Agents, Structures and International Relations

that his ‘transformational approach can draw explicit links between

structural and unit-level theories’.94
The reformulation of the agent–structure relationship highlights the
fact that both agents and structures are indispensable to any adequate
social explanation. If both agents and structures are necessarily causally,
and constitutively, implicated in social outcomes, then the question
of how important individual actors were to the social outcomes is a
straightforward empirical question, and not one that can be settled the-
oretically. Hollis and Smith illustrate the necessity of greater method-
ological sophistication in relation to this issue: ‘It is perfectly possible to
explain US policy in the Gulf War by starting with Bush’s choices and
calculations and then fitting in external causes in a specific historical
sequence, but it is just as possible to tell the whole story the other way
round, starting with structures and fitting in choices.’95 If we closely
examine the proposed content of both stories, we can see Hollis and
Smith are suggesting that both choices and structural causes are indeed
integral to any analysis. That is, there is not a story of choices and one
of structures, but two stories, one beginning with choices, the other
beginning with structures. Note that in both stories, both choices and
structures feature. The choice between the two stories comes down to
which factor we deem of most importance in a given situation and it is
difficult to see how this can be portrayed as a theoretical question, even
if theory will play a role in determining how we approach the issue. In
an open social field where both agents and structures are conditions of
possibility for the other, and each has emergent powers irreducible to the
other, then the interplay between the two could not possibly be deter-
mined in advance of the research process. Hence, if we accept a social
ontology that insists on the importance of both agents and structures,
we are faced with a methodological issue of how to research the inter-
play between them. Methodological individualists and methodological
structuralists are not faced with a similar problem and attempt to claim
that one or other element ultimately explains all outcomes.
If we start with the choices of our social agent – President Bush,
for example – he cannot feature as a de-socialised individual. For the
categories we use to define Bush in a particular situation, such as US
president, chief of staff, UN delegate and leader-at-war, are themselves
social predicates, not those pertaining to individuals. In this way, then,
part of the structural context is already embedded within the notion of

94 Dessler (1989: 441–473). 95 Hollis and Smith (1994: 250).

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