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Social Rules and the State as a Social Actor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Bruce Andrews
Bruce Andrews
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Abstract

New interest in the domestic sources of foreign policy intersects the notion that arguments about a state's international role are, at one level, arguments about domestic meaning, prohibitions, and responsibility. Even claimed strategic imperatives are neither self-explanatory nor comprehensible only in view of the stringencies of the international arena. Instead, they project a domestic content, referring to (and often transparent in the light of) particular domestic ends, needs, images, or interests. A rule-guided conception of die relation between domestic society and foreign policy is developed, in an analogy widi language and forms of discourse, in which discernible social rules will constrain or constitute a state policy—delimiting conduct, or defining its domestic referents, usage, and social conformity or deviance. Looking beneath the rather disembodied plane of ends and means, explanation begins to resemble an excavation; the state is seen not through the lenses of national security and rational behavior, but in the model and role of a domestic social actor.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , July 1975 , pp. 521 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1975

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References

1 For an extended treatment, see Andrews, “Foreign Policy: Explaining and Understanding State Action,” mimeo (1975), and Gunnell, John G., “Social Science and Political Reality: The Problem of Explanation,” Social Research, xxxv (Spring 1968)Google Scholar. “An action is first made intelligible as the outcome of [or, actually, as the expression of] motives, reasons, and decisions; and is then made further intelligible by those motives, reasons and decisions being set in the context of the rules of a given form of social life. These rules logically determine the range of reasons and motives open to a given set of agents and hence also the range of decisions open to them.” MacIntyre, Alasdair, “The Idea of a Social Science,” in Wilson, Bryan R., ed., Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1970), 115–16Google Scholar.

2 Hampshire, Stuart, Thought and Action (New York: Viking 1959), 99Google Scholar.

3 If, for example, we find a domestic rationale for an international action that opens with an untested assumption such as “It goes without saying that …,” the presence of such constraining rules should be suspected. For example, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan 1958)Google Scholar, #231: “‘But surely you can see … ?’ That is just the characteristic expression of someone who is under the compulsion of a rule.” A similar theme is nicely treated by Bachrach, Peter and Baratz, Morton S., “Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytic Framework,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 57 (September 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Indeed, the more important the rule, the greater is the likelihood that knowledge [of the nature of rule-guided activities and the consequences of breaching the rules] is based on avoided tests.” Garfinkel, Harold, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1967), 70Google Scholar.

4 For a discussion of the synchronic nature of such an analysis in other fields of inquiry, see Frederic Jameson's important work, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1972)Google Scholar, and Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971)Google Scholar. Compare Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1958)Google Scholar; Blum, Alan F. and McHugh, Peter, “The Social Ascription of Motives,” American Sociological Review, xxxvi (February 1971), 98–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harre, R. and Secord, P. F., The Explanation of Social Behavior (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams 1973)Google Scholar; and Radnitzsky, Gerard, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (Chicago: Henry Regnery 1973)Google Scholar.

5 Wittgenstein (fn. 3), #85.

6 See Ellsberg, Daniel, Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster 1972)Google Scholar.

7 See Wilson, Thomas P., “Concepts of Interaction and Forms of Sociological Explanation,” American Sociological Review, xxxv (August 1970)Google Scholar. See also Turner, Ralph, “Role-Taking: Process versus Conformity,” in Rose, Arnold M., ed., Human Behavior and Social Process: An Interactionist Approach (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1962), 23Google Scholar, cited in Wilson, p. 700: “The idea of role-taking shifts emphasis away from the simple process of enacting a prescribed role to devising a performance on the basis of an imputed other role. The actor is not the occupant of a status for which there is a neat set of rules—a culture or set of norms—but a person who must act in the perspective supplied in part by his relationships to others whose actions reflect roles he must identify.” The literature on the “level-of-analysis” problem in international relations is also relevant.

8 See, for example, Peckham, Morris, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Schocken 1965), 76 ffGoogle Scholar, 80: “The artist's role is to violate the rules, though he may fail to violate the rules enough to interest a particular perceiver.” Or compare Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972), 50–53Google Scholar, for a discussion of common law, where the rules are somewhat refashioned with each case, and are derivative of particular cases or are abridgements of the activity itself, not something completely prior to it.

9 Wittgenstein (fn. 3), #219, #206–7. Domestic rules and expectations about state aims are rarely this explicit or unproblematical. They will therefore diverge somewhat from an analogy with linguistic rules, which “are much more often than not applied correctly without their correct application being an issue at all.” Castafieda, Hector-Neri, “The Private-Language Argument,” in Klemke, E. D., ed., Essays on Wittgenstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1971), 228Google Scholar. In addition, see A. R. Louch's list of increasing departures from a game model in his Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press 1966), 212Google Scholar.

10 For a fuller treatment, see Andrews, “Of the People, By the People, For the People: Public Constraint and American Policy in Vietnam” (Sage Professional Papers in International Studies, forthcoming).

11 Louch (fn. 9), 164.

12 Melman, Seymour, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill 1970)Google Scholar, chaps. 6 and 7.

13 Laing, R. D., The Politics of the Family (New York: Pantheon 1969), 105Google Scholar.

14 In spite of its reluctance or disinterest in extending its analysis to the deeper domestic levels and linkages which I suggest are essential to any completely adequate account, Allison's work remains one of the few sophisticated treatments of the problem of explanation in the study of foreign policy. Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown 1971)Google Scholar.

15 Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press 1971), 165Google Scholar; emphasis added. Compare his impressive “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” in Toward a Rational Society (London: Heineman 1971)Google Scholar. As David Braybrooke warns, “action investigations easily degenerate into complacent and self-limiting recitations of cultural peculiarities: they readily impute to the fabric of the world the concepts and norms associated with contingent social arrangements; and in spite of the lessons to be found in history and anthropology find it difficult to envisage any basic variations on these arrangements.” , Braybrooke, ed., Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan 1965), 16Google Scholar.

16 Pitkin (fn. 8), 19.

17 This is a closely interrelated task which I must unfortunately defer. Compare Wittgenstein (fn. 3), #564: “The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point” For some recent discussions applicable in the case of the United States, see Burnham, Walter Dean, “Crisis of American Political Legitimacy,” Society, x (November/December 1972)Google Scholar; Kolko, Gabriel, “Power and Capitalism in Twentieth Century America,” in Colfax, J. David and Roach, Jack L., eds., Radical Sociology (New York: Basic Books 1971)Google Scholar; Mankoff, Milton, “Watergate and Sociological Theory,” Theory and Society, 1 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schroyer, Trent, The Critique of Domination (New York: George Braziller 1973)Google Scholar, chap. 7.

18 Terms adapted from recent art and literary criticism. See, for instance, the related discussions in Antin, David, “Some Questions About Modernism,” Occident, viii (Spring 1974), 7–38Google Scholar; Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, v (June 1967)Google Scholar; Robbe-Grillet, Alain, For a New Novel (New York: Grove Press 1965)Google Scholar; and , Andrews, “Surface Explanation,” Ironwood, iii, No. 1 (#5, 1975)Google Scholar, and “Index: On Reference, Objects, and Language,” in Open Letter, Second Series (forthcoming 1975). I will treat this issue more extensively in a future monograph, “The Social Embeddedness of State Action.”

19 Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (fn. 15), 91–94, 113–20, and passim. A fragmented social order may parallel the “decline of the referentials” (to borrow Henri Lefebvre's term), so that the government can attempt to forge the rules rather than refer (and defer) to them. , Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper & Row 1971)Google Scholar, chap. 3. Compare Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang 1972), 109–59Google Scholar; Shapiro, Jeremy J., “One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience,” in Breines, Paul, ed., Critical Interruptions (New York: Herder and Herder 1972)Google Scholar; Sheldon Wolin's discussion of rules and Leviathan in Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown 1960)Google Scholar; and , Habermas, “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,” in Dreitzel, Hans Peter, ed., Recent Sociology No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior (New York: Macmillan 1970)Google Scholar.