Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’: A Critique of the Transhistorical

Approach to Uneven and Combined Development
Sébastien Rioux
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 THE COLLAPSE OF ‘THE
INTERNATIONAL IMAGINATION’:
A CRITIQUE OF THE
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TRANSHISTORICAL APPROACH
TO UNEVEN AND COMBINED
DEVELOPMENT

Sébastien Rioux

ABSTRACT

Recent decades have witnessed great interest in Leon Trotsky’s idea of

uneven and combined development (UCD) by Marxist scholars of
International Relations (IR). A burgeoning literature has argued that one
interpretation, Justin Rosenberg’s U&CD, resolves the question of ‘the
international’ by offering a single, non-Realist theory capable of uniting
both sociological and geopolitical factors in the explanation of social
change across history. Evaluating this claim, this paper argues that the
transhistorical ways in which U&CD has been developed reproduce, reaf-
firm and reinforce some of the more important shortcomings of Realist IR.
I develop my argument through an internal critique of Rosenberg’s

Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy

Research in Political Economy, Volume 30A, 85 112
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0161-7230/doi:10.1108/S0161-72302015000030A011
85
 86 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

conception of U&CD, which, I argue, is illustrative of larger shortcomings

within the literature. I conclude that the political and geopolitical economy
of UCD and their dynamics must be grasped through the specific social
and historical relations in which they are immersed.
Keywords: Uneven and combined development; international
relations; geopolitical economy; Marxism; realism
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INTRODUCTION
Since the 1990s, Justin Rosenberg has taken the lead in retrieving and
developing Leon Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development
(UCD) as a major new theoretical departure in the study of International
Relations (IR) from a Marxist perspective.1 Most importantly, Rosenberg
has reactivated the theoretical agenda for a unified international theory
sensitive to both sociological, that is to say, domestic, and geopolitical
phenomena. While traditional Realist international relations theories have
tended to theorise the coexistence of multiple societies in problematic
abstraction from domestic social processes (Bull, 1966; Gilpin, 1981; Waltz,
1959, 1979), Rosenberg’s historical sociology seeks to theorise the causal
significance of the coexistence and interaction of multiple societies for
social theory (Halliday, 1999; Hobden & Hobson, 2001; Rosenberg, 1994a;
Teschke, 2003). By providing a social basis to ‘the international’, the
U&CD approach, argues Rosenberg, is uniquely equipped to transcend
the abstractions of Realism.
Given its theoretical and conceptual ambition, Rosenberg’s U&CD
research programme has gained considerable traction amongst IR scholars,
sparking a burgeoning literature in the field. This is apparent in the num-
ber of scholarly contributions applying the framework to historical case
studies (Allinson & Anievas, 2010; Anievas, 2013; Dufour, 2007; Glenn,
2012; Green, 2012; Matin, 2006; Rosenberg, 2007, 2013a). However, there
have been debates, including objections about the spatio-temporal applic-
ability of the approach.2 While some of the approach’s proponents have
followed Rosenberg in celebrating its elevation of U&CD to the status of
a generalised, transhistorical logic of IR (Allinson & Anievas, 2009;
Anievas & Nişancioğlu, 2013; Barker, 2006; Cooper, 2013; Glenn, 2012;
Hobson, 2011; Matin, 2007, 2013; Rosenberg, 2006, 2010, 2013a, 2013b),
others have raised concerns about the dangers of transhistorical abstrac-
tions and the problems associated with overstretching the conceptual and
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 87

historical limits of UCD as originally deployed by Trotsky (Ashman, 2009;

Callinicos & Rosenberg, 2008; Davidson, 2009; Desai, 2013; Rioux, 2009,
2014; Teschke, 2011).
It is noteworthy here that this constitutes Rosenberg’s second major
attempt at criticising Realist IR for its abstraction from the social; the first
was contained in his The Empire of Civil Society (1994). Whereas in that
work he had sought to provide a historical-materialist approach to the
international system through historically specific modes of production but
without deploying U&CD, the new resort to U&CD has come with a com-
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mitment to conceive it transhistorically. In abandoning specific theorisation

of concrete modes of production for the abstract formalism of a transhisto-
rical approach to U&CD, Rosenberg, as we shall see, effectively forsakes
Marx and Trotsky’s method and emphasis on historically specific political
and geopolitical economy.
While recent critiques provide a wider engagement with Rosenberg’s
approach to U&CD (Ashman, 2009; Davidson, 2009; Desai, 2013; Rioux,
2009, 2014; Teschke, 2011, 2014; van der Pijl, 2015), his claim that U&CD
provides a single, non-Realist theory capable of providing a unified sociolo-
gical and geopolitical explanation has received virtually no systematic eva-
luation. This claim begs further investigation in light of its pivotal
importance to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological development
of the U&CD research agenda in IR. This paper argues that Rosenberg’s
transhistorical approach to U&CD falls short of the promises of the
U&CD framework as it reproduces, reaffirms and reinforces some of the
major shortcomings of Realism in IR.
In order to do this, I use Rosenberg’s 1994 paper ‘The International
Imagination: IR Theory and “Classic Social Analysis”’ as a benchmark.
Inspired by American sociologist C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological
Imagination (1959), Rosenberg calls for an ‘international imagination’ to
displace Realism, which assumes that ‘anarchy’, rooted in nothing more
than the multiplicity of political jurisdictions, has characterised interna-
tional relations since time immemorial. Hitherto, despite a series of four
powerful charges against the Realist paradigm (1) lack of explanatory
power; (2) unhistorical approach; (3) binary conception of the world; and
(4) amoral stance no alternative framework had emerged to displace its
centrality in the field. So Rosenberg (1994b, p. 85) asked: ‘where is it, this
alternative approach to IR which combined historical understanding, sub-
stantive explanation, totalizing theory and a moral vocation of reason?’ If
an alternative is to emerge, he reasoned, it must overcome all four major
shortcomings.
 88 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

Rosenberg’s ‘international imagination’ framework thus indicates the

criteria by which an alternative to Realism must be tested and judged, and
therefore offers a sound and powerful benchmark to assess whether or not
his U&CD approach constitutes a viable alternative to Realism. One ironic
element of this conclusion is that, though it was far from unproblematic
(Campbell, 1994; Frost, 1994; Neufeld, 1994; Smith, 1994), Rosenberg’s
earlier attempt at producing a critique of Realist IR from a Marxist per-
spective was, in some ways at least, more promising. If his intellectual jour-
ney towards U&CD should be conceived of as an attempt to provide us
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with such an alternative approach that is at once substantive, historically

specific, theoretically unified and morally driven, his failure, as I demon-
strate in this paper, also appears to have been a regression.
The following four sections detail how Rosenberg’s approach to U&CD
falls short of meeting each of the basic requirements and, indeed, repro-
duces the corresponding shortcomings of Realism: lack of explanatory
power; unhistorical approach; binary conception of the world; and amoral
stance. I conclude by stressing that the failure of Rosenberg’s transhistori-
cal approach to U&CD in providing an alternative paradigm to Realism
does not invalidate the theoretical and methodological importance of
UCD, but rather, as recent interventions have emphasised (Bieler, 2013;
Bruff, 2010; Desai, 2013; Morton, 2011; Rioux, 2014; Selwyn, 2014,
pp. 88 93; Tansel, 2015; Teschke, 2011), highlights the need to grasp its
dynamics in a historically specific manner as a political and geopolitical
economy of capitalism.

LACK OF EXPLANATORY POWER

In formulating his first critique of Realism, Rosenberg had resorted to

Mills (1961, p. 75) for whom the main problem with grand theory, by
which he means Parsonian structural functionalism then so much in vogue,
is that, contrary to classic social analysis, it is not concerned with substan-
tive problems. The level of abstraction informing grand theory seriously
undermines its ability to relate to history, and therefore condemns it to
chronic reification: theory ought to be specific enough to comprehend his-
tory. Against grand sociological theories abstracted from the necessarily
historically specific structures of social production and reproduction, Mills
argues that there can be no transhistorical or universal ‘answer to the tired
old problem of social order, taken überhaupt’ (1961, pp. 46 47). For
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 89

Rosenberg, the strength of classic social analysis lies in its recognition that
concept formation is neither the result of pure theory nor the unmediated
accumulation of ‘facts’, but rather the outcome of the dialectical relation-
ship between theory and history. As a result, Rosenberg was adamant that
Realism, like all grand theory, suffered extensively from its timeless anar-
chical horizon, which sealed away its ability to problematise ‘the emergence
and historical formation of a global nation-state system’ (Rosenberg,
1994a, p. 6).
Rosenberg’s ‘international imagination’, like his earlier The Empire of
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Civil Society, began with a rejection of ‘ahistorical questions about the gen-
eral properties of states-systems sui generis’ (1994b, p. 102), and sought to
pull the transhistorical rug out from under orthodox IR theory through its
emphasis on the historical specificity of social relations and geopolitical
forms. However, his second attempt would be even less successful than the
first. At root lay his growing concern with, and reactivation of, Martin
Wight’s question ‘Why is there no international theory?’ as the proper sub-
ject of investigation for IR as a discipline (Wight, 1966). As Rosenberg
(2006, p. 324) explained:

it has been the great failure of earlier critiques of Realism (my own included) that they
have generally proceeded by trying to downplay, gainsay or even wish away this strate-
gic dimension [the international], rather than by capturing and decoding its contents
within a genuinely sociological definition of the international. In this respect, the
Realists have been the keepers of the seal of the international even if they have also,
to the enduring frustration of their critics, kept it sealed away.

Defining the international as ‘that dimension of social reality which arises

specifically from the coexistence within it of more than one society’
(Rosenberg, 2006, p. 308), Rosenberg now became increasingly dissatisfied
with critical approaches concerned with demonstrating the historically spe-
cific forms and dynamics of geopolitical orders. Accepting the view that
Realism asks the proper question in its attempt at providing an explanation
of the fact (rather than the form) of geopolitical multiplicity, Rosenberg
became anxious that ‘if we could not specify those attributes of socio-
historical development which explain the existence of “the international”
then the realist arguments for a sui generis theory of geopolitics beyond the
reach of social theory would resume their full force’ (2009, p. 108).
Rosenberg was not wrong, of course, to want to break the theoretical
hold of Realism over the study of IR. The problem lay in engaging battle
on Realist ground: having accepted the Realist proble´matique, the only way
forward for Rosenberg is to beat it on its own ground and overcome the
 90 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

limits of Realism by offering a wider, more encompassing theory capable

of explaining a transhistorical anarchy (Rosenberg, 2010, 2013a). This was
precisely what Marx declined to do in relation to the ‘vulgar economists’
who essentialised and eternalised capitalism by ‘proclaiming for everlasting
truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of
production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one’
(Marx, 1977, p. 175n.). They made the market transhistorical in precisely
the way Rosenberg, moving onto realist ground, made U&CD in the inter-
national system transhistorical and with the same effect: an essentialisation
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and eternalisation of U&CD mystifying the real historical relations of pro-

duction. The alternative, to extend the analogy with Marx further, would
have been to construct an account of international relations on the basis of
the historically specific capitalist social relations. This has been the burden
of Marx’s political economy and also what Mills had seen was necessary to
overcome the problems of sociological grand theory. Something critical
was lost in Rosenberg’s transition from Mills to Wight.
Since Rosenberg’s aims to offer what Kenneth Waltz sought but was
never able to formulate, namely ‘a single theory that would comprehend
both international and domestic, both political and economic matters’
(Halliday & Rosenberg, 1998, p. 379), there must be a dramatic shift in the
scale at which his theory should be deployed: away from ‘historical materi-
alist demonstrations of the changing forms and dynamics of geopolitical
behaviour’ (Callinicos & Rosenberg, 2008, p. 87) and towards what Mills
called grand theory. With the transhistorical nature of ‘the international’
now driving the research programme in Rosenberg’s Marxist IR, his other-
wise entirely salutary turn to Trotsky and idea of UCD was bound to be
mishandled. The need to explain the international in terms of UCD trans-
historically required Rosenberg to construct his U&CD in a rather tenden-
tious way. Though he sought licence for a transhistorical construction of
U&CD from Trotsky’s description of unevenness as ‘the most general law
of the historic process’ (1930, p. 3), he failed to understand that Trotsky
was equally clear that he saw combined development as historically specific
to the capitalist epoch (Desai, 2013, p. 52). As Trotsky (1930, p. 2, empha-
sis added) put it:

A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced
countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the
stages of their past. The theory of the repetition of historic cycles Vico and his more
recent followers rests upon an observation of the orbits of old pre-capitalist cultures,
and in part upon the first experiments of capitalist development. A certain repetition of
cultural stages in ever new settlements was in fact bound up with the provincial and
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 91

episodic character of that whole process. Capitalism means, however, an overcoming of

those conditions. It prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality and perma-
nence of man’s development. By this a repetition of the forms of development by different
nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a back-
ward country does not take things in the same order.

The point that combined development is specifically capitalist is plain as

day but for Rosenberg, like the purloined letter, it is ‘hidden in plain sight’
because he has abandoned the historical programme of The Empire of Civil
Society and adopted the ahistorical ‘sociological’ programme of Realist IR.
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He forgets that not just the answers but the questions are different between
Marxist and mainstream paradigms.
Instead of noting such historical specificities, Rosenberg (2006, p. 327)
claims that ‘the international arises from an intrinsic characteristic of social
development as a transhistorical phenomenon its inner multilinearity
and interactivity’. Rosenberg concludes that it is the universal unevenness
of societies the sheer quantitative multiplicity of them that generates
the geopolitical dimension (Rosenberg, 2013b). As Rosenberg explains,
‘Trotsky’s term ‘uneven and combined development’ … captures, at a more
general level, a sociological characteristic of all historical development’,
which ‘accounts for the transhistorical fact of geopolitical multiplicity’
(Callinicos & Rosenberg, 2008, p. 80). That Rosenberg must necessarily
evacuate Trotsky’s emphasis on the distinction between the pre-capitalist
contingency of development and its necessity under capitalism is the price
to pay to transform what was meant to be a historically specific theoretical
claim about the capitalist world order into a transhistorical phenomenon
(Desai, 2013, pp. 2 3, 10 12).
U&CD is Rosenberg’s answer to the problem of explaining the transhis-
torical fact of geopolitical multiplicity. It is no wonder, then, that this is
premised upon anchoring U&CD into the same operative logic as Realism.
Indeed, both approaches posit a timeless structure of the international:
whereas Realists elevate anarchy to the status of universal geopolitical
structure, Rosenberg explains transhistorical anarchy by positing U&CD
as a universal structure of social development. And in the same way that
anarchy generates its own abstract logics (e.g. self-help system, the need for
states to prioritise survival, a recurring security dilemma, balance of
power), so does U&CD through the redeployment of Trotsky’s suggestive
metaphors the ‘whip of external necessity’, the ‘privilege of historic back-
wardness’ and the ‘amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’
into transhistorical causal mechanisms. We shall come back to these
mechanisms in the next section. For now, suffice it to say that Rosenberg
 92 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

seeks to transcend Realism by proposing a more encompassing and univer-

sal framework of U&CD.
The problem here is not Rosenberg’s concern about the causal signifi-
cance of inter-societal multiplicity for social theory, but the conclusion that
the identification of ‘the international’ as a fundamental dimension of
social reality requires a transhistorical, ‘grand’ theory. If Rosenberg tends
to reduce U&CD to ‘a general nomological-deductive covering law’, as
Teschke (2011, p. 1102) has argued, it also carries the risk, noted by Alex
Callinicos (Callinicos & Rosenberg, 2008, p. 82), of giving ‘rise to essential-
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isms’ and therefore subsuming concrete historical specificities to abstract

transhistorical realities. To be sure, Rosenberg is, or at least used to be,
well aware of the danger of general abstractions (Callinicos & Rosenberg,
2008, pp. 85 87; Rosenberg, 2010, p. 171). Yet in refusing to develop con-
crete theories of U&CD in relation to its changing dynamics in time and
space, the risk of essentialism is real enough.
One important consequence of Rosenberg’s transhistorical U&CD is his
curious omission of any engagement with postwar theorists about the nature
of capitalist development (Baran, 1973; Baran & Sweezy, 1966; Brenner,
2006, 2009; Dobb, 1967; Foster-Carter, 1974). Similarly, he curiously omits
any discussion of over 30 years of scholarship by geographers on geographi-
cally uneven development under capitalism (Cox, 1997; Harvey, 1997,
2006a, 2006b; Sheppard, Barnes, & Pavlik, 1990; Smith, 2008; Webber &
Rigby, 1996), summarily discarding Neil Smith’s work, for instance, as irre-
levant (Rosenberg, 2010, pp. 170 171, 2013b, p. 572, 597). While other
scholars have noted the aspatial (Hesketh & Morton, 2014) and ascalar
(Davidson, 2009) nature of Rosenberg’s deployment of U&CD, Smith’s
(2008, p. 3) charge against the banal, yet ‘eternal impossibility of even devel-
opment’ strikes at the very core of Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach.
More fundamentally, however, Smith’s critique highlights the extent to
which Rosenberg’s general theory of U&CD cannot explain what it pre-
tends to describe. For one has simply to ask why development is both
uneven and combined, what its specific dynamics are, and how they operate
in time and space to bring the great transhistorical machinery of U&CD to
a grinding halt. This intrinsic inability, as we shall see in greater detail in
the next section, must necessarily reproduce itself further down the logical
chain of the U&CD approach. Why, for instance, is there a ‘whip of exter-
nal necessity’ to begin with? What are the dynamics within which this ‘pri-
vilege of backwardness’ exists? And how is the ‘amalgam between old and
new political forms’ operating in time and space? In this context,
Rosenberg faces two choices: either he substantiates his approach, in which
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 93

case he must (i) offer a theoretical reconstruction that actually explains the
historically and spatially specific dynamics of U&CD and (ii) engage with
the long tradition of scholars that have tackled this issue; or he continues
to develop the logical formalism contained in the transhistorical approach
to U&CD, which ultimately impedes the development of the full potential
of the idea of U&CD.
The larger point, of course, is that by positing a timeless structure of
U&CD, Rosenberg has effectively cordoned the ‘international imagination’
off from understanding social regularities and structures in their specific
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historical context. In The Empire of Civil Society Rosenberg could still criti-
cise Morgenthau for explaining historical events ‘by unchanging “objective
laws that have their roots in human nature”, [with the result that] the
essence of international politics is unhistorical’ (1994a, p. 20). Yet the same
critique can now be levelled against Rosenberg’s U&CD. While
Morgenthau derives the essence of IR from objective laws pertaining to
human nature, Rosenberg derives it from an objective law pertaining to the
nature of world-historical development as a whole. Transhistorical U&CD
also aligns with Wight’s view that ‘International Politics is the realm of
recurrence and repetition’ (1966, p. 26), and Robert Gilpin’s conclusion
that ‘the nature of international relations has not changed fundamentally
over the millennia’ (1981, p. 211). Where he once criticised ‘the timeless
compulsions of anarchy’ (Rosenberg, 1994a, p. 95), readily endorsing Mills’
rejection of the ‘transhistorical strait-jacket’ and condemnation of timeless
dynamic or principle ‘which operates irrespective of particular historical
structures’ (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 91), Rosenberg now abides by the timeless
compulsions of U&CD just as realist IR abides by timeless anarchy.

UNHISTORICAL APPROACH
The timeless structure of U&CD reproduces the separation between theory
and history typical of grand theory (Banaji, 2010; Desai, 2010). In such a
framework, history is never more than the mere confirmation of what is
always already known in theory, radically impoverishing, if not entirely
eliminating any conception of ‘historical specificity’ and systemically reify-
ing historical concepts and categories. The result is a starveling conception
of social change.
Indeed, the more a theory is inclined to derive general laws of social development, the
more that social change loses its significance. Change becomes a matter of historical
 94 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

curiosity, but it is no longer deemed scientific as an object of research. Positivism thus

tends to split science and history as if they are different orders of explanation, one being
theoretical, the other descriptive. (Knafo, 2010, p. 496)

The transhistorical approach to U&CD now prosecutes the less ambitious

programme of verifying in history what has already been ascertained to be
valid in theory (Banaji, 2010, p. 47), forcing the logic of U&CD onto his-
tory and choreographing human development according to its own prede-
termined structure, suffocating empirical curiosity.
It is interesting to see how Rosenberg’s approach to dialectics represents
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a fixed, transhistorical method of historical investigation. Rosenberg con-

tends that the first three principles of non-identity (A ≠ A) identified by
Trotsky and which he ‘takes to define dialectical thought change over
time, variation across instances, non-correspondence of concept and object
are already available within the tradition of classical social theory’
(Rosenberg, 2013b, p. 579). Yet, he argues, Trotsky ‘tacitly inserted an
extra philosophical premise into the inherited dialectical conception of
motion and change’, that is, a fourth principle or philosophical premise
recognising a specifically interactive dimension of social development
repressed by classical sociology and speaking to the ‘quantitative multipli-
city of being’ (Rosenberg, 2013b, p. 573, 581). The development of this
fourth principle of dialectics thus allows Rosenberg to strategically reposi-
tion international theory within his social ontology in which the multipli-
city of societies compose ‘the international’.
Notwithstanding Rosenberg’s failure to engage with any discussion
about dialectics over the last 75 80 years since Trotsky’s scattered and
incomplete writings on the subject (Albritton, 1999; Arthur, 2004; Banaji,
2010; Bhaskar, 1993; Capital & Class, 2015; Harvey, 1996; Lebowitz, 2005;
Lewontin & Levins, 2007; Meikle, 1985; Ollman, 1980, 2003; Rees, 1998),
there are at least three problems with Rosenberg’s argument. First, the
fourth, distinct principle of non-identity is surely redundant. It is already
implicit in the second principle of non-identity (variation across instances),
which posits that no two physical or social objects are ever exactly identical
and therefore encompasses the idea of a quantitative multiplicity of being.
Second, by positing a general law of development, U&CD subjects and ulti-
mately negates the first three elements of non-identity. To the extent that
this timeless logic of U&CD structurally determines the first three princi-
ples of non-identity, what we have is not four principles of dialectics but
one overdetermining principle of transhistorical U&CD. I shall come back
to Rosenberg’s structural determinism in the next section.
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 95

Third, and most importantly we have the development of a transhistori-

cal method of historical investigation. Rosenberg accepts Trotsky’s triadic
formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis as the proper method of dialectical
inquiry even though such an approach has long been abandoned by the
postwar literature on the subject. Deploying this ‘rock-ribbed triad … as an
all-purpose explanation’ (Ollman, 2003, p. 12), Rosenberg then maps it
onto what he perceives to be its historical equivalent, the triadic formula of
development-unevenness-combination. The result is a series of three cou-
ples development/thesis, unevenness/antithesis, combination/synthesis
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constituting a three steps sequential method of historical investigation that

can be applied across time and space (Rosenberg, 2013b, pp. 581 583).
Operationalising this methodological blueprint to world-historical develop-
ment through a case study of the causes of the First World War (develop-
ment/thesis), Rosenberg (2013a, p. 207) notes:

we must begin by identifying the most significant structure of uneven development at

work in producing the Europe of 1914. We must then trace the particular combinations
and contradictory fusions of social forms to which this unevenness had given rise. And
finally, we must follow the threads of causality produced by this process to the point
where they connect to the proximate causes of the war.

Rosenberg’s task is therefore to identify first the most important structure

of uneven development (unevenness/antithesis), and then to trace back the
evolution of social forms emerging from the latter through the fixed, trans-
historical causal mechanisms of combined development (combination/
synthesis). Whatever historical event one tries to explain, U&CD provides
a covering-law model to assemble and pigeonhole history through prede-
fined boxes.
It is therefore no coincidence that Rosenberg insists that ‘we must begin
by identifying the most significant structure of uneven development at
work in producing the Europe of 1914’, so it can be appropriately ‘fed’ into
the U&CD machine and processed by the fixed mechanisms of combined
development. The necessary information turns out to be that ‘the century
leading up to the War was heavily shaped by the historical unevenness of
capitalist industrialization as a global process’ (Rosenberg, 2013a, p. 207).
The latter is further specified through three intersecting planes or vectors of
unevenness: (1) a West-East plane of unevenness capturing the variegated
patterns of interconnected industrialisations amongst European societies;
(2) an Atlantic plane of unevenness through which New World industriali-
sation reacts back onto the Old World and (3) a North South European
plane of unevenness attending to the process of industrialisation and its
 96 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

differentiated forms of enhanced, paralysed and declining development

(Rosenberg, 2013a, pp. 212, 223).
Once the main structure has been identified, it can then be processed
through the independent and unchanging causal mechanisms of interactiv-
ity associated with combined development: (1) a ‘whip of external necessity’
speaking to the reality of geopolitical pressure and interconnection; (2) a
‘privilege of backwardness’ enabling the skipping of intermediary steps
through the temporal compression of development; and (3) a contradictory
fusion of old with new political forms which, in producing sociologically
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hybridised forms, secures and indeed reinforces the universal law of

unevenness (Rosenberg, 2013a, pp. 195 198). As the fundamental differ-
ences between capitalist modernity, feudal geopolitics or Roman imperial-
ism disappear, only the common abstraction of transhistorical unevenness
animating them remains. While Rosenberg’s underdeveloped notion of a
‘structure of unevenness’ marks a rupture with Trotsky’s emphasis on the
spatio-temporal dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, his trans-
historical redeployment of Trotsky’s historically specific approach to UCD
not only remains unable to provide us with the necessary conceptual appa-
ratus to identify the most significant structures of unevenness across time
and space, but also to retrieve their dynamics.
The outcome of Rosenberg’s formal abstractionism is predictable: ‘when
we follow the subsequent development of this social formation in its inter-
actions with the world around it, we will find that the proximate causes of
war which are in fact overwhelmingly dominated by German fears and
ambitions arise organically within the process of U&CD we have been
reconstructing’ (Rosenberg, 2013a, p. 208). There is a clear circularity to
Rosenberg’s argument: 1914, like everything else in human history, is
necessarily and logically the outcome of the process of U&CD. That, on
this transhistorical highway, we have learnt absolutely nothing about the
specific nature and spatio-temporal dynamics of this global process of capi-
talist industrialisation is a casualty of this method. While Rosenberg is cer-
tainly correct to point out that the source of the dynamics of German
industrialisation lay ‘in the inter-societal unevenness of development,
which … generated the compulsion to ‘follow after’ (Rosenberg, 2013a,
p. 219), he fails to tell us what the dynamics underpinning ‘the inter-societal
unevenness of [capitalist] development’ were and why their juxtaposition
generated ‘the compulsion to “follow after”’. By taking for granted pre-
cisely what needs to be explained, what Rosenberg’s ‘reconstruction’
amounts to is not a theoretical process by which the specific dynamics
of uneven (and combined) development are internally (dialectically)
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 97

reconstituted, but rather a descriptive account filtering history through the

fixed and unchanging parameters of its transhistorical method.
The explanatory poverty of the approach is clear: one can indeed remove
all references and terminology associated with U&CD from Rosenberg’s
case study without impacting the argument. Indeed, his explanation of the
1914 conflagration as the outcome of ‘the historical unevenness of capitalist
industrialization as a global process’ would suffer no injury were we to
remove the underdeveloped theoretical jargon of U&CD within which it is
framed. To the extent that Rosenberg merely formalises (rather than theo-
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rises) known processes of uneven capitalist industrialisation, he does not

need U&CD to make his argument (Rioux, 2014).
This is a remarkably ironic outcome for one who once lucidly criticised
the Realist paradigm for reducing the task of IR theory to the mere
descriptive exploration of the logic of anarchy. Again, it is Rosenberg’s
inability to specify the dynamics of his transhistorical law that forces him
into the development of an equally transhistorical method of historical
investigation, which in turn reduces history to a series of undertheorised
vectors of unevenness through which human development can be
pigeonholed.

BINARY CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD

The third element of Rosenberg’s international imagination, which he sees

as ‘perhaps the most intellectually radical in its implications for the con-
temporary social sciences’, is a conception of the social world as a totality.
For the author, this ‘is profoundly subversive both of horizontal, disciplin-
ary boundaries which reflect supposedly separate domains of the social
world (economics, politics, sociology), and of any vertical division of reality
into “levels of analysis” (e.g. individual, state, states-system)’ (Rosenberg,
1994b, p. 89). Rosenberg refuses the partitioning of the social world into
rigid, hermetic disciplines because it encourages the reification of social and
historical concepts and categories (Clarke, 1982). Rather he abides by what
Mills called ‘the ontological unity of the different dimensions of human
agency’. This means that ‘the international imagination is committed to
understanding the social world in genera l and our international system
in particular in terms of a complex and recognizable totality of real his-
torical relations between individuals’ (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 90, 104).
In spite of this promising theoretical commitment to the development
of an integrated framework, there remained an irresolvable tension in
 98 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

Rosenberg’s international imagination, a dualism between two different

types of societies or totalities one involving interrelations amongst indivi-
duals and speaking to the reality of a social totality, and a second inter-
societal totality specifically linked to interrelations amongst societies.

The societies that make up the modern international system are linked together (in
varying degrees) by definite institutional structures. In differing ways, they are all sub-
ject to the forces that are transmitted across those structures. That their interrelations
form a whole is therefore a simple, objective fact. It may even be the founding fact of
our discipline. … For totality in the second sense—meaning the actual interrelation of
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processes and forms which comprises the reality of the international system at any one
given point—is precisely what we have to find out empirically by looking at the world.
(Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 105)

So not only does Rosenberg argue for the development of an ontological

unity subversive of disciplinary boundaries, he also maintains the existence
of a second, distinct inter-societal totality, which he perceives as ‘the found-
ing fact’ of IR as a discipline. Can there be two totalities at once? How can
the ontological unity of the social world understood as a totality of
social and historical relations cohabit with an international totality?
An answer to this question must be based on an appreciation of the
changing conceptualisation of the relation between the sociological and
geopolitical totalities in Rosenberg’s works, or rather, what emerges as an
unresolved tension over his intellectual and methodological commitment:
did his commitment to Marxism take primacy over that to IR or vice versa?
Certainly Rosenberg could not reconcile the two. In The Empire of Civil
Society, Rosenberg firmly posited the inter-societal dimension as subordi-
nate to the more fundamental social reality described by classical social the-
ory. Convinced that the task at hand was ‘to find ways of seeing the form
of our states-system as the geopolitical expression of a wider social totality’,
Rosenberg’s central argument was ‘that there is a connection between the
strategic relation of production and the social form of the geopolitical sys-
tem’ (Rosenberg, 1994a, pp. 54 55, 161). In this respect, his argument
upheld Gramsci’s view that international relations logically followed ‘fun-
damental social relations’. The development of the international imagina-
tion framework, published the same year as The Empire of Civil Society,
reinforced the priority given to social theory:

But the difficulty surely has more to do with the attempt to constitute IR as a distinct
level of analysis which should generate its own theories, rather than as a dimension of a
wider social structure in the manner of classic social analysis. Viewed from this latter
perspective, the claim that IR has no classical figures comparable to the sociological
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 99

trio of Marx, Weber and Durkheim need no longer hold. We do have such figures—
namely Marx, Weber and Durkheim. (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 98)

Although Rosenberg’s critique of Realism ultimately relied on the view

that social theory structurally determined international theory, as an
attempt at rethinking the foundations of the discipline and the core issues
defining it, including the form and nature of geopolitical systems,
Rosenberg’s intervention represented an important contribution to the
necessity of breaking away from the conception of IR as a distinct realm of
activity secluded from social relations and historical processes. In this
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respect, it sparked a refreshing discussion about how one might begin to

think critically about the historical specificity of the form taken by the
inter-societal dimension in time and space.
Although the binary between social theory and international theory sur-
vived Rosenberg’s transition to U&CD, the causal relationship between the
two was reversed. In subjecting the social whole to the eternal logic of
U&CD, social structures and dynamics become a mere dimension of a
wider international structure or totality. The shift from having a social the-
ory for the international to having an international theory for the social
underpins the tension in Rosenberg’s attempt to bridge sociological knowl-
edge and geopolitical concerns within U&CD. Moreover, given that
Rosenberg’s transhistorical theorisation of U&CD is at the core of an
emerging ‘third wave’ of historical sociology in international relations
(HSIR), also referred to as international historical sociology (IHS)
(Hobson & Lawson, 2008; Hobson, Lawson, & Rosenberg, 2010;
Rosenberg, 2006), this tension is also, more widely, at play in HSIR. As
three of the field’s most prominent scholars recently argued:
As a branch of historical sociology, HSIR is fundamentally concerned with operationa-
lizing Mills’ vision of classical social analysis in the field of International Relations. In
doing so, however, it also modifies Mills’ original [sociological] formula: in effect, the
triangulation of structure-history-biography becomes instead structure-history-
international. The purpose of this modification is not, of course, to expunge the dimen-
sion of human agency (which can, in fact, be studied from all three angles); it is rather
to adjust the focus of “the sociological imagination” in line with the subject matter of
IR. And what results from the new triangulation is the intellectual agenda of HSIR
itself. (Hobson et al., 2010, p. 3. See also: Lawson, 2006; Rosenberg, 2006)

There are two main problems here. First, the view that ‘the international’
constitutes the proper subject matter of IR as a discipline does little to
advance specifically Marxist IR, reproducing as it does orthodox
approaches within the field. It constitutes an important methodological
setback which, in fact, betrays the inability of Rosenberg’s transhistorical
 100 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

framework to overcome the fragmented disciplinary knowledge that

is IR.
While the shift towards ‘the international’ as what constitutes ‘the sub-
ject matter of IR’ is difficult to reconcile with Rosenberg’s insistence,
mentioned at the beginning of this section, that ‘the international imagi-
nation is committed to understanding the social world […] in terms of a
complex and recognizable totality of real historical relations between indi-
viduals’ (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 104, emphasis added), it also stresses the
extent to which this research agenda is constituted through the mainte-
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nance of rigid disciplinary boundaries that are antithetical to Trotsky’s

dialectical approach and method (Knei-Paz, 1978; Löwy, 2010; Rees,
1998). Despite paying lip service to the idea that the social and inter-
social are co-constitutive, this renewed interest for international theory
not only fails to break away with the classical dualism of the discipline
but also embraces it as essential to safeguard HSIR as a sub-field of IR.
As Hobson et al. (2010, p. 4) recently put it, this new research agenda
conceptualises:
the international as the simultaneously differentiated and interactive dynamics of his-
torical development, it examines the substantive and methodological implications of the
international for our conceptualizations of social structure and historical process,
thereby advancing the distinctive contribution of IR to the social sciences as a whole.
This move, we suggest, contains the potential for a historical sociological enterprise
which can tackle issues of core concern to both IR and Sociology, serving as the “com-
mon denominator” for research in both.

This passage is interesting not only because it defines IR as an object

domain anchored within the traditional parameters of orthodox IR, but
also because it identifies an intellectual domain justifying the relevance of
the discipline to the social sciences more largely. Yet what good to the
social sciences is a discipline that posits its object of study as a timeless
structure of U&CD without ever specifying its historical dynamics in
relation to social theory? Whereas Waltz maintained that the interna-
tional was a disconnected realm with its own specific logic of anarchy,
thus tacitly endorsing (if only temporally) disciplinary pluralism,
Rosenberg’s conception fulfils Waltz’s dream of a general theory by
positing a social whole already determined by its wider international rea-
lity. What we have then is not a ‘common denominator’ for research, but
the effective repositioning of IR as a super-discipline presiding over social
theory itself. Whereas Rosenberg deployed a bottom-up approach to IR
in The Empire of Civil Society by deriving geopolitical systems from ‘fun-
damental social relations’, he now develops a top-down approach
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 101

whereby ‘the international’ becomes an all-encompassing, determining

structure for social relations.
The second major problem is the evacuation of agency, which had
hitherto been central to Rosenberg’s international imagination. To be
sure, one wonders how coherent and sustainable the sociological turn in
IR is if it is ultimately premised upon the substitution of an abstract
sphere of ‘the international’ for the concrete dimension of human agency.
To the extent that HSIR is founded upon discarding what is arguably
the most fundamental premise of any sociology, one will be forgiven for
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thinking that HSIR is a dramatically impoverished ‘branch of historical

sociology’. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to reconcile Rosenberg’s
approach with his call for a ‘social ontology of the international’ (2007,
p. 454). A social ontology that first substitutes a timeless structure of
U&CD for real and active social agents, only to reintegrate the latter
through the determining logic of the former, is a poor social ontology
indeed.
In this regard, the problem is not Rosenberg’s claim that U&CD consti-
tutes a sociological theory ‘because that multiplicity [the coexistence of
more than one society] itself is seen as an expression of the intrinsic uneven-
ness of historical development and change’ (Rosenberg, 2013a, p. 225), but
rather that at no point does his claim go further than a mere descriptive
generalisation. The poverty of Rosenberg’s sociological theory is therefore
contained both in that he takes for granted what needs to be explained
indeed continuously failing to provide a theoretical explanation of this
‘intrinsic unevenness of historical development and change’ and in the
perennial evacuation of the real subjects of history (Rioux, 2009, 2014).
This contrasts with the international imagination framework where he
argued that ‘the constitutive agency of individuals … must remain our
basic explanans’ (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 92). Rosenberg once argued that
Waltz’s approach did not qualify as a social theory because it was not ‘an
explanation of social phenomena which shows how their substance is made
up of individual and collective human agency, constituted in particular his-
torical forms’ (Rosenberg, 1994a, p. 93n.). As long as the idea of U&CD
remains problematised at a transhistorical level, it will not be able to live
by this definition either.
The result of this all-encompassing framework is therefore less its ability
to overcome the binary between sociological and international spheres than
the rearrangement of their causal relationship through the reconceptualisa-
tion of ‘the international’ as ontologically prior. The poverty of totality is
therefore contained in the theoretical subordination of the social whole to a
 102 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

wider and structurally determinant international dimension, and the subjec-

tion of real and concrete human agency to an abstract, general law of
U&CD. Far from offering an integrated approach that bridges sociology
and geopolitics within a coherent theoretical framework sensitive to the
specific dynamics of uneven (and combined) development in time and
space, the transhistorical approach to U&CD reproduces precisely what it
was mobilised to overcome.
The poverty of Rosenberg’s conception of the social whole is rooted in
his abstract, transhistorical quest for a theory of ‘the international’,
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which not only repudiates his previous commitment to historically specific

conceptualisations of sociological and geopolitical categories, but also
reproduces the segmented and reified knowledge of bourgeois theories,
which arose historically as a reaction to classical political economy
(Desai, 2015, 2016). ‘Though an ambition to make UCD the basis of a
Marxist understanding of geopolitics was announced by Rosenberg early
on (1996)’, Radhika Desai aptly notes, ‘his attempts to realize it went in
trans-historical directions which had little immediate relevance to under-
standing geopolitics in a specifically capitalist era’ (Desai, 2010, p. 465).
In accepting ‘the international’ as the proper ‘subject matter of IR’ and
embracing an unhelpfully abstract, formalistic conception of history,
Rosenberg’s approach to U&CD not only reproduces the positivist seg-
mentation of the social whole into reified disciplines, but also participates
in the dismemberment of Marxism by upholding a social scientific divi-
sion of labour typical of bourgeois knowledge (Clarke, 1982).
Far from a positive development, therefore, U&CD and HSIR scholars’
growing obsession with ‘the international’ represents a theoretical dead end
as well as an important setback in Marxist thinking, not least because it
effectively marks the acceptance of the intellectual and academic para-
meters set by mainstream approaches to IR. Perhaps more importantly,
however, this unfathomable attraction of ‘the international’ is also the
Trojan horse by which the Marxist foundations lying at the core of
Trotsky’s idea of UCD are being discarded. The irony is most certainly
that it is Rosenberg’s sanitised approach to U&CD that paved the way to
its appropriation by non-Marxist scholars (Buzan & Lawson, 2015;
Hobson, 2011). Emptied out of its Marxist content, Rosenberg has effec-
tively presided over the transformation of his U&CD into an empty theore-
tical shell whose universal formal-abstractionist method can now
accommodate bourgeois social scientific forms of knowledge in general and
Realist questions and method in particular.
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 103

AMORAL STANCE

‘Any adequate “answer” to a problem’, said Mills (1961, p. 131), ‘in turn,
will contain a view of the strategic points of intervention—of the “levers”
by which the structure may be maintained or changed; and an assessment
of those who are in a position to intervene but are not doing so’. For
Rosenberg, any international imagination worth the name would have to
uphold political principles it ‘does not eschew ethical judgment; yet nor
does it suppose that an intellectual method exists which can itself resolve
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moral dilemmas. Its principal contribution is the illumination of the objec-

tive, structural responsibility of individuals and groups for particular out-
comes’ (Rosenberg, 1994b, p. 105). The task of uncovering the structures
underpinning specific geopolitical systems is also the process by which we
denaturalise specific structures of domination and power actively engaged
in the production and reproduction of the current order.
Rosenberg’s approach to U&CD, as well as the positivist methodology
underpinning his transhistorical method of historical investigation, how-
ever, stand in tension with this political dimension and emancipatory
vocation of theoretical practice. How is it possible to identify political
‘levers’ or ‘strategic points of intervention’ in a framework based on a
covering law pertaining to world-historical development as a whole? And
who is to blame when the very meaning of ‘objective, structural responsi-
bility’ is itself ultimately reducible to vectors of unevenness? In this
respect, Rosenberg’s approach to U&CD marks a shift away from Mills’
emphasis on the social and political struggle around the maintenance of,
and the challenge to, historically specific structures of power and domina-
tion. His commitment to U&CD as a general theory thus tends to under-
mine his otherwise long and rich contribution to normative theories in
IR (Rosenberg, 1994a, 1994b). As Knafo (2010, p. 496) explains:

They [structures] set out the fundamental laws that govern society. Because they operate
at a general level, they appear impervious to the specific politics that are played out
‘below’ them. These structural laws are thus often seen as being generated indepen-
dently from power dynamics and, while they set the terrain for social struggles, they are
not directly linked to any specific interest or worldview. It is as if structural conditions
apply equally to all actors.

For the same reason that social change remains a matter of historical
curiosity in a general framework, so does the issue of power. This is one
important reason why Mills criticised grand theory for its lack of concern
 104 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

with substantive problems. Unable to delineate the specific dynamics of

uneven (and combined) development in time and space, and stuck with the
view that development is a differentiated and interactive totality,
Rosenberg has locked himself into the political poverty of a transhistorical
law of human development.
This is no small problem for an approach that seeks to provide an
alternative to the Realist paradigm. Be it a timeless structure of anarchy
or a universal logic of U&CD, both approaches are theoretical closures
at the level of emancipatory politics. This is cantilevered to Rosenberg’s
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international imagination and his previous appreciation for Marx’s under-

standing of theory as a consciousness-raising intervention into reality.
For Marx, the denaturalisation of the social order through critical
inquiry is not simply a process of defetishisation by which previous con-
cepts and categories are broken down, but also and at the same time the
creation of a political moment in which we can articulate social change
and challenge power relations. Under the general laws of development
posited by Rosenberg, however, the task of verifying in history what has
already been ascertained to be true transhistorically becomes the principle
vocation of social sciences. It constitutes the worst sort of scholastic exer-
cise plaguing modern academic work, disconnected as it is from social
constituencies through the objectification of the real subject of history
(Teschke, 2011, p. 1102). Rosenberg’s transhistorical method of historical
investigation undermines any theorisation of U&CD in time and space,
that is, according to specific epochs or modes of production.
The net result is a tendency towards what Robert W. Cox called
problem-solving theory according to which ‘it is possible to arrive at
statements of laws or regularities which appear to have general validity
but which imply, of course, the institutional and relational parameters
assumed in the problem-solving approach’ (Cox, 1981, p. 129). For Cox
(1981, p. 129), problem-solving theory is both ahistorical because it
wrongly ‘posits a fixed order as its point of reference … [and] conserva-
tive, since it aims to solve the problems arising in various parts of a com-
plex whole in order to smooth the functioning of the whole’. The
growing problem-solving tendency within the U&CD literature is obvious
in the recent ‘historical turn’ that the latter has undergone, with scholars
increasingly ‘applying’ the framework to vastly different case studies,
including the Mongol invasions, pre-Modern Iran, the Meiji Restoration,
hunter-gatherer bands and Chinese nationalism, to name but a few
(Allinson & Anievas, 2010; Anievas & Nişancioğlu, 2013; Cooper, 2015;
Matin, 2006, 2007; Rosenberg, 2010). Their generalised inability to
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 105

theorise the specific dynamics of U&CD in time and space is further rein-
forced by the descriptive nature of their works.
In this respect, U&CD marks an important shift from Rosenberg’s pre-
vious project, which sought to denaturalise the institutional order and the
social and power relations animating the historically specific dynamics of
the emergence and reproduction of the modern geopolitical system.
Rosenberg’s first critique of Realism was a case in point of what Cox called
critical theory.
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It [critical theory] is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of
the world and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving
theory, does not take institutions and social power relations for granted but calls them
into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be
in the process of changing. … Critical theory allows for a normative choice in favour of
a social and political order different from the prevailing order, but it limits the range of
choice to alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world.
(Cox, 1981, pp. 129 130)

Rosenberg’s eagerness to transform Trotsky’s laws of history into a fully

fledged theory of history, however, creates a fixed abstraction whose level
of generality defies even the Realist framework. From the perspective of
critical theory, therefore, the privileging of a general theory cannot consti-
tute an emancipatory project for at least three reasons. First, U&CD does
not, and simply cannot, stand ‘apart from the prevailing order of the
world’ because it in fact pretends to capture the mechanics of that order.
As a positivist theoretical endeavour, U&CD is the prevailing order.
Second, Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach to U&CD must necessarily
evacuate the question of the origins of that order. It therefore signals an
approach to the social world that is poorly equipped to theorise how far
and in what ways the inter-societal dimension of human development pro-
duces and reproduces historically specific social and power relations.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly for the present argument, the
social and political outcomes of Rosenberg’s theoretical argument for a
transhistorical approach to U&CD contradict Trotsky’s revolutionary
agenda. What remains of political and normative choices in a general the-
ory that is, by definition, true of all time? If the centrality of human agency
for Trotsky is evidenced in his commitment to revolutionary politics, it is
also exposed in his understanding of history itself, as The History of the
Russian Revolution testifies. With Rosenberg, however, Trotsky stands on
his head. Whereas Trotsky saw the ‘development of scientific thought … as
a scientific support for human praxis’ and revolutionary politics under
capitalism (Trotsky, 1986, p. 97), Rosenberg sees human praxis as the
 106 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

historical laboratory confirming the universal validity of his general theory

of human development. In short, if Trotsky, like Marx and Mills, saw the
process of theory formation as a historically specific critical endeavour pro-
viding us with knowledge enabling political possibilities, such political pos-
sibilities are sealed away from the theoretical closure that represents the
transhistorical approach to U&CD and the reactivation of ‘the interna-
tional’ as ‘the object matter of IR’.
Rosenberg’s conceptualisation of U&CD as a general theory, his trans-
historical method of historical investigation and his shift to international
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theory coalesced into a positivist approach to U&CD where ethics and

morality have very little room to breathe. In this transhistorical ballet of
alternating structures of unevenness, themselves operating through fixed,
universal mechanisms of combined development, the impossibility of trans-
formative politics is rooted in what Rosenberg has identified as universal
laws. Within the parameters set by U&CD, politics can neither expect nor
hope to change an otherwise timeless structure of U&CD. Like Realism,
therefore, Rosenberg’s positivist approach is also the lynchpin around
which the amoral stance of his framework revolves.

CONCLUSION

This paper has argued that Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach to U&CD

in IR has not been successful at overcoming the four main shortcomings of
the Realist paradigm. First, the lack of explanatory power is intimately
connected with Rosenberg’s deployment of U&CD as a transhistorical,
‘grand’ theory, with the result that Rosenberg continuously eschews the
task of theorising U&CD in relation to its historically specific dynamics.
Second, Rosenberg’s transhistorical method of historical investigation is
based on a fixed and unchanging form of dialectics that seals the poverty of
history by forcing it into predetermined, transhistorical boxes impervious
to social change and historical specificity. Third, the shift from having a
social theory for the international to having an international theory for the
social signals the failure to provide an integrated theorisation of totality.
Finally, Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach undermines any attempt to
capture the specific contribution of ‘the international’ as an undertheorised
field of causality in producing and reproducing power relations. Taken
together, the collapse of all four pillars of Rosenberg’s international imagi-
nation framework under the weight of his transhistorical approach to
 The Collapse of ‘The International Imagination’ 107

U&CD demonstrates the extent to which the latter reproduces all four of
the main shortcomings of the Realist paradigm, and therefore fails to offer
a substantive alternative to it.
This is a foundational problem for which there can be no solutions
within the limits of the paradigm as currently developed in IR.
Consequently, the issue is a fundamental flaw arising from the approach’s
acceptance contra Trotsky’s social and political economic thought of
bourgeois fragmented knowledge and the disciplinary sterile ‘object’ that is
‘the international’. The first step towards a reconstructed theory of U&CD
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that does not reproduce all four shortcomings of the Realist paradigm is
the recognition that the current intellectual drift towards general theory
and methodology must be abandoned, which means coming back to
Trotsky’s understanding of UCD as a resolutely Marxist framework.
Similarly, the current obsession with ‘the international’ as an abstract
dimension of social life has yielded very little (if any) theoretical progress
and must be abandoned too. Indeed, we are still awaiting any specific con-
ceptualisations of the spatio-temporal dynamics of U&CD (Rioux, 2014).
In this respect, Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach to world-historical
development underlines the strength of his earlier critique against
Globalization Theory. For the problem with Rosenberg’s approach is pre-
cisely that it posits U&CD as explanans rather than explanandum. What
needs to be explained U&CD as the spatio-temporal outcome of specific
social and historical processes becomes the explanation itself, with the
result that explanatory power is conferred to a transhistorical abstraction
that is never itself problematised. Hence Rosenberg’s ultimate charge
against Globalization Theory can also be raised against U&CD:

The wild, speculative debut of this discourse cannot go on forever. At some point, the
normal rules of intellectual coherence must re-assert themselves. And when they do, the
message for [U&CD] will be the same as for every other grand theory which has
strutted and turned on the stage of social science: substance, soon, or silence.
(Rosenberg, 2000, p. 165)

It is no coincidence that Rosenberg’s transhistorical approach to U&CD

and its failure to overcome the main shortcomings of the Realist paradigm
has been accomplished through Rosenberg’s gradual yet continuous distan-
cing from historical materialism, which was at the core of Trotsky’s idea of
UCD. If anything, Rosenberg’s own intellectual journey speaks loud to the
continuing problem that Marxism faces, under the hegemony of bourgeois
social science, of avoiding getting trapped in functionalist and reductionist
ways of thought.3
 108 SÉBASTIEN RIOUX

NOTES

1. Whenever I refer to Trotsky’s historically specific conceptualisation of uneven

and combined development, I use UCD. Whenever I use Rosenberg’s transhistorical
rendition of it, I use U&CD. The purpose is to make a clear distinction between
them.
2. In addition, there is some debate about whether or not the framework repre-
sents an antidote to Eurocentrism in IR: Anievas and Nişancioğlu (2013), Bhambra
(2011), Hobson (2011), Matin (2013), Shilliam (2009), Tansel (2015).
3. I am thankful for the perceptive comment of one of the reviewers in this
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regard.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Ian Bruff, Samuel Knafo, Frantz Gheller, Geneviève
LeBaron, Ben Selwyn, Cemal Burak Tansel, Marcus Taylor and Kees van
der Pijl for their insightful comments. Special thanks to Radhika Desai for
her constructive suggestions and keen editorial skills. This research was
funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.

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