by H-Diplo·Comments Off on Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory From Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot has established himself as arguably the leading disciplinary historian of post-World War II international relations (IR). In an earlier, “must-read” essay Guilhot painstakingly documented how, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled a network of realist scholars and practitioners who set out to build a theory of IR.[1] Although they could not agree on the meaning of “theory,” members of the group, including Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago and William Fox of Columbia University, were nearly all opposed to the creed that Morgenthau famously attributed to “scientific man”: the “conception of the social and physical world as being intelligible through the same rational processes” and the attendant view that “the social world is susceptible to rational control conceived after the model of the natural sciences.”[2] Guilhot cogently interpreted the group’s effort to “theorize” IR as a defensive reaction to the surge of the behavioral movement in the social sciences, a movement that appeared to embrace the creed of “scientific man” and that was generously funded by the Ford Foundation. For Morgenthau and his associates, creating “IR theory” was a way of delineating “an independent disciplinary territory” for the field, rendering it “immune to the cues of behavioralism.” [3]
Nicolas Guilhot has established himself as arguably the leading disciplinary historian of post-World War II international relations (IR). In an earlier, “must-read” essay Guilhot painstakingly documented how, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled a network of realist scholars and practitioners who set out to build a theory of IR.[1] Although they could not agree on the meaning of “theory,” members of the group, including Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago and William Fox of Columbia University, were nearly all opposed to the creed that Morgenthau famously attributed to “scientific man”: the “conception of the social and physical world as being intelligible through the same rational processes” and the attendant view that “the social world is susceptible to rational control conceived after the model of the natural sciences.”[2] Guilhot cogently interpreted the group’s effort to “theorize” IR as a defensive reaction to the surge of the behavioral movement in the social sciences, a movement that appeared to embrace the creed of “scientific man” and that was generously funded by the Ford Foundation. For Morgenthau and his associates, creating “IR theory” was a way of delineating “an independent disciplinary territory” for the field, rendering it “immune to the cues of behavioralism.” [3]
