited terms appear on pp. 428 and 426, respectively.

2 The quotations are from ibid., pp. 464 and 434, respectively.

3 On this point, see Lustick, Ian, “Political Science, History, and Historiography,” CLIO: Newsletter of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association, forthcoming. Lustick cites pages 443,447, and 454,Google Scholar respectively, of Fischer's article

4 Fischer, , “Feudal Europe, 800–1300,” p. 429Google Scholar.

5 Duby, Georges and Lardreau, Guy, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1980)Google Scholar, here cited in the German translation by Bayer, Wolfram, Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (History and historiography) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982)Google Scholar. In particular, see the first Dialogue, pp. 37ff. On the denial that history can be a science, see p. 55; and on the rejection of logical positivism as a viable epistemology for historical studies, see p. 44 of this work. See also Duby's exemplary study of the shifting interpretations of the historical record of the battle of Bouvines in Duby, Georges, Le Dimanche de Bouvines (The Sunday of Bouvines) (Paris: Gallimard, 1973)Google Scholar. For a “constructivist” discussion of international relations theory, see Wendt, Alexander, “Anarchy is What States Make of It,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 391–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Goff, Jacques Le, Histoire et Memoire (History and recollection) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986)Google Scholar.

7 Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

8 Cantor, Norman, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 140,141, and 142, respectively.

10 Ibid., p. 144.

11 Ibid., pp. 146–47. Joseph Strayer's work is similarly admonished by Cantor for a functionalist bias.

12 Duby, Georges, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 150Google Scholar.

13 For an example of the first problem, see the citation of Elias in Fischer, “Feudal Europe, 800–1300,” footnote 25. Although the quotation is meant to provide support for Fischer's contention that the normative claims of the kings “may have provided them with a modest influence beyond the reach of their arms” (p. 437), page 23 of Elias's book (the page Fischer cites) deals with the differences in the development of the German and French kingdoms and with the reason why centralization persisted longer in the East. Whatever the merits of Elias's argument,. here may be, none of them has anything to do with the issue of ideological support, as Fischer claims. Elias, surprisingly, cites the conditions of anarchy caused by persistent foreign invasions as one reason for the centralization of authority, but he does not do so in order to foster free-riding, fragmentation, or balancing, as we would expect from a neorealist theorist. In a similar fashion, the reference to Reinhard Bendix in footnote'16 of Fischer's article does not deal with the feudal discourse but rather with kingship and its roots in Germanic tribal custom and Catholic Christianity as opposed to the “legal tradition of the Roman Empire” (p. 434).

14 Fischer, , “Feudal Europe, 800–1300,” p. 444Google Scholar.

15 Baldwin, Marshall W., The Mediaeval Church (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 28Google Scholar. This page is cited by Fischer. Greater insight is obtained by reading the whole of chapter 1, “The Western Church in the Feudal Age.”

16 Ibid.

17 Blumenthal, Uta-Renate, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 3Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 4.

19 Reynolds, Susan, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 118Google Scholar.

20 Ibid. Reynolds explicitly cites Georges Duby's article “L'Evolution des institutions judiciares” (Evolution of judicial institutions) and his book about the Maconnais as example of these rather pessimistic French regional studies. See ibid., p. 117, footnote 41; and Duby, Georges, La société aux Xle et Xlle siècle dans la région máconnais (The society of the 12th and 13th centuries in the Maconnais region) (Paris: Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes, 1971), respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

21 Duby, , The Three Orders, pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

22 See Popper's emphatic warnings against a confirmationist research strategy in Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper, 1965)Google Scholar; and Popper, Karl, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1968)Google Scholar.

23 Duby, , The Three Orders, p. 5Google Scholar.

24 Schramm, Percy, Kaiser, , Rom und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des roemischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit (Emperor, Rome, and renewal: studies on the history of the Roman notion of renewal from the end of the Carolingian Empire up to the investiture controversy), 4th ed. (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984)Google Scholar.

25 Schramm, Percy, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik; Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte vom dntten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Signs of rulership and state symbols: contributions to their history from the third to the sixteenth centuries), 3 vols., (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1954–1956)Google Scholar.

26 Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

27 Bloch, Marc, The Royal Touch, trans. Anderson, J. E. (New York: Dorset Press, 1989)Google Scholar. This work is dedicated to demonstrating the resiliance of mystical beliefs associated with the medieval conception of Sacral Kingship.

28 On the importance of geography for Duby's intellectual development, see his admission in Dialogues, p. 95. For his indebtedness to the regional studies of Etienne Julliard, Daniel Faucher, and Andre Allix, see ibid., p. 145.

29 Kratochwil, Friedrich, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Fischer, , “Feudal Europe, 800–1300,” p. 434Google Scholar.

31 For a further discussion of the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules, see Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions, especially chap. 3.

32 For an excellent account of the First Crusade and a study of the motivations of the crusaders, see Riley-Smith, Jonathan, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: The Athlone Press, 1986)Google Scholar. See chapter 1 of that work for a description of Urban's appeal and of the spiritual benefits promised to crusaders. Papal policy toward the crusade is detailed in Robinson, I. S., The Papacy 1078–1198: Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chap. 9, “The Papacy and the Crusade.” An outstanding discussion of the significant corpus of canon law that grew up out of the Crusades may be found in Brundage, James A., Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 19–21Google Scholar.

33 See Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, footnote 32; Tyerman, Christopher, England and the Crusades: 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Kedar, Benjamin Z., Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

34 Riley-Smith, , The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, p. 26Google Scholar.

35 Riley-Smith cites a passage from Ralph of Caen's biography of the previously secular knight, Norman Tancred, as providing a “typical” response to Urban's appeal. See ibid., pp. 26 and 36.

36 Ibid., pp. 47–8.

37 Tellenbach, Gerd, Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Controversy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959)Google Scholar. Tellenbach argues that the Church never challenged the proprietary system of Eigenkloster or the church-statism signified by royal secular investiture of high clergy before the tenth century and the rise of the monastic reform movement; see the chapter entitled “The Transformation of Society by the Christian Church: Royal Theocracy, Proprietary Churches and Monastic Piety,” in ibid.

38 Ute-Renate Blumenthal, “Piety and Monastic Reform During the Tenth and Early Eleventh Centuries,” in Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy, chap. 1.

39 Ruggie, John Gerard, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” World Politics 35 (01 1983), pp. 261–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Waltz, Kenneth, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Keohane, Robert, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 322–45Google Scholar.

41 Fischer, , “Feúdal Europe, 800–1300,” p. 432Google Scholar.

42 Ruggie refers to Bull's assertion that one could not speak of a “state” in the Middle Ages, in his “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity,” p. 273, footnote 29. For the original citation, see Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 For a description of Waltz's system see Waltz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 93–97Google Scholar.

44 Ruggie, , “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity,” p. 274Google Scholar, emphasis original.

45 Fischer, , “Feudal Europe, 800–1300,” p. 431Google Scholar, emphasis added.