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What's at stake in the agent-structure debate?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

David Dessler
David Dessler
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.
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Abstract

Recent developments in the philosophy of science, particularly those falling under the rubric of “scientific realism,” have earned growing recognition among theorists of international relations but have failed to generate substantive programs of research. Consequently, the empirical relevance of much philosophical discourse, such as that centering on the agent-structure problem in social theory, remains unestablished. This article attempts to bridge the gap between the philosophy and practice of science by outlining a model of international structure based on the principles of scientific realism and by considering its implications for a structural research program in international relations theory. Appealing to Imre Lakatos's methodology of theorychoice, the article presents an ontological case for adopting a “transformational” model of structure over the “positional” model developed in the work of Kenneth Waltz. The article demonstrates that the positional approach offers no conceptual or explanatory hold on those features of the international structure that are the intended products of state action. In conclusion, the article argues that the stakes in the agent-structure debate include the capacity to generate integrative structural theory and the ability to theorize the possibilities for peaceful change in the international system.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 441 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1989

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References

1. Waltz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics (Reading. Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979)Google Scholar.

2. See, for example. Keohane, Robert. “Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond,” in Keohane, Robert, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 158–203Google Scholar; and Ruggie, John Gerard, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” in Keohane, Neorealism, pp. 131–57Google Scholar.

3. Consider Robert Cox's historical materialism, as presented in “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Keohane, , Neorealism, pp. 204–54Google Scholar; and the dialectical competence model offered by Ashley, Richard in “The Poverty of Neorealism,” International Organization 38 (Spring 1984), pp. 225–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the work of Alker, Hayward, especially “The Presumption of Anarchy in World Politics,” in Alker, Hayward R. Jr, and Ashley, Richard K., eds., Anarchy, Power, and Community: Understanding International Collaboration (forthcoming), pp. 1–62Google Scholar.

4. See Keohane, “Theory of World Politics.” “Political realism” is not the same as “scientific realism.” I will refer to each throughout this article by the full term.

5. Collin, Finn, Theory and Understanding: A Critique of Interpretive Social Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar. See also Keohane's remarks on Ashley's dialectical competence model in Keohane, , “Theory of World Politics,” p. 168Google Scholar.

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9. Ibid., pp. 361–69.

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12. Not every specific explanation, of course, need give a complete analysis of both agential powers and the conditions in which those powers are deployed. But the explanations must make room for such completion; or, more accurately, the conceptual scheme or framework underpinning specific explanations must recognize and make appropriate allowance for the workings of both agency and structure, even if each specific explanation does not exploit this allowance.

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17. Ibid., p. 56.

18. See Aronson, Jerrold, A Realist Philosophy of Science(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harre, Rom, The Principles of Scientific Thinking(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harre, Rom, Varieties of Realism, part 4 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar; and Korner, S., Categorical Frameworks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974)Google Scholar. The terminology of “common ontology” is Aronson's. Harre speaks of “source analogues,” Korner of “common categorical frameworks.”

19. In A Realist Philosophy of Science, p. 174. Aronson states that “two phenomena are independent in that it is (physically) possible for one to occur without the other and vice versa.”

20. The examples are Aronson's. See A Realist Philosophy of Science, pp. 174–75.

21. Ibid., p. 271.

22. Ibid., pp. 182–83.

23. Einstein used this lesson to protect one of his theoretical predictions from countervailing empirical evidence. In late 1905, the experimental physicist Walter Kaufmann reported measurements of the mass of the electron at variance with claims Einstein had set forth in earlier research. Einstein rejected Kaufmann's measurements, claiming that the “systematic deviation” reported between those measurements and Einstein's predictions likely indicated an “unnoticed source of error” in Kaufmann's work. Kaufmann's data were to be dismissed because, in Einstein's professed “opinion,” they supported theories that were not convincing alternatives to Einstein's own. And what made Einstein's theory more convincing was its ontological breadth. Einstein thus cited, as an independent criterion of theory-choice, the ontological power of his theory, in order to reject as implausible the data that contradicted his theory. Significantly, Einstein proved to be correct (though this was not shown for three decades). See the account in Miller, Arthur I., Imagery in Scientific Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), chap. 3Google Scholar; quotes are from pp. 118–19.

24. According to Lakatos. “There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.” See Lakatos, lmre, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., p. 32.

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28. Ibid., p. 91.

29. Ibid., p. 40.

30. Ibid., p. 18.

31. Ibid., pp. 39 and 60.

32. Ibid., p. 90; emphasis added.

33. Compare this figure with the diagram in Waltz, , Theory, p. 40Google Scholar. Waltz shows arrows in both directions between interaction and arrangement, without clarifying the distinct relations they indicate. In the terms of the present discussion, the first (upward) arrow refers to the creation of system structure by unit interaction (postulated ontologically); the second (downward) arrow reflects the constraint imposed by structure on interaction (explained theoretically).

34. Waltz, , Theory, p. 80Google Scholar.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 90.

37. Ibid., pp. 107–11.

38. Ibid., p. 74.

39. Ibid., pp. 81–99.

40. Ibid., p. 101.

41. Ibid., p. 69.

42. See the following works of Waltz, : Theory, p. 66Google Scholar; “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93 (Summer 1964), pp. 882–87Google Scholar; and Man, the Slate and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

43. Waltz, , Theory, pp. 125 and 127–28Google Scholar; and Waltz, , “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Keohane, , Neorealism and Its Critics, p. 332Google Scholar.

44. Bhaskar, Roy, The Possibility of Naturalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 43Google Scholar.

45. Ibid. On this crucial conceptual point, Wendt misinterprets the scientific realist understanding of structure. In his view, “Structuration theory is a relational solution to the agentstructure problem that conceptualizes agents and structures as mutually constituted or codetermined entities” (“The Agent-Structure Problem,” p. 350). Wendt tilts toward a structural determinism in his analysis of the relation between state and system, conceptualizing the state as an effect of the internally related elements comprising structure (see Wendt's, discussion of “generative structures” on p. 346Google Scholar and his claim that “structures generate agents” on p. 357). In viewing agents as products of structure, Wendt adopts a framework more similar to the dialectical model articulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann than to the transformational model of the scientific realists. See Berger, and Luckmann, , The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar, especially part 3, “Society as Subjective Reality,” pp. 119–68. For a scientific realist critique of this model, see Bhaskar, , The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 40–42Google Scholar. According to scientific realism, agents and structures are not “two moments of the same process” but “radically different kinds of thing” (Bhaskar, , The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 42Google Scholar). By viewing structure in Aristotelian terms as materials that enable and constrain action, the distinction between agents and structures can be clearly maintained without lapsing into either voluntarism or determinism.

46. See also the diagrams in Giddens, , Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 56Google Scholar. and in Bhaskar, , Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 126Google Scholar.

47. Wendt, , “The Agent-Structure Problem,” p. 362Google Scholar.

48. Giddens, , Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, chap. 3Google Scholar.

49. I will not undertake here a systematic review of the literature in international relations theory bearing on the proper definition of rules, which includes Kaplan, Morton, System and Process in International Politics(New York: Wiley, 1957)Google Scholar; Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Raymond, International Politics: The Rules of the Game (London: Longman, 1981)Google Scholar; and Krasner, Stephen, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca. N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For an important review of regime theory, see Haggard, Stephan and Simmons, Beth A., “Theories of International Regimes,” International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 491–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Giddens, , The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 21Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., pp. 20–21.

52. The seminal article on this subject is that of Rawls, John, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64 (01 1955), pp. 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Quine, W. V. O., “Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory,” in Davidson, Donald and Harmon, Gilbert, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Boston: Riedel, 1972). pp. 442–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the broader discussion in Kratochwil, Friedrich and Ruggie, John Gerard, “International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State,” International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), pp. 753–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The present essay draws primarily on the influential work by Searle, John R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Searle, , Speech Acts, p. 33Google Scholar.

54. Ibid.

55. One of the most significant implications of the transformational ontology is the malleability of constitutive rules in social life. Here the analogy with games such as chess ends. In chess, to attempt to change the constitutive rules is to fall outside the boundaries of the game. But in social life, the three-stage process of appropriation, instantiation, and reproduction/transformation implies that all rules are, in principle, subject to alteration.

56. Winch, Peter, The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958)Google Scholar.

57. Giddens, , Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 66Google Scholar.

58. Winch, , The Idea of Social Science, pp. 51–52Google Scholar.

59. Constitutive rules unite the what and the how of social action by giving social meaning to specified procedures and movements. In Speech Acts, p. 34, Searle gives a useful example: “A checkmate is made when the king is attacked in such a way that no move will leave it unattacked.” This, he says, explains why constitutive rules often appear as nothing more than analytic truths.

60. In International Politics, p. 36, Cohen calls these “affect displays.” See also Clarke, David S. Jr, Principles of Semiotic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), especially chap. 4Google Scholar, “Communication,” pp. 73–103.

61. See Blechman, Barry M. and Kaplan, Stephen S., Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973)Google Scholar; and Kaplan, Stephen S., Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981)Google Scholar.

62. Cohen, , International Politics, pp. 31–48Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., p. 33.

64. Ibid., pp. 33–34.

65. Ibid., p. 50. See also Keal, Paul, Unspoken Rules and Superpower Dominance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Compare Hart, H. L. A., The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 92Google Scholar. Hart speaks of the “rules of recognition.”

67. Cohen, , International Politics, pp. 55 and 61–63Google Scholar.

68. See Larson, Deborah Welch, Origins of Containment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 107–9Google Scholar.

69. The claim that “system” presupposes “rules” is distinct from the argument that the international political system represents a “society” reflecting shared norms. In Bull's version of this latter argument, an international society “exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the workings of common institutions.” Bull conceptualizes “rules” in the regulative sense only—“general imperative principles which require or authorize prescribed classes of persons or groups to behave in prescribed ways”—and links rules to the achievement and maintenance of “order,” implying “a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of … international society.” Thus, when Bull declares the existence of “a common set of rules” in international politics, he means a common dedication to the achievement of shared values, interests, or norms. By contrast, when the scientific realist speaks of a common set of rules, all that is necessarily implied is the shared conventions of meaning that the very idea of social action in international relations presupposes. Above quotes are from Bull, , The Anarchical Society, pp. 13, 54, and 8Google Scholar. For broader discussions of the relation between structure and social context, see Young, Oran, “Regime Dynamics: The Rise and Fall of International Regimes,” in Krasner, , International Regimes, pp. 93–114Google Scholar; and Ruggie, John Gerard, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” in Krasner, , International Regimes, pp. 195–232Google Scholar.

70. Keohane, , “Theory of World Politics,” p. 167Google Scholar.

71. Ibid., p. 165.

72. Waltz, , “Reflections on Theory, p. 331Google Scholar.

73. Waltz, , Theory, pp. 92–93Google Scholar.

74. Ibid., pp. 74 and 76.

75. Ibid., p. 127.

76. Ibid., p. 128.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., p. 76.

80. Ibid., p. 70.

81. Bhaskar, , The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 43–44Google Scholar.

82. Waltz, , Theory, p. 98Google Scholar.

83. Waltz, , “Reflections on Theory,” p. 329Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., p. 330.

85. Ibid., p. 329.

86. In addition to walls and floors, structure in the transformational model could include typewriters, computers, paper, pencils, telephones, and intercoms—the materials with and through which work is accomplished. In the positional model, such materials are incorrectly relegated to the unit-level. See my discussion of technology in the text and in footnote 89.

87. Even walls, floors, and staircases can be seen as an outcome of social action, in the sense that they are altered through action (say, through wear and tear). Buildings need repainting and refurbishing after a time. This illustrates a central principle of the transformational model, inadequately theorized in the positional approach: all structure is malleable (though not all to the same degree, of course).

88. Waltz, , Theory, p. 67Google Scholar; and “Reflections on Theory,” p. 343.

89. As Joseph Nye points out, “It is particularly odd to see nuclear technology as a unit characteristic that has had ‘system-wide’ pacific effects.” Nye then notes that in Waltz's theory the unit-level “becomes a dumping ground hindering theory building at anything but the structural level.” See Nye, , “Neorealism and Neoliberalism,” World Politics 60 (01 1988), p. 243Google Scholar. My analysis here suggests that part of the reason Waltz makes a “dumping ground” of the unit-level is that the inadequate ontology underlying positional theory offers no grounding for the material causes of action. Waltz is therefore forced, given a truncated ontology, to transfer consideration of such causes to the unit-level.

90. Keohane, Robert, “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (12 1988), p. 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91. Ibid., p. 384.

92. For a treatment of reputation as reliability of behavior, see Alt, James, Calvert, Randall, and Humes, Brian, “Reputation and Hegemonic Stability: A Game-Theoretic Analysis,” American Political Science Review 82 (06 1988), pp. 445–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of reputation as moral standing, see Goffman, Erving, Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 214–39Google Scholar.

93. See Hanson, Norwood Russell, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), chaps. 1, 2, and 4Google Scholar.

94. Feyerabend, Paul K., “On the Critique of Scientific Reason,” in Cohen, R. S., Feyerabend, P. K., and Wartofsky, M. W., eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 39 (Boston: Reidel, Dortrecht, Holland, 1976), p. 120Google Scholar, quoted in Krige, John, Science, Revolution and Discontinuity (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 79Google Scholar.

95. Thus, to reject naive falsificationism is not to endorse the pursuit of just any purported theory. We need good reason to expend valuable research energy pursuing the development of a weak or ambiguous theory. If this good reason does not come from an immediate or imminent empirical payoff, it must come from somewhere else—in this case, from the philosophy of science.

96. See the essays in Leplin, Jarett, ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Of particular value is the essay by Hilary Putnam, “What Is Realism?” pp. 140–53.

97. For an excellent example of research taking advantage of this interpretation of the relation between state and system, see Haggard's, Stephan analysis of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in “The Institutional Foundations of Hegemony: Explaining the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934,” in Ikenberry, G. John, Lake, David A., and Mastanduno, Michael, eds., The State and American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 91–119Google Scholar. Haggard shows how changes in the international rules of trade led to changes in the machinery of American foreign economic policymaking, which themselves reconfigured the processes through which the United States made and followed the rules of trade (for summary statements, see pp. 100 and 118). Haggard, notes that structure's influence in this case, conceived in terms of the rules and processes of global trade, does not “fit neatly into a Waltzian conception of structure” (p. 118)Google Scholar. The transformational model of structure, by contrast, provides ontological grounding for Haggard's explanatory account, and it does so within a potentially progressive structural research program.

98. See, for example, Schelling, Thomas, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), especially chap. 2Google Scholar, “The Art of Commitment,” pp. 35–92. For an illuminating discussion of how the reputation of a great power depends on its rule-enforcing behavior, applying the insights of Thucydides to an analysis of today's bipolar world, see Tucker, Robert W., The Purposes of American Power (New York: Lehrman, 1980), pp. 145ffGoogle Scholar.

99. In “Reputation and Hegemonic Stability,” Alt, Calvert, and Humes investigate one form of this dynamic in their analysis of bargaining and confrontation within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

100. Keohane, Robert, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 258Google Scholar.

101. See Gilpin, Robert, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robert Keohane, “Theory of World Politics.” For an important theoretical and historical analysis of the determinants of peaceful systemic change, see Doran, Charles F., The Politics of Assimilation: Hegemony and Its Aftermath (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

102. Keohane, , “Theory of World Politics,” p. 193Google Scholar.

103 Waltz, , “Reflections on Theory,” p. 338Google Scholar. The distinction is Robert Cox's, presented in “Social Forces, States, and World Orders.”

104. Waltz, , “Reflections on Theory,” p. 338.Google Scholar

105. Bhaskar, , Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 171.Google Scholar