Matthew Fluck (Auth.) - The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory - Critical Thought Beyond Post-Positivism-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2017)

The Concept of Truth
in International
Relations Theory
Matthew Fluck
The Concept
of Truth
in International
Relations Theory
Critical Thought Beyond Post-Positivism
Matthew Fluck
University of Westminster
London, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-55032-3 ISBN 978-1-137-55033-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931662
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For Ann Fluck
1945–2013
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much of the research for this book was conducted in the Department of
International Politics at Aberystwyth University. Thanks are due to the
Department and to the Economic and Social Research Council for their
support, as well as to colleagues at Aber for providing a stimulating
atmosphere in which to develop the project. I owe a particular debt to
Hidemi Suganami and Howard Williams, whose insight and guidance
were essential to the development of the argument presented here.
Thanks are also due to Milja Kurki and Nick Rengger for helpful com-
ments and advice concerning the ways in which the project might be
developed.
I have also benefitted from many productive conversations with Daniel
R. McCarthy, with whom I look forward to further pursuing issues identi-
fied in this research. The book was completed in the Department of Politics
and International Relations and Centre for the Study of Democracy at the
University of Westminster – my thanks to Westminster colleagues for
providing a collegial environment in which to finish the project.
Special thanks are due to my wife, Ann-Marie Olden, without whose
unstinting love, patience, and support this book could never have been
completed. I must also express my deep gratitude to my father, Mike
Fluck, for a lifetime of invaluable support and encouragement.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Ann Fluck.
vii
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: A Political Question 1
Part I Post-Positivism and Truth
2 The Parameters of Post-Positivism 23
3 Truth, Violence, and Difference 67
4 Truth and Communication 105
Part II Truth and Objectivity
5 Critical Realism and Truth-Based Critique 147
6 Adorno, Truth, and International Relations 181
7 Conclusion 225
Bibliography 231
Index 243
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Political Question
The political question . . . is truth itself.

Michel Foucault1
1 MODERN ANXIETIES
Attitudes to the concept of truth in modern politics are increasingly char-
acterised by contradiction and confusion. The last decade of British politics
has, for example, seen widespread demands that supposedly hidden facts be
revealed – most notably those relating to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The
same desire for a truth was apparent in the run-up to the UK referendum on
membership of the European Union, when members of the public repeat-
edly lamented the failure of politicians to provide them with hard facts upon
the basis of which they could decide how to vote. Such demands are
expressed, however, in a context in which the availability of a position
from which to identify the truth is increasingly in doubt. Modern liberal
politics are often presented as involving negotiation between different social
perspectives or the freedom to create or choose an identity for oneself. There
is little place in such a political system for straightforward truth claims or, say,
for the identification of and fidelity to hidden truth about society which
characterised nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism.2 At a global level,
the ‘universal’ truths of the West are regularly challenged from elsewhere in
international society.3 An increased ability to share information appears only
to add to the confusion. For some it points to the possibility of a more
‘transparent’ politics, but it has also provided the conditions of possibility for
‘weaponised relativism’ – propaganda of the kind deployed by the Putin
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Fluck, The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_1
2 THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY
government in Russia, which aims not to persuade the world of a particular

truth but to cast doubt on the possibility of their being any truth of the
matter at all.4
Bernard Williams summarises this situation as follows:
On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness – or, at any

rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled, and eager-
ness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie
behind them . . . Together with this demand for truthfulness, however, or
(to put it less positively) this reflex against deceptiveness, there is an equally
pervasive suspicion about truth itself: whether there is such a thing; if there
is, whether it can be more than relative or subjective or something of that
kind; altogether, whether we should bother about it, in carrying on our
activities or in giving an account of them.5
In philosophy and social theory the confrontation between these two

attitudes sustains a conflict which rages more fiercely than anywhere.
Supporters of a ‘common-sense’ attitude to truth portray the doubters
and sceptics as monkish occupants of ivory towers.6 For example, Williams
is scathing in his condemnation of the ‘frivolity’ of those in the humanities
who cast doubt on everyday truths, labelling them ‘émigrés from the
world of real power, the Secret Agents of literature departments’.7
Sceptics about truth, meanwhile, portray their detractors as, at best,
adherents to an outdated faith in a God’s-eye view of the world and very
often as unwitting enemies of freedom.8 Such philosophical confronta-
tions are, of course, not entirely new; at different points in the history of
philosophy Plato criticised the sophists and Russell the pragmatists, whilst,
on the other side, the ancient sceptics advocated the suspension of judge-
ment, and Nietzsche questioned the very value of truth itself.9
Moral and political concerns are seldom far from view in such discus-
sions. Thus, the philosopher Simon Blackburn can be found asserting that:
there is something diabolical in the region of relativism, multiculturalism or

postmodernism, something which corrupts and corrodes the universities
and the public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste to
young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within.10
In contrast, one of the best-known Anglophone critics of the desire for

truth, Richard Rorty, argues that the potential of Western liberal societies
1 INTRODUCTION: A POLITICAL QUESTION 3
can only be fulfilled if we stop worrying about truth and embrace a form of
‘liberal ironism’. According to Rorty, we should acknowledge that there is
no hope of ‘mirroring’ the world in thought, of identifying the way things
really are, and get on with constructing a society in which each member is
free to ‘create’ themselves as they see fit.11
The discipline of International Relations (IR) has not avoided this
conflict. The early 1980s saw the beginning of a sustained critique of the
Positivist theory which had previously dominated the discipline. Positivism
is defined by a faith in the natural sciences according to which the scientific
method, based on empirical observation and the identification of laws,
could be deployed in the pursuit of the truth about the social world.12
In IR this led to an emphasis on the ‘facts’ of a world of states, and to
attempts to identify and explain the law-like regularities apparent in rela-
tions between them in a manner reminiscent of the natural sciences.13
A number of dichotomies are central to the Positivist position; facts are
separated from values, theory from practice, and facts from theories. In IR
these distinctions drove the supposedly detached scientific pursuit of the
objective truth about world politics, free from political or normative
considerations. Behind the dichotomies lies the assumption of a separation
of the knowing subject from the objective world, according to which the
scientist stands apart from the world she examines; her theorising plays no
role in shaping it, and she is free from any distorting influence which it
might exert on her identification of the facts.
One of the main targets of the ‘Post-Positivist’ critique in IR was this
assumption that the social scientist could occupy an Archimedean position
above her subject matter.14 Far from involving some vantage point above
the fray, the social scientific pursuit of truth cannot be separated from the
norms, practices, and institutions of which world politics consists. For
Post-Positivists, knowing subject and object known merge, and with this
distinctions between facts and values, theory and practice begin to blur
and collapse. Early Post-Positivists like Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, and
Andrew Linklater – and many others following them – argued that, despite
their claim to scientific detachment, Positivist IR theorists played a role in
preserving certain practices and institutions whilst helping to repress
others.15 In particular, the scientific pursuit of truth tended to obstruct
consideration of normative questions concerning the desirable forms of
international political practice and of the nature of change within world
politics.16 As a result, far from being neutral observers, Positivists were
conservative supporters of an often violent and unjust status quo; they
stifled those political and normative tendencies which are at odds with a
world of power-seeking nation-states.17
The Post-Positivists dragged truth and knowledge into the social world
and with this the pursuit and identification of truth was revealed to be a
constitutive social and political activity in which certain features of inter-
national life were created and maintained. From the perspective of these
‘Critical’ IR scholars, there was no longer any hope of identifying the
‘objective’ truth or of pursuing it through a process of theorising free of all
normative and practical implications. Whereas for Positivists truth had
consisted in correspondence of ideas and statements with the empirical
facts, for Post-Positivists this was impossible; there was no position from
which such correspondence could occur. Now that the knowing subject
had lost its Archimedean position – now that the subject-object distinction
had collapsed – the mind could no longer play the role of a mirror held up
to the political life, and texts and ideas were no longer reflections of the
world but rather a part of it.18 From the perspective of this new critical
international thought, the social scientist was engaged in an inherently
normative activity and cannot avoid taking a political position. For Post-
Positivists, the proper response is to reflect on the social forces and inter-
ests that lie behind truth claims and to consider the ways in which such
claims can play a role in creating the very truths they claim to identify.19
2 THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUTH

The book seeks to clarify the role of truth in critical theories of IR. It
explores the strengths and weaknesses of some of the most influential
conceptions, whilst looking beyond them to consider the ways in which
as yet unexplored understandings of truth might help to reinvigorate the
critical tradition in IR. The same conflict is to be found in IR as elsewhere
in the political and intellectual life of the modern West; the desire for truth
comes up against increasing suspicion of the notion of truth itself. The
story is, however, rather more complex than it might first appear. Rather
than demonstrating that the concept of truth should simply be aban-
doned, critical international theorists began to consider a constellation
of political issues and concerns which cluster around it. With this, a shift
occurred in the role of truth in IR theory. IR Post-Positivists had to reflect
on the relationship of their own knowledge to political norms and inter-
ests. They also began to consider the ways in which the pursuit and
identification of truth functioned as an element within the practices of
which international political life consists. In the words of Friedrich

Kratochwil, ‘a critical theory has to address the problem of how modes
of knowledge and political practices interact positively and negatively’.20
Thus the critical tradition in IR did not simply oppose Positivist objecti-
vism with scepticism, but introduced a new way of looking at truth and
knowledge as political matters, constitutive of international realities.
Debates and anxieties about truth then turned out to be as much about
the actual and desirable shape of society, and about human freedom and
potential, as about supposedly abstract philosophical questions.
This concern with the political or constitutive significance of truth has
been one of the most significant contributions of Post-Positivist theorists to
the discipline. From this perspective, the question is not simply whether
international theorists and actors should pursue truth or not, but what sorts
of political behaviour it is tied up with. Where truth remains a goal – as it
does for Critical IR Theorists – it becomes one the attainment of which
would be a political and social as well as scientific achievement. Even where
it is rejected – especially by Poststructuralists – truth remains associated
with norms and practices which play an important, albeit largely negative,
role in world politics. Rather than a simple confrontation between acolytes
and enemies of truth – or ‘Veriphiles’ and ‘Veriphobes’, as they will be
labelled here – we find a new way of engaging with the concept. This mode
of theorising provides the focus of this book.
This way of approaching epistemic matters draws on a broad philoso-
phical tradition concerned not simply with the question of whether or not
truth is possible, but also with the way in which it relates to power,
progress, and identity. Critical international scholars have, to a degree,
been conscious of their participation in this tradition, having formulated
their theories by drawing upon the work of some of its main adherents.
Two schools of thought have been particularly influential. The first is that
of the Critical Theorists, consisting of the members of the ‘Frankfurt
School’ – especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen
Habermas – and the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Influenced by
Marx and Hegel, but also keen to resurrect the ancient connection
between the good and the true, these thinkers have highlighted the
historicity and sociality of truth and knowledge. At the same time, they
have sought to identify the intellectual and practical grounds of a form of
truth through which a more free and just society might be constructed.21
Critical IR Theorists like Andrew Linklater, Robert Cox, and (in his earlier
work) Richard Ashley followed such an approach in IR.22 The second
major influence has been that of Poststructuralist thinkers, in particular

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who understood truth’s political sig-
nificance in less positive terms.23 Following these thinkers, Poststructuralist
IR scholars like David Campbell, Jenny Edkins, James Der Derian, and (in his
later work) Ashley have taken a negative view of the relationship between
truth and world politics.24 Whereas Critical Theorists follow the tradition of
philosophical history in linking a non-Positivist conception of truth with
progressive, emancipatory political practices, Poststructuralists have pre-
sented the ideals and norms which cluster around truth as key elements in a
modern politics of violence and domination.
As we will see in the following chapters, the differences between these
two broad strands of critical international thought certainly lend support
to the idea of a confrontation between sceptics and supporters of truth
within Post-Positivist IR. However, such a picture of critical IR would be a
limited one since, in contrast with Positivists, Critical IR Theorists and
Poststructuralists both offer detailed accounts of the political significance
of truth in the manner just outlined. To this extent they are members of
the same critical tradition. Second, and perhaps surprisingly, we shall see
that there are significant similarities in the ways they understand truth –
not only do they agree that it is of political significance but they also agree
about many of its characteristics.
This book will consider the conceptions of truth which have been
employed by the main schools of critical international thought and the
ways in which these conceptions have shaped theories of International
Relations. In doing so it will be possible to gain a clearer understanding
of the claims about world politics and proposals for its transformation
formulated by critical IR scholars – of their origins, limitations, and poten-
tial. Of course, Post-Positivist scholars have already discussed epistemologi-
cal questions and their significance for IR theory at some length. This book
engages with a body of literature which has been defined by a sustained
interest in epistemic matters – in addition to and overlapping with the works
of critical international thought just described, there is a large body of
secondary literature which has sought to assess the impact and significance
of critical Post-Positivism on the discipline. From the initial identification of
a ‘Third Debate’ in IR25 through to more recent retrospectives the critical
tradition has, true to its word, been characterised by an abundance (some
would say an excess) of self-reflection. Early discussions of Post-Positivism
such as Yosef Lapid’s essay ‘The Third Debate’, Steve Smith’s ‘Positivism
and Beyond’, and Jim George’s ‘International Relations and the Search for
Thinking Space’ are especially concerned with the implications of the

critique of Positivism for the future of the discipline. In most cases episte-
mological matters take pride of place.26
More recently, there has been no small amount of stock-taking regard-
ing the state of critical international thought.27 A common feature of these
more recent retrospectives has been a sense of impatience with the focus
on epistemology which has characterised critical international thought.
There is a current of thought according to which, if critical IR scholars are
to avoid excessive abstraction, less attention should be paid to the critique
of ‘problematic forms of knowledge in the academy’28 and ‘philosophical
first principles’29 and more to their ability to engage with the world, either
empirically or by increasing their ‘motivational purchase’ on political
actors.30 The desire for a more empirical form of critical theorising is
apparent, for example, with Craig Murphy’s suggestion that critical IR
needs to try harder to engage with ‘the self-understanding of the world’s
least advantaged’ and with Thomas Risse’s account of the role of
Habermasian communicative action in diplomacy.31 Regarding the ques-
tion of motivation, Critical IR Theorists have been concerned with iden-
tifying the sources of emancipatory action or ‘praxis’, and epistemological
reflection can seem to be more of a hindrance than a help in this search.32
Such concerns are further apparent in recent discussions concerning the
supposed ‘End of IR Theory’, in which there is apparent a widespread
attitude of pluralistic pragmatism; any position is fine as long as it is useful
in addressing substantive international phenomena and issues.33 Whilst
dissatisfaction is expressed with IR’s narrative of Great Debates, another
concern is that IR scholars have been prone to focusing on questions
about epistemology, ontology, methodology rather than substantive ques-
tions about world politics. These recent concerns about the ill-effects of
reflective theory take a variety of forms, from those of analytical eclecticists
who believe IR should focus on ‘middle-range’ theorising and ‘substantive
problems’ to those of critical scholars who fear that IR scholarship is too
remote from the concerns and experiences of ordinary people.34
The eclecticists draw on pragmatism to argue that IR’s recurring theory
wars have been at best a distraction and at worst a struggle between ‘quasi-
religious’ beliefs.35 Arguing in the latter vein, David Lake asserts that
theorists should not need to defend their ‘methodological, ontological,
and epistemological assumptions at every turn’.36 A similar call for a stance
of analytical eclecticism has been made by Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein.
Such an approach focuses on ‘substantive problems’ and ‘concrete issues
of policy and practice’. It does so by adopting a pragmatist attitude which

‘sets aside metatheoretical debates’.37 Pragmatism, of course, rejects first-
order questions and focuses on the ‘consequences of truth claims’, empha-
sising the revisability of such claims and the importance of dialogue.38
Frustration has also been expressed by IR scholars of a more ‘critical’
persuasion, for some of whom the eclecticist position has held a certain
appeal.39 There is a more general feeling that the metatheoretical and
epistemological concerns which have characterised critical IR are now
proving to be a distraction. For example, Christine Sylvester argues that
war should be approached by focusing on the people who experience it
rather than ‘theoretical abstractions’.40 This is a concern she shares with
Milja Kurki, who laments the lack of ‘real systematic, effective or realistic
opposition’ to dominant models.41
3 WHY TRUTH NOW?

As far as matters of truth and knowledge are concerned, then, the litera-
ture shows every sign of being saturated or exhausted; earlier theorists
discussed epistemic matters at length, whilst contemporary theorists are
increasingly turning away from them. This being the case, what can be
gained by further investigation into the role of conceptions of truth in
IR theory?
There are a number of reasons to think that critical international
thought might benefit from renewed engagement with such questions.
These fall into three categories. Some relate to the epistemic anxieties,
assumptions, and self-confidence which continue to characterise modern
societies – IR theorists might be losing their interest in epistemic matters,
but actors in the ‘real’ world show little sign of doing so. In the context of
a culture and society which displays anxieties and disagreements about
truth – not least in popular attitudes to the secrecy which defines interna-
tional politics – it is surely necessary for critical international theorists to
continue to reflect on questions of truth and knowledge as politically
significant.42 There is an important distinction to be drawn between an
introspective critique of ‘forms of knowledge in the academy’, on the one
hand, and fidelity to the fundamental critical insight into the sociality of
knowledge and truth and the role they play in constituting political
realities, on the other.43 The modern anxieties described above reveal
the extent to which our beliefs about knowledge and truth are tied up
with normative and political questions. Indeed, world politics is frequently
described in epistemically loaded terms – we live in a supposed ‘informa-

tion age’ in which things such as ‘big data’ and ‘transparency’ promise to
transform our lives.44 In a political context defined by Wikileaks, the
Snowden revelations, the Panama Papers, and most recently concerns
about ‘Post-Truth’, the epistemically infused nature of political discourse
is increasingly prominent. Considered against this backdrop, IR’s own
philosophical struggles should be seen not as an abstract precursor to
engagement with ‘real’ political questions, but as the discipline’s engage-
ment with substantive political issues.
One of the most significant achievements of the key critical thinkers
on whom IR Post-Positivists have drawn – including Horkheimer, Adorno,
Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida – was precisely to examine modern
society through the lens of knowledge and truth seen as practices shaped
by, but also shaping, social interests, power relations, and institutions.45 In
doing so, each undermined the myth of the sovereign Cartesian ego
occupying an Archimedean position over society, and that of society as an
objective realm of facts which can be accessed via the observations of such a
subject. They have shown, in differing ways, that these epistemological
myths and ideals are always also forms of social and political practice, and
are often tied up with practices of control and domination. The need to
remain attuned to the links between philosophical, political, and social
problems was certainly one that Marx was aware of when he coupled the
critique of idealism with his critique of capitalism.46 Likewise, that Foucault
was conscious of the same need is apparent in his combination of meticu-
lous social and historical studies with his theory of power, knowledge, and
truth.47 For Habermas, too, epistemology has been the basis of critical
political theory.48 For Horkheimer and Adorno, it was the epistemic self-
confidence of the modern world which generated the need to consider such
matters, rather than any abstract philosophical concerns.49
Post-Positivist IR theorists must tread carefully, therefore, when
attempting to take the next step in critical theorising, taking care not to
re-render abstract that which they have succeeded in drawing into the
social world. None of this means, for example, that Murphy is wrong to
insist on the need for critical IR scholars to engage more extensively with
the most disadvantaged of the world’s inhabitants. It does mean, however,
that they should not do so without bearing in mind the constitutive role of
epistemic practices and relationships in modern political life.
A second reason to consider truth’s significance for critical international
thought arises from the dynamism of IR theory itself. It would be wrong
to assume that philosophical questions of truth and knowledge were

settled decades ago, and that critical IR scholars can therefore turn away
from them to a new, more concrete set of concerns. In doing so, theorists
risk the calcification of the epistemological concepts and theories which
have been established, causing them to change into rigid foundations no
longer open to question. In the interests of rigorous international theory,
it is vital that IR theorists do not forget or deny their debt to epistemo-
logical debates and theorising.
Indeed, despite the general movement away from epistemic concerns,
questions to do with truth have retained some importance as old critical
orthodoxies have been challenged. One of the main arguments of this
book is that whilst talk of ivory tower theorising in relation to critical IR is
to a great extent misplaced, the way in which truth has been politicised is
problematic and has led to a certain level of abstraction as a result. That
this is the case has become apparent with the appearance of Scientific
or Critical Realism in IR. Critical Realists have highlighted the extent
to which the main schools of thought in IR – Critical Theory and
Poststructuralism included – are based on a common set of assumptions;
all reject the subject-object distinction and attempt to understand political
reality by examining the nature of human knowledge.50 Critical Realists
suggest that this obsession with things epistemic obscures the more fun-
damental ontological question of what the world must be like for us to
have knowledge in the first place.51 Quite apart from the substance of
Critical Realist arguments, this is a significant development in critical
international thought. The common perception in the discipline is that
the critique of Positivism generated a new plurality of perspectives in the
place of the scientistic one advocated by Positivists. In claiming that this
apparent plurality actually rests on a consensus, Critical Realists have
highlighted the specificity of Post-Positivism as a family of theories united
by a set of shared assumptions.52
Such a sense of specificity opens the way for reflection on assumptions
which were widely taken for granted by critically minded IR scholars.
Critical Realists share many of the concerns of Post-Positivists; their
international theory aims to further the goal of creating a more just and
more rational world politics through criticism of political practices and
institutions which are wrongly presented as if they were part of the natural
order of things. They reject, however, the philosophical foundations of
Post-Positivism, and especially the idea that truth has nothing to do with
objective reality. This has important implications for the ways in which
they believe we can set about pursuing the emancipatory goals of critical
international thought. Thus, Critical Realists have shown that questions
about the significance of truth are far from settled.
The impetus for the present work arises not only from a consideration
of developments in contemporary critical international thought but also
from a concern with older works of Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
The theories upon which Post-Positivist IR scholarship has largely been
based certainly mesh nicely with some matters of particular concern to IR
theorists. The Habermasian emphasis on communicative interaction is
appealing to those searching for a means of overcoming the present state
of mutual estrangement between political communities. Likewise, the
Poststructuralist emphasis on the links between truth and domination
links up with concerns about sovereignty, violence, or global governance.
However, the productiveness of these positions when applied to IR –
which will be discussed in Part I of this book – has led critical international
theorists to brush over matters which were of central importance to earlier
generations of Critical Theorists.
The motivation for this book arises, in particular, from a concern with
issues which were raised by Theodor Adorno. Unfortunately for those
seeking both to defend and advance the critical tradition in IR, Adorno’s
work has received little attention in the discipline. Indeed, in many
respects he appears not to have much to offer contemporary international
thought. He avoided making specific political prescriptions, which no
doubt explains his reputation for pessimistic abstraction. Nor did he
focus on specifically ‘international’ issues to do with sovereignty or diver-
sity. However, that Adorno’s work can be productively applied in the
discipline has not entirely escaped the notice of IR theorists.53 Daniel
Levine’s recent call for an Adornian project of ‘sustainable critique’ is
particularly notable. As Levine points out, there is a close connection
between Adorno’s concern with ‘chastening reason’ and the needs of the
discipline of IR as it responds to the ongoing ‘crisis of modernity’.54
Whilst Levine focuses on IR in general, the present work looks to
Adorno – and specifically to his theory of truth – as a means of reviving
the tradition of critical international thought. Post-Positivist IR scholars
have generally accepted the critique of Positivism according to which truth
is an intersubjective phenomenon. In contrast, despite their recognition
of the complicity of certain sorts of truth claim with modern forms of
domination and the loss of meaning, Adorno and his colleague
Horkheimer insisted on the possibility and need for a truth which could
not be equated with utility or consensus. Horkheimer wanted to retain

what he called the ‘knowledge of the falling fighter’ – the way in which
truth might be maintained in the face of near overwhelming opposition –
and emphasised the need to avoid equating truth with political or social
success.55 Adorno was keen to assert the need for objective truth – albeit,
as we shall see, of a very different kind to that rejected by Post-Positivists –
and was critical of liberal faith in the political utility of mere opinion.56
This attitude is no doubt partly due to the different political circumstances
which the early Frankfurt School faced as refugees from Nazi totalitarian-
ism. Nevertheless, it suggests there is reason to think more carefully before
rejecting the notion of a truth which can stand at odds with prevailing
opinion or discourse.
Another area of concern for Adorno – one closely connected to his
conception of truth – was the subject-object relationship. Early Critical
Theorists displayed a Marxian interest in the objective activity of human
subjects – their interaction with the natural, material world of which they
are part – and the way in which this activity is related to the norms,
practices, and institutions of which social life consists. This interest in
the relationship between subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity
informed Adorno’s understanding of truth. In contrast, IR Post-
Positivists were quick to replace the concern with subject-object relations
with a focus on linguistic intersubjectivity. It is not clear that this move has
ever been adequately justified. Rather, as will be argued in Chapter 2, the
concern with a subject-object relationship has been condemned through
association with Positivist objectivism and a crude form of scientistic
Marxism. Critical international thought was able to move away from the
question of the relationship between subject and object to a great extent
through critique of these two positions. In doing so, it moved too quickly;
there was a failure to engage with the sophisticated consideration of the
subject-object relationship which is found in Adorno’s theory of truth.57
As we shall see, this failure left Post-Positivists vulnerable to some of the
criticisms levelled at them by Critical Realists.
Consideration of these three areas – the epistemic tone of modern
political discourse, the Critical Realist challenge, and the concerns of
the early Frankfurt School – suggests that there is much more to be
said about the role of truth in critical international thought, and about
Post-Positivist assessments of its political significance. It will be argued
here that, far from representing a retreat into the ivory tower, such a
reconsideration of the epistemic concerns which shaped Post-Positivist
IR points to the means by which this critical tradition might be

reinvigorated and extended.
4 THE ARGUMENT
There are two broad elements to the argument advanced in the following
chapters. The first, outlined in Part I, concerns the character of the critical
Post-Positivist tradition in IR. It will be argued that, despite the difference
of opinion between Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists as to whether
truth is of positive or negative value, the significance of truth has been
understood by Post-Positivists on the basis of the two common pillars
mentioned above. The first of these is a ‘critical epistemological proble-
matic’ which emerges once truth is recognised as a social phenomenon.
The problematic consists of three questions concerning: the relationship
between socialised truth and the forms of community and practice which
characterise world politics; the possibility of achieving the level of context-
transcendence necessary to sustain a critical international theory; and the
relationship between truth and political progress. The second unifying
factor is the intersubjective conception of truth with which the proble-
matic has generally been addressed. According to this conception, which is
implicit in most Post-Positivist IR theories, truth is understood in terms of
intersubjective epistemic practices and idealisations about the conditions
in which they take place, rather than in terms of the subject-object
relationship.
The way in which these two factors interact in critical international
thought will be illustrated through an investigation of key works of Post-
Positivist IR theory. Chapter 2 explores the origins of the critical epistemo-
logical problematic and the intersubjective understanding of truth in early
works of Post-Positivism, especially those of Ashley, Cox, and Linklater.
The breaking down of a sharp subject-object distinction is identified as the
most significant element of the critique of Positivism in IR. Contrary to
many analyses, however, the result of this merging was not theoretical
pluralism but the critical epistemological problematic. Two major attempts
to address the latter are identified, one involving the Veriphilia of Critical
Theorists and the other the Veriphobia of Poststructuralists. Despite their
opposing positions concerning the value of truth, both have tended to work
with an intersubjective understanding of the concept.
Chapter 3 considers a major Poststructuralist work – David Campbell’s
National Deconstruction – to show how the critical problematic and
intersubjective understanding of truth function when the political signifi-

cance of truth is understood in negative terms, as a source of domination
and violence.58 The chapter focuses on the influence of Derrida’s under-
standing of truth in particular. According to Campbell, the grounds for
critique and political progress (the subjects of questions 2 and 3 of the
critical epistemic problematic) lie in turning away from the pursuit of truth
altogether and towards an ethical concern with difference. Chapter 4 takes
a major work of Habermasian Critical IR Theory – Andrew Linklater’s The
Transformation of Political Community – and shows how the same pro-
blematic is addressed with an intersubjective conception of truth, but this
time from a perspective according to which truth is a source of progress.59
In this case, truth is redeemed through association with discursively gen-
erated consensus arrived at under ideal epistemic conditions. The possibi-
lity of progress and moral learning lies not in the assertion of sovereign
rationality standing over the world, as Poststructuralists fear, but in a form
of communal rationality based on the intersubjective, discursive pursuit of
truth claims and the construction of institutions which approximate the
conditions ideal for this pursuit.
Both the Veriphobic and Veriphiliac perspectives generate important
insights into the nature of world politics; Campbell’s into the prevalence
of certain unreflexive forms of Veriphilia and their links with political
violence, Linklater’s into the possibility that the pursuit of truth might
still be connected to a progressive practice. Nevertheless, both encounter
difficulties as a result of their intersubjective understandings of truth. In
Campbell’s case, the rejection of truth leads to a reliance on some proble-
matic quasi-transcendental concepts and an excessive emphasis on the
influence of Western philosophical tradition in explanations of political
practice. Despite the emphasis on difference, this Poststructuralist
approach takes on the character of a traditional philosophical system.
The Habermasian discourse theory of truth implicit in Linklater’s work
seemed to go some way to addressing these problems, but leaves him
struggling to address the normative and political issues surrounding
human relations with the material world.
Part II further investigates the sources of these problems and outlines the
second element to the book’s argument, according to which the difficulties
in question are partly due the intersubjectivist understanding of truth which
obscures the importance of the subject-object relationship. In Chapter 5 we
examine the arguments of Critical Realists, who introduce the idea that
truth is significant not because of the constitutive role of the intersubjective
practices and ideals with which it is associated, but rather because it involves
the cognitive relationship of human subjects with an objective reality. The
reintroduction of the subject-object relationship is an important step, but
the Critical Realists lapse into a scientism (faith in science) at odds with
Post-Positivists’ insights into the constitutive significance of truth.
Chapter 6 presents Adorno’s Critical Theory as a means of reconciling
Post-Positivist insights with Realist concerns, demonstrating how the poli-
tical significance of truth arises from both the subject-object relationship
and from the norms and practices with which truth is associated. Adorno
offers a conception of truth closely tied to his belief in the ‘primacy of
the objective’ and the importance of the ‘non-identical’ – the fact that
the world can never be captured ‘without remainder’.60 For Adorno, the
non-identical must be brought back in through the pursuit of a truth which
is objective, but also emphatic – in that it has normative content – and
‘unintentional’ – in that it requires us to search for ways in which the
objective is ‘expressed’ in the conceptualisations and structures established
through modern rationality. This understanding of truth points to the
substantive nature of critical IR’s epistemic concerns – the way they help
to illuminate real problems and predicaments encountered by individuals
living in a heavily bureaucratised, marketised, but divided world. At the
same time, it offers a means of overcoming the tendency to abstraction
which has emerged from the assertion that truth is purely intersubjective.
NOTES
1. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writing
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 133.
2. John Rawls rejects the idea that truth should play any significant role in
liberal politics, an idea challenged by Joshua Cohen. Joshua Cohen, ‘Truth
and Public Reason’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37, 1 (2005), pp. 2–42.
3. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Reflections on the “Critical” in Critical Theory’,
Review of International Studies, 33, Special Issue: Critical International
Relations Theory after 25 years (2007), pp. 25–45, reference p. 40.
4. The Guardian, ‘The Guardian View on Russian Propaganda: The Truth is
Out There’, 2 March (2015), http://www.theguardian.com/commentis
free/2015/mar/02/guardian-view-russian-propaganda-truth-out-there
[accessed 7 June 2016].
5. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002), p. 1.
6. William Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and
Practice in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 22, 3,
(1996), pp. 301–321.
7. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, p. 11.
8. Derrida states that ‘All the metaphysical determinations of truth . . . are
more or less inseparable from the instance of the logos’ and includes within
the latter ‘the sense of God’s infinite understanding’. Jacques Derrida, ‘The
End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, in Truth: Engagements
Across Philosophical Traditions, ed. José Medina and David Wood (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), pp. 207–225.
9. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960);
Bertrand Russell, ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’, in Truth, ed.
Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 69–82; Sextus Empiricus ‘Outlines of Pyrrhonism’, in
Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches, ed. Paul
K. Moser and Arnold vander Nat (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995), pp. 80–90; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans.
R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003).
10. Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, (London: Penguin,
2005), pp. xiv–xv.
11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
12. W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, (London: Routledge,
1981), p. 1.
13. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, MA: Addison
Wesley, 1979).
14. Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International
Relations Theory’, Millennium 10, 2 (1981), pp. 126–155.
15. Ibid.; Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International
Relations, 2nd Edition, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Richard Ashley
‘Political Realism and Human Interests’, International Studies Quarterly
25, 2 (1981).
16. Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. 28.
17. Cox, ‘Social Forces’.
18. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1979).
19. The best known Positivist reply is Robert Keohane’s International Studies
Association Presidential address of 1988. Robert Keohane, ‘International
Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly 32, 4
(1988), pp. 379–396.
20. Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36.
21. See e.g. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests; Max Horkheimer,
‘On the Problem of Truth’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,
ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978),
pp. 407–443.
22. Ashley, ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’; Cox, ‘Social Forces’;
Linklater, Men and Citizens.
23. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 133.
24. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the
Politics of Identity, Revised Edition (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1998); Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices
of Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); James Der
Derian, ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International
Relations’, in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings
of World Politics, ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (New York:
Lexington, 1989), pp. 3–10.
25. Yosef Lapid, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory
in a Post-Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly 33, 3 (1989),
pp. 235–254.
26. Ibid.; Jim George, ‘International Relations and the Search for Thinking
Space: Another View of the Third Debate’, International Studies
Quarterly 33 (1989), pp. 269–279.; Steve Smith, ‘Positivism and
Beyond’, in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, ed. Steve Smith,
Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), pp. 11–44.
27. See for example Nick Rengger and Ben Thirkwell-White eds., Review of
International Studies, Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory
After 25 Years, 33 (2007) and the contributions to the ‘Forum on
Habermas’ Review of International Studies, 31, 1 (2005).
28. Nicholas Rengger and Ben Thirkwell-White, ‘Still Critical After All These
Years? The Past, Present and Future of Critical Theory in International
Relations’, Review of International Studies 33, S1 (2007), pp. 3–24, refer-
ence p. 21.
29. Thomas Diez and Jill Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue? Habermas and
International Relations’ Review of International Studies 31, 1 (2005),
pp. 127–140, reference p. 138.
30. Rengger and Thirkwell-White, ‘Still Critical?’, pp. 21–22.
31. Craig Murphy, ‘The Promise of Critical IR, Partially Kept’, Review of
International Studies, Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory
After 25 Years, 33 (2007), pp. 117–134, reference p. 118; Thomas Risse
‘“Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International
Organization 54, 1 (2000) pp. 1–39.
32. Jürgen Haacke, ‘Theory and Practice in International Relations: Habermas,

Self-Reflection, Rational Argumentation’, Millennium, 25, 2 (1996),
pp. 255–259; Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 138; Friedrich
Kratochwil suggests that Critical Theorists need to address the question of
the nature of action, but unlike many IR scholars does not seem to believe
that such an avenue is blocked by the concern with epistemology.
Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36.
33. Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, ‘The End of International
Relations Theory?’, European Journal of International Relations 19, 3
(2013), pp. 405–425. See also Damiano de Felice and Francesco Obino
eds. ‘Out of the Ivory Tower’, Millennium, Special Issue 40 (2012), 3.
34. David Lake, ‘Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great
Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations’, European
Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 567–587; Rudra Sil
and Peter Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics:
Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions’,
Perspective on Politics 8, 2 (2010), pp. 411–431; Christine Sylvester,
‘Experiencing the End and Afterlives of International Relations/Theory’,
European Journal of International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 609–626;
Craig Murphy, ‘The Promise of Critical IR, Partially Kept’, Review of
International Studies 33, Special Issue: Critical International Relations
after 25 Years (2007), pp. 117–134.
35. Lake, ‘Theory is Dead’, p. 568.
36. Ibid., p. 580.
37. Sil and Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism’, p. 417.
38. Ibid.
39. Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Beyond Meta-Theory?’, European Journal of
International Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 589–608, reference p. 603.
40. Sylvester, ‘End and Afterlives’.
41. Ibid., p. 616; Milja Kurki, ‘The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections
on Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Today’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 40, 1 (2011), pp. 129–146.
42. Matthew Fluck, ‘Theory, Truthers, and Transparency: Reflecting on
Knowledge in the 21st Century’, Review of International Studies 42, 1
(2016), pp. 48–73.
43. Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36; Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’,
p. 132.
44. Steve Fuller, The Knowledge Book, (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), pp. 82–87.
Daniel McCarthy and Matthew Fluck ‘The Concept of Transparency in
International Relations: Towards a Critical Approach’, forthcoming
European Journal of International Relations.
45. Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’; Theodor Adorno, Negative

Dialectics, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Habermas, Knowledge
and Human Interests; Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Jacques Derrida of
Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
46. See for example, Karl Marx, ‘The Holy Family’, in David McLellan ed. Karl
Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), pp. 145–170; Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd Edition, ed. David
McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83–121.
47. Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
48. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.
49. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
(London: Verso 1972).
50. Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism? The Promises of
Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly 44, 2 (2000), pp. 213–237,
reference p. 217.
51. Colin Wight, ‘A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-
Opener Won’t Work!’, Millennium 39, 2 (2007), pp. 379–398, reference
p. 390.
52. Patomaki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism?’
53. Exceptions include Nicholas Rengger, ‘Negative Dialectic? The Two Modes
of Critical Theory in World Politics’, in Critical Theory and World Politics,
ed. Richard Wyn Jones (London: Lynne Rienner, 2001) pp. 91–109;
Columba Peoples, ‘Theodor Adorno’, in Critical Theorists and
International Relations, ed. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams
(London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 7–18; Shannon Brincat, ‘Negativity and
Open-Endedness in the Dialectic of World Politics’, Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political 34, 4 (2009), pp. 455–493; Daniel Levine Recovering
International Relations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
54. Levine, Recovering International Relations.
55. Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’, pp. 428–429.
56. Theodor Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’, trans. H Pickford, Yale
Journal of Criticism 10, 2 (1997).
57. Adorno, Negative Dialectics.
58. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in
Bosnia, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
59. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical
Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
60. Theodor Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, in The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell 1978),
pp. 497–511; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
PART I
Post-Positivism and Truth

CHAPTER 2
The Parameters of Post-Positivism
From now on, my dear philosophers, let us beware of the dangerous old
conceptual fable which posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing
subject’.
Friedrich Nietzsche1
this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must
therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.
Giambattista Vico2
1 INTRODUCTION
Accounts of the ‘sustained theoretical effervescence’ of IR’s Third
Debate have often given it the air of a rebellious golden age, an
unprecedented period of disciplinary self-reflection and fecundity.3
Early assessments of its significance celebrated the openness and plur-
alisation to which the turn supposedly gave rise. With varying degrees
of optimism and enthusiasm, the turn to ‘Post-Positivism’4 was char-
acterised by its participants as a productive pluralisation of metatheore-
tical perspectives5; as giving rise to the ‘next stage’ in IR theory6; as
the search for increased ‘thinking space’7; as a theoretical and practical

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_2
‘opening up’8; and in terms of a pluralisation of ‘dissident voices’

previously repressed by IR’s Positivist orthodoxy.9
In most accounts, this theoretical opening-up was presented as hav-
ing occurred by predominantly epistemological means. Steve Smith
referred to the critique of Positivism as the ‘epistemology debate’.10
Jim George identified four defining features of the ‘agenda of dissent’,
each of them at least partly epistemological: identification of the inade-
quacy of empiricism; the substitution of the Cartesian cogito, autono-
mous individuality, sense data, and correspondence notions of truth
with the investigation of the social, historical, and cultural constitution
of knowledge; the rejection of ‘the foundationalist search for an objec-
tive knowledge’; and a belief in the linguistic construction of reality.11
The prevailing view has been that the crumbling of the old Positivist
fiction of the ‘view from nowhere’ allowed theories to multiply, ‘dis-
sidents’ to be heard, and new theoretical and practical possibilities to be
explored.
Pluralisation continues to be celebrated. Indeed, as discussed in the
introduction, for some IR scholars this might be the truly lasting
achievement of Post-Positivism. The epistemological dimension of the
critique of Positivism has proved to be of less enduring appeal. Indeed, it
has become common to observe that critical IR cannot remain forever in
the realm of metatheoretical or epistemological reflection, but must
move on to empirical studies and practical applications.12 Such concerns
have been played a prominent role in recent discussions of the ‘end of IR
theory’.13
The present chapter argues that the insights of critical IR scholars
did not simply emerge with the blooming of a thousand theoretical
flowers. In fact, a specific set of epistemic concerns and theoretical
orientations shaped the development of critical international thought,
setting the parameters in which issues of more obvious relevance for IR
could be addressed. The first part of the chapter examines the early,
pioneering Critical Theory of Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, and
Andrew Linklater and reconstructs from within it an overarching ‘cri-
tical epistemological problematic’. The second section looks at the
debate about foundations and the emergence of Poststructructuralist
IR theories. It identifies not only a division between ‘Veriphiles’ and
‘Veriphobes’ but also, more importantly, a broad common understand-
ing of truth as intersubjective.
2 THE PARAMETERS OF POST-POSITIVISM 25
2 THE ‘BREACH IN THE DYKE’

Anti-Objectivism
Nick Rengger and Ben Thirkwell-White identify three theorists – Robert
Cox, Richard Ashley, and Andrew Linklater – the works of whom created
a ‘breach in the dyke’ of the Positivist orthodoxy in IR.14 A new form
of epistemologically informed, normatively aware, and critical Post-
Positivist theory emerged in the works of these theorists.15 The nature
of their critique is well-known; each attacked the Positivist assumption
that knowledge of the social world is value-free. Behind this criticism lies
the more general rejection of the separation of subject and object in
social theory, according to which the theorist, as knowing subject, stands
apart from and surveys the objects of the social world, thereby arriving at
an ‘objective’ account of international politics. Each linked the objecti-
vist truth claims of Positivist IR theory to global social and political
arrangements characterised by domination and injustice. A more reflex-
ive, consciously political way of knowing was linked to the potential for
progressive change in global political life. One of the main contributions
of the Post-Positivists was therefore – in the words of Thomas Diez and
Jill Steans – to illustrate
the role that knowledge played in creating and sustaining social arrange-
ments characterised by inequality and domination and in facilitating experi-
ments in different ways of living and relating to one another.16
As described above, this epistemological critique of Positivism has typically

been characterised as a moment of theoretical liberation which gave rise to
a plurality of approaches to IR. This is in many respects a reasonable
characterisation. However, at a more fundamental level, a specific set of
parameters and concerns were established. The context for their construc-
tion was both internal and external to the discipline.17
These developments in IR reflected – after a considerable delay – broad
yet interrelated changes in social theory, the philosophy of science, and
analytic philosophy which blurred the boundary between subject and
object – between the claims, concepts, and language of the theorist
and the political phenomena under investigation. This collapse of the
subject-object distinction is often presented as if it were a straightforward
development – in contrast to Positivists standing apart from the world,

Post-Positivists accept that they stand within it. In fact, the blurring
occurred in a specific manner, one which linked up with the specific,
intra-disciplinary concerns of critical international theorists.
An example of the theoretical narrative widely accepted in IR can be
found in the work of Richard Bernstein.18 In The Restructuring of Social
and Political Theory, Bernstein suggests that during the second half of
the twentieth-century social theory progressed from the dominance of
Positivism, through a turn to interpretivism, and on to reflexive Critical
Theory.19 Positivist theories, Bernstein argues, can describe and explain
aspects of society but not understand values and norms. Interpretivist
theories can point to the importance of culture, norms, and values in social
life, but cannot critically assess the boundaries of understanding as they exist
in a particular community.20 The latter task is addressed by Critical
Theorists who consider the connection between knowledge and power.
Within analytical philosophy, key developments included
Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy and J.L. Austin’s theory of speech
acts.21 Within social theory, such positions influenced interpretivist social
theorists like Peter Winch, who argued that the forms of study appropriate
to society and nature differ in fundamental ways. Winch asserted that the
former consists of ‘forms of life’ (a Wittgensteinian notion) which involve
rule-following behaviour. Understanding relations between subjects
meant understanding the ideas which lie behind their behaviour, and
which are ultimately constitutive of these relations. Winch argued that
understanding what a ‘form of life’ is ‘as such’ is an epistemological task
(since it takes the place of the Cartesian ego as the foundation of knowl-
edge), and one essential to understanding the nature of social phenomena.
For this reason, epistemology becomes an essential element in social
theory.22 At the same time, since a form of life is an inherently social
phenomenon, social theory becomes integral to epistemology.
It is unlikely that these developments would have been so influential had
it not been for the simultaneous breakdown of the Positivist-empiricist
philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific paradigms and
their mutual incommensurability was especially influential.23 According to
Kuhn, scientific communities consist of sets of shared values. There is no
external vantage point or standard from which these can be assessed so
theory change, or ‘scientific revolution’, could not occur through recogni-
tion of ‘the facts’. The latter are constituted within a given theoretical
paradigm. Different paradigms are therefore incommensurable; their
members operate within different worlds containing different ‘facts’ which

do not admit of comparison.24 For example, Kuhn suggests that
Copernicus and his opponents did not simply disagree about the move-
ment of the earth, but about the very meaning of concepts like ‘earth’ and
‘motion’.25 They were occupying ‘different worlds’.26 This merging of
theory and facts, intersubjectivity and objectivity in the philosophy of
science fed into social theory, supporting the idea that knowledge and
truth should be understood in social terms rather than as a matter of
uncovering objective facts. Kuhn seemed to confirm that there was no
perspective from which to identify objective truths about the social
world, only the interaction of members of a given community. Many social
theorists have applied this ‘incommensurability thesis’ to relations between
different cultures and value systems.27
As Bernstein explains, these developments in Anglophone philoso-
phy overlapped with the concerns of Critical Theorists, and in parti-
cular Habermas, who drew on a heritage which had long challenged
empiricist epistemology.28 The emphasis on power and interests in the
work of these critical thinkers was combined with the interpretivist
view that the social world consists of intersubjective values and rules,
the understanding of which should be the goal of social theory. Like
the other ‘continental’ philosophers who have been influential in IR –
especially Foucault and Derrida – Habermas’s work was characterised
by rejection of the Cartesian subject and a turn to the theory of
communication.29
Within IR, two perceived ills of the mainstream – those of ‘objectivism’
and ‘structuralism’ – provided a context in which this narrative of inter-
pretivism and intersubjectivity held considerable appeal. ‘Objectivism’
consists of the belief in ‘a realm of basic, uninterpreted, hard facts that
serves as the foundation for all empirical knowledge’.30 ‘Structuralism’ (at
least in the form discussed by early Post-Positivists in IR) is the assumption
that the social world can be analysed in terms of objective, independently
existing systems which determine the practices of social actors.31 Elements
of each were supposedly identified in Kenneth Waltz’s Neorealism –
the primary focus of the Post-Positivist critique. Waltz explained the
objectively identifiable laws of international politics by appealing to the
anarchical structure of the international system.32
Ashley summed up the concerns of early critical international scho-
lars when, quoting Anthony Giddens, he referred to the ‘scandalous
anti-humanism’ which obscures the role of meaningful human practice
in the international system.33 Linklater expressed similar concerns when

he criticised the ‘mechanistic’ Realism which ignores the role of culture
and values in world politics.34 Likewise, although he continued to refer
to social structures, we find that for Cox social realities are ‘constituted
by intersubjective ideas’ which are perpetuated by individuals acting ‘as
though’ they exist. This ‘ideological and intersubjective element’ was
introduced to counter the Realist emphasis on ‘the brute power rela-
tionship’.35 Each theorist’s approach was characterised by a broadly
interpretivist understanding of social reality and an epistemology
based on ‘understanding’ and reflecting on intersubjective norms,
rules, and understandings. This new interpretivist attitude involved a
social ontology as well as an epistemology; ideas about what humans as
social beings are and how we know about the social world were
entwined.36
Neorealism was the main target of Post-Positivist criticism, but the anti-
objectivist character of the new paradigm also emerged in reaction against
Marxism.37 Elements of Marx’s thought were a source of inspiration for
early Post-Positivists. Nevertheless, the Marxian tradition was also seen to
contain examples of what could go wrong when a supposedly critical
theory succumbed to the temptations to objectivism. Each of the early
Post-Positivists worried that orthodox Marxist theory involved an eco-
nomic determinism which reduced meaningful social phenomena to the
status of epiphenomena of economic structures, the objective facts about
which are identified by the (Marxist) social scientist. Ashley began his
account of the ‘Poverty of Neorealism’ by recounting E. P. Thompson’s
attack on Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, drawing parallels
between this critique and his own criticisms of structural Realism in
IR.38 Cox emphasised that Gramsci, by whom he was heavily influenced,
had been keen to focus on the efficacy of ethical and cultural sources of
political action.39 Where structures do appear, they are seen as configura-
tions of ideas, institutions, and ‘material capabilities’.40 From this perspec-
tive, Cox could point out the dangers of objectivist, structuralist Marxism,
which he believed sustained ideological dogmatism,41 as well as the limita-
tions of Marxian inspired world systems theory.42 Indeed, he has tended
to downplay the influence of Marx on his work, emphasising instead that
of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico
which, along with Gramsci, pushes his work in a distinctly intersubjectivist
direction.43 Linklater’s early philosophical history also relied on Marx, but
was primarily concerned with reintroducing questions of normativity and
culture as integral elements in an attempt to identify sources of moral

learning in world politics.44
Behind the rejection of Marxist structuralism and objectivism by early
Critical IR Theorists was the same concern about the relegation of nor-
mativity and culture that was raised regarding Neorealism; both are sup-
posedly guilty of Giddens’ ‘scandalous anti-humanism’. If this supposedly
impoverished view of life were abandoned, subject and object could be
seen to merge because of the role of what Linklater would later describe as
the ‘lens of language and culture’ in constituting the objects of knowl-
edge.45 Knowledge and truth would then be revealed to involve relations
between subjects rather than relations between subjects and objects. The
specific nature of this merging of subject and object – that it is not the only
way of blurring the boundary – is apparent if we remember that the lines
had been blurred in rather a different way by Marx, for whom the objects
of knowledge are constituted through objective activity. For Marx subject
and object interact; the objective must be thought of ‘subjectively’ but, at
the same time, human activity is ‘objective activity’.46
We will return to this alternative view in Chapter 6. For now, we can
note that the emergence of Post-Positivist IR theory involved concerns
beyond the simple rejection of a sharp distinction between subject and
object. Those dimensions of social life which had supposedly been
squeezed out in Positivist and Marxist theory – intersubjective values,
rules, and culture – took on a great importance. Those concepts, such as
‘objectivity’ and ‘structures’, which had previously obscured such factors
were relegated or excluded in the new paradigm, condemned by associa-
tion with Positivism, Neorealism, and crude Marxism. The objects of
knowledge were now thought to be constituted by pre-existing intersub-
jective interests, values, and practices. Knowledge became an intersubjec-
tive, social practice, the form of which sustained particular social and
political formations understood in terms of rules and norms rather than
objective structures. Talk of objects or objectivity was increasingly taboo.
The Critical Epistemological Problematic

We will consider this intersubjectivism in more detail below. First, it is
necessary to note that it was not the only distinguishing feature of Post-
Positivist IR. The new generation of critical IR scholars also faced a series
of questions which seem particularly pressing once knowledge and truth
become social practices to be included in accounts of global society and
politics. In other words, the critique of Positivism did not leave IR

theorists with a blank theoretical canvas upon which to paint any number
of new and diverse approaches. On the contrary, a determinate new set of
questions emerged which together formed a distinct critical epistemologi-
cal problematic. This did not emerge as of logical necessity – it was, of
course, possible for interpretivists to ignore or reject it – but the questions
of the problematic were implicitly recognised by Cox, Ashley, and
Linklater and can therefore be reconstructed from within their work. It
will be helpful to outline the problematic in abstract terms before embark-
ing on such a reconstruction.
First, we have the ‘problem of how modes of knowledge and political
practices interact’.47 If knowledge and truth are elements in the same
sphere in which ‘social arrangements’ are formed, how, precisely, do
they relate to those arrangements? In IR, we must consider how they
relate to the character of and interaction between political communities.
We can label this the question of the sociology of knowledge.
With this, a second question emerges – how is critical knowledge of
world politics possible if truth, including that of the Critical Theorist, is
the product of a particular social context? This is in some respects a basic
problem of epistemology which faces anyone who engages in reflection
about the social preconditions of knowledge – in describing such precon-
ditions it seems we assume that we are already able to extract ourselves
from them such that they can become an object of study. For example, it
has been alleged that in claiming all knowledge is conditioned, relativists
are, paradoxically, claiming to have identified a context-transcendent truth
– that of relativism.48 Hegel identified a similar (albeit not identical)
problem with the epistemology of Kant. The latter claimed that it was
necessary to identify the conditions of the validity of judgements before we
could have a secure claim to knowledge.49 As Hegel pointed out, how-
ever, Kant was already relying on some pre-existing epistemological per-
spective from which the conditions in question could be outlined – he was
assuming the secure knowledge which he was supposed to be justifying, to
‘know before knowing’.50 Critical IR scholars must therefore account for
how they can socialise and politicise knowledge and truth without lapsing
into the self-contradiction of a perspective which is itself assumed to be
unconditioned. They must explain the critical perspective rather than
simply assume it. We can label this the question of context-transcendence.
Given Post-Positivists’ socialisation of knowledge, their solution to the
problem of context-transcendence cannot be a matter for theory alone.
They must avoid lapsing into the very assumption they sought to criticise –
that knowledge is somehow separate from practice. Context-transcendence
must be rooted in a social context defined by particular forms of practice
and must itself have practical political implications. The question of context-
transcendence is therefore accompanied by the question of the precise
nature of these links to politics and society. We can call this the question of
praxis. In Critical Theory, ‘praxeology’ involves the investigation of the
potential link between epistemological considerations and emancipatory
political practices.51 The possibility of such a link emerges once it is
accepted that the relationships and practices upon which knowledge is
based are historically contingent social products, and can therefore be
‘recreated’ in new ways.52
Richard Ashley
Of the three early Critical IR Theorists, Ashley engaged most directly with
the questions of this problematic. He did so primarily on the basis of
Habermas’s theory of knowledge-constitutive interests.53 According to
the position outline by Ashley in his article ‘Political Realism and
Human Interests’, epistemology is not simply a matter of social scientific
methodology but, following Habermas, involves normative and political
questions.54 Habermas himself characterises his theory as an attempt to
‘recover the forgotten experience of reflection’, the disavowal of which, he
argues, ‘is positivism’.55 For Habermas, the need for reflection arises from
the hold that technical rationality, reflecting an interest in instrumental
control of humanity’s environment, has on modern society and the grip
it has on philosophy in the form of Positivism.56 Restoring a truly reflexive
knowledge should be the fundamental political goal of our time.
Habermas’s critical epistemology is intended to show that cognition of
values is possible, and indeed fundamental to social life, and that a properly
rational society would be one in which such cognition had been restored
to its rightful place.57 From this perspective, the question of the good life
and its pursuit is not distinct from the question of the nature of human
knowledge and, ultimately, truth.
Following Habermas, Ashley criticises Positivist Neorealism for being
epistemologically flawed, empirically limited, and normatively impover-
ished account of global political life. This critique involves undermining
‘objectivism’ by demonstrating that it is linked to particular interests and
practices – primarily those involving technical control. This is achieved by
embarking on a new form of epistemologically reflexive IR theorising

which addresses the question of the sociology of knowledge. Thus,
Ashley provides an account of the underlying relationship between
realist concepts, knowledge claims, and modes of inquiry and grounding, on

the one hand, and the world of social action realism would inform, on the
other.58
He argues for the existence of different forms of knowledge which relate

to different sorts of international practice. Following Habermas, three
fundamental knowledge-constitutive interests are identified: technical,
practical, and emancipatory. Each is linked to a particular form of intellec-
tual activity and social practice, and each reflects essential human capabil-
ities and needs. Ashley links each of the knowledge-constitutive interests
to a particular form of Realist IR theory and international political
practice.
The technical cognitive interest generates knowledge which enhances
humanity’s technical control over its objective environment. This is the
constitutive interest of Positivist science and, in IR, Neorealism. Technical
Realism reflects the interest in instrumental control and manipulation of
international society in pursuit of the security of sovereign states.59
The practical cognitive interest reflects the interest in a form of knowl-
edge which enhances the mutual understanding and communication
necessary to ensure societal cohesion. This interest is associated with
historical and cultural sciences, and with hermeneutics in particular.60
Practical Realism, which is associated primarily with Classical Realist IR
theory, is concerned with understanding and maintaining the fragile tradi-
tions which generate order in the international system. True knowledge is
distinguished not by successful control of objective reality, but by under-
standing the social sphere, which in IR consists of the norms, and rules
existing between representatives of states in the international system.61 As
Ashley explains
for practical realism, explicans and explicandum are of the same ‘language
system’, and practical realism must express its concepts, norms, and knowl-
edge in terms of the very language it interprets.62
Finally, the emancipatory cognitive interest is concerned with ‘securing

freedom from “hypostatized forces” and “conditions of distorted
communication”’.63 It arises from the human ability to communicatively

reflect upon ‘needs, knowledge, and rules’ and thereby achieve greater
autonomy and self-understanding.64 It can be derived from the first two
interests; the proper exercise of science assumes a free and self-critical
group of enquirers whilst the practical interest seeks to promote undis-
torted communication amongst the members of a given sphere.
Emancipatory knowledge is at the same time more basic than the others,
since it involves the recognition that the interest in the pursuit of freedom
as such is their precondition.65
Ashley identifies Emancipatory Realism with John Herz’s attempts to
ground Realism in ‘reflective reason’.66 Herz’s approach is distinguished
by an interest in securing freedom from unacknowledged constraints, and
thereby enabling humans to consciously and rationally ‘make their own
future’.67 According to Ashley, for Herz, neither the technical nor the
practical interest is sufficient grounds for knowledge since both ignore the
human capacity for self-reflection and interest in autonomy which are their
preconditions. They therefore fail to provide any basis for questioning the
processes which shape self-understandings and immediate interests.68
Ashley suggests that, rather than rejecting the technical and practical
interests, Herz tries to ‘recombine’ them with ‘the associated approaches
to inquiry and grounding in a way that would carry the Realist dialogue
forward in response to historical change’.69 To this end, Herz widens the
hermeneutic circle of the practical interest to include participants beyond
the ‘traditional consensus of statesmanship’ as ‘suitable partners for a
dialogue’, thereby embracing within the circle ‘the whole of international
society and its history’.70 Technical Realism is incorporated through the
recognition that many of the threats to have emerged in the modern world
are threats to the whole human species. Under these circumstances the
‘universal orientation’ of reflective, emancipatory reason no longer appears
as ‘mere idealism’, but turns out to be implicit within technical reason
concerned with the development of greater powers of control in world
politics.71
Ashley identifies a potential problem with this mode of critique, noting
that in identifying the link between knowledge and interests Habermas
needs to proceed without reducing the relationship to one of
‘Mannheimean simplisms’.72 He refers here to Karl Mannheim, an associ-
ate of the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists who is often credited with
founding the ‘sociology of knowledge’.73 Mannheim was criticised by
Critical Theorists for his objectivist approach to the sociological analysis
of knowledge and for treating all socially determined truths as equally

relative.74 In the words of Adorno, such an approach
is not adequate . . . if social reality has, prior to every theoretical ordering

glance, a highly ‘articulated’ structure upon which the scientific subject and
the data of his experience depend.75
In other words, Mannheim has not considered the second of the questions
outlined above – that of context-transcendence – but has taken his own
context-transcending abilities for granted. Ashley’s passing reference to
Mannheim reflects his awareness of this trap; his account of the link
between knowledge and international political practices must not unthink-
ingly lay claim to objectivity, but must reflect on its own conditions of
possibility. Simply to succumb to relativism would be self-contradictory –
he therefore needs to point to the sources of some level of context-
transcendence in human knowledge. Thus, he recognises that in addition
to the question of the link between knowledge and international social and
political arrangements, he faces that of the nature of his own critical
knowledge.
Ashley believes that Habermas provides a way of avoiding the
Mannheimean pitfall. From the perspective of the theory of knowledge-
constitutive interests, Positivism is not relativised as a mere epiphenome-
non of underlying social factors; it is explained as a manifestation of a
fundamental human interest in technical control. Positivism is problematic
because it fails to recognise that its ‘objects’ are constituted by this interest
and because it serves to obscure the other knowledge-constitutive inter-
ests, thereby helping technical reason to usurp practical reason from its
proper place in global political life. Identification of the other fundamental
human interests points to alternative ways of knowing; hermeneutic
understanding (as in practical Realism) and reflection (as in emancipatory
Realism). Reflectivist empancipatory knowledge is the perspective from
Ashley can formulate his sociology of knowledge. Habermas thus seems to
provide critical IR with a means of understanding the relationship between
ways of knowing and social arrangements and of identifying a form of non-
objective but non-relative knowledge.
Finally, as a result of the simultaneous sociality and non-relativity of
knowledge this context-transcendence is linked by Ashley to what Diez
and Steans describe as ‘different ways of living and relating to one
another’, or what Linklater identifies as the question of praxeology.76 In
other words, Ashley is implicitly aware of the third question of the proble-
matic. Rather than simply formulating an international sociology of
knowledge and justifying his own theoretical perspective, he points to
the ways in which critical knowledge is connected to an alternative form
of political practice; to the expansion of the circle of participants in inter-
national society and to the need to take steps to address the threats faced
by humanity as a whole.77
Examination of ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’ has, then,
enabled us to reconstruct the same critical epistemological problematic
identified in a more abstract manner at the start of this section. In out-
lining his particular IR theory, Ashley is also implicitly addressing a specific
set of issues which emerge from the critique of Positivist objectivism in IR.
If we turn to the early writings of Cox and Linklater, we find that the same
problematic is at work.
Robert Cox
Cox opens his 1981 article, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’,
by stating that the ‘starting point’ for intellectual activity is ‘some
initial subdivision of reality, usually dictated by convention’.78 This
intellectual dividing up of reality may, he argues, be more or less
adequate to the way humans actually organise their lives. In contrast
with the Positivist orthodoxy in IR theory, for Cox social facts are not
simply the objective data of experience but are shaped by the social
conventions within which the observer is situated.79 As is well-known,
Cox identifies two forms of theory; ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’.
Problem-solving theory ‘takes the world as it finds it’, thereby helping
existing ‘relationships and institutions to work smoothly by dealing
effectively with particular sources of trouble’. In this way it serves
‘particular national, sectional, or class interests, which are comfortable
with the given order’.80 In contrast, Critical Theory is ‘reflective on
the process of theorising itself’ and on the basis of this self-awareness is
able to understand its own relationship to a constantly changing social
whole.81 The task of theory becomes that of identifying the possibi-
lities for ‘feasible transformations of the existing world’ and thereby
playing the role of ‘a guide to strategic action for bringing about an
alternative order’.82
Like that of Ashley, Cox’s critique of Positivism takes place on the basis
of a blurring of the boundary between subject and object in social theory;
Positivists think that their knowledge is objective when it in fact shapes

and is shaped by forces operating within the supposed object domain.
However, whilst theoretical knowledge is a social product, it is also
distinguished by its constant striving to transcend the context and per-
spective within which it emerged.83 Thus, Cox quickly identifies the dual
nature of knowledge:
Social and political theory is history-bound at its origin, since it is always

traceable to an historically-conditioned awareness of certain problems and
issues, a problematic, while at the same time it attempts to transcend the
particularity of its own historical origins in order to place them within the
framework of some general propositions or laws.84
In the case of Positivism, the tension between these two aspects of knowl-
edge gives rise to what we might call a ‘bad transcendence’; Positivists
assume the immutability and necessity of the particular historical proble-
matic they face, and this directs them to pursue transcendence through
identification of ‘laws or regularities which appear to have general valid-
ity’.85 In contrast, Cox asserts that reality as it appears is the product of
social convention and historical circumstance; unlike Positivism, his
‘Critical Theory’ is aware that knowledge is conditioned. As a result, it
faces the same Mannheimian pitfall as any sociology of knowledge, and
therefore the question of context-transcendence; in light of its conscious-
ness of the contingency of knowledge, how can Critical Theory attain the
transcendence necessary to avoid relativism? Like Ashley, Cox is aware of
the need to address this question. He claims that
Critical theory is conscious of its own relativity but through this conscious-
ness can achieve a broader time perspective and become less relative than
problem-solving theory.86
The answer lies, then, as it did for Ashley, in the reflexivity of critical
thought. Cox pursues this point through an account of Critical Theory as
he believes it appears in the work of Vico. For Vico, human nature and
institutions were not fixed or natural, but are in fact caught up in con-
tinuous processes of self-creation. Knowledge of ‘nations’ could be
attained in part through knowledge of changes in human consciousness,
which is itself shaped by changing social relations.87 Following Vico, Cox
argues that whilst mind might be dependent on social reality, it is also
the thread connecting the present with the past, a means of access to a
knowledge of these changing modes of social reality.88
Thus, knowledge of international life requires reflection on knowledge

itself.
Cox identifies a modern manifestation of this sort of reflexive theory in
Marxist historical materialism.89 One of the most important contributions of
Marxism in terms of critical epistemology has been its theory of the dialectic.
Like Vico’s theory, the dialectic presents knowledge and truth not as static
and absolute, but as in constant historical motion. At one level dialectic
consists in ‘the continual confrontation of concepts with the reality they are
meant to represent and their adjustment to this reality as it continually
changes’. The truth of the dialectic is a truth ‘always in motion, never to
be encapsulated in some definitive form’.90 At another level – that of social
reality – dialectic concerns contradictions between opposing social forces
and the potential for alternative forms of development that they generate.91
Thus, reflexive knowledge of knowledge’s own genesis as an element in a
changing social reality allows a greater self-awareness, and therefore some
level of transcendence. This context-transcendence can aid those social
forces which oppose the prevailing structure of society.
Of course, Cox does not address the question of context-transcendence
without also addressing that of the sociology of knowledge. From the
perspective outlined in ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders’, it is not
only the way reality happens to be theoretically ‘carved up’ in accordance
with convention which reflects and reproduces a given society and political
formation, but also the nature of knowledge itself; the form as well as the
content of knowledge performs a political function. Cox’s concern with
this question is less explicit than Ashley’s – in part because he retains a
Marxist belief in ‘structures’ as distinct from ‘ideas’92 – but his two ‘ways
of knowing’ are nevertheless related to different forms of political practice.
The empiricist knowledge of problem-solving theory takes appearances at
face value, believing itself to be detached from social forces. The corre-
sponding form of political practice is conservative, since there are few
resources available with which to question existing institutions. In the
current international context this form of knowledge serves to perpetuate
the system of states and of production. The reflexive knowledge associated
with Critical Theory is, in contrast, conducive to political practice which
aims at rationally directed social change, since it is consciously normative
and partial, and aware of its own practical implications. This incorporation
of change, partiality, and normativity into the mode of knowledge points

to the need for emancipatory political practice. In an international context,
such a form of knowledge helps to raise consciousness of structural contra-
dictions and points to the strategies by which they might be harnessed in
pursuit of emancipatory change.93 With this last point, Cox addresses the
third of the questions of the critical epistemological problematic, that of
praxis.
Andrew Linklater
In his early work Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations,
Linklater is less overtly concerned with epistemological questions than his
fellow critical theorists. His primary aim is the normative one of uncovering
‘a non-rationalist foundation for the traditional belief in obligations to
humanity’.94 The goal of this Post-Positivist theory seems to be not so
much that of providing a critical epistemology as of reintroducing norma-
tive reflection, which has been excluded from IR by ‘mechanistic realism’.
According to Linklater, because he fails to engage in this form of philoso-
phical inquiry, Kenneth Waltz, the most influential proponent of such
Realism, is unable to understand that the occurrence of conflict in interna-
tional life is ‘inseparable from the state as a limited moral community’.95
He must instead conclude that the sources of conflict lie in the state of
anarchy in which international politics is necessarily conducted. According
to Linklater, such a position ignores the fact that political communities are
bound together by moral bonds which have evolved over time, both as a
result of changes in the relationships within and between societies and of
the reflection about norms of citizenship those changes trigger. The influ-
ence of this tradition of reflection in international thought has been in
decline since Kant, and it is Linklater’s aim to restore it to what he sees as its
rightful place in contemporary IR theory.96
Despite this emphasis on the normative dimension of political commu-
nity, the nature of truth and knowledge does, for Linklater, have a bearing
on the norms and practices at work in world politics. He points out that, in
keeping with the tradition of social science since Weber, empiricist philo-
sophy since Hume, and the international legal thinking of Hans Kelsen,
Waltz assumes that questions of justice are non-cognitive; we cannot have
knowledge of normative and ethical matters.97 Against this position
Linklater poses that of T.H. Green, who argued that political communities
are engaged in a process of moral learning according to which they learn to
attribute natural rights to those living beyond their own borders and
‘adopt a critical posture towards the predominantly self-regarding prac-
tices of states’. On this view a ‘perfectly constituted state’ is not, as Waltz
argues, one that simply pursues its own interests in a world of anarchy but
rather one which is able to participate in an international society based on
the development of shared norms.98
Linklater combines an interpretivist emphasis on the importance of
culture and shared values with the reflectivist critique of prevailing
norms. Critical reflection reveals that, in the context of a world of separate
sovereign states and ‘intersocietal estrangement’, the values implicit in
modern notions of citizenship are incompletely realised; there is still
more moral learning to be done.99 The foundations of an account of the
learning process are to be found, for Linklater, in the ‘philosophical
history’ tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx and the epistemology that
developed therein. From this perspective
history supplied grounds for the conviction that it was within man’s power
to appropriate a comprehensive knowledge of the conditions of individual
and collective self-determination.100
Moral learning is to be achieved, then, through the increasing self-

knowledge of humanity – a process in which it is the task of social theory
to participate. In keeping with the critical tradition initiated by Kant,
moral reflection and learning involve progress in man’s understanding of
his natural and social environment.
In the process of outlining this theory, Linklater provides an account
of the philosophy of human consciousness and freedom from Kant to
Marx. Kant’s international theory is formulated on the basis of his
account of the historical development of man. He argues that the
possibility of freedom arose as rational subjects extracted themselves
from the natural realm of desire and necessity and progressed to the
states of civil and then moral freedom. Progress in international politics
is then assessed according to the extent to which it supports individual
freedom.101 Hegel criticised Kant for failing to see that individualism
developed in the context of a specific stage in the history of conscious-
ness. Nevertheless, like Kant, he saw the development of human free-
dom in terms of the development of self-knowledge and man’s
emancipation from nature.102 According to Hegel there is a progression
from societies in which man seems to be governed by natural forces to
those characterised by individualism and universalism, and on to those

which create laws on the basis of rationally chosen principles.103
Hegel’s view of the outcome of this process is the subject of some
debate. It is commonly taken to be the modern state, but some believe
it to have been a world ‘united by culture and reason’.104
Although Linklater does not mention it, it is important to note that
according to Hegel ‘[f]reedom is the sole truth of Spirit’.105 The
unfolding of history in which human societies evolve is, for the idealist
Hegel, the process of absolute Spirit’s coming to correspond with its
own true essence: ‘the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working
out the knowledge of that which it is potentially’ – that is, full self-
consciousness and freedom.106 Thus, the development of individual
freedom is the development of self-knowledge, and the endpoint is
both freedom and truth.
Marx, in turn, criticised Hegel’s idealist faith in philosophical reflection
and belief in the unfolding of absolute Spirit, insisting that the human
subject should not be abstracted from objective material conditions. For
Marx, human freedom advanced ‘within the framework of man’s social
interaction with nature’.107 Incorporated within this framework was an
account of the evolution of forms of social life and intercommunal rela-
tions.108 The globalisation of capital provides the springboard for the
highest level in the development of human freedom, in which men
would come to control ‘modern universal intercourse’ with ‘full-
consciousness’ by seizing the means of production which governed their
interactions with nature.109
As in his account of Hegel, Linklater does not make explicit the
epistemological implications of Marx’s theory of ‘full-consciousness’.
Correspondence with reality – which is full self-knowledge – occurs for
Marx not in thought, but in action. As he tells us in the first of his
‘Theses on Feuerbach’ the object is not to be thought of as the abstract
object of contemplation, but rather ‘subjectively’, as ‘sensuous human
activity’ which is at the same time ‘objective activity’.110 For Marx,
objects are known through that activity of humanity which is both
subjective and objective – labour. We do not achieve knowledge by
standing apart from the material world, but through our practical
interaction with it.111
For Linklater, the significance of these theories lies in their proposition
that
reason is neither universal and immutable nor socially relative or culturally

dependent. Reason has a history; it develops a determinate and progressive
content from its expressions in various forms of social life.112
The modes of reflection manifested in the various social forms that emerge
throughout history are the basis of moral learning; social relations which
appear to be ‘natural’ are recognised to be human creations and therefore
as potentially subject to rational control. Importantly though, as we have
seen, this development of reason is also the development of knowledge
and the practical pursuit of truth, which in the broad historical perspective
of the philosophy of history is the development of the knowledge that man
makes his own history. The unfolding of knowledge is also the unfolding
of freedom – the development of rational autonomy. In terms of world
politics we find that for Linklater
the growth of self-knowledge entails first the criticism, and then the aboli-
tion, of the forms of necessity associated with the existence of international
relations.113
Knowledge of society develops through recognition that ‘objects’ – or

‘forms of necessity’ – are human creations and as humanity increases its
ability to shape them in accordance with its will. With regards to IR
theory, the prevailing international ‘forms of necessity’ are partly sustained
by the objectification of the international social sphere by the unreflective
mechanistic attitude which excludes morality from the realm of cognition.
Thus, the historical development of knowledge is an element in the
development of human society, and different forms of knowledge are
associated with different forms of international political practice.
On the basis of this philosophy of history Linklater addresses the
question of the sociology of knowledge identified above; his account of
the development of self-knowledge enables ‘the placement of different
societies on a scale or hierarchy of types’.114 Beginning with relations
between tribal groups operating on the basis of a notion of ‘internal
obligation’ which excludes neighbouring groups, he suggests that pro-
gression occurs through the ‘humanly established inter-tribal rules’ which
culminate in the formation of the state.115 Whereas humans once saw
kinship as the ‘natural’ basis of community, when they overcome it
through the development of self-knowledge they come to see citizenship
as the ‘natural’ basis for exclusive social organisation.116 The further
progression of self-knowledge reveals that citizenship is a human creation

rather than a necessity, and points beyond it to a cosmopolitan society of
‘free individuality’.117 Underlying these levels are different stages of self-
knowledge through which the subject passes, at each stage recognising
that what appear to be unavoidable natural constraints are human crea-
tions which can be overcome. The overarching association running
throughout this progression is that of reflexive knowledge, which enables
communities to pass from one stage to the next, with the emergence of an
increasingly cosmopolitan world politics in which individuals are increas-
ingly able to exercise rational autonomy.
Whilst his critique of Positivism involves historicising and socialising
knowledge, like Ashley and Cox, Linklater is conscious of the need to
address the question of context-transcendence. Clearly, the historical
progression of reflexive knowledge provides a general answer. However,
the question of theoretical and practical transcendence is explicitly
addressed in Linklater’s discussion of the nineteenth-century historicist
challenge to Kant’s rationalism and ethical universalism. Linklater affirms
the importance of the historicist turn to culture, but argues that histori-
cists’ positive assessment of a plurality of enclosed moral communities is
itself a value judgement that cannot find grounds within the context of
cultural pluralism.118 This criticism echoes Critical Theorists’ identifica-
tion of the contradictory character of Mannheim’s sociology of knowl-
edge. Linklater’s answer is, of course, to be found in the tradition of
philosophical history according to which culture is located within the
broader context of the historical development of the rational powers of
human subjects. The different stages of knowledge and the political norms
associated with them emerge precisely through the fact that each stage and
each community contains the conditions of its own transcendence, which
can be identified through reflection. It is in this reflexive process that the
possibility of Critical Theory and emancipatory practice lie.
Linklater’s answer to the third question of the problematic – that of
praxis – emerges from the preceding two answers, and is perhaps the most
clearly formulated of IR’s early Post-Positivists.119 The highest stage of
world politics is one in which the development of self-knowledge has
broken down all forms of false necessity in social life and is maintained
through appropriate institutional arrangements. Awareness that the state-
system is not a necessity but a human creation points to the need for
efforts to transform world politics such that it comes to be governed by
intersubjective reflection and reasoned consent. Linklater writes that
The content of the principles of [future cosmopolitan] international rela-

tions can be derived from the self-knowledge which men [sic] obtain
through the medium of their historical development . . . they would be
aware of their capacity to develop their powers within social arrangements
which recognise the equality of all men, their existence as non-natural beings
capable of creating the conditions favourable to their own development.120
As a result,
It is important to replace the sovereign state, with its particular guarantees to

those who have been associated together historically, with a global legal and
political system which affords protection to all human subjects as moral
equals.121
Examination of the work of these three early Post-Positivists reveals that,

with the critique of Positivism there emerged a new set of parameters for
international theory. The adherents of this new approach linked episte-
mology with politico-normative questions, both by relating forms of
knowledge to forms of politics, and by seeking that form of knowledge
which would allow a critical understanding of the values and interests lying
behind existing practices. This critical knowledge is conscious of itself as a
form of practice, and reflects upon the interests, values, and practices
which must be followed if the conduct of world politics is to be trans-
formed in such a way to become more rational.
This much is well-known in IR. However, that these developments can
be reconstructed in the form of responses to a series of three questions
reveals the extent to which early Post-Positivist IR theory was structured
around a determinate problematic. As we shall see, it is one which has
proved remarkably durable. Moreover, linking the answers to all three
questions in the theories considered so far is an account of the context-
transcending force of historically located truth which involves subjects’
collective self-reflection as much as knowledge of some objective reality.
Truth is not the preserve of the isolated knowing ego, but of human
collectivities and, ultimately, of humanity as a whole. This way of looking
at the concept provides a means of attacking the anti-humanism of objecti-
vists and structuralists on the three fronts reflected in the critical proble-
matic: of describing the place of knowledge itself in international politics; of
accounting for the perspective of the Critical Theorist; of recommending a
form of practice beyond the blindly technical or unreflexively conservative.
3 DIVISION AND CONSENSUS IN POST-POSITIVISM

Veriphilia and Veriphobia
The early critical IR scholars believed that, on its own, interpretivism
provided inadequate grounds for Post-Positivist IR theory. In the
absence of sufficient epistemological reflection, the interpretivist
emphasis on cultural norms and meanings risk sliding into paradox;
either the interpretivist position itself becomes relativised or else its
status as a position from which to understand social reality is, like
that of the Positivists, assumed rather than justified. The early critical
international thinkers addressed the question of context-transcendence
by emphasising the need for reflexive theory aware of its own relativity
but less relative for it.122 This in turn entailed the need to foster
reflexive praxis in world politics.
It is perhaps not surprising that this underlying anti-objectivism and
emphasis on the contextual nature of knowledge eventually led some Post-
Positivists to reject the notion of progressive reflection. The challenge had
several sources within IR, but each arose from the belief that there was a
tension between the broadly interpretivist attitude to social theory and cri-
tique of objectivism, on the one hand, and the reflectivist account of knowl-
edge and progress in social life, on the other. In particular, it was argued that
the philosophy of reflection and the claims to context-transcendence it was
employed to sustain were contaminated by remnants of the very Cartesian
and objectivist foundations which had sustained Positivism.
Some of the first expressions of this criticism came in response to
Mark Hoffman’s claim, in 1986, that the Critical IR Theory of the early
Post-Positivists represented the ‘next stage’ in IR theory.123 Rengger
responded by identifying a ‘serpent in the Eden’ of Critical IR
Theory.124 According to Rengger, this Critical Theory relied on rationalist
foundations which brought it closer to Positivism than was generally
realised. Whilst Ashley, Cox, and Linklater adopted a broadly interpretivist
approach, their account of world history, the development of world order,
and normative progress required some notion of foundations or univers-
ality.125 However, the belief in a rational foundation on which to base
knowledge, ethics, and progress sits uncomfortably with awareness of a
plurality of social worlds and the relativity of knowledge.126
Of course, the early Critical Theorists would argue that they had
already noted this tension and addressed it by identifying the historical
development of reflexive knowledge. From this perspective there is no need

to assert that there are secure foundations for knowledge and morality or that
it is possible to identify a law-like universality.127 Rengger suggested, how-
ever, that having granted the importance of history and culture, Critical
Theorists were ‘playing on the home turf’ of more radical interpretivists for
whom we are ‘the historical moment and nothing else’. From this perspec-
tive, any appeal to foundations or ‘basic elements’ is suspect.128 The reliance
on reflection seems to involve just such an appeal to foundational criteria.
For radical interpretivists, it represents a futile attempt to escape from the
historical moment. Ultimately, Rengger argued, the Critical IR Theory of
the pioneers of Post-Positivism seemed to require, like Positivism, some
version of the ‘view from nowhere’.129 This residue suggested the need for
a more extensive assault on objectivism.
Ashley himself was amongst the first to adopt a more ‘radical’ inter-
pretivism. His 1988 critique of the ‘anarchy problematique’ in IR repre-
sents a departure from his early, Frankfurt School inspired Critical Theory.
In this paper, he rejects the notions of fundamental forms of knowledge
and reflexive critique to which he previously adhered, linking them to the
same oppressive form of epistemic practice as Positivism.130 He instead
adopts a Poststructuralist approach which charts the influence and devel-
opment of ‘knowledgeable practices’ as purely cultural phenomena, with
no context-transcending power. The plausibility of the conventional pic-
ture of world politics arises from ‘a knowledgeable practice that is at once
pervasive and extremely effective in the disciplining of knowing and doing
in modern culture’.131 This is the ‘heroic practice’, which revolves around
a dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy. The sign of sovereignty
betokens a rational identity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is

hierarchically ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presiding over a
coherent ‘self’, and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an
external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to its
identical being.
The sign of anarchy, on the other hand,
betokens this residual external domain: an aleatory domain characterised by

difference and discontinuity, contingency and ambiguity, that can be known
only for its lack of the coherent truth and meaning expressed by a sovereign
presence. 132
The ‘heroic practice’ involves invoking ‘one or another sovereign presence

as an originary voice, a foundational source of truth and meaning’ and
thereby marginalising and suppressing anarchy.133 In IR this role is most
obviously occupied by the model of the state as a rational actor. Ashley
makes clear, however, that the meaning and practical value of such a
conception depends upon another sovereign source of truth and meaning-
the ‘totalizing standpoint of a theorist’.134
As in his earlier work, then, Ashley links understandings and practices of
truth and knowledge with global political practices. However, the theore-
tical basis for the association has now shifted – it is not a typology of
fundamental forms of knowledge, but rather the identification of a parti-
cularly widespread but contingent epistemic practice. Manifested in this
shift is another more fundamental one; the view of truth and knowledge as
particular forms of social practice is radicalised to the extent that they lose
any context-transcending power or positive normative role. It is not just
Positivist objectivism which is condemned, but the pursuit of truth in
general.
Building on the interpretivist criticisms of structuralism and objectivism
outlined by early Post-Positivists, Ashley argues that it is necessary to
privilege ‘practice over structure, surface over depth, and historical move-
ment over stasis’.135 From this perspective the ‘heroic practice’ is not seen
as a manifestation of any deep structure, but rather as
a knowledgeable practice – at once an orientation and procedure – that is

widely circulated in a culture and by way of what people do on the very
surface of life.
This practice is
a productive principle of an ‘economy of power’ by which are constituted

the socially recognised modes of subjectivity, objectivity, and conduct that
we know to be characteristic of modern life.136
Whilst ‘ways of knowing’ are still critical to politics, there are no longer
any fundamental cognitive forms or underlying interests. Rather than
having a ‘core’ or direction, knowledge and truth are fluid surface-level
cultural phenomena. All hint of teleology has been erased. The ‘heroic
practice’ exists only so long as it works, and it works only to the extent that
it is able to maintain the boundaries which keep anarchy, ambiguity, and
indeterminacy at bay. Once these boundaries collapse the heroic practice

‘dissipates’.137 Ashley believes that the ‘anarchy problematique’ in IR, as a
replication of the heroic practice, is increasingly unable to maintain these
boundaries in globalising world.138 This collapse of an epistemic practice
is occurring in global political life.139
This radicalised interpretivism was supported by a concern with linguis-
tic intersubjectivity. Poststructuralists like Ashley placed language at the
centre of their critique of the prevailing epistemic practices. Michael
Shapiro provides a summary of this radical linguistic interpretivism:
the meaning and value imposed on the world is structured not by one’s
immediate consciousness but by various reality-making scripts one inherits
or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural/linguistic condition. The pre-
text of apprehension is therefore largely institutionalized and is reflected in
the ready-to-hand language practices, the historically produced styles –
grammars, rhetorics, and narrative structures – through which the familiar
world is continuously reinterpreted and reproduced [ . . . ] the familiar world
cannot be separated from the interpretive practices through which it is
made.140
As a result, in IR ‘we must operate with a view of politics that is sensitive to

textuality’ and the way in which ‘the boundaries for constituting meaning
and value are constructed’.141 Shapiro goes on to explain the epistemolo-
gical implications of this linguistic turn:
[t]o textualise is to recognise that any reality is mediated by modes of

expression, and that representations are not descriptions of a world of
facticity, but are ways of making facticity. Their value is thus not to be
discerned in their correspondence with something, but rather in economies
of possible representations within which they participate.142
Poststructuralists confirmed the merging of subject and object initiated by

the early Post-Positivists but extended it by placing truth and knowledge
firmly on the same intersubjective linguistic plane as other socially con-
stitutive practices. The Foucauldian analogy of ‘economies’ employed by
Ashley and Shapiro reflects the fact that for Poststructuralists truth and
knowledge cannot reveal hidden depths or lead to transcendence of the
status quo, but rather involve the ‘horizontal’ ordering of like units.143
For Poststructuralists, it is through this linguistic ordering that political
and social life are constituted, not through the operation of objective
structures or interests lying ‘beneath the surface’. The constitutive role of

fundamental interests or forms of knowledge is replaced by the play of
language, and with it any hope of retaining a response to the critical
epistemological problematic seems to disappear.
This anti-foundationalist challenge, influenced by the Poststructuralist
philosophy of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, appears to represent a
significant departure from the project initiated by Cox, Linklater, and
Ashley himself. In particular, the second and third questions of the critical
epistemological problematic – those of context-transcendence and praxis –
seem to be based upon foundationalist assumptions; truth and knowledge
must surely be based on some enduring trans-cultural, trans-historical core
if they are to provide grounds for context-transcendence or transformative
praxis. In contrast, Ashley asserts that whilst the ‘heroic practice’ has been
influential, ‘knowledgeable’ practices exist on the ‘surface’ with no inher-
ent meaning or importance other than their contingent success in regulat-
ing behaviour. As such, there seems to be fundamental split between
Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists – or foundationalists and anti-
foundationalists – regarding the nature of truth and knowledge.
The two sides of this division correspond to what Richard Rorty has
described as ‘Platonist’ and ‘Anti-Platonist’ strands of philosophy.
According to Rorty, Platonists are those philosophers who ‘took our
ability to know . . . as the crucial human potentiality’. For these thinkers
truth is the key to the good life, the goal of inquiry, and the foundation of
emancipatory politics. That is not to say that the concept must remain in
its traditional form; as we have seen, within the tradition of philosophical
history it is radically transformed. Anti-Platonists, on the other hand, seek
to replace this preoccupation with knowledge and truth with some other
source of ‘social hope’. Rorty sums up Anti-Platonism as the assertion that
we should
stop thinking about truth as the name of the thing that gives human life its
meaning, and stop agreeing with Plato that the search for truth is the central
human activity.144
Alvin Goldman identifies a similar split between ‘Veriphiles’ and

‘Veriphobes’.145 We will adopt the latter labels here since they have the
advantage of emphasising the concern with truth rather than any particular
philosopher or tradition.
This division has, in many ways, defined the contours of critical inter-
national thought, with the division between Critical Theorists and
Poststructuralists revolving around their difference of opinion regarding
the possibility of redeeming truth. Critical IR Theorists believe in the
possibility of some position from which legitimate universal claims can
be established within the context of multiple and competing truths.
Poststructuralists share the interest in fostering a different form of inter-
national political practice, but believe that all truth claims – not just those
of Positivists – are instrumental in practices of domination and must
therefore be abandoned. Thus, Ashley’s shift from the Habermasian
Critical Theory of knowledge-constitutive interests to Poststructuralist
anti-foundationalism represents a shift from Veriphilia to Veriphobia.
The following two chapters consider the two sides of this division in in
more detail.
As significant as this division is, however, the Poststructuralist departure
from the concern with truth and knowledge was far from total. Whilst
Poststructuralists no longer wished to find some way of justifying knowl-
edge or pursuing truth as the basis for critical international theory, the
normative and practical implications of knowledge and truth as social and
political phenomena were still a key area of concern. Truth remained a
substantive political issue because its pursuit and the assertion of truth
claims played a constitutive role in international politics; Poststructuralist
philosophers have been keen to conduct detailed investigations into the
supposedly negative political and social effects of Veriphilia.
This interest is not shared by all Veriphobes. For example, Rorty is
happy to ‘deflate’ the concept of truth by arguing that it is of only
rhetorical use – that there is nothing substantive to which ‘truth’ refers
and that it has little or no practical impact.146 In contrast, whilst
Poststructuralists agree that the concept of truth is of no positive practical
use, they tend to believe it has played a prominent role in the shaping of
modern political realities and link it closely to the exercise of political
power and domination.147 Truth is mistaken but of substantive political
import – it is of constitutive significance in IR.
As a result, it is possible to identify a Veriphobic appropriation of the
questions of the problematic, which was reworked rather than rejected by
Poststructuralists. Their interest in the negative political significance of
truth means that the first question of the problematic – that of the
international sociology of knowledge – is still encountered by
Poststructuralists working in IR. Like the early Critical IR Theorists,
they are still concerned with the role played by epistemic practices ‘in
creating and sustaining social arrangements characterised by inequality
and domination’.148 As Ashley’s Poststructuralist approach demonstrates,
the question of the relationship between epistemic practices, political
practices, and social structures is not dependent on the acceptance of
foundations. Certainly, for Poststructuralists there can be no permanent
interests and there are, as a result, no fundamental forms of knowledge
with an enduring relationship to forms of community. Nevertheless, the
possibility remains of charting the relationship between the pursuit of
truth – Ashley’s ‘heroic practice’ – and political practices. Indeed, this is
arguably one of the defining features of Ashley’s Poststructuralist IR
theory; understanding the ‘heroic practice’ tells us about the ways in
which practical possibilities in world politics have been determined in
such a way as to exclude that which is perceived as ‘anarchical’.
Other early Poststructuralist IR works shared this interest in the rela-
tionship between epistemic practices and world politics. For example,
Shapiro argues, following Foucault, that modernity is characterised by
increasing dependence on ‘knowledge agents nominated within moder-
nity’s knowledge-related discourse’.149 In a similar vein, James Der Derian
can be found arguing that
the preferred discursive weapon in the age of nuclear deterrence is the force
of (official) ‘truth’, which can convert mass (opinion) into power (politics).
This force of truth is historically constructed and geopolitically specific.150
At first glance, the second question of the problematic – that of the

possibility of context-transcendence – is anathema to Poststructuralists;
there is, for them, no hope of identifying some privileged form of knowl-
edge or understanding of truth through which we can sustain critique.
Indeed, whilst Critical Theorists seek to identify some critical form of
knowledge, Poststructuralists reject the very question ‘what can I
know?’, replacing it with ‘how have my questions been produced?’.151
Seen from this perspective, Ashley is no longer interested in tracing the
limits and possibilities of critical knowledge. Rather, he views knowledge
simply in terms of contingent practice, the effects of which he wishes to
identify. Whilst he might be concerned with the question of the relation-
ship between ‘knowledgeable practices’ and world politics, it seems he
must reject the idea that there could be a privileged way of knowing.
Nevertheless, IR Poststructuralists have been keen to refute the accusa-

tion that this sort of position amounts to relativism – they are aware that
the critical perspective stands in need of some kind of justification.152 That
Poststructuralism does involve taking a determinate position is apparent in
Ashley’s suggestion that it is necessary to choose the perspective of anar-
chy over that of sovereignty. We are told that were IR theorists to
‘privilege the play of ambiguity, contingency, chance, and open-ended
eventuation’, they could recognise the arbitrariness and political effects of
foundationalism.153 Likewise, Shapiro argues that, because it reflects
awareness of the power of ‘knowledge agents’ who determine what counts
as valid knowledge in modern society, the Poststructuralist position repre-
sents a ‘politicizing knowledge practice’.154 Thus, whilst Poststructuralists
refuse to identify some privileged, context-transcending form of critical
knowledge or truth, they do recognise that if the socialisation of truth is
not to result in naïve relativism some critical perspective needs to be
established and defended. The need to address some form of the second
question of the problematic is thereby acknowledged. Rather than asking
how epistemic transcendence is possible, Poststructuralists want to identify
a form of epistemic practice which avoids the prevailing assumptions of
Western intellectual and political life. David Campbell follows Foucault in
presenting this attitude as an ‘ethos’, a ‘manner of being’ attuned to the
ambiguity and openness, identification of which politicises prevailing atti-
tudes and practices.155 This position will be outlined in more detail in the
Chapter 3.
Finally, for Poststructuralists any attempt to pursue the radical trans-
formation of international politics on the basis of some privileged form of
knowledge is to be rejected. As Rengger notes, for radical interpretivists
such a project appears as part of the ‘great project of commensuration’
which seeks to achieve a perfectly rational community by erasing ambi-
guity and difference.156 Nevertheless, practical recommendations, or at
least orientations, do emerge from Poststructuralist IR theory, and they do
so through the discussion of knowledge and truth. Ashley clearly favours a
turn away from sovereignty to anarchy in practice as well as in theory. Like
Critical IR Theorists he rejects the distinction between theory and prac-
tice; the epistemic practices at work in IR theory are also forms of social
practice. In other words, Ashley ties his different understanding of ‘theo-
retical knowing’ to ‘new modes of political seeing, saying, and being’.157
In advocating an anarchic theoretical knowing, he at one and the same
time advocates political practices more attuned to ‘discontinuity,
contingency and ambiguity’.158 Likewise, as we have just seen, the ‘ethos’

proposed by Campbell is both an intellectual attitude and a ‘manner of
being’.159 Thus, whilst Poststructuralists reject any pursuit of the perfectly
rational community through the pursuit of some higher form of knowledge,
they still recognise that any critical perspective they adopt must be linked to
political practice. To this extent, they address the question of praxis.
The critical epistemological problematic was, then, still operating in the
works of Veriphobes in IR. Having proposed the same merging of subject
and object in social theory and, therefore, having located knowledge and
truth in social life, Poststructuralists faced the same questions as the early
Critical Theorists: how do forms of knowledge and epistemic practice
interact with political practices? How can the critical perspective be
explained? What does this critical perspective tell us about the possibilities
that exist for new forms of political practice? The key differences between
the two lie not so much in the underlying issues that need to be addressed
as in their responses to these questions. It is here that the Veriphilia–
Veriphobia divide comes into play. Whilst questions about the nature of
truth and knowledge as social phenomena are important for
Poststructuralists, they reject the pursuit of truth and any connection it
might have with the good life.
Intersubjective Truth
The source of the Veriphile-Veriphobe divide appears to lie in part in
Poststructuralists’ emphasis on language. As we have seen, they believe
that meaning and identity are constituted in language, and that knowledge
is essentially a linguistic phenomenon. By replacing any notion of depth
with the single plane of language, and by reducing truth to the mere
ordering of the elements of discourse through the exercise of power,
they remove any hope of context-transcendent truth. This radical linguis-
tic interpretivism appears to be fundamentally at odds with the Critical
Theorists’ hope that reflexive self-knowledge might provide the basis for
political progress.
However, whilst Poststructuralists rejected the notion that there can be
any theory of truth or knowledge which could provide the basis for an
account of context-transcendence and praxis, they did so, as Rengger
suggests, on the basis of a radicalisation of the same anti-objectivist inter-
pretivist stance adopted by the early Critical Theorists in IR.160 In fact,
despite the threat the Poststructuralist emphasis on language apparently
poses, there was already in the early stages of Critical IR Theory a tendency
to understand reflection by means of a philosophy of linguistic intersubjec-
tivity. What matters from the perspective of this partly linguistified Critical
IR Theory are the intersubjective communicative practices through which
truth and validity claims are assessed, rather than any foundational elements
of human reason or reflexively understood historical context.
Elements of such an approach to IR are already apparent in Ashley’s
early works. It was noted above that for Critical Theorists the importance
of truth lay not in the ‘capturing’ of reality but in the reflexive knowl-
edgeable practices and freedom of ideal epistemic conditions with which it
is associated. The emancipatory cognitive interest was in fact defined as an
interest in ‘undistorted communication’ rooted in the human capacity for
the ‘communicative exercise of reflective reason’.161 That is to say, it
guides a form of knowledge which seeks to remove the constraints on
communication through the medium of ‘intersubjectively understood
symbols’ (i.e. the communication with which the practical interest is
concerned).162 For Habermas, and following him the early Ashley, only
this free communication would allow full reflection on ‘the self-formative
process of the human species’.163 Thus, emancipatory knowledge is devel-
oped through the pursuit of free communication.
Likewise, we find that the unfolding of self-knowledge described by
Linklater in Men and Citizens culminates in a world politics which has
institutionalised the conditions of communicative freedom. Linklater
argues that a higher stage of international moral life is reached when states
cease to make moral claims on the basis their own ‘sheer existence’ and
appeal instead to what would be granted to them by ‘the reasoned consent
of the whole society of states’. The appearance in international politics of
the ‘language of claims and counter claims’
not only brings forth and more widely applies man’s rational powers but also
makes determinate a network of international principles which have elicited
the consent of all.164
The ethical universalism which is recognised in this process can be further

promoted by
the dissolution of both the state’s right to determine when it will use force
and the government of international relations by principles based upon the
consent of its constituent parts.165
The rules that emerge in this way ‘provide a focal point for the evolution
of a loyalty which extends beyond the parameters of the sovereign
state’.166
Cox’s position is rather different, partly because he does not draw on
Habermas to tackle the problematic and partly because he places an
emphasis on the dialectical nature of truth. However, as we have already
seen, there is a strong intersubjectivist dimension to his work as a result of
the influence of Vico. We will postpone consideration of these elements of
his work until Chapter 6.
As a result of the influence of Habermas in particular, Critical IR Theory
tends to rely not on some hidden Cartesian core, as anti-foundationalists
alleged, but rather on identification of context-transcendence and emanci-
patory praxis achieved through the intersubjective epistemic practice of
justification involving dialogue between subjects. The emphasis on dialogue
reflects the intersubjectivisation of truth, according to which the possibility
of context-transcendence is associated with the practical epistemic condi-
tions conducive to achieving justification rather than with the content of
self-reflective knowledge. Such a reading is confirmed in the postscript to
the second edition of Men and Citizens, by which time Linklater endorses
Habermas’s notion of the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ as a
means of overcoming the Poststructuralist suggestion that there is ‘no
truth at all’ and therefore no grounds for moral universalism.167 Whilst
objective truth is not available, then, intersubjective communication under
conditions of freedom does represent a form of truth.
The concern with communication and consensus has been drawn upon
in later works of Critical IR Theory, and in the process the epistemological
basis for Critical Theory has gradually been subsumed within a theory of
communication. This shift reflects the development of Habermas’s own
work. In Knowledge and Human Interests, first published in 1968, he
identifies the epistemological grounds for Critical Theory in a fundamen-
tal human interest in emancipation through reflection. As we have seen,
emancipation was already at this stage understood in terms of free com-
munication. By the late 1970s he was beginning to emphasise the practi-
calities of speech and communication and turn away from the search for
epistemological grounds for emancipation.168 With this, Critical Theory is
not so much concerned with the fundamental nature of knowledge as with
the role played by truth claims within the pragmatics of everyday commu-
nication.169 This shift reflects Habermas’s turn away from the ‘subject
philosophy’ of his predecessors in the critical tradition to one of linguistic
intersubjectivity.170 The blurring of the subject-object distinction con-

tinues, until we find that Habermas can claim that he would like to
abandon ‘the ontological concept of world’ altogether.171
We will return to Habermas’s theory of communication in Chapter 4.
For now we can note that, to an extent, this communicative element of
Critical Theory reflects the same linguistic ‘levelling-off’ effected by
Poststructuralists in IR. Like the ‘intertextuality’ of the latter, it reflects
an extension of the interpretivist anti-objectivism and anti-structuralism
identified at the start of this chapter. Knowledge becomes an intersub-
jective, discursive social practice rather than one which depends upon
sovereign subjectivity, underlying interests, or any external measure.
Truth comes to be equated with idealisations about this discursive
activity and the conditions in which it takes place rather than any
relationship with an objective reality. As with Poststructuralists, both
knowledge and truth can be understood upon a single plane – that of
language.
Habermas refers to the understanding of truth that emerges from his
communicative Critical Theory as an ‘epistemic conception’. On this
view, truth is equated with consensus arrived at through free commu-
nication, that is, with ideal epistemic conditions.172 Significantly, both
Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer have identified a Veriphobic version of
this conception. The former has described how Rorty deploys the epis-
temic conception to undermine Platonism – truth is simply a way of
talking about ideal conditions for justification. Wellmer suggests that
Derrida sees such idealisations about conditions of justification as an
infection in language which must be removed.173 Thus, in a limited but
significant sense, Derrida takes a similar view of truth to the Critical
Theorists – he believes it is a matter of linguistic epistemic practice and
that it involves the aspiration to achieve rational autonomy.174 In contrast
with the Critical Theorists, for whom this desire reflects is integral to the
pursuit of emancipation, for the Poststructuralist followers of Derrida its
pursuit can only lead to domination.175 A similar position is apparent in
Ashley’s critical account of the ‘heroic practice’, where the pursuit of
truth is traced to the assertion of sovereign subjectivity unhindered by
anarchy. Likewise, Foucault, whose work has had a considerable influence
on IR Poststructuralists, at once equates truth with the ordering of
discourse and singles out for particular criticism the view that truth is
‘the reward of free spirits . . . the privilege of those who have succeeded in
liberating themselves’.176
It is to a great extent because of the association of the claim to truth

with the assertion of rational autonomy – with the belief in ideal epistemic
conditions – that Poststructuralists believe it is necessary to abandon
Veriphilia. The effect of the claim to truth, they believe, is to subdue
and marginalise that which threatens the asserted sovereign subjectivity.
The Veriphiles’ ideal does shape norms and practices but, contrary to the
hopes of Critical Theorists, it only does so in support of domination rather
than freedom. In contrast, Critical Theorists argue that, at the most
fundamental level, knowledge and truth are to be seen in terms of
interest-guided activity in an intersubjectively constituted social reality,
not in terms of the correspondence between subject and object. The most
fundamental of the knowledge-constitutive interests is, as we have seen,
that of freedom from constraints. This state is wrongly assumed by
Positivists to be already in place. In contrast, Critical Theorists do not
assume the subject to be always already perfectly free and rational. Rather,
rational autonomy is a goal to be pursued through intersubjective episte-
mic practice. Truth, were it to be achieved, would lie in the state of free
and rational intersubjective communication, in the ideal epistemic condi-
tions assumed to already be in place by Positivists.
In summary, Poststructuralists agree with Critical Theorists that knowl-
edge and truth are to be understood in terms of intersubjectivity rather
than the subject-object relationship. They agree that underlying the
notion of truth is the ideal of rational autonomy. They also agree that
this implicit ideal is pursued in practices which shape the ways in which
social and political life is organised. As Veriphobes, however,
Poststructuralists reject the idea that there is anything progressive about
these epistemic practices and ideals. Nevertheless, in each case truth can
play a role in constituting international realities.
This shared intersubjective understanding of truth has been of consider-
able appeal in IR. It represents a useful means for Veriphiles and Veriphobes
alike to extend their critique of objectivism whilst recognising the substantive
rather than simply theoretical importance of epistemic questions. This lends
further support to our claim that the parameters of critical Post-Positivist IR
theories have been shaped by a broad but specific set of attitudes to truth and
knowledge. The relationship between Critical Theory and Poststructuralism
in IR can be understood in terms of the Veriphile-Veriphobe divide, on the
one hand, and in terms of the common ground represented by their con-
ceptions of truth and the shared critical epistemological problematic, on the
other. Whilst the former is important, we shall see in the following chapters
that the latter, broad, dual-aspect consensus has had significant impact on
critical international thought.
4 CONCLUSION
Whilst not denying the theoretical pluralisation which Post-Positivism
generated, it is important to recognise that such characterisations tend
to obscure the particular concerns which defined the critique of Postivism.
Once we focus on the questions scholars began to address and the con-
ceptions of truth and knowledge with which they did so, the picture that
emerges is a complex one. On the one hand, the division between Veriphilia
and Veriphobia is significant. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism were,
from the beginning, divided by their attitudes to reason, knowledge, and
truth. On the other hand, they have been united by the belief that ‘truth’ is
of substantive political importance – that it plays a constitutive role in
international politics. This consensus is reflected in the critical problematic,
the operation of which is apparent in the work of Poststructualists and
Critical Theorists alike.
Moreover, despite the Veriphilia-Veriphobia divide, there is a broad con-
sensus about the intersubjective character of truth. From the critical inter-
pretivist stance adopted by both Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists,
truth is understood in terms of intersubjective, linguistic epistemic practices
and their normative and political implications. This broad attitude to truth
bears the marks of the anti-objectivism with which Post-Positivism emerged
in IR. Initially this had simply pointed to the need to address the questions of
the problematic. As Cox’s work shows, it was at first conceived as compatible
with a dialectic conception of truth involving reflection on objective histor-
ical conditions. However, the anti-objectivism which accompanied Post-
Positivism was such that the subject-object axis itself fell under suspicion.
In this context, a linguistic and intersubjective turn, based on that which
had already occurred beyond IR, was of considerable appeal to many IR
scholars. It was this additional turn which gave the Post-Positivist concep-
tions of truth with which the problematic was addressed – Veriphile and
Veriphobe alike – their distinctive flavour.
Having described the process of theoretical parameter-setting which
occurred through the development of the critical epistemological pro-
blematic and the intersubjectivist understanding of truth, we now face
two further tasks. First, it is necessary to investigate the operation of
these two factors in those later works of critical international thought

which provide more substantive analyses of global political practice and
clearer praxeological prescriptions. Second, we can begin to critically
assess these theories by asking whether the foundations established by
early critical IR scholars help or hinder the formulation of such ana-
lyses and prescriptions. In the next two chapters, we will pursue these
tasks by considering in depth two major works of Post-Positivist IR
theory – Campbell’s National Deconstruction and Linklater’s The
Transformation of Political Community.
NOTES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 98.
2. Quoted in Cox, ‘Social Forces’, p. 132.
3. Lapid, ‘Third Debate’, p. 238.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Mark Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory and the Inter-Paradigm Debate’,
Millennium 16, 2 (1987), pp. 231–249, reference p. 244.
7. George, ‘Thinking Space’, pp. 269–279.
8. Smith ‘Positivism and Beyond’, pp. 37–38.
9. David Campbell and Jim George, ‘Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration
of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations’,
International Studies Quarterly 34, 3 (1990), pp. 269–293.
10. Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, p. 11.
11. George, ‘Thinking Space’, p. 272.
12. Such suggestions have been particularly common in accounts of Critical
Theory. See Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 138; Kimberly
Hutchings, ‘The Nature of Critique in International Relations Theory’, in
Critical Theory and World Politics, ed. Richard Wyn Jones (London: Lynne
Rienner, 2003), pp. 79–90; Murphy, ‘The Promise of Critical IR’. Concerns
about ‘Ivory Towers’ have of course long been expressed by critics of post-
positivist critical thought. See Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and
Technocrats’.
13. Dunne et al., ‘End of IR Theory’.
14. Rengger and Thirkwell-White, ‘Still Critical?’, p. 4.
15. The use of the lower case ‘Critical Theory’ refers to any theory with these
characteristics. ‘Critical Theory’ refers to the Marxist inspired theories of the
Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci. Thus, some, but not all, ‘Critical
Theorists’ are ‘Critical Theorists’. Where possible the distinction will be
maintained by referring to the former broader group as ‘Critical Thinkers’,

‘Critical Scholars’, or practitioners of ‘critical international thought’. Each
of the early ‘Critical Thinkers’ examined in this section was also a ‘Critical
Theorist’.
16. Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 132.
17. Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory’, pp. 236–237; Lapid, ‘Third Debate’; George,
‘Thinking Space’; Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’.
18. Hoffmann, ‘Critical Theory’, p. 231; Mark Neufeld, The Restructuring of
International Relations Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 4; S. Brincat, ‘An Interview with Andrew Linklater’, Global
Discourse 1, I [Online], (2010) available from: http://global-discourse.
com/contents [accessed 20 May 2016].
19. Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory,
(London: Methuen, 1976).
20. Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory’, pp. 231–232; Bernstein, Restructuring.
21. Bernstein, Restructuring, p. xvi.
22. Ibid., pp. 65–67.
23. Ibid., p. 85.
24. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 6.
25. Ibid, pp. 149–150.
26. Ibid., p. 150.
27. For a critical account of the ‘Incommensurability Thesis’ in IR see Colin
Wight, ‘Incommensurability and Cross-Paradigm Communication in
International Relations Theory: “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?”’,
Millennium 25, 2 (1996), pp. 291–319. Kuhn himself expressed doubts
about incommensurability as it is commonly understood in the social
sciences, arguing that it does not mean that we cannot exercise judgement
in choosing between paradigms. See Thomas Kuhn, ‘Objectivity, Value
Judgement, and Theory Choice’, in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies
in Scientific Tradition and Change, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 320–339. See also Richard Bernstein, Beyond
Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis,
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 86.
28. Bernstein, Restructuring, p. 174 & p. 184.
29. Ibid., p. 184.
30. Ibid., p. 111.
31. Richard Ashley, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organisation
38, 2 (1984), pp. 225–286, reference pp. 235–236.
32. Ibid., pp. 236–237. Ashley also provides a useful account of the differences
between Structural Political Realism and other forms of structuralism.
Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Recent work in IR has presented a
more nuanced view of Positivism. See e.g. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The
Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, (New York: Routledge,
2011).
33. Ashley, ‘Poverty’, p. 237.
35. Robert Cox, ‘Realism, Positivism, and Historicism’, in Approaches to World
Order, ed. R. Cox and T Sinclair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996; (1985), pp. 55–56.
36. Bernstein, Objectivism and Relativism, p. 113.
37. Mark Hoffman describes Critical IR Theory as post-Realist and post-
Marxist. Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory’, p. 244; Andrew Linklater ‘The
Achievements of Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory and World Politics,
ed. Linklater (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 45–59.
38. Ashley, ‘Poverty’, pp. 225–226.
39. Cox, ‘Social Forces’, p. 134.
40. Ibid., p. 134 & p. 136. See also Jonathan Joseph, ‘Hegemony and the
Structure-Agency Problem in International Relations: A Scientific Realist
Contribution’, Review of International Studies 34, 1 (2008) pp. 109–128,
reference p. 109. Gramsci saw the achievements Marxism as lying mainly in its
rejection of transcendentalism rather than in its materialism, and the main
enemy of the philosophy of praxis as metaphysics rather than idealism. In
terms of epistemology, this position entailed rejection of the separation of the
known object from the process by which it is known. Quentin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gramsci, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 378–379.
41. Cox, ‘Realism, Positivism, Historicism’, pp. 56–57.
43. P. Schouten, ‘Theory Talk #37: Robert Cox on World Orders, Historical
Change, and the Purpose of Theory in International Relations’, Theory Talks
(2009), http://www.theory-talks.org/2010/03/theory-talk-37.html
[accessed 20 May 2016].
45. Linklater, Transformation, p. 48.
46. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd
Edition, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
pp. 171–173.
47. Kratochwil, ‘Reflections’, p. 36.
48. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Linklater, Men and Citizens,
pp. 131–133.
49. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 7.
50. Ibid., pp. 7–8 & pp. 12–18.
51. Andrew Linklater, ‘The Changing Contours of Critical International

Relations Theory’, in Critical Theory and World Politics, ed. Richard Wyn
Jones (London: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp. 23–44, reference p. 37.
52. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 64.
53. As will be described below, Ashley later abandoned his Habermasian
approach in favour of poststructuralism.
54. Ashley, ‘Human Interests’.
55. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. vii.
56. Ibid., p. 5.
57. Ibid.
58. Ashley, ‘Human Interests’, pp. 206–207.
59. Ibid., p. 220. The instrumentalism of Waltz’s IR theory is apparent when he
argues that theories are to be judged on the basis of their utility in explaining
the facts about world politics. They are not to be seen as ‘edifices of truth’ or
‘a reproduction of reality’. This instrumentalist understanding of theoretical
validity is combined with an empiricism according to which scientific obser-
vation enables identification of basic facts and laws about world politics.
Waltz continues to assume that ideas and concepts can be more or less
adequate to reality. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 5–9.
60. Ashley, ‘Human Interests’, p. 208.
61. Ibid, pp. 211–212.
62. Ibid, p. 213.
63. Ibid., p. 208.
64. Ibid., p. 208.
65. Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory’, p. 236; Bernstein, Restructuring, p. 198.
66. Ashley, ‘Human Interests’, p. 226.
67. Ibid., p. 227
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., p. 229.
70. Ibid., p. 230.
71. Ibid., p. 231.
72. Ibid., pp. 207–208.
73. Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political
Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994),
p. 51.
74. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London:
Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 42; Wiggerhaus, Frankfurt School, p. 51.
75. Adorno, Prisms, p. 43.
76. Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 132; Linklater, ‘Changing
Contours’, p. 37.
78. Cox, ‘Social Forces’, p. 126

79. Ibid., p. 126.
80. Ibid., pp. 128–129.
81. Ibid., p. 128.
82. Ibid., p. 130.
83. Ibid., p. 128.
84. Ibid., p. 128.
85. Ibid., p. 129.
86. Ibid., p. 135.
87. Ibid., pp. 132–133.
88. Ibid., p. 132.
89. Cox distinguishes ‘Historical Materialism’ from ‘Structural Marxism’. Ibid.,
p. 133.
90. Ibid., p. 134.
91. Ibid., pp. 133–134.
92. Cox believes ideas are elements in structures. Ibid., p. 136.
93. Ibid., p. 130.
94. Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. xi. By rationalism Linklater means the view,
of which Kant is the most famous exponent, according to which the human
race ‘consists of free and equal human beings’ all of whom possess certain
essential powers and capacities independently of any given state of ‘orga-
nised social life’. Ibid., p. 124.
95. Ibid., p. 28.
96. Ibid., p. xi.
97. Ibid., p. 29.
98. Ibid., pp. 30–31.
99. Ibid., p. xii.
100. Ibid, pp. 141.
101. Ibid., p. 144.
102. Ibid., p. 145.
103. Ibid., p. 147.
104. S. Avineri quoted Ibid., p. 149.
105. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,
1956), p. 17. Emphasis added.
106. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
108. Ibid., pp. 155–157. See also Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Part 1), ed.
C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974).
109. Marx quoted Linklater, Men and Citizens., p. 158.
110. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd
Edition, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
111. Ibid.
113. Ibid, p. 165.
114. Ibid., p. 160.
115. Ibid., p. 167.
116. Ibid., pp. 182–183.
117. Ibid., p. 167.
118. Ibid., pp. 131–133.
119. This concern with praxis remains throughout Linklater’s work. See e.g.
Linklater, ‘Changing Contours’.
120. Linklater, Men and Citizens, pp. 197–198.
121. Ibid., p. 199.
123. Hoffman, ‘Critical Theory’, p. 244.
124. Rengger, ‘Going Critical?’, p. 82.
125. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
126. Ibid., p. 85.
127. Mark Hoffman, ‘Conversations on Critical International Relations Theory’,
Millennium 17, 1 (1988), pp. 91–95.
128. Rengger, ‘Going Critical’, p. 85.
129. Ibid.
130. Richard Ashley ‘Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the
Anarchy Problematique’, Millennium 17, 2, (1988), pp. 227–262, refer-
ence p. 228.
131. Ibid., p. 230.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid., p. 237.
135. Ibid., p. 243.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid., p. 244.
138. Ibid., p. 259.
139. Ibid., p. 255.
140. Michael Shapiro, ‘Textualizing Global Politics’, in International/
Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, ed. James
Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989),
141. Ibid, p. 12.
142. Ibid, pp. 13–14. As Jan Selby points out, despite frequent appeals to
Foucault, IR’s Poststructuralists have tended to emphasise textuality in a
manner which is more Derridean than Foucauldian. Jan Selby,
‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of
Foucauldian IR’, International Relation 21, 3 (2007), pp. 324–345,

reference p. 328.
144. Richard Rorty, ‘Emancipating Our Culture’, in Debating the State of
Philosophy, ed. Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders (London: Praeger,
1996), pp. 25–27.
145. Alvin I. Goldman, ‘Social Epistemology: Theory and Applications’, in
Epistemology: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 64, ed. Anthony O’
Hear (2009), pp. 1–18, reference p. 3.
146. Rorty, ‘Emancipating Our Culture’; See also Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel,
What’s the Use of Truth?, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
148. Diez and Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue?’, p. 132.
149. Shapiro, ‘Textualizing’, p. 20.
150. James Der Derian, ‘Spy versus Spy: The Intertextual Power of International
Intrigue’, in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of
World Politics, ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (New York:
Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 163–187, reference p. 163.
151. George and Campbell, ‘Patterns of Dissent’, p. 285.
152. See for example David Campbell, ‘Why Fight: Humanitarianism, Principles,
and Post-structuralism’, Millennium 23, 3 (1998), pp. 497–521.
153. Ashley ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, p. 230.
155. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 4; Campbell, ‘Why Fight’, p. 512.
156. Rengger ‘Going Critical’, pp. 84–85.
157. Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, p. 259.
158. Ibid., p. 230.
159. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 4.
160. Rengger, ‘Going Critical’, p. 85.
161. Ashley ‘Human Interests’, p. 208.
162. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), p. 255, quoted in Ashley, ‘Human Interests’,
p. 209.
163. Habermas, Human Interests, p. 211, quoted in Ashley, ‘Human Interests’,
p. 209.
165. Ibid., p. 199.
166. Ibid, pp. 198–199.
167. Ibid., pp. 215–216.
168. Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Futner
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 1–2.
169. Ibid.
170. Jürgen Habermas Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1, trans. Thomas

McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
171. Ibid., p. 82.
172. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’ in Truth: Engagements
Across Philosophical Traditions, ed. José Medina and David Wood (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), pp. 107–129, reference p. 118.
173. Ibid., p. 119; Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Truth, Contingency, and Modernity’,
Modern Philology, 90, Supplement (1993), S109–S124, reference S113.
174. Ibid. Derrida’s conception of truth will be considered at length in
Chapter 3.
175. Campbell, National Deconstruction.
CHAPTER 3
Truth, Violence, and Difference
1 INTRODUCTION
Perhaps ironically, it was the Veriphobic Poststructuralists who continued
to pay closest attention to the concept of truth after the debate about
foundations had subsided. Ironic maybe, but not surprising. As we saw in
Chapter 2, Poststructuralist International Relations (IR) scholars pursued
a radical interpretivism according to which truth is understood at the level
of discursive epistemic practice alone – practice through which they
believe political reality is constituted. This might undermine the sort of
reflexive context-transcendence pursued by Critical Theorists, but it also
means that ideals and practices associated with truth can be of great
political significance. Responses to the critical epistemological problematic
therefore continue to play a key, albeit implicit, role in Poststructuralist
works. These responses are characterised by unremitting Veriphobia, but
they also display adherence to the intersubjective conception of truth
outlined in the previous chapter. As well as using this approach in descrip-
tions of political practice, Poststructuralists have addressed the other
questions of the critical epistemological problematic by formulating justi-
fications of a Veriphobic IR Theory and by reflecting on the connections
between such justifications and alternative forms of international political
practice.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_3
In the work of many Poststructuralist IR theorists, conceptions of

truth are intertwined with issues more obviously related to the core
concerns of the discipline. One of the most important of these has
been the relationship between the dominant forms knowledge, on the
one hand, and heterogeneity, difference, and ‘Otherness’, on the
other. Along this line of inquiry, which is already apparent in
Ashley’s account of heroic practice, the main problem with objectivism
is not simply that identified by the early Post-Positivists – that the
illusion of objectivity and neutrality conceals a reality of conservative
politics, technical control, and moral poverty. It is, more specifically,
that it tended to suppress the plurality of forms of social life by
imposing universal categories on that which is diffuse, and thereby to
obscure the experiences and voices of marginal groups.1 Such issues
are, of course, particularly pertinent to the study of IR. Faced with
political and economic systems which are global in reach but also with
the greatest possible diversity of actors, IR scholars have faced the task
of investigating the politics of a fragmented totality, and of under-
standing relations between universality and difference. The view that
Veriphilia is at the heart of violence against difference means that the
concept of truth is seldom far from Poststructuralist engagement with
this more obviously political question.
This supposed connection between the concept of truth and the sup-
pression of difference lies at the heart of a major work of Poststructuralist
IR scholarship – David Campbell’s National Deconstruction. At one level
an investigation into political violence in Bosnia, Campbell’s book is at the
same time a critique of Veriphilia and of its supposedly violent political
effects. For Campbell, the critique of Western metaphysical tradition is
integral to, if not identical with, the critique of modern politics. It is
structured around the radical interpretivist notion that the same discourses
in which epistemic practice takes place – described by Shapiro as ‘reality-
making scripts’ – are constitutive of identity and meaning in world poli-
tics.2 As well as providing a means of exploring in greater depth how the
Poststructuralist critique of Veriphilia can shape theories of international
politics, National Deconstruction provides a lens through which to deter-
mine the extent to which Veriphobic critical international thought is
sustainable. It will be argued here that whilst Campbell provides a power-
ful account of the suppression of heterogeneity which accompanies certain
forms of political truth claim, insurmountable problems arise from his
Veriphobic approach to the critical problematic.
3 TRUTH, VIOLENCE, AND DIFFERENCE 69
2 VERIPHILIA AND VIOLENCE

Like other Poststructuralist works in IR, National Deconstruction is, in
part, an attempt to negotiate the metatheoretical, normative, and political
terrain left by the collapse of the ‘view from nowhere’. One of Campbell’s
main concerns is to demonstrate that the rejection of secure epistemolo-
gical grounds need not set us on the path to moral chaos.3 His analysis of
the conflict in Bosnia is presented as, in part, an anti-foundationalist
response to the allegation that
if the foundations of intellectual and political certainty are questioned, then

there is little basis for opposing some of the worst excesses of our time.4
Campbell deflects the accusation of moral poverty back against founda-

tionalism with an account of its complicity in political violence. He targets
the dominant attitudes to political knowledge and community, which
assume the possibility of identifying cohesive, stable, singular, and terri-
torially situated identities. This critique is formulated from the perspective
of the Poststructuralist ‘ethos of political criticism’ mentioned in the
previous chapter. This ethos is oriented towards the indeterminacy and
heterogeneity which is suppressed by, but at the same time supposedly
undermines appeals to secure identities.5
There are two main features of this anti-foundationalist approach to
political identities and the violence with which they are associated. Firstly,
in keeping with the intersubjectivist merging of subject and object in IR
theory, it is claimed that political identities are performatively and discur-
sively constituted; ‘discourse produces the effects that it names’.6 As a
result, objects cannot ‘constitute themselves as objects’ outside of dis-
course.7 The boundedness and apparent objectivity of political identities
and units is the product of a performative and discursive process of
‘materialization’.8 The idea that the entities referred to in political dis-
course have a non-discursive existence – an assumption that Campbell
refers to elsewhere as ‘epistemic realism’9 – is an illusion.
Since identities are constituted through ongoing discursive processes,
any attempt to ground them in external reality represents an ‘interpretive
and performative coup de force’; it asserts grounds and pre-exiting identi-
ties where, because all is discourse, there can be none.10 Campbell derives
this second aspect of his position from Derrida’s deconstructionist account
of the nature of political authority. Derrida takes the example of the
American Declaration of Independence, asking from where those who

signed it derived their authority. The obvious answer would seem to be
that it came from ‘the people’. However, he points out that before the
declaration appealed to ‘the people’ they did not exist as an entity.
Therefore, the signatories could not, prior to the moment of signing,
have been their representatives. There is a ‘fabulous retroactivity’ at
work here, according to which ‘the signature invents the signer’.11
Derrida suggests, and Campbell agrees, that ‘such a coup de force always
marks the founding of a nation, state, or nation state’.12 On this view, in
the words of Campbell, ‘something receives its interpretive justification as
true after the fact’.13 Truth and knowledge are products of power which
turn out to exist on the same discursive plane as their ‘objects’.
We will consider Campbell’s understanding of truth in more detail
below. For now, we can note that there are no grounds for the authority
claimed and identity asserted with the coup de force. It either rests on itself
as an assertion or else on prior ‘laws, resolutions or conventions’ which will
themselves turn out to be assertions without grounds.14 Derrida argues
that, because stable identity does not exist but must rather be feigned,
such moments will nearly always be accompanied by ‘sufferings’, ‘crimes’,
and ‘tortures’.15 Thus ‘the discourse of primary and stable identity’ comes
up against a limit which means that it will always involve some form of
violence.16 Campbell believes that Bosnia was such a moment, when the
assertion of political identities resulted in violence being enacted upon the
difference which will always escape such assertions of political identity.
The impossibility of identity means that political life is characterised not
by preformed, determinate identities but rather by inescapable relation-
ships to difference and alterity in processes of performative identity con-
stitution. Since concepts never successfully ‘capture’ or ‘reflect’ reality,
something always remains ‘Other’ to our determinations. This ‘Otherness’
escapes foundationalist attempts to identify determinate identities and
institutions. The appropriate attitude to politics is therefore not the
attempt to identify the truth about an objective political reality, or even
that of reflecting on our own biases, but that of striving to cultivate
an ethical relationship of responsibility to that which escapes such
determinations.
Campbell assesses theories and practices in terms of their relation to this
responsibility to alterity. Most modern political practices obscure the process
of performative constitution and are instead based upon the assumption that
national identities and political institutions are pre-existent objects of
knowledge. Others are more attuned to the impossibility of closed political

identities and stable grounds it entails. National Deconstruction describes the
supposedly extensive influence of the former, and attempts to identify the
instances of the latter. Campbell believes that international political practice
can become less violent if difference-sensitive attitudes are cultivated
through the adoption of a deconstructionist perspective which challenges
truth claims about coherent identities and institutions.
Campbell applies this deconstructionist philosophy in a detailed exam-
ination of the Bosnian conflict, where he believes the ills of foundational-
ism and possibility of an alternative, difference-sensitive politics were both
apparent. On the foundationalist side, we find diplomats, journalists, and
academics – ‘observers’ who overwhelmingly approach the collapse of
Yugoslavia with the aid of census data and maps referring to determinate
ethnic identities and with a linear, teleological understanding of history.17
Such an approach assumes the existence of singular, pre-existing ethnic
identities (i.e. ‘one person, one identity’) linked to particular territories.18
It also assumes what Campbell, following Derrida, describes as ‘the
authority of the “is”’.19 This is the ‘epistemic realist’ assumption that
impartial investigation can reveal the ‘facts’ of a situation. By making
essentialist assumptions about the links between ethnicity (the complex-
ities of which are obscured in census data) and territory, observers and
diplomats became complicit in the processes through which the goals of
ethnic nationalism were realised through political violence and ‘ethnic
cleansing’. According to Campbell, such an approach to the Bosnian crisis
at best prevented an effective response by the international community
and at worst actively aided the nationalists.20
That the theoretical coup de force involved in the assumptions of
‘observers’ about stable, pre-existing identities is also a political one is
apparent when the claims and practices of nationalists are examined. For
example, rather than drawing on pre-existing identities for political ends,
Serbian nationalism enacted a coup de force by drawing on and deploying
nationalist symbols such as the disinterred remains of Prince Lazar,
leader at the time of the defeat by the Ottomans in Kosovo in 1389.
Serbian identity was thereby performatively constituted, and violently so,
rather than something ready-made which might be ‘discovered’.21 The
identification of truths about coherent and pre-existing identities by
members of the international community was of essentially the same
form – each repressed the complex multiculturalism of Bosnian society
which survived in the attitudes and relationships of many of Bosnia’s
inhabitants.22 Faith in the ‘authority of the “is”’ did violence – conceptual,

cultural, and physical – to those aspects of cultural and political life that failed
to fit within the framework it imposed.
Both Campbell’s attack on the political effects of faith in the ‘authority
of the “is”’ and his identification of the coup de force involved in appeals to
stable, territorially situated identities arise from an insistence that truth
claims are always already part of the social fabric. Behind the theory of
political violence outlined in National Deconstruction there therefore lies
extensive engagement with questions about truth. Indeed, truth claims are
the quintessential form of the coup de force and Campbell’s account of
identity formation and political violence is based upon a critique of the
Veriphilia of Western cultural and intellectual tradition. Through this
critique, he addresses the three questions of the critical epistemological
problematic, providing an account of the links between epistemic and
political practices, of a Veriphobic form of Post-Positivist critique, and of
the forms of praxis which might in future prevent political violence of the
kind witnessed in Bosnia. The answers to each of the three questions are
based around the opposition between two different attitudes to knowl-
edge and truth, each with different implications for political practice. The
first is represented by the assumption of the ‘authority of the “is”’, the
second by deconstructionist sensitivity to difference.
We have already seen how Campbell addresses the first question of
the problematic by working with a negative sociology of knowledge
in which truth claims, in the form of the ‘authority of the “is”’, are
linked to political violence. He continues to develop this account as
he answers the second and third questions. The question of context-
transcendence is engaged with fairly directly in National Deconstruction,
initially through a discussion of the historical anti-realism of Hayden
White. According to Campbell, White shows that our relationship with
the past cannot take place through the identification of facts but must
rather be mediated by narratives. On this view, and in keeping with the
Poststructuralist claim that identities are discursively produced, history
does not involve the discovery of historical facts so much as their creation
in narrative; they are ‘as much invented as found’.23 White was criticised
for undermining the ability of historians to respond to revisionist accounts
of history and, in particular, Holocaust-denial.24 In other words, he was
confronted with the fear, identified by Campbell, that anti-foundational-
ism leads to moral chaos – that if there is no ‘truth of the matter’ there
can be no grounds for objecting to racist or otherwise violent historical
claims. As Campbell notes, in responding to such objections White him-

self succumbed to Veriphilia, claiming that it is possible to appeal to
certain fundamental facts the denial of which leads revisionists to engage
in a ‘total lie’.25
Campbell encounters similar difficulties in formulating his account of
the conflict in Bosnia; if all is discourse, how is it possible to deny the
validity of violent nationalism?26 If we accept the inescapability of
narrative,
[w]e can no longer place faith in the epistemological security of an extra-

discursive domain, a narrative-free and interpreterless zone of reference, to
stabilize particular understandings via their correspondence to ‘facts’.27
The solution lies, for Campbell, in turning to the ethico-political criteria

revealed by deconstruction: ‘these narratives should be judged in terms of
the relationship to the other they embody.’28 We have already seen that he
believes appeals to social facts and grounds are based on a suppression of
difference and therefore lead to political violence. Deconstruction offers
the possibility of a different approach, pointing to an ‘ethos of political
criticism’ involving
interventions in established modes of thought and action . . . to disturb

those practices that are settled, untie what appears to be sewn up, render as
produced that which claims to be naturally emergent.29
Campbell argues that this questioning ‘creates the conditions of possibility

for the formulation of alternatives’.30 In other words, it is an attack on the
‘authority of the “is”’. In keeping with the merging of knowledge and
practice, this mode of critique is not just a matter for academic observers,
but is rather a ‘lived experience’ apparent in the attitudes of those Bosnians
who refuse to be defined in terms of a single ethnic or religious identity.31
Clearly, the ethnic essentialism of revisionist historians will be at odds with
this ethos, and can therefore be rejected.
Campbell elaborates on the notion of an ethos of criticism over the
course of National Deconstruction and in doing so extends the account of
the links between Veriphilia and political violence which emerges with his
identification of the coup de force. The philosophy of Immanuel Levinas is
particularly helpful in this regard. Levinas opposes himself to that tradition
of Western philosophy which he claims has, since Ancient Greece, been

based upon
an intelligibility which considers truth to be that which is present or copre-

sent, that which can be gathered or synchronized into a totality that we
would call the world or cosmos.32
In other words, truth is traditionally thought to involve the immediate

presence of preformed and cohesive objects to the knowing subject.
Truths ‘discovered’ in this way are thought to represent ‘pieces of the
world’, parts of an independently existing totality. For Levinas, the
attempts to reduce that which is fundamentally diffuse to ‘the Same’ to
which this tradition gives rise represent an ‘alchemy that is performed by
the philosopher’s stone of the knowing ego’.33 In keeping with the
tendency to link forms of knowledge to forms of politics which has proved
so influential in IR, he argues that ‘political totalitarianism rests on an
ontological totalitarianism’, that is, on the pursuit of truth and the ontol-
ogy of presence and unproblematic identity.34 The Veriphilia of Western
metaphysical tradition drives political attempts to force identity upon that
which is fundamentally different and diffuse.
For Campbell, this misplaced desire for presence, coherence, and
identity – Levinas’s ‘alchemy performed with the knowing ego’ – has
played a key role in shaping politics not only in the former Yugoslavia
but also in the established Western democracies. He identifies its opera-
tion in the debates about multiculturalism in the United States and
Europe, where the ‘desire for presence’ and the ‘phenomenology of
coherence’ (the belief that our experience is of stable, ‘closed’ identities)
have fostered nostalgia for a supposed era of close-knit homogeneous
communities. They also drive the ‘celebration of difference in the form
of “culturalism” instantiating determinate borders of identity consistent
with apartheid politics’.35 In other words, Veriphilia leads us to assume a
world of discrete ethnic or national units, knowledge of which can suppo-
sedly provide the basis for successful political practice. Since identity is
performatively constituted in discourse and pre-existing, coherent identi-
ties are an illusion this Veriphiliac politics is violently brought into being –
‘materialised’ – at the same time that it supposedly identifies the elements
of political reality.36 The political coup de force which asserts a coherent
national identity goes hand-in-hand with the philosophical coup de force
which asserts the possibility and desirability of truthfully representing the
world. The ‘desire for presence’ corresponds with the epistemic idealisa-
tions; coherent, rational, and autonomous subjects are thought to stand
over a distinct reality of preformed and coherent entities.
As well as helping Campbell to further develop his answer to the first
question of the critical international problematic, Levinas confirms the
role of sensitivity to difference as a response to the threat of relativism.
According to Levinas, responsibility to the Other is ‘the essential, pri-
mary, and fundamental structure of subjectivity’, and ‘the very node of
the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility’.37
Contrary to Western philosophical tradition’s idealised view of the indi-
vidual knowing ego, subjectivity is constituted by the relationship to
fundamental alterity which can never be fully present to or successfully
represented by the knowing ego. For Campbell, following Levinas,
alterity is part of a fundamental structure which makes possible both
subjectivity and the truths which subjects can supposedly discover. It is
the defining feature of social and political life. Therefore, the ethics of
responsibility to the Other rather than a cognitive capturing and cate-
gorisation of reality is the basis of a ‘first philosophy’ with which it is
possible to address matters of epistemology and ontology, as well as
ethical issues.38 The belief that we can identify the truth about the
world is not simply mistaken; it is violently opposed to our structurally
determined responsibility. Truth consists of the striving to attain unat-
tainable ideals, a sort of pathological epistemic practice which necessarily
takes place on an intersubjective plane whilst generating the illusion that
the subject might transcend it in order cognise the elements of an
objective realm which lies beneath.
If Levinas identifies for Campbell our fundamental ethical responsibility
to alterity and the corresponding totalitarianism of truth claims, Derrida
helps to illustrate in more detail the supposed links between ‘ontological
totalitarianism’ and ‘political totalitarianism’.39 It is Derridean decon-
struction, too, which provides the means to combat this totalitarianism.
According to Campbell, deconstruction is ‘the at least necessary condi-
tion’ for thinking about a solution to Bosnia and situations like it.40 As we
have seen, it supposedly demonstrates that there are no ultimate founda-
tions for the ‘containers of politics’ which are taken for granted by con-
ventional approaches.41 According to Campbell, it is only this lack of
ultimate foundations which makes politics possible, for were there in fact
such grounds ‘social action would be no more than the automatic opera-
tion of a knowledge, and ethics and politics would be no more than
technology’.42 Thus, truth is opposed to politics; were truth in fact

available to us there could be no politics to speak of. In contrast, decon-
structionist thought is ‘necessary for politics’ because it is attuned to the
indeterminacy and fluidity of the identities around which political life is
structured.43
The fundamental point to emerge from Campbell’s discussion of Levinas
and Derrida is that ‘both depend on the recognition of a structural condition
of alterity prior to subjectivity and thought’.44 It is only in the context of this
‘structural condition’ that the notion of truth can be seen to depend on
idealisations which can never be redeemed but only violently asserted. This,
for Campbell, points to the need to reject the ‘totalitarian’ claims to truth
which help to violently materialise political identities and boundaries. The
Veriphiliac ‘metaphysics of presence’ obscures the fact that something neces-
sarily remains ‘different’ or ‘other’ to the entity in question, and must do so
for there to be any ethics or politics at all.45 Recognition of the ‘structural
condition of alterity’ points to a solution to the third question of the critical
problematic by providing the basis for a new approach to world politics
based on responsibility to otherness, awareness of difference, and the ques-
tioning of established political boundaries and identities.
Campbell’s proposal for a new form of politics – to which we will return
below – is based, firstly, around Derrida’s conception of the ‘promise’ of
democracy. He argues that the common conception of democracy as a
determinate form of institutional arrangement contributed to the rise of
ethnic-nationalist politics in Yugoslavia.46 It is based on the assumption
that democracy can be successfully – finally – established, an attitude which
reflects the same metaphysical assumptions underlying the Veriphiliac
attitudes to political community. Just as the structure of alterity means
that any appeal to a pre-existing community represents a coup de force, so it
means that democracy can never be entirely secured. Rather, and in keep-
ing with the portrayal of foundationalism and truth as ‘anti-political’,
Campbell suggests that
at the core of modernity is a fundamental indeterminacy with regard to the

foundations for action and being . . . democracy as an ethos of disturbance is
the political form that is both attuned to and derived from these conditions
of indeterminacy in the modern era.47
According to Campbell, following Derrida, the form of politics this situa-

tion necessitates is a democracy which takes the ‘structure of a promise’, of
something which is always ‘to come’.48 Given the structure of alterity and
difference, democracy can never be fully present; some Other will always
be excluded. Campbell argues, therefore, that
the central element of democracy should remain the ethos, one that embo-
dies the temporality, oscillation, critique, disturbance, denaturalization,
problematization – the ‘ad infinitum’ of nomadic movements.49
A second aspect of Campbell’s recommendations for a new form of praxis

emerges from the complex multiculturalism which he believes is enabled
by the recognition of the impossibility of closed identities. He suggests
that the makings of this multiculturalism are to be found in Bosnian
society. In the penultimate chapter of National Deconstruction he argues
that the complex multiculturalism found in Bosnia before the war, aspects
of which still exist, could be fostered in order to create a politics of greater
responsibility to the Other. In the Ottoman system which existed prior to
the process of ethnic categorisation there existed a way of life that was
more sensitive to the complexity of identity, as recognised by deconstruc-
tion.50 The non-essentialist Bosnian identity which preceded the war, and
which can be traced back to Ottoman times, represents
an identity that operated in terms of the care for the complex relationship
of identity/difference.51
At the heart of Campbell’s theory of international politics, then, lies a

Veriphobic response to the critical problematic on the basis of an
intersubjectivist conception of truth. He formulates a powerful argu-
ment linking ethnic essentialism and political violence with Western
Veriphilia, thereby supporting the general point made by IR’s Post-
Positivists that certain kinds of scientistic, calculative knowledge can
feed domination and violence by suppressing the heterogeneous and
fluid. The example of Bosnia suggests that, in approaching the ques-
tion of truth and politics we should recognise that truth claims about
international reality are constitutively political, sometimes viscerally so,
but that they are condemned to be undermined by that which they can
never capture. Contrary to the claims of Positivists, the latter factor –
the particular and heterogeneous – is that with which we should be
most concerned as theorists and citizens. This concern is to be pursued
by abandoning truth in favour of deconstruction.
3 DIFFÉRANCE, STRUCTURES, AND KNOWLEDGE

This is a radical position and it has, not surprisingly, attracted allegations of
contradiction.52 Critics suggest that those who claim to reject foundations
and truth cannot avoid appealing to foundations and truths of their own, and
are therefore engaged in a ‘performative contradiction’.53 In terms of the
critical problematic identified in the present work, the claim is that they fail
to address the question of context-transcendence by providing an adequate
explanation of their own position. Campbell does not avoid such problems.
However, the contradictions in which he becomes entangled are neither as
straightforward as such criticism suggests, nor do they detract from all of the
insights generated by his critique of Western metaphysics. They do, on the
other hand, tell us a lot about what is at stake in debates about truth in IR.
The most basic problem for Campbell appears to be that he adopts an
entirely negative conception of truth whilst the whole time making truth
claims of his own about Bosnia. In addition, as we have seen, the supposed
ills of Veriphilia are revealed in National Deconstruction through appeal to a
‘structural condition of alterity’.54 It is only against this background the
concern with truth appears to be fundamentally violent.55 Campbell’s
response to the critical problematic stands and falls with this idea and yet
his identification of a structure seems to contradict his assertion of the
fundamental indeterminacy and diffuseness of the social. More generally,
it appears to be at odds with the anti-structuralist and anti-objectivist
concerns of critical international thought. The viability of Campbell’s
Veriphobia depends, therefore, on his being able to answer to two questions.
The more obvious concerns the nature of Veriphobic knowledge – given
their radical critique of epistemology, how can Poststructuralists like
Campbell ‘know’ anything? How can they avoid the performative contra-
diction which would arise from their making truth claims? A second question
concerns the social ontology which can be used to undermine Veriphilia –
how can the Veriphobe identify, without contradiction, anything resembling
a structure? These are pivotal questions for the Poststructuralist Veriphobia
which has been so influential in IR, and the responses available to Campbell
tell us much about the viability of such an approach. It will be helpful to
tackle the question of structure first, since the way in which it can be
addressed provides the framework within which it is possible to understand
the nature of the claims Campbell makes in his work.
It seems that for Campbell to be able to appeal to a ‘structural condi-
tion’ without contradiction, it must be of a different kind to the structures
of the ‘structural’ Realists or Marxists criticised by earlier critical interna-

tional thinkers. The clearest formulation of the idea of a ‘structure defined
by alterity’ is Derrida’s concept of différance. Although Campbell seldom
refers to the concept directly in his book, it is by means of this idea that he
can make the connection between violence, truth, and identity. Indeed,
although he tends to refer to alterity rather than différance, we are told at
one point that ‘alterity, being’s other, is a necessity structured by
différance rather than ontology’.56 Thus, Campbell does not have in
mind anything like a structure as a feature of ‘being’ or ‘reality’. Instead,
he presents différance as a fundamental principle structuring reality in such
a way as to make alterity a ‘necessity’. Campbell clearly believes he is
talking of a structure of a fundamentally different kind to those of
Marxists and Realists; it is not one the truth about which can be identified,
ultimately, through empirical investigations into the nature of reality.
So what kind of thing is différance? The concept emerges from Derrida’s
critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’, upon which Campbell relies
throughout National Deconstruction. Derrida argued that Western intel-
lectual tradition has assumed that voice, mental experiences, and nature are
closely intertwined – the same attitude as that which is supposedly at work
in the assertions of identity described above.57 It is typically believed that
words directly signify mental entities which in some sense reflect the objects
of the natural world. It is supposed that this close relationship allows us
access to that which our words represent, the ‘transcendental signified’,
and therefore to truth. Derrida argues that this position confines writing, as
opposed to speech, to secondary status as the mere signification of a prior
signifier, the spoken word. However, the relegation of the ‘signifier of the
signifier’ to secondary status as the ‘supplement to the spoken word’, as
Rousseau put it, is a mistake. ‘Signifier of the signifier’ in fact describes the
very ‘movement of language’, for that which is supposedly signified ‘always
already functions as a signifier’ and nothing escapes ‘the play of signifying
references that constitute language’.58 The logic of writing is the logic of
all language.
According to Derrida, the ‘experience of the effacement of the sig-
nifier in the voice’ which appeared to allow the knowing ego access to
some external reality ‘is not merely one illusion among many’, but rather
‘since it is the condition of the very idea of truth . . . This illusion is the
history of truth’.59 Put simply, the belief in truth – the constitutive
illusion of Western thought – is based on the mistaken belief that subjects
can have immediate access to an objective reality, that there is something
to which our words ultimately refer or attach, that they can successfully
correspond and possess a fixed meaning. Identification of the logic of
writing reveals, on the contrary, the futility of all attempts to ‘withdraw
meaning, truth, presence, being, etc. from the movement of significa-
tion’.60 Truth can only be understood in the context of language. To the
extent that the concept obscures its own conditions of possibility it is
illusory.
The collapse of truth is accompanied by the collapse of traditional
understandings of meaning and being. Ultimately, according to Derrida
one cannot retain the convenience or the ‘scientific truth’ of the Stoic and
later medieval opposition between signans and signatum without also bring-
ing with it all its metaphysical-theological roots.61
Derrida offers a means of distancing ourselves from these roots by propos-

ing the concept of différance as an alternative to the ‘metaphysics of
presence’. The former has both the sense ‘to differ’, in the sense being
non-identical, and of ‘to defer’, as in ‘to delay’.62 The concept is derived in
part from Saussure’s argument that that the meaning of signs derives not
from reference to some ‘fully present entity’, but rather from their relative
position in a chain of differences.63 Derrida argues that since this semi-
ological difference is unavoidable, each element in a language is not itself
‘present’ but necessarily refers to another. Each sign is therefore a ‘trace’
which has never actually been present, and the present is simply the
differential network of these ‘traces’.64 Thus, as well as depending on
difference, meaning also depends upon constant deferral. For Derrida,
différance – difference and deferral of meaning and presence – is the
context in which truth is necessarily pursued, but it is one which con-
demns it to be perpetually undermined.
Most importantly for Campbell, Derrida states that ‘[d]ifférance by
itself would be more “originary”, but one would no longer be able to
call it “origin” or “ground”’.65 In other words, according to Derrida,
whilst différance is in some sense more fundamental than presence, iden-
tity, meaning, or truth, it does not precede them in an empirical or
historical sense, nor does it provide foundations of the kind associated
with traditional metaphysics.66
Clearly in appealing to an underlying ‘structural condition of alterity’
which is in turn ‘structured by différance’, Campbell has in mind Derrida’s
idea of a ‘more originary’ condition of possibility rather than a determinate
ontological structure, ground, or origin.67 This ‘more originary’ status of

différance is apparent in National Deconstruction where it accounts for the
priority of alterity and the violence generated by the pursuit of truth. It is
the necessary structure of the discourse through which social reality is
performatively constituted and of our knowledge of that reality. Most
importantly, identification of différance undermines the concept of
truth, apparently exposing it to that which will always remain beyond it
but which it is mistakenly believed to capture.
Thus différance is at the centre of the constellation of issues concerning
truth, violence, politics, and critical thought which Campbell examines in
National Deconstruction. It provides the basis on which he theorises the
links between knowledge and practice in world politics. Campbell avoids
contradiction to the extent that the ‘structure’ différance does not occupy
any object domain or past from which the subject stands apart. From the
perspective of the theory outlined in National Deconstruction, différance
cannot be identified as a social structure on the basis of historical record or
empirical investigation. To assert the priority of différance in these senses
would represent a reversion to the ‘desire for presence’, assertion of
grounds, or appeal to the ‘epistemological security of an extra-discursive
domain’.68
Whilst Campbell might to this extent avoid falling into a self-
contradictory structuralism, the question remains of the status of the
claims made in National Deconstruction. As suggested above, the question
can be approached from two angles. First, we can ask how Campbell can
avoid making truth claims about Bosnian history and society. He might
object to the ‘authority of the “is”’ but, as Colin Wight has pointed out,
he still seems to rely upon the historical record as a ground for his claims.69
Indeed, one of the overarching arguments of National Deconstruction is
that the complex multiculturalism which once characterised Bosnian
society was violently dismantled with the imposition of ethnic essentialism.
This is surely a historical truth claim.
In this form, the accusation of performative contradiction is not entirely
justified. It is often assumed that Poststructuralists totally reject empirical
scholarship when, as James Der Derian has pointed out, what they reject is
the correspondence theory of truth and the notion of objective reality in
favour of the idea of realities which are produced by multiple discourses.70
The empirical is not so much banned as subsumed within the emphasis on
constitutive discursivity. Thus, in response to Wight, Campbell can point
out that he does not deny the possibility of appealing to the historical
record. His point is only that ‘events have no general meaning until they
are emplotted [in a narrative]’.71 Likewise, he does not deny the possibility
of making claims about the world, only that the notion of ‘external reality’
can itself have a ‘currency’ independently of the discourse in which it is
expressed; we cannot simply assume that we are talking about an object
domain existing apart from discourse, since that assumption itself is an
element in the performative constitution of reality.72 In each case, we
cannot conceive of the world ‘outside of language and our traditions of
interpretation’.73
Campbell leaves himself free to draw upon the historical record and
make claims about Bosnian society, but his position still reflects a sig-
nificant departure from traditional Veriphiliac assumptions about what is
happening when we make such claims. He is not claiming to have
identified the ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ but, by making explicit his ontological
presuppositions, to engage in the ethos of criticism which reveals and
unsettles settled identities and practices.74 When he makes claims about
Bosnia’s past, Campbell argues, he does so not with the assumption that
he has captured the objective facts of the matter but rather by projecting
the ontological presumptions which underlie his position into an account
of actuality, whilst acknowledging that there is no hope of demonstrating
their ‘truth’.75 The account that emerges is not claimed as the most true,
but rather, as we have already seen, as the most ethical. In summary,
then, Campbell avoids self-contradiction by claiming that he is not
making empirical truth claims but making an ethical intervention
armed with a philosophical insight into the role of indeterminacy and
difference in the constitution of reality. This insight and the différance it
identifies take priority over appeals to the historical record which are
subsumed within it.
The question is harder to address when considered from a second
angle, concerning how knowledge of différance – the structuring principle
of epistemic and political practice, the enabling and disabling condition of
truth claims – is possible. When we consider the ways in which Campbell
can respond to this question the price he has paid to maintain his
Veriphobia begins to become apparent. He cannot claim that différance
can be recognised through the reflective self-knowledge drawn on by the
early IR Post-Positivists, for example, since différance undermines the
notion that there is any perspective from which such reflection can take
place. Indeed, the same would be true of any attempt to present différance
as the structure of human understanding and deconstruction as a form of
self-knowledge; as we have seen, it is meant to perpetually undermine the

assumption of a stable ego which might come to know itself. Whilst
différance is in some sense the context for human knowledge, it also
supposedly means that there are no secure epistemic grounds available.76
Derrida is concerned to show that any appeal to ultimate transcendental
grounds, especially those associated with the knowing ego, is unsustainable –
this is why Campbell finds his theory so useful.
Appearances can be deceptive, however. Peter Dews has pointed out
that Derrida’s philosophy does not in fact represent a total departure from
transcendental inquiry.77 Because they must take care not to base their
philosophy on empirical claims, deconstructionists like Campbell must
prioritise a claim to insight into the quasi-transcendental grounds of
possibility of the knowing subject and of truth; quasi-transcendental
because, of course, différance is both an enabling and disabling condition
of truth claims and meaning and is lodged within the process of reflection
by which any transcendental grounds might be identified.78 According to
Dews, identification of the quasi-transcendental condition of différance
represents a claim to philosophical insight since, having rejected the
notion of truth – and thereby any grounding of philosophy upon experi-
ence of a non-human reality – deconstruction ‘cannot learn from its
objects’. Instead, ‘the successor to philosophy continues to evade the
exposure of thought to the contingency of interpretation, and the revisa-
bility of empirical knowledge’.79 The fundamental insight comes, for
deconstruction, from philosophical inquiry into the nature of language
which reveals différance as the a priori condition of possibility of truth,
meaning, and identity, but also the condition of their undoing. Thus
deconstruction actually represents ‘an attempt to preserve the security
and priority of philosophical discourse’.80 As Rodolphé Gasché has
pointed out, deconstruction is in fact concerned with identifying the
‘principles of the ultimate foundation of all possible knowledges’.81
Campbell does not, then, fall into contradiction as a result of claiming
to have identified the structure of alterity in an empirical sense or by
relying on the identification of historical truths, so much as by implicitly
claiming to have identified the necessary precondition of all knowledge
and meaning. He can only reject truth by falling back on the sort of
formalistic foundationalism according to which the structure of thought
is preordained. This preordination of the nature of thought and action is
partly what concerns Campbell about the metaphysics of presence – hence
his claim that truth is opposed to politics.
At first glance this characterisation of deconstruction as a subspecies

of the philosophy of reflection is a strange one. After all, it tends to be
presented by adherents such as Campbell, as well as by many critics, as a
total rejection of the traditions of Western metaphysics and as a theoretical
celebration to the ‘end of philosophy’.82 Along with other Poststructuralist
theories, deconstruction has been employed in IR and elsewhere to
undermine the notion of transcendentally secure grounds for thought
and action assumed to lie in the enduring features of subjectivity. This
same tendency is apparent, for example, in Ashley’s critique of the
‘anarchy problematique’.83
However, Campbell endorses Levinas’s call for a philosophy of ‘ethics
as first philosophy’, arguing that this ethics is a form of ‘transcendence’
because ‘alterity is a necessity structured by différance’.84 The latter is, as
explained above, not an empirically identifiable historical structure but
rather a quasi-transcendental, ‘originary’ structure which is at once a
precondition for facts and truth claims and the source of their undoing.
This precondition is identified through the philosophical-linguistic cri-
tique of the modern ‘metaphysics of presence’ which Campbell takes
from the work of Levinas and Derrida. It cannot, without contradiction,
be identified as an empirical or historical fact, since any such approach
would involve appeal to the truth and grounds which it is the aim of the
theory to reject. Following Dews, this deconstructionist critique of
Western metaphysics can be characterised as ‘moving upstream’ to identify
the quasi-transcendental basis for human consciousness, rather than
‘downstream’ to argue that philosophy and the knowing ego are entwined
with a social reality and historical contingency which they cannot master.85
Indeed, Levinas himself pointed out that
the whole contemporary discourse of overcoming and deconstructing meta-

physics is far more speculative in many respects than metaphysics itself.86
The knowledge claimed by Campbell – the lens through which he examines

Bosnia and his response to the critical problematic – is thus based on the
identification of a foundational first philosophy and a quasi-transcendental
critique of Western metaphysics. It is ultimately based upon the philoso-
phical identification of a priori conditions which lie behind the notions of
truth, identity, and grounds. Therefore, whilst it would be a mistake to
accuse Campbell of only being able to reject truth by making a truth claim
of his own, his critique is based on the prioritisation of the a priori over
truth.87 It represents, if not a truth claim, a claim to insight into the

fundamental grounds of knowledge and meaning.88
Given the role of the critical problematic in his work, it is not surprising
that this mode of critique has significant implications for Campbell’s
accounts of politics. Despite the careful attention he pays to the views
and experiences of ordinary Bosnians and his detailed account of the
response of the international community to the crisis, the prioritisation
of philosophy and elevation of transcendental inquiry are apparent
throughout National Deconstruction. Their impact is evident in his assess-
ment of the accounts of the crisis in Bosnia provided by political actors and
theorists, the view he adopts of Bosnian history, and ultimately his under-
standing of political practice.
As we shall see in the coming chapters, philosophical identification of
the shortcomings and contradictions of the assumptions with which actors
operate can be an important element of social theory. Nevertheless,
Campbell tends to present the accounts and attitudes of the various parties
involved in the conflict as if they are, at root, based on philosophical error
according to which they fail to recognise the différance upon which
identity and knowledge depend. That is to say, contrary to his goal of
doing justice to the other of reason, political experiences and behaviour
are not understood in their particularity or contingency but rather in terms
of their relationship to a philosophically identified quasi-structure. The
limitations of the prevailing forms of action are understood as arising from
their relationship with the conditions of knowledge and meaning as such.
The actors considered in National Deconstruction are freed from the orbit
of identity and presence into which they have been dragged by prevailing
forms of Veriphiliac political knowledge, only to find themselves drawn
into that of a new framework within which rationality is to be understood
and assessed. Political pathologies emerge in relation to the preconditions
of thought, rather than contingently as individuals interact and respond to
the shifting circumstances in which they find themselves.
The nature of the problem is apparent if we compare Campbell’s
position with that of the early critical IR scholars considered in the pre-
vious chapter. For earlier critical international thinkers, the philosophical
flaws of practice-shaping assumptions – that of the amoral nature of
international politics, for example – arise from historically emergent social
conditions. Thus, for example, it would be open to the early Linklater not
only to express regret that statesmen lack philosophical insight into the
importance of moral reflection in global political life, but also to note the
origins of their attitude in the state of global social relations which pre-
vailed at an earlier period.89 Structures of thought are dialectically con-
nected to shifting ways of living. It is for similar reasons that Cox claims
that truth is dialectical.90 This is what Dews might refer to as a ‘down-
stream’ critique. In these approaches, the pursuit of truth is combined
with the recognition that there must remain an inescapably reflective
moment in our attitude to the social. On the one hand, the pursuit of
truth undermines the totalising tendencies of philosophical systems by
linking them to concrete historical conditions and social interests. On
the other hand, the moment in which truth itself is scrutinised cannot,
as Positivists assume, be wished away through the denial of reflection.91
From this perspective it is not possible to prioritise philosophical, histor-
ical, or empirical inquiry alone.92 Whether these advantages survived the
increasing influence of the intersubjectivist conception of truth is a ques-
tion we will consider in Chapter 4.
Such approaches are not without their problems, many of which have
been identified by Postructuralists. In particular, as discussed in Chapter 2,
they often conceal a teleological core which assumes the secure position
of the enlightened Western subject. In doing so they reflect the very
insensitivity to heterogeneity which so concerns Campbell and other
Poststructuralists. Nevertheless, such approaches do leave it open to the-
orists to appeal to contingent historical conditions as well as philosophi-
cally identified preconditions, allowing the two elements to temper each
other. The ideal of relating to a contingent reality contained in the con-
cept of truth has been a means of ‘chastening’ as well as reinforcing the
prevailing forms of reason.93
In contrast, whilst its aim is to undermine the security of the enlight-
enment subject and its truth claims, Campbell’s critique is addressed to
Western metaphysics as the defining feature of international politics.94 It
seeks to undermine this metaphysics by revealing the exclusions and
silences which sustain it and does so with an account of its necessary
preconditions. However, as we have seen, these revelations cannot be
of hidden levels of reality, social interests, or historical structures. As
Ashley argues, from a Poststructuralist perspective such an approach
would imply the activity of a knowing ego with the power to uncover
the truth.95 Rather, Poststructuralist critique is conducted by charting
the effects and conditions of possibility of Veriphiliac assumptions.96
Poststructuralists locate these assumptions on the single plane of linguis-
tic practice, rather than in shifting historical or social structures or
processes to be explained in terms of reasons and causes. By ‘laying bare’

the quasi-transcendental structure of the linguistic practices through
which political reality is performatively constituted, and by revealing
the concepts of metaphysics, especially that of ‘truth’, as ‘emperors
with no clothes’, Poststructuralists aim to challenge the epistemic prac-
tices upon which international political conduct is based.97 Such an
approach gives the impression of taking historical context and contin-
gency even more seriously than did the first critical IR scholars.
However, in the absence of a positive conception of truth the risk is
that exposure of thought to contingency disappears and one form of
‘unchastened’ reason is challenged by means of another – in place of
Positivistic truth claims or naïve reflection we have Poststructuralist
insight, not into shifting circumstances but into the nature of shifting
as such.
It is not clear that such an approach can live up to Campbell’s stated
aim of fostering sensitivity to the particular in the face of universalising
reason. The danger for international theory is apparent if we consider his
suggestion that ‘it is to be regretted that international diplomats were
not attuned to the deconstructive ethos’ (i.e. attuned to the originary
structure identified by deconstructive philosophy).98 The statement
implies that had the members of the international community adopted
the right philosophical stance – that is, a deconstructionist one – they
would have been able to respond to the crisis with less disastrous results.
Of course, Campbell argues that the ethos in question is not purely
philosophical, but also practical, to be found in both the attitudes of
Bosnians themselves and the modern democratic tradition. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that the primary means by which this ethos has been
identified is that of the quasi-transcendental critique of Western metaphy-
sics. It is as if we have excavated a quasi-structure which necessarily lies
within the interactions of all subjects. It is not clear how such an approach
can capture the specific reasons why Western diplomats might not have
developed the necessary ethos.
The difficulties Campbell faces in explaining how actors come to favour
either alterity or presence are also apparent in his account of Bosnian
history, in which he contrasts the multiculturalism of Ottoman Bosnia
with the ethnic essentialism which led to the modern crisis. In this case,
we might wonder how and why the multiculturalism of Ottoman Bosnia
came to be obscured by the ‘desire for presence’. Once again, from
Campbell’s perspective the violent identifications of modernity seem to be
explicable only if we accept the priority of philosophy; we can provide no

explanation of the origins of the ‘identifications’ behind nationalism and the
operation of the international system other than that Western metaphysics
drives actors to emphasise identity whilst failing to recognise fundamental
alterity. No account is provided of how people might come to recognise the
operation of deconstruction or to live in a manner attuned to alterity, of the
social power relations and interests which might lead to such a state of
affairs. Likewise, no account is given of how and in response to what specific
concerns and problems others might have come to prioritise its opposite.
One option open to Campbell is to argue that the international com-
munity was operating on the basis of assumptions which arose from what
he calls the ‘desire for presence’.99 However, this desire is surely, for
deconstruction, so much a defining feature of Western metaphysics as to
offer no solution at all. At other moments Campbell appeals to the
Foucauldian notion of an interest in power. Here, he appears to suggest
that the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and the international system based on
its assumptions reflect an interest in developing ‘disciplinary power’ or the
technical control of populations. However, quite apart from the question
of the compatibility of Foucault’s theory with deconstruction, such a
solution would raise as many questions as it answers.100 Like Derrida,
Foucault rejects truth and identifies an underlying structuring principle
beyond or outside of it, in this case power. Truth is then understood in
terms of the boundaries of legitimate knowledge set by the prevailing
power relations.101
The difficulties with the Foucauldian position will be outlined in more
detail below. Suffice to say for the moment that the question remains of
how an interest in technical control can explain the predominance of the
metaphysics of presence. Campbell provides no account of how the inter-
est in disciplinary power comes to predominate in modern international
politics or of how alternatives might emerge. Surely we cannot assume that
awareness of deconstruction would overcome this interest. Indeed, if
Campbell wants to adopt a Foucauldian position, according to which
power is all pervading, we might wonder what forms of power might lie
behind the complex Ottoman multiculturalism which supposedly does not
reflect the interest in control. There is little reason to think that it would
be much more benign than the form of domination which is the object of
Campbell’s critique, and yet it is difficult to see how he could provide an
account of any form of domination other than that which supposedly
accompanies Veriphilia. It is only in the absence of any recognition of
possible preceding forms of domination and in the presence of an account

of the conditions of meaning as such that it is plausible to present an
overwhelmingly negative view of Veriphilia.102
Of course, like the IR Poststructuralists discussed in the previous
chapter and like Foucault himself, Campbell makes clear that he is not
interested in identifying causes or reasons behind political and social
phenomena. Rather, he states that he is interested in identifying the
political effects of representations and asking ‘how they came to be’.103
However, even by this standard his account seems incomplete. The only
account he provides is of a conflict between modes of social and political
being attuned to a ground of différance and those which are not but for
which différance nevertheless provides the context. He painstakingly
constructs a picture of the logic operating within the latter quasi-
transcendental scheme and of its political effects. However, having asserted
the possibility of an alternative to the politics of a flawed Veriphile meta-
physics, he provides no account of the specific circumstances – problems,
interests, contradictions – under which either of the two possible relation-
ships to difference might emerge, whether in the past or future. This is a
significant problem for a theory concern with challenging those processes
which obscure particularity. The only explanation available on the basis of
the position outlined in National Deconstruction seems to be that they are
driven by philosophical insight or mysterious attunement to the priority of
difference and alterity, on the one hand, or an equally mysterious desire for
presence or pursuit of power, on the other.
Campbell highlights the violence and indifference which the prevailing
epistemic attitudes can promote when applied to the lives of ordinary
people. He succeeds in capturing the pernicious nature of such attitudes
and their constitutive, substantive, often visceral role in international
politics. This is an important means of understanding why the interna-
tional system is so often a source of suffering and violence. However, his
Veriphobia also appears to hinder his efforts to give an account of those
ways of living which cannot be captured with technocratic knowledge. On
the one hand, his account of Bosnia identifies the tendency of Veriphilia
to suppress, in reality – materially, even – difference or heterogeneity.
This is highlighted as a key political, theoretical, and ethical problem for
IR: how can we account for and avoid the violence to difference which
has characterised modern politics and knowledge? On the other hand,
in pursuing this critique he is led back towards the sort of systema-
tising, formalistic stance which makes the metaphysics of presence so
problematic. Veriphobia repeats the ills of Veriphilia. Clearly, this is not

Campbell’s intention and appears to be precisely the opposite of what the
prioritisation of difference should achieve.
4 THE GROUNDS OF DECONSTRUCTION

Why, despite a powerful account of the brutal suppression of heterogene-
ity in practice and healthy suspicion of foundationalist first principles does
Campbell arrive at such a position? As has been suggested, the reasons
seem to lie in the ‘upstream’ form of critique he adopts in order to
undermine the identity, universality, and coherence of the Western subject
and its concepts. We can elaborate on the problems with this approach by
considering the relationship between identity and difference, universality
and particularity, unity and heterogeneity in greater detail.
As IR’s Post-Positivists have recognised, problems arise when we try
to prioritise one of these poles. This problem is most obvious in the case
of Positivists, who assume the secure identity of a universal subject. In
the case of Campbell’s Veriphobic approach to IR, in contrast, problems
arise from the self-defeating nature of the prioritisation of difference.
As Dews points out regarding Derrida, the consequence of this priority
would be the collapse of meaning. For, whilst we might accept that
difference is a precondition of meaning, it cannot determine meaning
on its own; difference must depend on identifications which establish the
elements to be differentiated between. In other words, difference must
be difference from or between something. If difference really took prior-
ity, these identifications would not be possible and, as a result, neither
would meaning.104
This problem is apparent in Campbell’s application of deconstruction
to international history and politics; for both the theorist and the actors he
considers, there must be some possibility of intervening, some element of
stability or grounds which momentarily avoids being undermined by
difference or else the possibility of action and thought would collapse
entirely. Campbell argues that truth and politics are incompatible – if
there were secure foundations for knowledge, there could be no history
or politics, only technology.105 Likewise, however, there could be no
society or politics and no possibility of critique if there were no grounds
at all; any attempt to adopt a determinate position, whether in the forma-
tion of a community or in responding to social problems, would be
inconceivable.
Having apparently prioritised difference Campbell is in a difficult position –

he has left himself with little basis upon which to account for the operation
of politics or society other than by means of a first philosophy which
identifies a quasi-transcendental structure of différance. Contrary to initial
appearances and somewhat paradoxically, this provides the necessary
moment of stability – a point from which it is possible for the theorist to
account for politics and for the actors he discusses to act. In the words of
Dews, it turns out that differance is in fact a ‘powerful principle of unity’.106
We can understand IR in terms of deconstruction because différance is the
grounds of thought and politics as such. This approach directs our atten-
tion to the difference which undermines the identifications associated with
truth claims, only to protect itself from contingency by moving ‘upstream’.
This sort of immunity is precisely what critical IR scholars have objected to
in Positivist epistemology and rationalist accounts of social action, where
the knowing subject appears as an unproblematic given rather than a
fragile, partial, and ambiguous historical entity.
Deconstructionists – Campbell included – are not unaware of these
problems. Derrida was certainly conscious of the difficulties which would
accompany the prioritisation of difference – the risk of coming full circle
and arriving back at total identity – pointing out that différance is not
equivalent to absolute difference, but rather involves the interplay of
difference and identity.107 Campbell also recognises the threat of nihilism –
of anti-politics – which would appear to lie within the prioritisation of
difference as much as in the obsession with truth. Whilst this awareness is
not manifested in most of his discussions of Bosnian politics and history,
he does state at numerous points in National Deconstruction that decon-
struction involves the interaction of the universal and particular or identity
and difference. He attributes the view that it prioritises difference alone to
the ‘half-baked’ ideas of its critics.108 As he acknowledges, however,
concerns about the nihilism, relativism, and political passivity which
might arise from the emphasis on difference have also been expressed by
philosophers sympathetic to deconstruction. For example, Simon
Critchley asks ‘how is one to account for the move from undecidability
[the lack of grounds] to the political decision to combat domination?’109
In light of its suspicion of identity, grounds, and associated concepts, how
can deconstruction explain any political practice, decision, or change?
In addressing this question to his own theory, Campbell provides a
more detailed answer than we were initially able to uncover above regard-
ing the perspective of diplomats or development of political of identities in
Bosnia. The key to his response lies in Derrida’s notions of ‘undecidabil-

ity’, ‘decision’, and ‘justice’. For Derrida, ‘undecidability’ is a precondi-
tion of any decision. Campbell points out that if
the realm of thought was preordained such that there were no options, no
competing alternatives, and no difficult choices to make, there would be no
need for a decision.110
As he argued regarding the anti-political nature of foundations, without

the uncertainty which necessitates a decision, there would be no politics,
no responsibility, and therefore no ethics – the right course of action
would always be clear to us. According to Derrida the ‘undecidable’ is
precisely this state of competing alternatives, ‘an opening up of the field of
decision’, which makes politics possible. He claims that
even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any
deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the
undecidable.111
Campbell points to the significance of Derrida’s referring to the ‘undecid-

able’ rather than to ‘indeterminacy’; the former captures the fact that there is
‘always a determinate oscillation between possibilities’, whilst the latter
would imply a relativism which deconstruction rejects. This notion of unde-
cidability provides the condition of possibility for responsibility to alterity;
responsibility requires a situation in which decisions need to be made.112
However, and in keeping with the concerns outlined above, the ques-
tion remains, again expressed by Critchley, of how the decision necessary
for a deconstructionist politics is possible – how is a specific political
decision to be made in favour of deconstruction?113 Campbell turns to
Derrida’s theory of justice for an answer.114 Derrida argues that whilst law
consists of attempts to determine sets of enforceable rules, justice is of the
same nature as undecidability and différance; it is ‘not a principle, or a
foundation’, but is ‘infinite’, ‘undeconstructable’, ‘unrepresentable’, and
‘pre-original’. At the same time, it is not indeterminate, but in keeping
with the notion of undecidability just outlined, it is
that which brings the domain of the possible into being and gives it the
ongoing chance for transformation and refiguration, that which is one of the
conditions of possibility for ethics and politics.115
So, just as the undecidable enables the decision, so justice is the ‘unrepre-
sentable’, ‘infinite’ precondition of the formulation of any determinate
law. Law works from undecidable and unrepresentable justice to reach a
necessary decision. At the same time, justice remains lodged within this
decision and undermines any finality or certitude which the law might
claim.116
Significantly for the current discussion, Campbell describes how, since
for Derrida the undecidable does not remove the need for a decision,
justice requires that a decision be made. Such a decision will always be one
of ‘madness’ since it renders finite the infinite character of justice – it will
be a coup de force. However, because infinite justice reflects ‘a heteronomic
relationship to the other’, and because its undecidability multiplies respon-
sibility (we can never determine who, exactly, we have responsibility to),
and finally because there is always the risk that it might always be appro-
priated by ‘the most perverse calculation’, we have a duty to act and
calculate in pursuit of justice.117 This duty is what for Campbell makes
deconstruction a necessary condition for combating totalitarianism.
In answer to Critchley, it is ‘a duty that responds to practical political
concerns’.118
For Campbell, the responsibility he outlines contains the seeds of a
utopian strategy orientated towards emancipation. The content of such a
strategy arises from the interplay of identity and difference and recogni-
tion of the need for a moment of identity despite the inescapability of a
relation to alterity. The result is an aporia between the need not to
multiply division by pursuing difference for difference’s sake, on the
one hand, and the need to avoid the centralised hegemony which arises
from the prioritisation of identity, on the other. This apparent dilemma
turns out to be another instance of the undecidablity necessary for there
to be any politics at all. In this context it is our responsibility to find new
ways to bring the sides of the aporia together in a ‘dual allegiance’. The
resulting strategy, according to Derrida, involves a set of practical poli-
tical duties which include: welcoming foreigners whilst respecting their
alterity; criticising totalitarianism and dogmatism; cultivating but also
deconstructing critique; assuming the promise of European democracy
as something yet to come; respecting both differences and the univers-
ality of formal law.119
Campell’s account of undecidability, decision, justice, and utopian
strategy represents an explicit response to the concerns outlined above.
It is an account of the ‘procedure’ by which decisions and actions can
supposedly be taken within the context of différance and in keeping with

the responsibility to alterity.120 It is an attempt to show that the prioritisa-
tion of difference in the attack on Veriphilia does not lead to nihilism and
the collapse of politics, but also to move from the critique of metaphysics
to an account of political practice.
The same awareness of the need to temper the priority of difference
in order to maintain a coherent account of politics is apparent in
Campbell’s discussion of the universal and the particular in world
politics. He argues that contrary to assertions that deconstruction is
only concerned with the particular, it in fact identifies its interdepen-
dence with the universal. Whilst the end of the Cold War seemed to
bring the ‘death of universalism’ and rise of particularist ethnic and
national struggles,
the right of national self-determination involves the declaration of a uni-

versal principle, albeit a universal principle that derives its force from the
plurality of the particular groups seeking self-determination because of their
heterogeneous singularity, rather than a universal subject confident of its
homogeneity and global applicability.121
Ultimately Campbell recognises, following Gasché, that no singularity

could even be recognised
without having an addressable identity guaranteed by a set of universal rules

that . . . inscribe its singularity within a communal history, tradition, and
problematics.122
That is to say, he recognises the force of Dews’ suggestion that the

prioritisation of difference and particularity would lead to the collapse of
meaning. However, he also recognises the problem posed by adopting
‘even a greatly reworked concept of the universal in the context of an
argument animated by Derrida’s thought’, since any universalism ‘calls
forth foundational elements of philosophical traditions that Derrida’s
thought has thought to disclose, disturb, and dislodge’.123 The question
is, then, how deconstruction can maintain the necessary ‘sense of the
nonparticular’ (i.e. universality).124
The necessary moment arises, for Derrida, from the ‘iterability’
which ‘accounts for the constitution of general meanings through
processes of repetition without having to invoke a prior ideality’.
Iterability captures the way in which discursive performances ‘produce

the effects that [they] name’ rather than capturing pre-existing
grounds or forms. It is therefore of the same nature as the coup de
force which materialises supposedly pre-existing political identities;
both (re)produce universality or identity through discursive perfor-
mance. The structure of iteration ‘produces the ideality of “the uni-
versal” by constituting the possibility of the relation between universal
and particular’.125 However, as with political appeals to ethnic identity,
we find that any foundation this might provide is ‘founded on the
mystical foundations of authority’ (i.e. the coup de force) since there is
no underlying universality to which to appeal. Ultimately, like any
assertion of identity or associated concepts, ‘the repetition of iterabi-
lity’ which provides the necessary moment of universality ‘is always
linked to alterity’. As Derrida tells us, the repetition of iteration must
bring with it an alterity which ‘forbids the unity of the foundation that
it was supposed to insure’.126
Campbell is aware of the impossibility of prioritising difference and
concomitant need for a moment of identity or universality. However,
throughout most of National Deconstruction there is a clear prioritisa-
tion of difference which undermines his attempts to account for poli-
tical action and reasoning or to recognise the necessary moment of
identity or universality. Even in the account of iterability – an explicit
acknowledgement of the need for a moment of universality – we find
that whilst ‘unity’ is ‘forbidden’ by alterity, the opposite is not the case;
alterity takes priority. Likewise, that it is the decision that remains a
moment of ‘madness’ in the context of the structure of undecidability,
rather than vice-versa, reflects an imbalance in Campbell’s deconstruc-
tionist stance. This imbalance undermines his claim that rather than
prioritising difference and indeterminacy deconstruction recognises the
interaction of identity and difference in its various forms. The persis-
tence of the imbalance means that Campbell remains vulnerable to
Dews’ criticism; the prioritisation of difference renders meaning and –
as has been argued here – politics inexplicable. For both Campbell and
Derrida awareness of the need for a moment of identity, decision, or
universality sits uncomfortably with actual prioritisation of difference in
their thought.127 This hinders the progression from the critique of
metaphysics to a theory of politics.
Since they believe any truth claim or appeal to grounds is inherently
flawed, deconstructionists must find some other means of explaining
how all meaning and possibility of action does not collapse. However,
having dismissed all appeals to truth as manifestations of a mistaken
metaphysics and equated the appeal to foundations with the assumption
of absolute grounds which would turn politics into technology, they
have very little left to work with. This explains the reliance on proble-
matic, mysterious-sounding notions such ‘desire for presence’ and the
‘madness of the decision’. Such concepts take on a role equivalent to the
equally problematic one played by knowing subjects in common-sense
accounts of politics, providing the same moment of coherent subjectivity
or identity necessary to explain political practices.
In fact, none of the theoretical notions to which Campbell explicitly
appeals can do the work required to sustain his theory. Within the theore-
tical parameters set by deconstruction it is ultimately, and paradoxically,
the quasi-transcendental principle of différance itself which must provide
the necessary point of unity and grounds for Campbell’s theory and for the
political practices he describes. It is the identification of différance which
provides Campbell with a response to nihilism – the ability to ‘respond to
the worst excesses of our time’ in the absence of secure grounds – and
enables him to identify some point of orientation in the history of political
community other than those supposedly contaminated by Veriphilia. It is
this rather than the ethos of criticism which provides Campbell’s means of
addressing the question of context transcendence. A critical approach to
IR is possible despite the irrevocably social nature of knowledge because it
is possible to appeal to différance.
This principle of unity can only be arrived at through covert and
contradictory means and, as we have seen, is immune to contingency.
Deconstruction must fall back on the hidden claim to essential philo-
sophic insight into ultimate grounds. In the absence of the move ‘down-
stream’, the prevalence of ethnic essentialism and political violence must
be explained in terms of mysterious ‘desires’ or philosophical error with-
out origin. Likewise, domination can only be overcome either through
an equally mysterious affinity with alterity which the pursuit of these
desires or errors has obscured or else through political action which can
only be seen to emerge from the ‘madness of a decision’. Faced with such
claims, we might reasonably feel that ‘the alchemy of the knowing ego’
has simply been replaced with alchemy of a different kind, one which
appears to identify a ‘preordained structure of thought’ of the kind
which Campbell believes would make politics impossible in the case of
Veriphilia.
5 THE LIMITS OF VERIPHOBIA

Deconstruction must appeal to the hidden ground of différance and
various ‘stand-in’ concepts for reasons, causes, grounds, and identity
because of the dichotomy it establishes between the totalitarian desire
for truth, on the one hand, and sensitivity towards difference, on the
other. Ironically, and much as the prioritisation of difference starts to
look like its opposite, this dichotomous approach to truth replicates the
foundationalist anxiety Campbell seeks to overcome, according to which
we either have secure grounds for knowledge and morality or no response
to ‘the worst excesses’.128 In this case, the problematic idea that we can
have access to truth in the sense of successfully and straightforwardly
representing the world in mind or language is dismissed and replaced
with what is assumed to be the only alternative – the assertion that the
pursuit of truth is futile and violent.
The problematic effects of this Veriphobic attitude to truth are appar-
ent in the other Poststructuralist theories upon which IR scholars have
drawn, most notably that of Foucault.129 For Foucault, political domina-
tion rests on the ‘regimes of truth’ the most powerful are able to estab-
lish.130 A dichotomy is established between disciplinary knowledge which
presents itself as if it were ‘objective’, and marginal challenges which
reflect the perspective of those subjected to ‘regimes of truth’. It is
assumed that a bond therefore exists between those subjected to the claims
of the dominant regime of truth.131 Accompanying Foucault’s dichotomy
is the contrast between ‘a myth’ according to which truth is ‘the reward of
free spirits’, and the recognition that truth is the product of ‘multiple
forms of constraint’.132 This dichotomy is between faith in truth and the
recognition that it operates within the economy of power – between truth
as seen in Western intellectual tradition and its actual implications as a
form of intersubjective epistemic practice. The comparison should not be
pushed too far, but Foucault follows the same path as Derrida in applying
this critique of truth to the analysis of social institutions, revealing that
which is excluded and marginalised by a disciplinary power based on
Veriphile idealisations.133
Foucault’s telling description of himself as a ‘happy positivist’ is
indicative of the problems this generates.134 He faces the question of
context-transcendence – of how to avoid the contradiction that would
result from his position being revealed as manifestation of power like
any other truth.135 Like Derrida, he is caught between a claim to have
identified rules or operations in which truth is located, and the total

rejection of any claim to truth.136 However, unlike Derrida, for whom
deconstruction provides a means of avoiding the contradiction involved
in making straightforward truth claims, Foucault is concerned to avoid
any hint of transcendentalism or appeal to the a priori. The ‘happy’
mask of his ‘Positivism’ serves to conceal the fact that, in the absence of
any alternative account of context-transcendence, he is relying on the
very ideal of unproblematic identification of the facts which is found in
Positivism.
Similar problems accompany Ashley’s critique of ‘heroic practice’ in IR.
As was described in the previous chapter, according to Ashley the pre-
dominant epistemic practices in modernity revolve around the ideal of
a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically ordered, that

has a unique centre of decision presiding over a coherent ‘self’, and that is
demarcated from, and in opposition to, an external domain of difference
and change that resists assimilation to its identical being.137
Once again, the ideals attached to the notion of truth are contrasted with
the outside which undermines them. Ashley wants to reveal the delusions
of the heroic practice by presenting it as a ‘surface level’ practice like any
other, which persists precisely as long as people happen to engage in it. He
argues that it is necessary to prioritise anarchy over sovereignty, and
thereby refuse to ‘impose standards and pass judgement’.138 The result
is a theory which charts the operation of the discourse in which the
epistemic practice associated with sovereignty and truth subsists, whilst
refusing to participate in the setting of boundaries and suppression of
ambiguity it involves. Following Derrida and Foucault, and like
Campbell, Ashley’s position depends on the dichotomy between the
supposedly illusory ideal of truth and that which it attempts to obscure;
between the pursuit of truth through sovereign practice and a celebration
of and sensitivity towards ambiguity and difference. Once again, however,
this dichotomy generates a tension. Despite his suspicion of truth, Ashley
must claim some form of insight into the workings of sovereignty and
anarchy. The result is that he is trapped between a Foucauldian ‘happy
positivism’ which rejects depth in favour of the examination of the work-
ings of surface phenomena and a Derridean prioritisation of difference – or
‘anarchy’ – which can only be grounded on philosophical insight into
quasi-transcendental structure.
6 CONCLUSION
Campbell demonstrates that truth is a substantive political issue, an idea
the pursuit of which has been closely tied to the political structures
which define modern international politics. This recognition leads to a
sustained engagement with the questions of the critical epistemological
problematic identified in Chapter 2. Problems arise from the Veriphobic
intersubjectivist conception of truth with which the problematic is
approached. The problems encountered by Campbell and other
Poststructuralists are not simply those of a performative contradiction –
it is not enough to claim that those who reject truth are always already
making truth claims and to therefore demand that we return to an easy
Veriphilia. Campbell and other Poststructuralists do show that there is
something problematic with conventional truth claims. The difficulty is
that their critique of those truth claims leads back to a position which
displays some of the same problems as those found in the theories they
seek to criticise – whether through moving upstream to accounts of the
fundamental linguistic preconditions of truth or by positivistic rejection
of ‘depth’ in favour of ‘surface’.
Attempts to identify an alternative understanding of truth with which to
approach the critical problematic clearly face significant obstacles, however.
First of all, as described in the previous chapter, the notion of a distinct
reality about which the truth might be known has been undermined in social
theory and the philosophy of science, and is tarnished in IR through
association with Realism and Marxist structuralism. It appears to represent
the road to ethical impoverishment, technical manipulation, and political
domination in world politics. At the same time, the reflectivism of early IR
scholars seemed too optimistic about the possibilities that exist for the
reformulation of truth and reason and, in particular, too unconcerned with
the problem of heterogeneity and difference highlighted by Campbell. It is
in the context of these problems that Habermas’s later theory of commu-
nicative action has been appealing in IR, and it is to this that we now turn.
NOTES
1. Richard Ashley and R B J Walker, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile:
Dissident Through in International Studies’, International Studies
Quarterly 34, 3 (1990), pp. 259–268.
3. Campbell identifies this point of view in John Ruggie’s attack on ‘the moral
vacuum – if not vacuity – the French Fries [i.e. Poststructuralists] would
have us inhabit’, as well as in Stephen Krasner’s claim that ‘[t]here is no
reason to think that post-modern pronouncements will exercise any con-
straint over those with power’. Ruggie, quoted Ibid., p. 5; Krasner, quoted
Ibid., p. 6.
5. Ibid., p. 4.
6. Judith Butler, quoted Ibid., p. 24.
7. Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe quoted in David Campbell, Writing
Security, p. 6.
8. Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 25–26.
9. Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 4–5.
10. Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 26–27 & p. 85.
11. Derrida quoted Ibid., p. 26.
12. Derrida quoted Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 27.
15. Derrida, quoted Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 78.
18. Ibid., p. 80.
19. Ibid., p. 78.
20. Ibid., pp. 155–157.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
22. Ibid., p. 217.
23. Hayden White, quoted Ibid., p. 35.
24. Ibid., p. 37; See also Saul Frielander ed., Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Harvard: Harvard
25. White, quoted in Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 39.
26. Ibid., pp. 40–41.
27. Ibid., p. 42.
28. Ibid., p. 42.
29. Ibid., p. 4.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Levinas, quoted Ibid., p. 172.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., pp. 168–169.
36. Ibid., p. 14.

38. Ibid., p. 174.
39. Ibid., pp. 182–183.
40. Derrida, quoted Ibid., p. 183.
41. Ibid., p. 183.
42. Ibid., pp. 183–184.
43. Ibid., p. 101.
44. Ibid., p. 182.
45. Ibid., p. 181.
46. Ibid., p. 193.
47. Ibid., p. 197.
48. Ibid., p. 202.
49. Ibid., p. 202.
50. Ibid., p. 211.
51. Ibid., pp. 217–218.
52. Colin Wight, ‘Meta-Campbell: The Epistemological Problems of
Perspectivism’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 311–316.
53. See e.g. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
55. Ibid., p. 168.
56. Ibid., p. 175.
57. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 7.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., p. 20.
60. Ibid., p. 14.
61. Ibid., p. 13.
62. Jacques Derrida, Positions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
p. 5.
63. Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 10–11.
64. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 10.
65. Ibid., p. 23.
66. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. 17.
67. Rodolphé Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of
Reflection, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 147.
68. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration, (London: Verso, 1987), p. 44.
69. Wight, ‘Meta-Campbell’, pp. 311–316.
70. Der Derian, Antidiplomacy, p. 6.
71. David Campbell, ‘Contra Wight: The Errors of Premature Writing’, Review
of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 317–321, reference p. 319.
72. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 7
73. Ibid., p. 6.
74. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 23

75. Ibid.
76. Dews, Logic of Disintegrations, p. 11.
77. Ibid., pp. 44–45.
78. Peter Dews, Limits of Disenchantment, (London: Verso, 1995), p. 120;
Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, p. 318.
79. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 45.
80. Ibid., p. 45.
81. Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, p. 88.
83. Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’.
84. Ibid., p. 175 (emphasis added).
87. Ibid., p. 46.
88. Brincat, ‘Negativity’, p. 460.
89. Linklater, Men and Citizens.
91. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. vii.
92. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Conceptions of Modernity: A Look Back at Two
Traditions’, in The Postnational Constellation, ed. & trans. Max Pensky
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 130–156.
93. The ideas of ‘chastened’ and ‘unchastened’ reason have been introduced to
IR by Daniel Levine. Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 33.
94. Richard Beardsworth points out that Derrida approaches the question of
political practice from the perspective of metaphysics. Beardsworth, Derrida
and the Political, p. xiii.
95. Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’.
96. Campbell characterises the poststructuralist approach as one which rejects
the search for causes and origins in favour of the examination of political
consequences and effects. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5.
99. Ibid., p. 168.
100. On the former problem see Selby ‘Engaging Foucault’, p. 328.
102. Many critical thinkers have, of course, emphasised that different forms of
domination have occurred throughout history, and that today’s ‘dom-
ination’ was quite possibly yesterday’s emancipation. This is Marx’s
position – the bourgeoisie were a revolutionary class but also the bene-
ficiaries of capitalist exploitation. As will be argued in Chapter 6, in his
critique of Enlightenment Adorno emphasises that pre-Enlightenment
thought and politics were accompanied by forms of repression to which

Enlightenment subjectivity, now linked to domination, provided a solu-
tion. Theodor Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, in The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell,
1978), pp. 497–511, reference p. 498. Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri suggest that the predominant forms of domination in world pol-
itics are no longer determined by the traditions of Western metaphysics:
‘postmodernists are still waging battle against the shadows of old ene-
mies: the Enlightenment, or really modern forms of sovereignty and its
binary reductions of difference and multiplicity to a single alternative
between Same and Other . . . In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away
with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to
play across boundaries . . . ’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 142.
104. Dews, Logics of Disintergration, p. 34.
107. Ibid., pp. 32–33.
109. Ibid., p. 184.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., p. 185.
114. As Beardsworth points out, Derrida uses his theory of law and justice as a
bridge between metaphysics and politics. Richard Beardsworth, ‘In
Memorium Jacques Derrida: The Power of Reason’, Theory and Event 8,
1 (2005), p. 4, //muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/
8.1beardsworth.html, [accessed 27 March 2007].
116. Ibid.
117. Derrida, quoted Ibid., p. 186.
118. Ibid., p. 187.
119. Ibid., p. 190.
120. Ibid., p. 186.
121. Ibid., p. 199
122. Rodolphé Gasché, quoted Ibid.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., p. 200.
125. Ibid.
126. Derrida, quoted Ibid.
127. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, pp. 32–33.

128. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5. This ‘Cartesian Anxiety’ is dis-
cussed at length in Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. For a
critique of this attitude to truth in feminist theory see Linda Martín Alcoff,
‘Reclaiming Truth’, in Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions,
ed. David Wood and Jose Medina (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 336–349.
129. Ibid., p. 337.
130. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 133
131. Campbell, ‘Why Fight?’, pp. 516–517.
133. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. xiii.
134. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge,
1972), p. 141.
135. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 279.
137. Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, p. 230.
138. Ibid., p. 228.
CHAPTER 4
Truth and Communication
1 INTRODUCTION
For many philosophers the pursuit of truth is not, as many Veriphobes
fear, a matter of achieving a definitive account or representation of the
world, but rather one of procedural legitimacy.1 Such thinkers have long
rejected the image of truth as reflection of the world which has merely to
be discovered, ‘a coin that is issued ready from the mint’.2 For example,
Peirce equated truth with the opinion which could potentially be agreed
upon by a community of scientific investigators – an idea which, as we shall
see, has had a considerable influence in International Relations (IR).3
Rom Harré argues that rational discussion is at the heart of the scientific
pursuit of truth, which turns out to be an inherently social and ethical
enterprise.4 From this perspective there is apparently no need for secure
grounds or the assumption of successful correspondence; the process of
science is one of the discursive justification of truth claims and their
eventual acceptance by the scientific community. The pathological effects
of truth-seeking which concern Poststructuralists like Campbell can then
be seen to arise from the objectivist approach to truth in particular, rather
than from Veriphilia in general.
One of the most influential procedural conceptions of truth is that of
Habermas, whose theories of communicative action, discourse ethics, and
moral learning have had a significant impact in IR. Taken up by Critical IR
Theorists, and most influentially Linklater, they have provided a means
of addressing the critical epistemological problematic: of explaining the

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_4
relationship between knowledge, truth, and society; of describing how

theoretical context-transcendence can be achieved; and of explaining
how emancipation can be pursued in praxis. As suggested in Chapter 2,
Habermas’s account of practices of rational communication also provided
Critical IR Theorists with a means of shaking-off the reliance on the sover-
eign knowing ego for which they were criticised by anti-foundationalists
and Poststructuralists. As Critical Theorists moved further towards a
concern with communicative action, truth and knowledge seem no longer
to depend on secure and timeless grounds but rather on shifting social
practices and procedures. In contrast with the Poststructuralist position
examined in the previous chapter, this points to an intersubjectivist under-
standing of truth which might be used to sustain a critical Veriphilia.
Whilst Habermas’s Critical Theory has had a significant influence in IR,5
however, there has been relatively little detailed discussion of the theory
of truth which underpins it.6 This is no doubt due, in part, to an under-
standable desire to progress beyond the epistemological debate which took
place in the earlier stages of the Post-Positivist turn. Nevertheless, this has
been an unfortunate omission. Neglect of Habermas’s theory of truth
arises from a lack of clarity regarding the nature of Critical Theory, which
obscures key concerns and confuses the ideas of different theorists and
different stages in a manner which conceals important areas of contention.
Habermas’s discourse ethics and theory of communication represent a turn
away from the philosophy of the subject to one of intersubjective commu-
nication. Central to the latter is an account of the role of validity claims
in communication which is in turn sustained by Habermas’s theory of
truth. Without his account of the context-transcending force of truth,
Habermas’s Critical Theory loses much of its force. It is largely on the
basis of this element that he can argue that intersubjective communication
and discourse can provide a source of context-transcendence and emanci-
patory praxis. IR theories drawing on Habermas’s philosophy of commu-
nication are inevitably influenced by his conception of truth. It will be
argued here that an explicit concern with the question of truth is the best
way for its adherents to prevent Habermasian Critical IR Theory from
sliding back towards unreflexive social science or traditional moral theory.
The first goal of this chapter is, therefore, to demonstrate the centrality
of Habermas’s understanding of truth to his accounts of moral learning,
reason, and praxis, and thereby that Habermasian Critical IR Theory must
bear the marks of his theory of truth. This is achieved by focusing
on Linklater’s position as outlined in The Transformation of Political
4 TRUTH AND COMMUNICATION 107
Community (hereafter TPC) and in his article ‘The Achievements of Critical

Theory’. Since Linklater presents his Habermasian approach to IR almost
entirely in terms of normative theory, it is necessary to proceed with care
when considering the influence of Habermas’s theory of truth upon his posi-
tion. By starting from Linklater’s theory and introducing Habermas’s philo-
sophy in increasing levels of detail, the chapter aims to reveal how questions
of truth which might at first seem remote from Critical IR Theory in fact lie
behind many of the key Habermasian concepts and arguments it has adopted.
The second aim of the chapter is to assess the extent to which
Habermas’s philosophy provides a basis for an approach to critical inter-
national thought which might avoid the difficulties identified in the pre-
vious chapter. It identifies a tension in the Linklater’s theory according to
which questions of material well-being, which Linklater claims his theory
addresses, are less integral than those of difference-sensitivity and universal
rights. Returning to the in-depth analysis of Habermas’s theory of truth,
it is argued that this imbalance can be traced to significant problems with
his intersubjectivist understanding of the concept, which Habermas him-
self has identified.7
2 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Like Campbell and other Poststructuralists, Linklater engages with ques-
tions of truth primarily as a means of addressing questions of more obvious
concern for IR. TPC continues the project, begun in Men and Citizens, of
challenging the ‘forms of necessity’ found in world politics.8 It does so on
the basis of a philosophical-historical account of the forms of reason which
can endow international political practice with a progressive force.9
Linklater is especially concerned to show how it might be possible to
overcome the modes of ‘exclusion’ which have characterised international
relations.10 Whilst the most visible exclusionary barriers have for much of
the modern era been internal to the state, he argues, citizenship has in
most places expanded to include those previously marginalised on the
basis of class, gender, religion, or race. At the same time, exclusion of
those living beyond borders on the basis of national citizenship continues.
As the interdependence of humanity has increased, such exclusion of
individuals from participation in decision-making about matters which
affect them appears increasingly arbitrary.11
As in his earlier work, Linklater argues that modern forms of citizenship
contain a dialectical potential as a result of which they continually point
towards their own expansion and thereby to the means of overcoming

exclusion.12 In the past, this dynamic of inclusion led to the domestic expan-
sion of citizenship in three ways: becoming more universal by widening the
sphere of participants; becoming more sensitive to difference through recog-
nition of the ways in which the majority can do violence to minorities; and
becoming fairer by addressing material inequalities. Together, these elements
of transformation constitute an emancipatory ‘triple transformation’ of poli-
tical community13 which Linklater argues must now be pursued at a transna-
tional level.14 In pursuing this task we must be aware of the dangers apparent
in past attempts at overcoming exclusion. Whilst he sees Kant and Marx as the
philosophical fathers of the struggle against arbitrary exclusion, in a departure
from his position in Men and Citizens Linklater argues that each was insuffi-
ciently sensitive to cultural difference and therefore failed to recognise the
potentially violent character of their universalism. As Poststructuralists have
argued, this dimension was based on an idealisation of European ways of life
and was insensitive to the threat that this posed to non-Western peoples.15
It is with the identification of the second element of the triple
transformation – increased sensitivity to difference – that Linklater
addresses these dangers. Aware of the concerns of Poststructuralists
about the potential violence of universal truth claims but keen to avoid
relativism, he follows Habermas in advocating the substitution of proce-
dural universals for universalistic interpretations of the good life.16
According to this approach, no single way of life is proposed as the goal
or template for all others to aim at. Given the ‘distorting lens of language
and culture’, we cannot hope to identify any final ‘truth’ which would
underpin such a goal.17 Rather, following Habermas, the traditional
desire for universality should be replaced with the pursuit of ‘wider
communities of discourse to make new articulations of universality pos-
sible’.18 Appeals to truth and universality are not to be totally abandoned.
Rather, we must recognise that
[o]nly through dialogue with other cultures can progress be made in separ-
ating merely local truths from those with wider acclaim.19
Kant’s kingdom of ends and Marx’s transformation of capitalism into

communism are to be replaced with a continuous procedure based on
the discussion of claims of universal scope.20
Such a procedure is orientated towards the ideal of a universal commu-
nication community in which all inhabitants of the world would be free to
participate in dialogue concerned with increasing mutual understanding.21

This ideal is the driving force behind Habermas’s discourse ethics, which
Linklater suggests could be productively applied to IR.22 Discourse ethics
is encapsulated in the principle according to which:
Only those norms can be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval
of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.23
On this basis, the triple transformation which Linklater believes has

already been taking place within Western states could supposedly be
carried forward at a global level.24 Greater universality would be achieved
by inclusion in dialogue and through the agreements that it can produce.
Sensitivity to difference would be maintained by the openness of dialogue
both in terms of access and outcomes. Together, universality and differ-
ence would be preserved through their mutual interaction within the
context of communication. Finally, the promotion of social and economic
justice is necessary because a certain level of material well-being is a
precondition of participation in dialogue.25
Linklater is primarily concerned with recovering moral truth and uni-
versalism, and thereby political progress, in a form sensitive to the global
plurality of cultures. Nevertheless, as was the case with Men and Citizens,
his account of moral progress is located within the broader context of the
historical development of human knowledge and reason – Habermas’s
‘self-formative process of the human species’.26 Habermas’s communica-
tive Critical Theory offers another means of addressing the critical epis-
temic problematic identified in Chapter 2. The solution lies for Linklater
in the Habermasian claim that cognition is not primarily a matter of
subjects seeking to control, capture, or reflect objective reality but of the
intersubjective activity of communication involving the exchange of ideas
to reach mutual understanding. Such processes, oriented around the ideal
of universal communication, contain the resources with which theorists
and citizens can transcend their immediate socio-cultural sphere to the
extent necessary to engage in moral learning through which new norms
can be established. They therefore provide an answer to the question of
context-transcendence. At the same time, they provide an answer to the
question of praxis since they point to the need for political actors to
engage in discourse and the importance of institutions which increase
the possibilities for doing so. The result is a new normative, discourse
ethics-based approach to world politics and in particular to the problem of
difference discussed in the previous chapter. In keeping with Critical

Theory’s merging of the good and the true, implicit in Linklater’s ideal
of universal communication is a continuing belief in the link between the
pursuit of truth and emancipation, between knowledge understood as a
social phenomenon and the norms which might sustain new forms of
political community.
The key to Linklater’s Habermasian solution to the problematic and to
the normative theory it sustains is an account of epistemic practice in terms
communicative intersubjectivity rather than relations between subjectivity
and objectivity. The nature of the shift in question is apparent if we
consider his summary of the achievements of Critical IR Theory. The
four main achievements he identifies are:
(1) The critique of Positivism, and in particular of the belief in the

possibility of objective, value-neutral theory.
(2) The critique of the ‘immutability thesis’ – the belief that the state is
the unchanging container of political life and that the nature of
relations between states has remained constant throughout history.
(3) The critique of Marxism, according to which man’s relationship
with nature cannot be considered primary, and nor can class-
based exclusion and the activity of labour.
(4) The idea that social arrangements are to be judged on the basis of
their ability to embrace open dialogue.27
Whilst (4) is obviously central to Linklater’s normative theory and his account
of the transformation of international politics, contributions (1) and (3) and
the arguments that support them do most of the work in sustaining it. More
specifically, it is only with the critique of Marxism (3) conducted from the
perspective of Habermas’s theory of communication that the importance of
intersubjective communication and dialogue (4) is fully established.
The assumptions behind contribution (3) fall into two main areas.28
Firstly, Linklater argues that the Marxist emphasis on production means
that Marxists have been insensitive to forms of exclusion based on race,
nationality, or gender rather than class.29 Secondly, and more fundamen-
tally, he follows Habermas in arguing that by focusing on production, that is
on interaction with nature, Marx ignored another crucial, communicative or
intersubjective dimension of human activity.30 The problem with both
Positivism and Marxism was never simply the first error – that their picture
of the world was incomplete or inaccurate – but rather that they failed to
appreciate the fundamental importance intersubjective, communicative

activity. This sustained the supposed ‘scandalous anti-humanism’ described
in Chapter 2. At another level still, the shortcoming according to which
Marxism focuses on production at the expense of interaction arises from an
assumption that cognition is to be understood in terms of the subject-object
relationship.31 From the perspective of Habermas’s Critical Theory,
Marxists wrongly believe relations between man and nature to be funda-
mental in both a social and philosophical sense, a fact which explains their
tendency to engage in objectivist theorising. The result is a normatively
impoverished objectivism; ‘normatively impoverished’ because it cannot
recognise the potential for progressive, context-transcending knowledge
that resides in intersubjective communication.32
This more fundamental objection to Marxian theory would be consis-
tent with continued engagement with the critical epistemological proble-
matic. From this perspective, the theory of communication is important
because it helps us to understand the nature of knowledge as a social and
political phenomenon and to deal with the questions that arise when we
do so. Recognition of the importance of communication as an epistemic
activity, rather than as simply one important activity amongst others,
means that Critical Theorists can identify within it the basis for context-
transcendence and therefore a universalising force. This form of knowl-
edge is, like any other, inherently normative, but especially so because its
development allows people to identify and overcome the ‘forms of neces-
sity’ which have previously characterised world politics. It does so because
it represents a process of intersubjective reflection in which new norms can
be formulated on the basis of communicatively achieved consensus. In the
words of Habermas, it explains how ‘practical questions admit of truth’.33
For Linklater, then, Habermas’s alternative theory of truth and uni-
versality provides the foundations of a renewed attempt to deal with the
aftermath of the critique of Positivism in IR, the makings of which were
already apparent in Men and Citizens. It offers an account of community,
critique, and praxis which need not rely on assumptions about the indivi-
dual knowing ego or problematic objectivist claims in order to avoid
relativism. Emerging from the critique of Positivist objectivism (1) and
the critique of Marxism (3) this position sustains Linklater’s fourth con-
tribution of Critical IR Theory – the dialogic approach to politics and its
transformation which provides an orientation for critique and a guide for
practice. It sustains his belief that it is possible to identify provisionally
universal truths through procedures of rational communication. For
Linklater, such communication is the basis of moral-practical learning

through which arbitrary forms of exclusion can be overcome.34 The
success or failure of Linklater’s Habermasian Critical IR Theory depends
to a great extent, therefore, upon the viability of Habermas’s intersubjec-
tivist theory of truth.
3 HABERMAS’S THEORY OF TRUTH

For Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, consciousness is at once imma-
nent and transcendent. It is defined by social and historical context but
always has a ‘utopian truth content’ in virtue of which it has the potential
to transcend the prevailing conditions.35 Critical Theorists have been
concerned to identify the conditions under which the latter potential can
be fulfilled and under which such intellectual ‘transcendence’ might join-
up with progressive social practice. This joining-up would represent the
achievement of praxis. This understanding of truth was directed against
that of Positivism, according to which truth was equated with actuality –
with the empirically identifiable social facts. The appeal to utopian truth
content was not simply normative – it also served the cognitive function of
denaturalising the status quo. For Critical Theorists, a truth set in motion
is a better means of undermining the metaphysics of presence than
Veriphobic debunking.
In addressing this problem, Habermas’s predecessors in the Frankfurt
School – in particular Horkheimer and Adorno – continued to work
within the broadly Marxian framework of the subject-object relationship.
Initially sympathetic to Georg Lukacs’ belief in the proletariat as the
unified subject-object of history through which intellectual and practical
context-transcendence might be achieved, these thinkers subsequently
came to doubt the availability of such praxis. They instead focused on
the social conditions as a result of which possibilities for praxis were
diminishing and on the defence of the intellectual resources through
which this process might be revealed.36
One of Habermas’s concerns was to find a means of overcoming
the lack of foundations for emancipatory political transformation that
apparently consumed the work of his predecessors. At the same time,
like them, he was been keen to criticise those (in his case generally
Poststructuralist) philosophers he believed to have succumbed to relati-
vism and thereby conservatism.37 He set about achieving these goals
by linking truth to procedures of linguistic communication – the
communicative, interactive dimension he believed was neglected by the

focus of previous Critical Theorists on subject-object relations and the
realm of production. In a manner reminiscent of deconstructionist
attempts to abandon the ‘metaphysics of presence’ he characterised this
as a shift from the ‘philosophy of the subject’ to ‘the philosophy of
language’.38
For Habermas, in keeping with the Critical Theoretical task of identify-
ing a form of reason that is at once immanent and transcendent, linguistic
communication is partly defined by culture and history but always points
beyond the present and actual. As such it contains the possibility of
emancipatory praxis. Without such a source of rational autonomy it
would not be possible to criticise, justify, or improve on any position,
and would therefore be impossible to rationally transform current political
realities.39 For Habermas, societies can therefore engage in learning on the
basis of discourse structured around the context-transcending potential of
communication. The possibility of such moral learning is central to
Linklater’s Critical IR Theory as outlined in The Transformation of
Political Community.
It was in this context that Habermas formulated and developed the
critique of Marx upon which Linklater draws. His criticism of Marx is as
at least as concerned with identifying how a claim to truth might be
re-established as a basis for critical thought and action as it is with provid-
ing an adequate account of social reality.40 Indeed, from the perspective
of Critical Theory the two cannot be separated. Habermas introduces
communicative activity because it offers a means of reuniting the good
and the true in theory and in practice. It contains a universalistic, context-
transcending, but pragmatically and socially grounded potential which
can provide the foundations for a rejuvenated critical social theory and
progressive political practice.
At the heart of Habermas’s theory is the idea of the ‘validity basis of
speech’ identified by means of a theory of ‘universal pragmatics’ which
identifies the counterfactual presuppositions that participants in com-
munication cannot help but accept. According to Habermas, partici-
pants in communication must communicate by making validity claims,
both explicit and implicit, and must assume that these claims could be
vindicated.41 There are three kinds of validity claim present in any
linguistic utterance: a claim to truth about the world; to normative
rightness; and to sincerity.42 Crucially, the validity being claimed is not
simply that of the prevailing social norms and understandings but is
inherent in the statement itself. Therefore, such claims point beyond

the particular social context within which they are made and poten-
tially ‘burst every provinciality asunder’.43
If he is to provide a non-metaphysical account of universality Habermas
cannot attribute a fully transcendental status to the validity basis of com-
munication.44 There can be no Archimedean perspective from which to
assess validity claims; they must be assessed from within this world. This
much was recognised by earlier Critical Theorists. However, in Habermas’s
communicative theory, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of claims can only
be ascertained by intersubjective argumentative procedures rather than
along the subject-object axis.45 According to Habermas, if they are to
understand the meaning of universal claims, that is, if they are to be able
to communicate, participants must have an intuitive understanding of the
means by which such claims might be vindicated – their ideal conditions of
acceptability.46 Along with the raising of validity claims, this intuitive pre-
understanding is a pragmatic rather than purely transcendental precondi-
tion of communication. Its main features can be drawn out by means of a
discourse theory of truth as ‘consensus arrived at under ideal conditions of
argumentation’ or an ‘ideal speech situation’.47 According to this theory,
truth is to be defined in terms of the social conditions which we must
assume to obtain when we believe we have identified the truth. In engaging
in rational communication, participants implicitly anticipate such a situa-
tion; the validity being claimed would be attained under these ideal con-
ditions. Such a conception of truth is ‘epistemic’ in the sense described in
Chapter 2 – truth is explained in terms of intersubjective epistemic practices
and idealisations about them.48
To avoid the pitfalls of metaphysics once and for all, Habermas must
show that these universal pragmatic presuppositions are social and his-
torical phenomena. In the previous chapter, Campbell’s Veriphobic
deconstructionist response to the critical epistemological problematic
was found wanting at this point – the quasi-transcendental grounds of
language, meaning, and truth rose above rather than developed within
the activities of social and historical actors, thereby rendering those
activities inexplicable in anything but philosophical terms. Habermas
believes the element of pragmatism in his approach ‘defuses the tension
between the transcendental and the empirical’.49 In The Theory of
Communicative Action, he argues that it is possible to identify a histor-
ical shift from societies in which social integration is achieved by unques-
tioned, sacred norms maintained through ritual and protected by taboo,
to modern societies where it is increasingly achieved through the com-

municative pursuit of validity claims.50 In formulating this account,
Habermas takes as his starting point Durkheim’s sociology of normative
validity. According to Durkheim a society can only stabilise itself by
projecting an idealised self-image. The stabilising normative consensus
within that society is then present to members of the community as an
idealised agreement which transcends spatio-temporal changes.51 As was
argued in Chapter 3, a moment of identity is necessary for there to be any
social or political life. For Durkheim the idea of truth arises from this
notion of a transcendental ‘harmony of minds’ and as a result simply
reflects the prevailing normative structure.52 Habermas disagrees,
arguing that from normative validity the notion of truth takes only the
‘impersonality’ brought by the moment of a ‘harmony of minds’, of
idealised agreement amongst the members of a communication commu-
nity. To this must be added the moment of ‘harmony with the nature of
things’. As a result:
the concept of truth combines the objectivity of experience with a claim to the
intersubjective validity of a corresponding descriptive statement, the idea of the
correspondence of sentences to facts with the idea of an idealized consensus.53
In other words, the participants in discourse do not simply assume they are
trying to arrive at consensus or some position which accords with prevail-
ing norms, but rather that they are trying to identify the ‘true’ nature of
things – especially the objective world and values – which transcends any
given social context. When normative validity claims are understood by
analogy with truth
Commands can then be understood as utterances with which the speaker

raises a contestable validity claim vis-à-vis members of a social group – and
not merely the claim that a speech act conforms with a norm where the
validity of that authorizing norm itself remains untouched.54
With this recognition the basic societal consensus is set ‘communicatively

aflow’ and the scope for freedom within modernity becomes apparent.55
Thus, underlying Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality
and therefore his wider Critical Theory is a conception of truth consisting
of the two pillars of ‘harmony of minds’ and ‘harmony with the nature
of things’. However, it is the former pillar which dominates – truth
ultimately lies in the direction of intersubjectivity rather than that of

any relationship to objectivity. Indeed, at the very start of Theory of
Communicative Action Habermas argues that a philosophical realist
conception of rationality is subsumed by communicative rationality
since ‘[t]he world gains objectivity only through counting as one and
the same world for a community of speaking and acting subjects’.56 That
is to say, objectivity is posited by a community as a prerequisite of
rational communication. The ‘cash value’ of truth lies in this pragmatic
assumption rather than in any actual relationship with the real world. For
this reason, Habermas wishes to ‘replace the ontological concept of
“world” with one derived from the phenomenological tradition’.57
Starting from this ‘phenomenological’ perspective, rationality is to be
understood by examining ‘the conditions for communicatively achieved
consensus’, that is, approximation to the ideal speech situation.58 It is
these conditions which are the source of progress and rationality. In this
way Habermas hopes to maintain the possibility of universality and truth
whilst avoiding the difficulties he believes his predecessors in the Marxian
tradition encountered as a result of their focus on relations between the
human subject and the objective world.
Whilst Habermas’s account of truth is the basis for his understand-
ing of validity claims in general, he makes clear that there are important
differences between propositional truth claims and normative validity
claims. In particular, the existence of norms depends on the expecta-
tion that claims as to their validity can be redeemed discursively – only
the assumption that the prevailing norms are justified ensures their
continued observance, and therefore existence.59 In contrast, whilst
there is a connection between states of affairs and the truth of claims
about them, there is no connection between the existence of a given
state of affairs and the assumption that such claims can be justified –
there is no link between ‘existence’ and ‘anticipated justifiability’.60
This difference reflects the mutual dependence of language and social
world – the latter is in part constituted by the role of validity claims in
the former.61
Nevertheless, Habermas makes clear that he wants to show that
normative and practical matters ‘admit of truth’.62 That normative claims
to validity can to a great extent be treated like claims to truth is one of the
main pillars of his discourse ethics.63 In fact, the notion of the ‘ideal
speech situation’ has its origins in the pragmatist philosophy of science
rather than in ethics. Habermas and his colleague, Karl-Otto Apel (whose
notion of an ideal communication community corresponds closely with

Linklater’s ‘universal communication community’) are influenced by
Peirce.64 According to Peirce
[t]he opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate,

is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is
the real.65
Peirce formulated his account of truth as part of an account of scientific

knowledge in which the notion of a community of investigators is key. The
principle of discourse ethics – that validity depends on the free participa-
tion in discourse of all concerned – is therefore at least partly derived from
this notion of a truth-seeking scientific community of investigators.66
Moral argumentation is to be understood in terms of the conditions
most conducive to truth-seeking communication:
Participants in argumentation cannot avoid the presupposition that . . . the

structure of their communication rules out all external or internal coercion
other than the force of the better argument and thereby neutralise all
motives other than the cooperative search for truth.67
Habermas can best be understood, therefore, as implicitly working with

two conceptions of truth, one broad and roughly corresponding to validity
in general, and one relating to propositional truth claims in particular. This
double usage is not the result of carelessness in formulating his terminology
but reflects the foundational importance of truth for Critical Theory.
Critical Theorists do not reject the idea of empirical truth but locate it
within a more holistic understanding of truth in terms of the ‘self-formative
process of the human species’.68 Habermas’s theory represents the con-
tinuation of this approach within the philosophy of language and inter-
subjectivity. That Linklater also refers to ‘truth’ whilst discussing norms is a
reflection of the fact that the approach he takes is derived from a tradition in
which ethical questions cannot be completely separated from epistemolo-
gical ones.
Clearly, Habermas’s position differs significantly from the Veriphobic
Poststructuralism outlined in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, like
Poststructuralists, Habermas sees the pursuit of truth as an intersubjec-
tive, linguistic affair rather than as a matter of the relationship between
the cognising subject and an objective world. Habermasian Critical
Theory and Poststructuralism are united in opposition to the Marxian

and early Frankfurt School assertion that truth and cognition are to
be understood primarily in terms of the subject-object relationship.
Moreover, whilst truth is to be located in the realm of linguistic practice,
it must also be understood in terms of the idealisations this practice
involves. We have seen how Veriphobes like Campbell accept this as a
broad characterisation of truth but portray the idealisations in question
as politically dangerous and ethically problematic. In contrast, for
Habermas meaningful communication depends on the notion of ideali-
sations which, rather than violently distorting the social, imbue it with
direction and progressive potential. Whilst for deconstructionists episte-
mic idealisations are undermined by difference, for Habermas they make
communication possible and give it its context-transcending force.
4 TRUTH AND CRITICAL IR THEORY

Failure to appreciate the nature of the integral epistemic dimension of
Habermas’s theory leads to difficulties for IR theorists. For example,
Thomas Risse has argued that the theory of communicative truth-seeking
behaviour can supplement Rational Choice and Social Constructivist per-
spectives to generate a more complete account of processes of negotiation
in international politics.69 Risse’s argument forms part of the wider ‘ZIB
debate’ between Rational Choice theorists and Constructivists within
German IR over whether the former can explain interstate cooperation.70
He describes instances – diplomacy at the end of the Cold War and interna-
tional discourse about human rights – where he believes cooperation can be
explained primarily as an instance of communicative action oriented towards
mutual understanding.71 On this view, Habermas makes the more limited
contribution identified above, of filling in the gaps in our account of inter-
national political reality by identifying a previously neglected form of activity.
On the basis of the understanding of Habermas’s theory just outlined,
this appropriation is problematic – Habermas himself formulates his
theory as a means of reviving truth and thereby Critical Theory rather
than as a more accurate account of social reality. Nicole Deitelhoff and
Harald Müller suggest that attempts to employ the theory in the latter way
in IR will inevitably run into difficulties; Habermas’s concepts are part of a
transcendental-pragmatist operation which aims beyond the empirically
given to the presuppositions necessary for communication to take place.72
These presuppositions need not ever be considered consciously by actors
nor do they correspond to an empirically identifiable, distinct form of

political practice. Rather, they are idealisations which can be extracted
from the behaviour of actors via philosophical investigation.73 At any
given time these idealisations and the communicative action they sustain
will be operating alongside other forms of behaviour – strategic or rheto-
rical, for example. The ideal form of communicative action and these
necessary universalising presuppositions having been identified, it is pos-
sible to ask under what institutional conditions they can be most closely
approximated.74 Empirical attempts to identify communicative action in
world politics ignore the fact that it is an element in a Critical Theory
which draws on that which is immanent but not immediately apparent
or actualised to uncover some means of transcending the status quo.75
As such, they cannot be expected to meet with success.76
A second possibility is to interpret Habermas as offering a set of ethical
principles which can be applied to world politics. This might seem to
be the interpretation reflected in point (4) in Linklater’s list of the
achievements of Critical IR Theory – the normative standard of free
communication – if it is considered in isolation. It is certainly the case that
Linklater is primarily concerned with the ethical aspect of Habermas’s
theory, and as such it is tempting to interpret his position as one of
normative IR theory. As Habermas himself has indicated, however, such a
project would be based on an assumption that the theorist could occupy
some privileged position – that of the moral ‘expert’ – from which the
identification of universal values was possible.77 Habermas avoids this pitfall
by presenting himself as already engaged in the process of moral argumen-
tation which would be the object of a traditional moral theory. He claims
that attempts to deduce ultimate moral principles are futile, and instead
adopts a strategy of identifying the necessary pragmatic presuppositions of
the process he is engaged in.78 Habermas is concerned with the identifica-
tion of these ‘transcendental-pragmatic’ rules of argumentation alone. He
intends only to show that universality is necessarily implied in communica-
tion and cannot be denied without contradiction. Any substantive moral
principles must be formulated within the actual discourse of members of a
given community.79 Foremost among the necessary presuppositions of
discourse identified by Habermas is the idea that participants raise validity
claims that can be assessed and accepted or rejected by others.80 On this
basis progress can be achieved through rational communication.
Whilst he does not believe it is necessary to engage with Habermas’s
universal-pragmatic theory of language,81 Linklater derives his ethical
principles from philosophical-historical investigation into the necessary

role of universalising assumptions in the development of political com-
munities and relationships between them. He argues that ethics cannot
be seen in terms of a set of ahistorical principles.82 Just as in Men and
Citizens, in TPC normative progress lies in social processes of increasing
self-knowledge, but this now occurs through discourse and is therefore
an intersubjective rather than subjective process. Significantly, as was
argued in Chapter 2 and above, this evolution of self-knowledge is the
context in which Critical Theorists locate all more specific forms of
knowledge. Thus, whilst the theory of communicative rationality sustains
a normative theory, it is also part of a broader project which links truth
and the good life, where the latter is achieved through the rational
autonomy which comes with increased self-knowledge. Whilst
Linklater’s theory is explicitly normative, then, the normativity in ques-
tion arises from a Habermasian understanding of epistemic practice in
general.
Of course, this is not the only way of interpreting Linklater’s position.
After all, the argument in TPC focuses on Habermas’s ethics.83 However,
the account of Critical IR Theory and the goals of Habermas’s theory
just outlined suggest that the Veriphiliac dimension of Habermas’s
thought is more fundamental to Linklater’s position than is made explicit
in TPC. It also suggests, more generally, that in turning away from
questions of truth and knowledge – in seeing them as matters distinct
from empirical or normative theorising – IR theorists risk reverting to a
reliance on modes of theorising they had sought to abandon. In Risse’s
case, there is the risk of a slide back to the scientistic attitude in which the
theorist attempts to stand over and apart from the world and thereby
becomes complicit in technocratic politics. Likewise, taking a purely
normative view of Habermas’s theory risk relying on an abstract moral
framework.
5 HABERMAS’S TRUTH, LINKLATER’S TRANSFORMATION

The influence of Habermas’s theory of truth on Linklater’s approach is
most obviously apparent in the ideal of universal communication. The
centrality of this concept is apparent in Linklater’s summary of the tasks
established by Habermas for Critical Theory. These are: to investigate at a
sociological level the forms of social learning which allow this ideal to
become a reality; to ‘defend the ideal of universal discourse’ at a normative
level; and, at a praxeological level, to ‘reflect on the moral and political

resources which can be exploited in order to make progress towards a
universal communication community’.84 The account of Habermas’s
Critical Theory outlined above reveals the Veriphiliac core of this ideal –
universal communication is an important ideal because of its role in an
account of truth as at once immanent within social practices and transcen-
dent of them. This theory of truth is central to a social theory according to
which it is possible to identify the sources of progress in the expression and
assessment of validity claims in communicative practice.85
Universal communication occupies a similar position in Linklater’s
theory and helps him to address the questions of the critical epistemo-
logical problematic which emerged with the critique of Positivism in IR.
In terms of his sociology of knowledge, for Linklater the ideal of a wider
communication community turns out to be immanent within the norms
around which societies have structured themselves. At the same time, it
represents a source of context-transcendence; the ideal of universal com-
munication is the basis on which he can recognise the inherent sociality
of truth whilst also distinguishing between ‘local truths’ and more ‘uni-
versal’ ones.86 Finally, it points to as yet unrealised forms of praxis which
would transform political community. Thus, for Linklater, as Jay
Bernstein points out regarding Habermas, ‘[t]ruth, freedom, and justice’
are not ‘thought apart’.87
The central role of Habermas’s conception of truth in the Critical
Theory of communication also partly explains the possibility and desir-
ability of Linklater’s triple transformation of world politics. As described
above, Linklater proposes a transformation of political community accord-
ing to which it becomes more universalistic, more sensitive to cultural
difference, and more sensitive to material inequalities. Having traced the
philosophical foundations of Critical IR Theory to Habermas’s attempt to
redeem truth and universalism with his theory of communication, it is
further apparent why difference-sensitivity and the universalisation of
citizenship are to be the focus of transformative practices and why they
are best pursued by dialogic means.
On the one hand, the ethical conduct of social life depends on uni-
versal access to discourse which expresses and assesses validity claims of
universal scope. For Linklater, the assessment of these claims through
discourse enables us to engage consciously in procedures aimed at separ-
ating local from universal truths, and this drives moral learning and
progress in international life. On the other hand, and in keeping with
the interpretivist character of Post-Positivist IR theory, since we must

always understand the world through the ‘distorting lens of language
and culture’ it is always necessary to remain sensitive to the different
cultural backgrounds of participants in dialogue. To do otherwise would
be to revert to the imposition of moral rules from a particular, generally
Western perspective which claims to be universal.88 As Linklater states,
following Rorty, ‘we have to start from where we are given the elusiveness
of the Archimedean ideal’.89 As such, truth must always emerge from
within a given social context rather than from any abstract theoretical
perspective. For Linklater, the process of distinguishing universal from
contextual truths is one in which cultural differences cannot be ignored.
Rather, universal truths must emerge from the discourse that takes place
between participants from different backgrounds. In Habermasian terms,
the ideal communication community is an idealising presupposition of
the participants in real discourse; it is immanent as well as transcendent,
local as well as universal.
Nevertheless, as Linklater points out, recognition of the need for
sensitivity to difference can itself be achieved only from a qualified
universalistic perspective. The linguistic and cultural sphere in which
participants find themselves constitutes the point from which universal
participation must always begin, but recognition of the moral impor-
tance of cultural particularities is itself an achievement of procedures
which partially transcend this context, which are already partly univer-
sal.90 This universalising dynamic is a reflection of the fact that moral
universals can only be established through the public use of discursive
reason. Since there will be some level of discussion about the prevailing
forms of exclusion in any society, ‘[t]o start from where we are . . . is
already to be implicated in complex moral questions about the char-
acter of modern political community’.91 As such, Linklater endorses
Derrida’s claim that no practice of ‘boundary-fixing’ is beyond ques-
tion.92 However, in contrast with Derrida and Campbell, this unavoid-
able reflection on boundaries already reflects a form of universalism
according to which it is necessary to include the excluded in the process
of reflection via ‘the radical extension of dialogic relations’.93 As a
result
[u]niversality takes the form of a responsibility to engage others, irrespective

of their racial, national or other characteristics, in open dialogue about
matters which impinge on their welfare.94
In this way universality cannot erase difference, since ‘[t]ranscultural

validity can only be established by bringing judgements about good
reasons for actions before a tribunal which is open to all others’.95
Linklater presents this form of difference-sensitive procedural univers-
alism as a reformulation of the philosophy of history according to which, as
we saw in Chapter 2, ‘[u]niversalisable truths emerge out of the struggle
between opposing perspectives and the tensions within social structures’.96
This reformulated universalism reflects the simultaneous immanence and
transcendence of truth in Habermas’s theory. The context-transcending
force of validity claims identified by Habermas imbues discursive reflection
on social norms with the capacity to enhance moral learning and overcome
exclusion – that is, with an inherent universality. However, the transcen-
dental-pragmatic understanding of truth means that the universal is not a
pre-determined ‘meaning’ behind history, but rather emerges in the course
of real, contextual discursive practice. It thereby promises to overcome
the problematic tendency of the philosophy of history – and of earlier IR
reflexivist approaches to truth – to erase difference by assuming an ultimate
truth behind opposition and tension.
What of the third element of Linklater’s triple transformation of poli-
tical community, that of social and economic justice – the pursuit of
material well-being? It seems that this can also be incorporated into the
constellation of Habermasian concepts with which Linklater works. As
Linklater describes it, transformation in this dimension has been an inte-
gral part of the expansion of citizenship; it was recognised in the nine-
teenth century that political rights could not be meaningfully exercised if a
certain level of material well-being were not established.97 In the present
day too, the detrimental effects of the global economy must, Linklater
argues, be met with the globalisation of elements of the welfare state –
transnational harm requires transnational solutions.98 Most importantly,
the rights gained through the establishment of a global communication
community could only be meaningfully exercised if the bearers possessed
the resources to do so. Social and economic rights are a precondition for
participation in dialogue.99
Despite the importance he attaches to questions of material well-
being, however, an imbalance is apparent in Linklater’s proposed triple
transformation at this point. Unlike social and economic rights, the
universalistic and difference-sensitive elements are not preconditions of
dialogue or the pursuit of a universal communication community but
rather are integral to processes of communication. Discourse begins from
a context characterised by disagreement about values in order to gen-

erate universal norms. Difference and universality interact. There is a
sense, then, in which universality, difference and the corresponding
aspects of transformation are ‘internally’ related to or partly constitutive
of Linklater’s Habermasian theory of communicative rationality and
transformation; it would not be what it is, were they not related to it as
they are. Rationality and cognition, for Linklater, involve the discursive
negotiation of the relationship between universality and difference. This
‘internality’ is apparent if we consider what would happen were we to
remove the dimension of difference from the equation. The notion of
the transformation of politics through and in pursuit of rational
dialogue would then depend not on presuppositions internal to social
life but on universal values conceived of in the traditional transcendental
manner – precisely the form of normative theorising Linklater condemns
in Kant and Marx. The adequacy of dialogic transformation depends
upon the notion of particular societies being normatively ‘grounded in
communicative action’ behind which there lie no predetermined univer-
sal values.100 This in turn means that we cannot avoid taking into
account ‘the distorting lens of language and culture’, and therefore
taking specific sets of communicatively grounded norms as our starting
point. On the other hand, without universalism Linklater would be left
with a contextualist theory which had no way of distinguishing domina-
tion from the good life. The world would then be characterised by
different socio-cultural spheres in possession of incommensurable values.
If this were the case there would be no possibility of the progress and
moral learning Linklater wants to foster. Thus, his Habermasian under-
standing of rationality is defined by the relationship between universality
and difference.
In contrast with the ‘internality’ of universality and difference to
Linklater’s theory, there is something ‘external’ about the role of material
concerns in TPC; they are not elements within the structure of epistemic
practice in the same way as universality and difference. We might have
practical concerns that economic or social factors obstruct dialogue, but
the structure of rational communication remains defined by its potential to
generate universality without erasing difference. We have already seen that
the objective world – the nature of interaction with which determines our
material well-being – only figures in Habermasian truth as a background
assumption of the members of a community who strive for ‘harmony
of minds’. From a Habermasian perspective there is no possibility of
ultimately identifying truth with any aspect of the human relationship with
this objective world, since the only means we have of arriving at the truth is
through the discursive testing of truth claims which if successful generates
consensus. Given the interrelation between the three concepts, this equa-
tion of truth with discursively arrived at consensus shapes the understand-
ing of rationality, freedom, and justice that emerges from Habermas’s
theory and is taken up in IR. The praxis of free, rational individuals
would take place in this realm of communication, and justice lies in their
access to it. Materiality or objectivity – non-ideational, non-formal things
from human beings themselves to the resources upon which they depend –
are internal to the realm of cognition and therefore to praxis only in the
form of intersubjective consensus, that is, as a reality intersubjectively
constituted for a given community. It is not, in itself, an element within
the form of rational interaction which can drive political progress.101
This imbalance is, of course, unproblematic within the parameters set
by the Habermasian approach to universality. Within these boundaries,
questions of materiality could not assume any other role in TPC. Indeed,
the idea that materiality or objectivity is in some sense ‘internal’ to
rationality is characteristic of the Marxism which Critical IR Theory
rejects. For Marx, it is only through the practical interaction of material
beings with nature – ‘objective activity’102 – that the truth can emerge.103
It is for this reason that Marxist philosophers like Lukacs presented the
proletariat, with their unique position in the production process, as the
historical bearers of truth.104 In contrast, as we have seen, from a
Habermasian perspective truth emerges not through the interaction of
subject and object but of subjects with subjects, not through ‘harmony
with the nature of things’ but ‘harmony of minds’. From this perspective,
any excessive focus on the material leads to objectivism and instrumental
reason. Only through recognising intersubjective processes of constitution
of the objective can reason be redeemed.
Concerns about the marginalisation of the material in Linklater’s
Critical IR Theory have not been altogether absent from IR. Norman
Geras suggested that the problem of materialism might in fact undermine
the emancipatory goals of Linklater’s Critical IR Theory. For Geras,
material well-being’s status as a precondition for communication points
to the priority of the transformation of economic relations within pro-
cesses of emancipation. He points out that whilst modern capitalist society
seems fairly compatible with increased sensitivity to cultural differences,
the same cannot be said for material inequalities. Discursive negotiation of
universal values between those with different identities seems, in a formal

sense at least, to be compatible with the prevailing global capitalist
system.105 As Linklater suggests, there is apparent in the history of capi-
talist societies a tendency to develop systems of universality and difference
in which the voices of minority groups are drawn into discourse and
arbitrary exclusions on the basis of the identities of those groups gradually
overcome.106 Geras argues that exclusions arising from economic inequal-
ity are a different matter, since capitalism depends upon class inequalities
which are ‘endemic’ and ‘integral’ to its operation.107
Therefore, according to Geras, if the materially disadvantaged are to
become participants in the discursive shaping of world politics as Linklater
wishes – if a universal communication community is going to be properly
pursued – the global system of production must be overturned. The result
for discourse ethics is a near paradox; the pursuit of universal communica-
tion cannot take place solely on the basis of the communicative negotia-
tion between universality and cultural difference. Rather, as Geras
suggests, ‘a truly dialogic perspective leads straight back into the social
theory inaugurated by Marx’.108 That is to say, genuine dialogue cannot
be pursued theoretically by means of the focus on communication or
praxeologically through discourse alone, but rather requires an under-
standing of human relationships with materiality in theory and reform of
those relations in practice.
Although Geras, does not pursue this line of argument himself, these
problems suggest there might be cracks in the understanding of cognition
upon which Habermasian Critical IR has been built. If Geras is right,
discourse ethics does not provide the basis for a decisive move away from
the subject-object relationship. To borrow a metaphor employed in a
different context by Rengger, the question of materiality seems to repre-
sent the ‘serpent’ in the communicative ‘Eden’. Geras’s criticisms suggest
that the imbalance in Linklater’s theory of transformation is in fact a
problematic one; that which is presented as a precondition external to
the communicative realm of freedom and rational autonomy turns out to
be prior to communication and integral to emancipatory epistemic prac-
tice. This suggests that reason and the pursuit of freedom cannot be
reduced to the discursive pursuit of validity claims but properly conceived
of might involve the very practices of interaction with nature marginalised
in the turn to communication. These practices, those concerning the
‘harmony with the nature of things’ which Habermas subordinates to
the ‘harmony of minds’ in his theory of truth, must be an integral element
within procedural universalism. That they do not occupy this role in

Habermasian Critical Theory is indicative of a problematic formalism
which has both epistemological and normative-political manifestations.
To conclude, however, that Geras’s critique of emancipatory praxis
entails a materialist critique of Habermas’s theory of truth seems to risk
a return to objectivism. The Habermasian response might be that Geras’s
proposed return to Marxism would, as a result of the Marxist neglect of
communication, lead back into subject-centred philosophy and a politics
which struggles to escape the grip of technical rationality. Some level of
material inequality higher than that acceptable to Marxists might be the
price paid for a society free from domination. Whilst these inequalities are
undoubtedly excessive at present, the pursuit of communicative rationality
would require that they be significantly reduced. In contrast, the level of
economic equality demanded by Marxism would seem to require that we
turn away from communicative reason to technical rationality. Indeed,
Linklater replied to Geras to this effect, stating that ‘discourse ethics
comes fully-fitted with an ethic of redistribution’ and that his triple
transformation ‘recognises the importance of class exclusion without pri-
vileging it’.109
Moreover, even from the perspective of some Marxian critics of
Habermas’s Critical Theory, it is not immediately clear that the problem
identified by Geras concerns his theory of truth. Rather, the problem
could be Habermas’s separation of system and lifeworld, according to
which the market economy can be confined to the realm of purposive-
rational action, or system, and its effects meliorated by the welfare state.110
On this basis, Habermas argues that the issues facing society are not those
of class conflict but rather those of ensuring the realm of system does
not impinge on that of the lifeworld and communicative interaction.111
Moishe Postone argues that Habermas fails to recognise the constitutive
role of the market in relation to the lifeworld under capitalism, and that
there is no basis for the separation of the two.112 From this perspective the
problem identified by Geras would refer to the impossibility of identifying
some realm of communication free from the influence of capitalism, rather
than to any problem with Habermas’s theory of truth.
Despite these alternatives, however, the practical difficulties arising
from the marginalisation of materiality are best interpreted as indicating
the problematic effects of the Habermasian conception of truth upon
Linklater’s Critical IR Theory. As we have seen, for Linklater progress is
possible because there is a difference between local values and truths
agreed upon on the basis of discursive reflection. The latter reflect the
achievement of a limited form of context-transcendence. In this way
Critical Theorists can redeem the idea of progress in world politics with
the idea of social learning and point to the sorts of institutional innova-
tions through which it can be achieved. If Geras is right, before these new
institutions can be constructed we have to deal with the uneven distribu-
tion of material resources which would otherwise obstruct their proper
implementation. This suggests that the ‘more universal truths’ arrived at
through consensus might not transcend the context of capitalist relations
of production at all.
For this reason it is necessary to find some other form of context-
transcendence, based on the pursuit of material as well as discursive auton-
omy. As we have seen, however, the Habermasian discursive/epistemic
conception of truth subsumes relations to the objective world within dis-
course and consensus. As a result, autonomous rational behaviour – the
behaviour of free and rational beings – is seen as essentially communicative,
only requiring a level of material well-being which does not prevent parti-
cipation in discourse. Whilst, as Linklater argues, Habermasian IR theory
might point to the need for substantial redistribution, it cannot account for
the importance of a form of rationality within which relations to the
material world are integral. Put simply, seen from the perspective of the
theory of truth, Geras’s critique suggests that the intersubjective truths of
consensus are insufficient without the truths of the subject-object relation-
ship; the ‘harmony of minds’ might depend on ‘harmony with the nature of
things’. More simply still, in the words of one IR theorist, ‘getting things
right’ in the relationship between subjects and objective reality is as impor-
tant as agreeing with one another.113 The question of what this might
involve is one we will consider in Part II of this book.
The problem identified by Geras is not therefore, as Postone seems to
suggest, simply an empirical one according to which Habermas and his
followers have failed to recognise the extent to which the mechanisms of
production impinge upon communicative interaction. It regards the way
in which critical thinkers have adopted a theory of truth as purely a
matter of intersubjective ideals and practices – of the form and structure
of communication. It now seems that this approach might limit their
ability to provide a response to the critical epistemological problematic,
providing an incomplete account of the activity of cognition and there-
fore a problematic account of theoretical knowledge and of future
praxis.
6 TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY

The difficulties we have identified point to problems not only with
Habermasian IR theory but with the general direction taken by Post-
Positivists in the discipline. If the Habermasian understanding of truth
fails to take sufficient account of the way in which non-discursive factors
are involved in epistemic activity, there is reason to doubt the viability of
the underlying intersubjectivist understanding of truth employed in both
Veriphobic and Verphiliac responses to the critical epistemological pro-
blematic. Indeed, this suggests that there is a common root to the
Poststructuralist tendency towards philosophical abstraction identified in
the previous chapter and the Habermasian formalism identified in the
present one. This raises the prospect that critical IR would be better served
by a theory of truth and knowledge which could encompass rather than
suppress the subject-object relationship.
In contrast with this conclusion, most criticism of Habermasian
Critical Theory by other Post-Positivist IR scholars has focused on the
normative problems Habermasian formalism generates for relations
between subjects.114 This is the case even where the centrality of truth
to Habermasian Critical IR Theory is acknowledged. For example,
Richard Shapcott points out that the Habermasian emphasis on discur-
sively redeeming validity claims serves to exclude ‘concrete others’ from
consideration. For Shapcott, this exclusion is understood in terms of the
normative problem of difference which has been of recurring concern for
IR theorists. Following Seyla Benhabib and emphasising the centrality of
the Habermasian understanding of truth to Linklater’s theory, Shapcott
argues that the ‘telos of validation’ with which Habermas imbues com-
munication generates a problematic distinction between the truly moral
and the merely ethical.115 The Habermasian ‘account of the sort of
consciousness that is required to engage in conversation’, Shapcott
claims, ‘stems from an overdetermination by the goal of assessing the
validity (rationality) of normative claims’ and ‘is in tension with the goal
of universal inclusion’.116 By way of solution, Shapcott proposes an
alternative theory of truth derived from Han Georg Gadamer’s herme-
neutics in which conversation is ‘fundamentally concerned with
truth’.117 On this view, ‘understanding’ rather than consensus is the
‘telos of hermeneutic conversation’.118 This conception of truth grounds
a ‘thin cosmopolitanism’, since for Gadamer ‘in being open to encoun-
tering truth one sees the other as equal’.119
Such criticism rightly points to the danger of formalistic high-handedness

which accompanies Habermasian Critical Theory. However, in keeping with
the intersubjectivist consensus amongst Post-Positivist IR scholars, it ignores
the possibility that the problems in question might be linked to Habermas’s
rejection of the ‘subject philosophy’ of his predecessors. As was suggested in
Chapter 2, the move to intersubjectivity in IR was triggered by assumptions
about the ‘scandalous anti-humanism’ of theories which concerned them-
selves with the objective. Such a move ignores the fact that Habermas’s
predecessors in the Frankfurt School saw a close connection between sub-
ject-object relations, intersubjectivity, and the possibility of sensitivity to
‘concrete others’. Linklater himself has recognised some of the significance
of these concerns. In his more recent work, he has been conscious of
normative difficulties emerging from the neglect of materiality and corpore-
ality in Habermasian Critical Theory. This has led him to call for an inter-
national sociology of moral learning sensitive to the moral significance of the
corporeal vulnerability which all humans have in common.120 Such a sensi-
tivity, which is largely absent from Habermas’s work can, Linklater suggests,
be found by turning to the work of early Frankfurt School theorists like
Adorno.121 However, this has not led Linklater into a fundamental reconsi-
deration of the epistemic basis of Critical IR Theory. Rather, his focus has
been on forms of cosmopolitanism which have ‘placed solidarity with the
suffering at the centre of their conceptions of ethical life’.122
In fact, Adorno was particularly concerned that most modern accounts
of cognition furthered the suppression of particularity by relying on the
elevation of a formalised subjectivity through which the objective was
obscured and suppressed. The solution, he believed, lay not in turning to
intersubjectivity but in recognising the complex dialectical relationship
between subjectivity and objectivity.123 This left room for him to combine
the critique of Positivism with the assertion that truth is ‘objective’.124 Far
from meaning that the subject captures the object with its concepts, Adorno
was thereby insisting that cognition should not be surrendered to formalised
rational subjectivity. In keeping with the Marxian position described above,
cognition involves an element of objectivity which is active rather than
passive, particular rather than fungible and quantifiable. The question of
truth was still a question of subjectivity’s relationship to objectivity, but this
was not distinct from the normative question of particularity, whether that
of the human or non-human. Significantly, this account of truth led Adorno
to warn against the temptation of looking to communication between
subjects as the route to emancipatory praxis. As long as the objective was
suppressed in theory and in practice, such a step would serve to promote

rather than undermine the prevailing structures of domination.125
7 HABERMAS ON OBJECTIVITY
We will consider Adorno’s theory at length in Chapter 6. It will first be
useful to consider two others ways in which truth might be reconnected
with objectivity. Chapter 5 will look at Scientific Realist criticisms of Post-
Positivism in IR, according to which a return to the subject-object axis
dissolves the link between epistemic and political practice, thereby under-
mining the Post-Positivist critical epistemic problematic altogether. The
remainder of this chapter will consider the possibility that the connection
between objectivity and truth can be re-established without damaging
Habermas’s theory of communication – a line of argument which has
appeared Habermas’s later work, where he has acknowledged that the
idea of a non-discursive reality should play a more prominent role in
accounts of cognition, but claimed that this is not of any significance for
his critical social theory.126
We saw above that the Habermasian concept of truth depends upon two
notions of idealised harmony – the ‘harmony of minds’ and ‘harmony with
the nature of things’ – and that the former encompasses the latter. As a
result, Habermas suggested that it would be better to do away with the
ontological notion of ‘world’ all together. Understood as agreement
between the members of an ideal communication community, the pursuit
of truth imbues communication with a context-transcending power.
Following criticism by Rorty, Habermas later acknowledged that the con-
cept of truth has a ‘cautionary’ use which captures the fact that a rational
consensus might always be mistaken.127 It is a mistake to understand truth
solely in terms of discourse and consensus, since this fails to capture the
important distinction between truth and justification. The cautionary
aspect of truth is captured by the fact that when we use a truth predicate
‘we connect an unconditional claim which points beyond all the evidence
available to us’.128 Thus, truth is not equivalent to idealised consensus.
This ‘cautionary’ use reflects awareness of the ‘recalcitrance’ of reality in the
face of human goals and desires. As Habermas points out:
We don’t walk onto any bridge whose stability we doubt. To the realism of
the everyday there corresponds a concept of unconditional truth, of truth
that is not epistemically indexed – though of course this concept is but

implicit in practice.129
In other words
[t]he practices of the lifeworld are supported by a consciousness of certainty

that in the course of action leaves no room for doubts about truth.130
If we are to walk on the bridge we must assume that it is stable, we do not

seek out the opinions of others first. This ‘everyday realism’ therefore
detaches the concept of truth from discursive justification.
Thus far, this ‘weak realism’ seems in keeping with the suspicions out-
lined above, according to which intersubjective procedures of justification
can be influenced by factors emerging from interaction with the material
world. However, Habermas does not believe that this recognition is of
any great importance for his social theory. It is only in the everyday
functioning of the ‘lifeworld’ that we must, of pragmatic necessity,
adopt this realist attitude. As soon as any aspect of our lifeworld seems
to fail us or becomes the object of dispute, the attitude is suspended until
matters can be settled in accordance the procedures of communicative
rationality.131 In other words, as soon as we have to justify rather than
assume truth we must revert to discourse. For this reason, Habermas
frames his later revisions to his conception of truth as matters of ‘theore-
tical philosophy’ rather than social theory.132 Whilst the realist distinction
between truth and discursive justification is necessary if we are to have a
proper conceptual understanding of truth, the connection between truth
and justification is a praxeological necessity because
[a]rgumentation remains the only means of ascertaining truth since truth

claims that have been problematized cannot be tested in any other way.
And,
[t]here is no unmediated, discursively unfiltered access to the truth condi-

tions of empirical beliefs.133
As such, the concept of truth is ‘Janus-faced’ – it ‘mediates’ between

pragmatic realism and discursive justification.134 According to Habermas,
this means that the normative stance generated by his theory of the validity
basis of speech remains unchanged:
[t]he normatively exacting and unavoidable communicative presuppositions

of the practice of argumentation now as then imply that impartial judgement
formation is structurally necessary.135
Moreover, normative validity claims can be distinguished from truth claims

insofar as they do not refer to a distinct reality. The fact that morality cannot
be reduced to simple agreement arises not from any objective moral law, but
from the fact that practices of justification depend on presuppositions of
communication which are not ‘up to us’. These pragmatic presuppositions,
which Habermas already identified in the theory outlined above, play a part
in his normative theory equivalent to the pragmatic assumption that there is
an objective reality in his revised conception of truth.136 As a result,
Habermas believes his normative theory remains intact.
For Habermas, then, the question of realism or objectivity does not
indicate that Critical Theory needs to address some non-discursive stratum
of social reality for two reasons. Firstly, as we have seen, discourse retains
its role as the medium which enables the autonomy of rational individuals;
when necessary we ‘ascend’ from action based on everyday pragmatic
realism to the realm of discourse.137 Secondly, norms cannot be seen in
the same way as objective reality because they are dependent on discourse
and consensus rather than being potentially recalcitrant in the face of
them. Discourse is therefore still the ‘most rational’ way in which human-
ity relates to the world, the source of human autonomy and the good life.
Habermas’s reformulation of truth seems to capture some of the intui-
tions behind the concerns about the objective or material outlined above
whilst, at the same time, showing that rational political practice must never-
theless remain discursive. From this perspective the balance Linklater strikes
between the three parts of his triple transformation remains the right one,
and the pursuit of progress in world politics must be primarily oriented
around communicative action between subjects rather than relations
between subjects and objectivity. Although it is conceptually inadequate,
in praxeological and normative terms at least the discursive epistemic con-
ception of truth is still paramount.
There is another way in which Habermas’s late philosophical realism
leads him to alter his theory of truth. In his turn to a ‘weak’ realism,
Habermas also introduced a ‘weak naturalism’ to his theory of the
transcendental-pragmatic presuppositions of speech.138 As described

above, Habermas must explain how the form of rationality he identifies
can be located firmly in ‘this world’ and thereby ‘detranscendentalised’. In
his more recent ‘realist’ work he was concerned to show how recognition
that humans are the result of processes of natural evolution does not point
to a reductionist, naturalist account of reason which explains away our
subjective experience as rational creatures. He suggests that human cogni-
tion must be understood as ‘a process of intelligent, problem-solving
behaviour that makes learning processes possible, corrects errors, and
defuses objections’.139 This understanding of cognition means that
‘our’ learning processes, that are possible within the framework of socio-
cultural forms of life, are in a sense simply the continuation of prior ‘evolu-
tionary learning processes’,
and that
the structures that form the transcendental conditions of possibility for our
kinds of learning turn out to be the result of less complex, natural learning
processes – and thereby themselves acquire a cognitive content.140
Thus, as well as, introducing an element of realism within the concept of

truth, from the ‘outside’ Habermas explains cognition in terms of a non-
subjective material reality. From this perspective, the possibility of cogni-
tion emerges as another form of our pragmatic strategies of coping with
a recalcitrant reality of which we are a part. Such strategies are understood
in naturalistic terms as those of objective, material creatures.
The important question for the moment is whether Habermas succeeds
in taking materiality and objectivity into account without undermining the
essentials of his Critical Theory. There is good reason to think that, having
opened the gates to realism and/or materialism, he cannot prevent their
impinging upon the political and normative concerns of Critical Theory.
As we saw above, Habermas argues that the validity claims necessary for
communication provide the moment of context-transcendence necessary
for rational conduct in social life. This role now seems, however, also to be
occupied by Habermas’s ‘recalcitrant’ reality – our pragmatic experience
of the resistance of the world to our aims, which tells us that truth cannot
be confined within a given socio-cultural context.141 Moreover, the
importance of the link between social learning and ideal speech is also
undermined, since Habermas’s weak naturalism implies that this learning

is also linked to our interactions with or place within an objective material
reality.142 These two incursions, initiated by Habermas himself, suggest that
moral learning occurs through communicative interaction and through
interaction with materiality. But this being the case, both the primacy of
discourse and Habermas’s turn away from the subject-object axis which
concerned Adorno and other early Critical Theorists seem much less secure.
In pragmatic terms we are aware of context-transcendence not only via the
expression of validity claims in communication but also in our relationship
with a recalcitrant reality. From the perspective of the sociology of knowl-
edge, the link between knowledge and politics lies not only in consensus but
also in our common location in an objective world.
Thus, despite his claims to the contrary, Habermas’s realist revisions to
his theory of truth suggest that the discursive epistemic conception might
not only be problematic at an abstract philosophical level, but also at a
normative and political one. This is clear if we consider the possible links
between Geras’s critique of Linklater’s theory and the philosophical rea-
lism of Habermas’s later work. Geras suggests that communication is
dependent on the distribution of resources arising from human relations
to a material realm which is ‘outside’ of discourse and which has the
potential to distort it – there is an inherent limit to the extent to which
the prevailing mode of relating to the natural world and framework of
distribution, that is, capitalism, will allow access to meaningful commu-
nication. Attempts to widen participation in discourse might therefore
require fundamental change in this configuration rather than attempts to
communicate more freely within it. Communication does not need to be
defended against interference by the capitalist mode of production, rather
it requires that it be dismantled. Habermas’s pragmatic realism reflects
our intuitive awareness of the same difficulties with subordinating the
material to the communicative. He identifies the same ‘outside’ of dis-
course in the form of the ‘recalcitrant’ reality which means truth cannot be
equated with justification and consensus. Given that Habermas concedes
both that our experience and awareness of this reality is immanent within
the ‘lifeworld’ and that it is reflected in our understanding of ‘truth’, and
given that he recognises that this reality provides a trans-contextual evolu-
tionary background to moral learning, it is unclear why we are unable to
draw upon objectivity as a source of context-transcendence. In this con-
text, the suppression of the material or objective upon which the success
of Habermasian Critical Theory depends seems arbitrary.
8 CONCLUSION
The appeal of the Habermasian approach to IR outlined here lies in
several areas. Firstly, the theory of communication has provided a
means of responding to the critical epistemological problematic.
Habermas offers an account of political community grounded in a
Critical Theory of epistemic practice, an account of critical context-
transcendence, and a theory of praxis. Secondly, his theory of commu-
nication seems to offer a universalism with which to replace that derived
from the Marxist assertion of the primacy of relations between humanity
and nature. As described in Chapter 2, early Post-Positivists were already
keen to reject what they perceived as Marxist objectivism. It was only by
taking up Habermas’s later theory of communication that they found a
means of casting off any remnants of the reliance on the individual
knowing subject whilst at the same time protecting universalism in the
face of anti-foundationalist threats. The theory of communication offers
a response to Poststructuralist and anti-foundationalist claims that
Critical Theory was of essentially the same theoretical family as
Positivism. Critics like Ashley and Rengger pointed out that the univer-
salistic dimension of Critical Theory still posited a form of transcendent
human knowledge independent of and standing over history and culture.
Linklater himself recognised that the tradition of philosophical history
upon which he drew in Men and Citizens was insufficiently sensitive to its
own cultural specificity. Habermas’s emphasis on dialogue and consensus
rather than any universal history of increasing rationality offered, in
contrast, an account of a universality which could be negotiated between
different cultures.
As has been argued here and in Chapter 2, this position relies upon an
intersubjectivist conception of truth according to which it is equated with
idealisations about intersubjective epistemic practices. In particular, a uni-
versalistic Critical IR Theory can be based upon the notion that truth
emerges from free and universal communication. There are undoubted
advantages to this position, not least that it demonstrates that Veriphilia
need not rely on the technocratic, absolutist conception of truth criticised
by Campbell and other Poststructuralist IR scholars. As Habermas himself
has recognised, however, there are major conceptual problems with his
intersubjectivist understanding of truth. For a start, it does not capture
what we generally mean when we talk about truth. More importantly, it
generates a restricted account of human experience and the sociology of
knowledge. It does not succeed in capturing the experience of a recalci-

trant reality which makes the concept of truth so important in our daily
lives. Nor can it fully acknowledge the relationship between the materi-
ality of humanity and its cognitive capabilities. It is for these reasons that
philosophical realism is adopted by Habermas. Despite his claims to the
contrary, however, this move undermines his theory of truth by introdu-
cing another form of transcendence, located not in intersubjective epis-
temic practices but rather in the relationship between those practices and
objective, trans-contextual reality. It was therefore possible for us to link
practical concerns about the marginalisation of the material in Linklater’s
theory to the limitations of the Habermasian intersubjectivist theory of
truth. Our brief (re)introduction of Adorno suggests that these difficul-
ties might not be distinct from the questions about particularity, hetero-
geneity, and difference upon which Post-Positivist critics of Habermasian
IR have focused.
In conjunction with the critique of Campbell outlined in the previous
chapter, this indicates the need to rethink radically the basis upon which
critical Post-Positivists can respond to the critical epistemological proble-
matic. Chapter 3 revealed the way in which the Veriphobic rejection of
truth led to a prioritisation of difference which left no way to account for
political practice or for the critical perspective itself other than with con-
cepts which were more ‘metaphysical’ than that of truth. The present
chapter has demonstrated that truth need not be absolutist and transcen-
dental, but can be identified within human practices and procedures.
Nevertheless it has revealed problems with the intersubjectivist under-
standing of truth in general, leading us to question the legitimacy of
theories of truth which reduce it to intersubjective epistemic practices.
Despite these difficulties, it is important to recognise the insights of
Poststructuralists and Habermasians if further investigation of truth in
critical international thought is not to lead back to the difficulties of the
past. Firstly, regarding the contribution of Poststructuralism, we can
note that the flaws of Habermasian Critical Theory lie at least in part in
its failure to recognise the importance of the ‘other’ of truth claims –
precisely the criticism direct against Veriphilia by Campbell and other
Poststructuralists. That is to say, Habermasians have too much faith in
the power of ideal communication and in the possibility of isolating
discursive epistemic practices from ‘interference’. As Campbell follows
Derrida in suggesting, Veriphiles have a tendency to ignore that which
at once escapes, enables, and undermines their idealisations. In this case,
however, the ‘outside’ of the ideal of universal communication was not

that of fundamental difference, but that of materiality and non-discursive
reality. This move ‘downstream’ undermines the intersubjective under-
standing of truth in both its Veriphile and Veriphobe forms.
On the other hand, Critical Theorists have rightly demonstrated that a
positive attitude to the political and social role of truth need not rest on
the assertion of a coherent, isolated knowing ego standing over reality.
Rather, as Linklater’s Veriphile IR theory shows, truth can be associated
with an inherently social context-transcendence, one which does not
necessarily lead to domination. Problems arose when truth was reduced
to communicative practices alone. Nevertheless, in contrast with Derrida
and Campbell, Habermas and Linklater recognise the way in which truth
can represent a moment of universality which is a necessary precondition
for collectively driven political change.
Post-Positivists wishing to formulate critical accounts of world politics face
a difficult task – that of identifying a conception of truth which can maintain
these insights but also avoid the shortcomings which have accompanied
them. It is clear that the intersubjectivist understanding of truth, about
which there has been a widespread but implicit consensus in Post-Positivist
IR faces insurmountable difficulties. In terms of the critical epistemological
problematic, it marginalises important aspects of social life and, as a result,
gives rise to problematic accounts of critique and transformation. The ques-
tion is whether there is some other response to the problematic which can
take objectivity into account. Part II of this book considers two possible
responses introduced above. Chapter 5 turns to Scientific Realist interven-
tions in IR which would sever the constitutive relationship between truth and
politics, thereby removing the need to address the critical epistemological
problematic. Chapter 6 explores the theoretical resources offered by Adorno.
NOTES
1. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s “Social
Theory of International Politics” and the Constructivist Challenge’,
Millennium 29, 1 (2000), pp. 73–101, reference p. 75.
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baille (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2003), p. 22.
3. C.S. Peirce ‘How to make our ideas clear’, in Collected Papers of Charles
Sanders Peirce, Volume V and Volume VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 246–271.
4. Kratochwil, ‘New Orthodoxy’, pp. 92–93.

5. See the contributions to the ‘Forum on Habermas’, in Review of
International Studies, 31, 1 (2005), pp. 127–209.
6. Exceptions include Haacke ‘Theory and Praxis in International Relations’
and Chris Brown, ‘“Turtles All the Way Down”: Anti-Foundationalism,
Critical Theory and International Relations’, Millennium 23, 2 (1994),
pp. 213–236, reference pp. 219–220.
7. Habermas, Truth and Justification; Habermas ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic
Turn’.
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Ibid., p. 84.
12. Ibid., p. 168.
13. Ibid., p. 3.
14. Ibid., p. 7 & p. 106.
15. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
16. Ibid., p. 41.
17. Ibid., pp. 48–49.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 79.
20. Ibid., p. 40.
21. Ibid., p. 8.
22. Ibid., pp. 87–91.
23. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans.
Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1990), p. 66.
25. Ibid., p. 165.
26. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, (London: Heineman,
1972), p. 5.
27. Linklater, ‘Achievements’, pp. 45–46.
29. Linklater, ‘Achievements’, p. 49; see also Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism
and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations, (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1990).
30. Linklater, ‘Achievements’, p. 50.
31. For an account of Marx’s theory as epistemology see Chapter 4 of
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.
32. Ibid.
33. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, p. 43.
34. Linklater, Transformation, pp. 120–121.
35. Seyla Benhabib Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of
Critical Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 4.
36. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Adorno, Negative
Dialectics; Theodor Adorno, Minama Moralia, (London: Verso). This is
not to say that the nature of praxis itself is ignored. Adorno’s Critical Theory
will be considered in detail in Chapter 6.
37. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse.
38. Ibid., pp. 296–297.
39. Habermas, Communicative Action Vo. 1, p. 9; Maeve Cooke, ‘Meaning and
Truth in Habermas’s Universal Pragmatics’, European Journal of Philosophy
9, 1 (2001), pp. 1–23.
40. Tom Rockmore, Habermas on Historical Materialism, (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 141–142.
41. Jürgen Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’, in On the Pragmatics of
Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998),
42. Habermas, Communicative Action Vol.1.
43. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 322.
44. Cooke, ‘Meaning and Truth’, p. 2.
45. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, (London: Verso, 1992),
p. 160; Habermas, Communicative Action Vol.1.
46. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, p. 159.
47. Ibid. p. 160.
48. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 118
49. Habermas, Truth and Justification, p. 17.
50. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2, trans.
Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 89.
51. Ibid., p. 71.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., p. 72.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., p. 82.
56. Habermas, Communicative Action Vol.1, pp. 12–13.
57. Ibid., p. 82.
58. Ibid., p. 13.
59. Ibid., p. 62.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 61.
63. Ibid., p. 68.
65. Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, p. 268.
66. J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of
Critical Theory, (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 106.
67. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, pp. 88–89.
68. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 5
69. Risse, ‘Let’s Argue!’.
70. ZIB stands for Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the journal in
which the debate took place. See Nicole Deitelhoff and Harald Müller,
‘Theoretical Paradise – Empirically Lost? Arguing with Habermas’, Review
of International Studies 31, 1 (2005), pp. 167–178.
71. Risse, ‘Let’s Argue’, pp. 23–33.
72. Deitelhoff and Müller, ‘Theoretical Paradise’, p. 178. Habermas’s ‘trans-
cendental-pragmatics’ will be described in more detail in the following
section.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p. 4.
76. Deitelhoff and Müller, ‘Theoretical Paradise’, p. 178; Martin Weber has
noted the same loss of ‘critical thrust’ in Risse’s use of Habermas’s theory.
Martin Weber, ‘The Critical Social Theory of the Frankfurt School, and the
“Social Turn” in IR’, Review of International Studies 31, 1 (2005),
78. Ibid., pp. 81–82.
79. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
80. Ibid., p. 58.
81. Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. 211; Linklater, Transformation, p. 90.
85. Brown, ‘Turtles all the Way Down’, p. 219.
87. Bernstein, Ethical Life, p. 51.
88. Linklater, Transformation, pp. 38–39.
89. Ibid., p. 100.
90. Ibid., pp. 48–49 & pp. 72–74.
91. Ibid., p. 100.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 101.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., p. 102.
96. Ibid., p. 89.
97. Ibid., p. 186.
98. Ibid., p. 165.

99. Ibid., p. 106.
100. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
101. Habermas locates economic in relations in the realm of ‘system’ rather than
‘lifeworld’. The system consists of those complex activities necessary in for
the functioning of modern societies. The important thing, for Habermas, is
to ensure that ‘system’ does not encroach upon the lifeworld. Habermas,
Communicative Action, Vol.2.
102. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, p. 71
104. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 72.
105. Norman Geras, ‘The View from Everywhere’, Review of International
Studies, 25, 1 (1999), pp. 157–163, reference p. 163
107. Geras, ‘The View from Everywhere’, p. 163.
108. Ibid.
109. Andrew Linklater ‘Transforming Political Community: A Response to the
Critics’, Review of International Studies 25, 1 (1999), pp. 165–175, refer-
ence pp. 173–174.
110. John F. Sitton, ‘Disembodied Capitalism: Habermas’s Conception of the
Economy’, Sociological Forum 13, 1 (1998), pp. 61–83.
111. Habermas, Communicative Action, Vol.2, p. 356.
112. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
pp. 251–252.
113. Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 383. It remains to be seen, of course, what ‘getting it
right’ might involve.
114. Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Moral Deliberation and Political Judgment:
Reflections on Benhabib’s Interactive Universalism’, Theory, Culture and
Society 14, 1 (1997), pp. 131–142; Richard Shapcott, Justice, Community,
and Dialogue in International Relations, (Cambridge: Cambridge
115. Shapcott, Justice, Community, and Dialogue, pp. 105–106.
116. Ibid., pp. 119–120.
117. Ibid., pp. 148–149.
118. Ibid., p. 147.
119. Ibid., p. 150.
120. Linklater, ‘Towards a Sociology of Morals’.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., p. 149.
123. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’.
124. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 41.

125. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’; Fluck, (2014).
127. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 113.
128. Ibid.
130. Ibid., p. 39
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
133. Ibid., p. 38.
134. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 117.
136. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
137. Ibid., p. 16.
138. Ibid., p. 22.
139. Ibid., p. 27.
140. Ibid.
141. Cooke, ‘Meaning and Truth’, pp. 1–23.
142. Ibid., p. 18.
PART II
Truth and Objectivity

CHAPTER 5
Critical Realism and Truth-Based Critique
1 INTRODUCTION
For the theorists examined in Part I, truth is arrived at through interaction
between subjects rather than through encounters with objective reality.
There is widespread acceptance that the traditional correspondence theory
of truth is problematic once we become ‘even a little psychologically sophis-
ticated’.1 This position is especially appealing to those concerned about the
dehumanising or oppressive tendencies of modern politics and the epistemic
resources upon which it draws. The difficulties with objectivist truth claims
are compounded in International Relations (IR) by a subject matter which
involves the interaction between diverse communities. Nevertheless, as
Habermas has conceded, the notion that truth is simply a matter of inter-
subjective epistemic practice seems to contradict some of the most basic
presuppositions with which we operate in everyday life. It also seems to
promote the detachment of intersubjectivity, or at least its cognitive dimen-
sion, from materiality in a manner at odds with both normative recognition
of the importance of material well-being and philosophical acknowledge-
ment of humanity’s own natural history. In the previous chapter,
Habermasian Critical Theory began to unravel when concessions were
made to everyday realist intuitions and to materialist claims about the social
and natural context for the development intersubjective cognitive capacities.
Some of the most consistent attempts to challenge this denigration of the
objective in IR are to be found in the work of Scientific and Critical Realists.
Realists recognise that there are no means to arrive at asocial knowledge

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_5
of ‘the facts’. Whatever insights Post-Positivists might provide into the

sociology of knowledge and contextuality of truth, however, for Realists
the world – social as well as natural – exists independently of human con-
sciousness and discourse. On this view, the intersubjectivisation of truth
carried out by many Post-Positivists in IR obscures our relationship with a
recalcitrant reality, a relationship which means that ‘getting things right’ is of
primary importance.2 For Scientific Realists, the existence of such an objec-
tive reality is a necessary precondition of there being any knowledge at all.
These theorists seek to awaken IR from what they believe to be its
lengthy epistemological reverie; if the social world can be shown to exist
independently of our ideas and discourses then the connection between
epistemic practices and the nature of global social and political arrange-
ments can be broken. The important question is that of ontology (what
world politics is like) rather than that of epistemology (how we know
about it). With this, an alternative understanding of the political signifi-
cance of truth emerges. In contrast with the Post-Positivist view that truth
is, as a form of intersubjective practice with constitutive political signifi-
cance, for IR’s Scientific Realists truth involves the cognising subject’s
successful apprehension of objective political reality.
The first part of this chapter sketches a Scientific Realist critique of the
critical epistemological problematic. In the second, Realist theories of
truth will be examined in more detail and a distinction drawn between
Scientific Realism (SR) and Critical Realism (CR). The discussion draws
on the work of three Realists, two of them (Alexander Wendt and Heikki
Patomäki) IR theorists, and one (Roy Bhaskar) a philosopher who has
inspired the work of several IR scholars. It will be argued that, on the one
hand, Realists succeed in identifying a problematic elevation of subjectivity
and intersubjectivity, which they label ‘anthropocentrism’, common to the
work of Positivists and Post-Positivists. On the other hand, Realists
wrongly assert that recognition of objectivity removes the need to consider
the constitutive relationship between the epistemic and the political.
2 THE REALIST CRITIQUE
Scientific Realism
Doubts of the kind raised by Habermas regarding his own theory of truth
have been taken up in IR by followers SR. Realists seek to reintroduce
the subject-object distinction, rejection of which was at the heart of
5 CRITICAL REALISM AND TRUTH-BASED CRITIQUE 149
Post-Positivist IR. To a great extent, SR rests on common-sense ontol-

ogy.3 The basic Realist argument is refreshingly (but, as we shall see,
deceptively) simple; the world exists independently of what we think or
say about it and theoretical concepts refer to real objects.4 For SR there is a
fundamental question that neither Positivists nor their Post-Positivist
critics think to ask. The key question is not that of the nature of knowl-
edge, but rather that of its possibility – of how there is any such thing as
knowledge at all. According to Scientific Realists, both Positivists and
Post-Positivists concentrate on the former.5 The Positivist answer is that
knowledge is justified through experience – empirically – and through
theoretical success – instrumentally.6 As we have seen, Post-Positivists take
issue with this Positivist justification of knowledge. Critical Theorists link
knowledge to interests and interaction, arguing that the Positivist account
reflects an interest in technical control. Whilst the technical aspect cannot
be ignored, knowledge is constituted in a broader social process of reflex-
ive discourse. Empirical knowledge must be located within the context of
this potentially emancipatory activity. Poststructuralists argue that whilst
justification takes place within the social medium of language, the nature
of language is such that it undermines appeals to successful justification.
For example, Campbell points out that appeal to the facts only succeeds
through the coup de force which involves the suppression of difference.7 In
the former case truth remains the goal, in latter the pursuit of truth is
revealed to be so politically dubious that it must be rejected. In each case,
contrary to Positivism, the pursuit of truth becomes a major factor shaping
global political and social life.
Scientific Realists believe that whether it is understood in Positivist or
Post-Positivist terms this focus on the nature of knowledge obscures the
question of what the world must be like for there to be knowledge in the
first place; ontology must be addressed before epistemology.8 Positivists,
Critical Theorists, and Poststructuralists, it is argued, share an obsession
with epistemology which leads them to emphasise the importance of ways
of knowing – observation, communication, and the structure of language,
respectively.9 In contrast, asking how knowledge is possible rather than
how it can be justified, SR starts from the analysis of scientific practice and
the apparently undeniable success of scientific knowledge. The Realist
argument is a transcendental one – it identifies the conditions of possibility
for scientific practice and knowledge10 – but only to the extent of asking
about the condition of possibility of science as a historically particular form
of activity. It is not claimed that Realism can identify the conditions of
possibility for all knowledge for all time.11 Nevertheless, Scientific Realists
are naturalists; they believe in the possibility of scientific knowledge of the
social world. Their theory of scientific knowledge therefore has implica-
tions well beyond the philosophy of the natural sciences.12
The Realists argue that scientists must generally assume that the
theoretical entities they describe – atoms, gravity, bacteria, dark matter,
etc. – exist independently of ideas or discourse.13 Moreover, the success
scientific experimentation depends on there being an independent reality
consisting of various layers of structures and mechanisms as well as
objects. The phenomena generated in experimentation allow scientists
to identify the mechanism which generates them.14 Whereas Positivists
identify causal laws with recurrent phenomena, Realists believe they are
real tendencies and mechanisms.15
Moreover, whatever doubts one might have about the power relations
or interests involved in the scientific attitude to the world, it is difficult to
deny that the rise of the natural sciences has been accompanied by unpre-
cedented progress in humanity’s ability to manipulate its environment in
order to meet fundamental needs. Realists argue that the only plausible
explanation for this success is that theories refer to real entities which exist
independently of human experience.16 That is to say, not only do scientists
adopt a Realist attitude when conducting their research, that they are right
to do so explains the success of science.
Scientific Realists working in IR make a number of claims on the basis
of these Realist arguments. In general, they have argued that the emphasis
on epistemology is misguided and should be replaced with a focus on
ontology.17 The former is, they claim, the source of errors common to
Positivists and Post-Positivists.18 Indeed, both Positivists and Post-
Positivists accept the Positivist-Empiricist understanding of science.
Whilst the latter reject the claim that a Positivist approach can be success-
fully applied to the social world, they generally accept that it is an accurate
representation of the activity of science.19 According to SR, however, the
Positivist-Empiricist view does a disservice to science by basing its claim to
objectivity on a rigid empiricist methodology. For Realists, the success
of science remains a mystery until we accept the existence of a mind-
independent reality of structures and mechanisms. Of course, Post-
Positivists argue that this belief in objectivity is precisely the problem with
Positivist IR theory. One of their main criticisms of Neorealism and
Marxism was that objectivism amounted to an impoverished view of poli-
tical and social reality which excluded the role of normative and ideational
factors and could not account for political change. From an SR perspective,
however, Positivists are only concerned with the real, objective world in a
very limited sense; they are ‘empirical realists’ for whom the only reality lies
in the events which we experience.20 For example, Waltz argues that
only laws (i.e. constant conjunctions of experienced events) can be true
(i.e. reflect reality), whereas the theories that explain these constant con-
junctions are to be judged on the basis of their explanatory success.21
We should not, according to Waltz, take this success to mean that the
entities they refer to really exist.22 For Scientific Realists the conceptual
violence that Positivists seem to perpetrate on the social world in incorpor-
ating it into their scientific methodology arises not, as Post-Positivists
assume, from any separation between subject and object but from this
empirical realism which reduces reality to atomistic objects and events.23
In contrast, Scientific Realists distinguish between the levels of the
real, the actual, and the empirical – between that which exists (but might
not manifested itself or be experienced at a given moment), that which
actually occurs (but might not be experienced), and that which is experi-
enced.24 Theories refer to real objects and mechanisms which might not
be experienced or manifested in actuality. Empiricists make the mistake
of collapsing these three levels into that of experience.25 To this extent,
they do not really separate subject and object at all. This Realist under-
standing of science makes room for a less restrictive understanding of
‘real objects’, as a result of which the naturalist project of extending
science to the social world can take place without the Positivist-
Empiricist imposition of a static atomism. Bhaskar labels the realm of
real objects and structures the ‘intransitive dimension’.26 His criteria for
attributing ‘reality’ to an object are ‘pre-existence’ and ‘causal power’.27
For Bhaskar, societies and social structures are real and therefore possible
objects of knowledge because, firstly, social forms pre-exist us in the
sense that every member of society is born into a world with pre-existing
features such as religious beliefs and language. Whilst these features
would not exist without the practice and recognition of the members
of society, they are not simply constituted by current practices and ideas.
Rather, they existed before any living individual was born and, having
been maintained and shaped by their practices, will continue to do so
after they die. According to this ‘transformative model of social activity’
[s]ociety does not exist independently of human activity (the error

of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism).28
As a result, knowing what people think, say, or do is not exactly the

same thing as knowing about social structures. Secondly, these social
forms have causal, constraining effects upon our behaviour – the recalci-
trance of reality noted by Habermas. For example, Durkheim pointed
out that whilst he was not obliged to speak French, the reality is that
French is the language spoken in France and he therefore had little
choice but to do so.29 If we accept Bhaskar’s argument, the range of
‘real’ objects is considerably expanded. Contrary to the anti-scientistic
fears of Post-Positivists, it is even possible to take a scientific view of
ideational structures.30
If SR increases the range of objects which can be included on the
object side of the subject-object distinction, on the subject side it does
not appear to require the rigid foundations provided for Positivists by
the sovereign knowing ego. Realists can embrace many Post-Positivist
insights into the sociology of knowledge. In Bhaskar’s words we have
‘changing knowledge of unchanging objects’.31 Most of the Scientific
Realists working in IR are therefore ‘epistemological relativists’ – they
accept that truth and knowledge are, to a great extent, social creations
which vary according to time and place.32 The prioritisation of ontology
means that ‘the nature of objects determines cognitive possibilities’.33
Colin Wight argues that the Scientific Realist should therefore be an
‘epistemological opportunist’, adapting her epistemological stance to the
objects of inquiry.34 Bhaskar locates this shifting, flexible knowledge in
the ‘transitive dimension’, where knowledge is shaped from pre-existing
theories and ideas.35 From this perspective, it appears that the pursuit of
scientific knowledge of the social world need not involve the assertion of
the autonomous sovereign ego, as Post-Positivists fear.
According to Scientific Realists, in addition to the mistaken understand-
ing of science, there is a second, related error common to Positivism and
Post-Positivism – the ‘epistemic fallacy’. In Bhaskar’s words, this is the
mistake according to which it is assumed that ‘statements about being can
be reduced to statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions
can always be translated into epistemological terms’.36 We have already
seen that Positivists mistakenly move from the (epistemological) assump-
tion that knowledge is based on empirical data to the (ontological) assump-
tion that the world has an atomistic structure. The result is that
the world, which ought to be viewed as a multi-dimensional structure

independent of man, [is] squashed into a flat surface whose characteristics,
such as being constituted by atomistic facts, were determined by a particular

concept of knowledge.37
According to Scientific Realists, Post-Positivists make the same mistake

of reducing the real to the epistemic, in this case language or discourse.38
A similar ‘squashing’ is therefore apparent. As Colin Wight and Heikki
Patomäki point out, to this extent the theories of Positivists and Post-
Positivists share a common metaphysical structure; both fall prey to the
hubris of anthropocentrism, equating the nature of the world with the
nature of human knowledge.39
It is important to be clear about what is being criticised here. The
Realist claim is not that the primary normative orientation of social
theory should be determined by something other than the interests of
human beings. Nor is it that the focus of social theory should fall else-
where than on human practices, institutions, beliefs, etc. – of course,
there is nowhere else for it to fall. Rather, the argument is that our
understanding of the world – natural or social – should not be shaped
by the epistemic activities we believe to be fundamental to human sub-
jectivity or intersubjectivity, whether these are seen to consist in sensory
experience, discourse, differentially structured writing, or any other epis-
temic phenomenon or practice. Indeed, it is difficult to see how such
activities are possible in isolation from a reality which they do not
determine.
For Realists, the epistemic fallacy is as problematic in the social
sciences as in the natural sciences. The Realist ‘pre-existence’ and ‘causal’
criteria for reality demonstrate that the structures of the social world are
not dependent on our knowledge of them. Whilst, as we shall see, the
fact of interaction between the social world and the knowledge we have
of it cannot be ignored, the separation between the transitive and
intransitive dimensions is such that the epistemic fallacy can occur in
the social sciences too. In IR, Patomäki and Wight argue that the
epistemic fallacy has generated a flawed ‘problem field’ shared by
Positivists and Post-Positivists alike. They trace its influence in interna-
tional thought back to Hume, whose empirical realism formed the basis
for an atomistic ontology of international life. Kant responded to
Hume’s sceptical empiricism by distinguishing between a phenomenal
realm of causal phenomena and a noumenal world of reasons and free-
dom.40 This duality has continued to influence debates in IR about the
merits of realism versus idealism, science versus interpretivism, the
persistence of the states system versus global change and progress. Its
source lies in the continued epistemic fallacy according to which inter-
national reality is assumed to reflect either empiricist or rationalist knowl-
edge, and therefore to be either amoral and atomistic or normative and
ideational.41 The Post-Positivist discourse which asserts various forms of
radical interpretivism against the Positivist statism of Neorealists is
‘embedded in the same background discourse and is derived from
a long philosophical tradition of anti-realism/scepticism’.42 That is to
say, it arises from the epistemic fallacy.
Scientific Realism and the Critical Epistemological Problematic

For Realists, the premises of Post-Positivist critical international thought
as in Part I are untenable. Both the critical epistemological problematic
and the intersubjectivist understanding of truth bear the marks of the
epistemic fallacy. Once the epistemic fallacy is identified, the questions
of the problematic seem to dissolve. Regarding the first question – that of
the relationship of socialised truth and knowledge to world politics – as we
have seen, Realists are opposed to the asocial view of knowledge taken by
Positivists. Knowledge and truth involve creative social processes which
take place in the ‘transitive dimension’. Since cognitive possibilities are
determined by objects rather than by any epistemological foundations,
there are simply no fixed ways of knowing. For this reason the rigid
Positivist-Empiricist methodology is mistaken.43 Nevertheless, from a
Realist perspective the sort of analysis found in the works of critical Post-
Positivists, where epistemic practice is partly constitutive of political rea-
lity, is equally problematic. It reflects an unwarranted anthropocentrism
which ignores the fact that epistemic practices which take place in the
transitive dimension are distinct from the objects of knowledge in the
intransitive dimension. Realists believe we can acknowledge the sociality of
knowledge and truth without assuming that they have any fixed form or
significant connection with the nature of objects and structures in the
intransitive dimension. In IR terms, we can note the importance of dis-
course and consensus, or the role of difference and deferral in writing,
without assuming that this tells us anything about progress or violence in
world politics. The former issues involve ‘second order’ questions – they
lie in the realm of metatheory, telling us about the nature of theorising.44
For Scientific Realists, such matters are distinct from the ‘first order’
empirical question of the structures of social life that happen to exist in a
given time and place – the only way to find out about these is through
social scientific research.45 It is for this reason that Scientific Realists can be
found aligning themselves with a wide range of substantive political and
social theoretical stances, from Constructivism46 to Marxism.47 If these
are seen as ‘first order’ theories, they are perfectly compatible with SR as a
metatheory concerned with ‘second order’ questions.
The second question of the problematic – that of context-transcendence –
is less troublesome for SR. Indeed, SR can be read as an assertion of context-
transcendence against the interpretivist emphasis on context. For Scientific
Realists, the transitivity of human knowledge is counter-balanced by the
intransitivity of the objects of knowledge. That the objects of the intransitive
dimension transcend the shifting forms of knowledge in the transitive
dimension is a condition of possibility of knowledge.48 In this way, Realists
can reassert the possibility of non-relative knowledge since, whatever the
context in which they are formulated, our truth-claims refer to an indepen-
dent reality to which they can be more or less adequate.
One of the main criticisms Realists direct against Post-Positivists is that
their theories have the counter-intuitive result of removing the possibility
of being mistaken; if the objects of knowledge are discursively constituted,
how can we be right or wrong about them? For example, I can think or say
what I like about petrol, but it will not put out a fire. It is difficult to see
how a Poststructuralist could account for the nature of the mistake that
would be involved in trying to douse my burning house with petrol – it
could not be the case, from their perspective, that I have not understood
the real properties of this particular liquid.49 If the objects of knowledge
exist independently of thought and discourse, then the ideas expressed in
either can be more or less adequate. One of the real characteristics of
petrol is its flammability and if I claim otherwise I am making a false
statement. SR does take account of the fact that knowledge formation,
being a social process, is inherently fallible – truth can never be final or
absolute. Nevertheless, the truths identified by science refer to objects and
structures which exist regardless of the social forces which influence
human knowledge claims at any given moment.
If Scientific Realists want to show how context-transcendence is possi-
ble, the notion that we might thereby identify the sources of emancipatory
praxis – the subject of the third question – seems to be nonsensical. As was
the case with the first question, this is because of the distinction between
the transitive and intransitive dimensions, and second- and first-order
questions. There is nothing in SR to suggest that we should not
investigate the possibilities for emancipatory transformation in world

politics. Indeed, most Scientific Realists working in IR express an interest
in normative questions about emancipation, as we shall see below when we
turn to Critical Realism (CR). SR simply states that this is not a question of
praxis in the sense of reforming human subjectivity on the basis of episte-
mological and normative reflection. Rather, it will be a matter of scientific
investigation into the possibilities that exist within a given context and of
non-scientific normative reflection on the desirable ends of political life.50
Only from an anthropocentric perspective could it seem reasonable to
advocate a particular form of practice on the basis of the characteristics
of subjective or intersubjective epistemic activity alone.
Thus, if Scientific Realists are right, the whole critical project described
in Part I represents a theoretical wild goose chase. It remains to be seen,
however, whether the basic premises of Realism – that the world exists
independently of epistemic activity and that theories refer to this world –
can support such a sweeping critique. In particular, we have yet to consider
a common response to SR – that it is a convincing account of natural
science, but that the separation of subject and object in social theory
cannot be maintained to the extent necessary to exclude epistemic activity
from any role in constituting political and social reality. To this end, it is
necessary to examine the work of some key Scientific Realists thinkers in
more detail. This is the task to be addressed in the next section, where we
shall see that all is not lost for the Post-Positivists.
3 REALISM, TRUTH, AND POLITICS

At several points in the preceding chapters, we found that apparent disin-
terest in or hostility towards the concept of truth often turns out to
conceal its opposite. Linklater’s primarily normative concerns turned
out to be grounded in Habermas’s theory of truth, whilst Campbell’s
Veriphobia led him to examine the concept of truth in considerable detail.
SR is no exception to this pattern. Scientific Realists might insist that there
is no reason to think that philosophical reflection on the question of truth
will tell us anything about world politics, but they do believe that the
question is significant if we wish to arrive at a good metatheoretical
understanding of the activity of studying it. For Realists, having an accu-
rate understanding of reality matters, and the concept of truth refers to a
relationship between transitive knowledge and intransitive objective reality
in which the former provides an accurate account of the latter.51 On this
view, the significance of the concept seems to lie in its role of reminding us
of our relationship with an independent, recalcitrant reality and of the
importance of cognitive success in that relationship, which can be thought
of in terms of reference, correspondence, accuracy, etc. Thus, Realists
reassert the significance of the subject-object relationship against the
Post-Positivist emphasis on intersubjectivity.
As well as undermining the problematic which has been a defining
concern of critical Post-Positivist IR, then, SR brings a critique of the
conceptions of truth with which the problematic has been addressed.
According to the intersubjectivist understanding of truth, whether in its
Veriphiliac or Veriphobic form, the claim to universality and context-
transcendence characteristic of truth claims is to be traced not to any
relationship with objective reality but to idealisations operating within
intersubjective epistemic practice. According to Veriphiles it is possible
to make good on these idealisations, for Veriphobes they turn out to be
mistaken and dangerous. Either way, for the Post-Positivists discussed in
the previous chapters the significance of truth for IR lies the constitutive
relationship between intersubjective epistemic practices and international
politics. From the perspective of SR, not surprisingly, the intersubjectivist
understanding of truth seems to be a manifestation of the epistemic fallacy.
As we have seen, this is an error committed by Positivists and Post-
Positivists alike. At the end of Chapter 2 it was suggested that both
Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists objected to Positivism in part
because of its tendency to assume the existence of an isolated, perfectly
rational knowing ego. From a Realist perspective, however, the role of the
sovereign ego in Positivism is, as we saw above, not a result of objectivism –
of the assumption that it is somehow detached from objective reality – but
of the anthropocentrism of the epistemic fallacy. The latter involves
forgetting that humanity faces a world which cannot be explained in
terms of subjective epistemic activity alone. For Realists, this same fallacy
is reflected in Post-Positivist understandings of truth.
This fallacy and the anthropocentrism driving it go some way to
explaining the problems with Campbell’s elevation of the philosophical
critique of metaphysics, as discussed in Chapter 3. They also further
illuminate the problems identified in Linklater’s Critical Theory in
Chapter 4. Campbell’s position arises from the elevation of the epistemic
activity of writing, Linklater’s from the elevation of discursive pursuit of
validity claims. In each case it is assumed that some privileged form of
intersubjective epistemic activity plays a key role in constituting social
reality. In each case an intersubjective understanding of truth – in which

the privileged activity is the context in which the relevant epistemic ideals
emerge – played a key role in explaining the constitution of reality and the
problems or possibilities which accompany it. In Campbell’s case the
privileging of the structure of writing results in an unconvincing, abstract
account of political practice. In Linklater’s case the emphasis on discursive
epistemic activity leads to problems in dealing with the significance of the
human relationship with materiality.
Scientific Realists would not be surprised at these problems. For
them, truth is significant precisely because of the distinction between
subject and object, discourse and reality which intersubjective concep-
tions are intended to replace. Once we acknowledge that truth has an
objective as well as intersubjective aspect, the possibility of epistemically
based IR theory appears to disappear. For Realists, our cognitive rela-
tionship with this reality can be more or less successful – we can move
closer to or further away from the truth – but there are an infinite
number of ways of knowing, all of them distinct from but dependent
on the reality which is the object of knowledge, in this case world
politics. Thus, on one reading, the task of the IR theorist is that of
pursuing the truth about world politics in an epistemologically oppor-
tunistic manner.52 The nature of politics and praxis cannot be defined
in advance by identifying some fundamental feature of epistemic activ-
ity. We should therefore stop looking to the pursuit of truth as some-
thing which constitutes political practice and stick to ‘getting things
right’ in our accounts of world politics.53 Having discovered the truth,
we will no doubt be in a stronger position to identify which courses of
action to pursue or promote and which to avoid, but that will have
nothing to do with the nature of knowledge or truth. SR seems to
provide a means of restoring IR to a ‘common-sense’ view of the world
after the Post-Positivist daydream in which the world seems to be
dependent on intersubjective epistemic activity.
However, things are not quite so simple. As we have seen, Realists have
acknowledged that the pursuit of truth is a social activity.54 In the case of
the social sciences this reflects an admission that the distinction between
subject and object cannot be absolute; the activity of knowing subjects is,
to an extent, an element within the object domain about which knowledge
is sought. In conceding this point, Realists are forced to engage with the
question of the nature of truth in more detail than their criticisms of Post-
Positivists suggest. It is not enough simply to assert that the world consists
of mind and discourse independent structures and forces and that the
facts identified have no normative implications for social life – a more
specific account of the nature of truth is required. In this section we
examine three different accounts of truth in SR – those of Alexander
Wendt, Roy Bhaskar, and Heikki Patomäki.
Wendt’s Scientific Realism

Whilst it might seem to point to a correspondence theory, the relationship
between Realism and truth is not a straightforward one. Strictly speaking,
the view that the objects of knowledge exist independently of our concepts
tells us very little about what truth might involve.55 Nevertheless, there are
aspects of the correspondence theory which appeal to most Scientific
Realists working in IR. The extent to which it is accepted tends to depend
upon the extent to which it is believed that IR can be studied from a
detached scientific perspective. According to the position outlined by
Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics, SR demonstrates the
possibility of objective, apolitical, truth-seeking social science.56 He main-
tains that SR represents a via media between Positivism and Post-Positivist
concerns because it ‘takes account of the contribution of mind and lan-
guage yet is anchored in external reality’.57 As a Constructivist, he argues
that the structures of world politics can be understood in terms of a
‘distribution’ of shared knowledge.58 At the same time, SR shows that,
contrary to the radical interpretivism of Post-Positivists, the question of
‘what there is’ is distinct from that of ‘how we know it’.59 Therefore,
despite being ideational in nature, ‘[t]he state and states system are real
structures whose nature can be approximated through science’.60
According to Wendt, this entails a correspondence theory of truth.61
He bases his claim on a discussion of theories of reference in which he
claims that the Positivist focus on reference to the data of experience and
the Poststructuralist emphasis on ‘relations among words’ share a similar
shortcoming: ‘neither grounds meaning and truth in an external world
that regulates their content’.62 The real world is ‘squeezed out’ by the
sensory experience of events in the case of Positivism, or by the structure
of language and communication in the case of Post-Positivism. This leads
to problems in accounting for the way in which our terms refer.63
According to Wendt, social science requires a Realist ‘causal theory of
reference’ according to which the meaning of terms is determined by
reality rather than by sensory experience or language.
Objective reality ‘causes’ meaning in two ways. Firstly, new referents

(e.g. a previously unknown animal) ‘impress’ themselves on the senses in
such a way as to induce a ‘baptism’ in which they are given a name.
Secondly, this name is handed down in ‘a causal process of imitation and
social learning’. Thus, according to Wendt, meaning-determination is
not only a mental or linguistic process, but also one ‘regulated by a
mind-independent, extra-linguistic world’.64 The causal theory of refer-
ence brings with it the assumption the world contains ‘natural kinds’ –
‘self-organising, material entities whose causal powers are constituted by
intrinsic, mind-independent structures rather than by human social con-
vention’.65 It is these natural kinds which account for the recalcitrance of
reality – ‘if we want to succeed in the world our theories must conform to
them as much as possible’. For this reason, ‘bringing knowledge into
conformity with natural kinds is the main task of science’.66
Given this account of reference and scientific knowledge, it is not
surprising to find that Wendt endorses a correspondence theory of truth
according to which ‘theories are true or false in virtue of their relationship
to states of the world’.67 As we saw in the previous section, however,
Realists reject the reliance on the ‘view from nowhere’ found in Positivism;
theories are formulated in the transitive dimension and are therefore social
entities. Wendt admits that this raises the question of ‘how we can know
for certain that a claim of reference is true’. His reply is simply that we
cannot, and should therefore only speak of ‘approximate’ truth. This does
not matter, however, since whilst ‘[t]ruth presupposes reference’ the
reverse is not the case – ‘reference does not presuppose truth’. Thus, our
theories can refer even where they are incomplete or mistaken and Realists
can argue that we gain a better understanding of the world through
science without needing to rely on the notion of ‘the Truth’.68
As Kratochwil has pointed out, there is something disingenuous
about Wendt’s attempt to deny the importance of truth for SR.69 At
this point it will be helpful to distinguish between ‘the Truth’ and
‘truth’. Realists are often accused of assuming that it is possible to
identify the final and absolute ‘Truth.’70 Advocates of SR in IR are
understandably keen to refute such allegations; hence Wendt’s distan-
cing himself from the notion of ‘the Truth’ and perhaps also Colin
Wight’s claim that the possibility of error does more work in SR.71
Although absolute Truth is not claimed, however, Realist social science
is very much truth-seeking and, broadly, in the sense of the correspon-
dence theory; the aim of science is theory which expresses reality as
accurately as possible. For Scientific Realists, theoretical concepts do

refer to real entities and can do so more or less accurately. When we
believe them to refer more accurately than any other we generally say
that they are ‘true’ or, if we are less sure of ourselves, ‘more true’. In
other words, for Realists, whilst we should not lay claim to or hope to
arrive at ‘the Truth’ we can and should pursue approximate truth
understood, broadly, as correspondence.
It seems, then, that Wendt’s ‘bringing knowledge into conformity with
natural kinds’ is equivalent to ‘becoming more true’.72 For Wendt, in
keeping with the SR critique of Post-Positivism outlined above, this
understanding of truth and reference has no political implications.
Rather, it points to the possibility and importance of social science. He
describes himself as ‘a strong believer in science . . . a positivist’73 and
asserts that ‘what really matters is what there is rather than how we know
it’.74 In other words, as we saw above, the question of truth is only
important at the level of ‘second order questions’; it does not affect the
real business of providing an account of what the social world is like. Nor
does it tell us how to act in that world.
In advocating the scientific pursuit of truth in IR, Wendt is aware that
he must address some powerful criticisms that have been directed against
naturalism. In general, these consist of the observation, that there are
significant differences between natural and social science which seem to
make the idea of scientific detachment untenable in the case of the latter.
Wendt himself points out that the objects of social inquiry are not inde-
pendent of the activity of theorising in quite the same way as the objects of
the natural world.75 He acknowledges, moreover, that there are moments
of reflexivity when subject and object might merge – when by theorising
people come to recognise that the social realm is not one of objective
necessity but is rather the product of their behaviour.76 It seems that just
as there is a causal relationship running from object to subject in virtue of
which theoretical terms refer, there is a relationship running in the other
direction, from subject to object.
This would seem to suggest that the identification of truth could affect
the shape of social reality. As we saw in Chapter 2 it is precisely the
possibility of recognising that the social world is shaped by our knowledge
and interpretations that grounds Critical Theory. Despite this, Wendt
insists that the Scientific Realist pursuit of truth about the social world is
of no political significance.77 The reasons for this insistence are the Realist
ones described above: social entities offer resistance which is a sign of their
reality and, whilst social structures are not totally independent of mind and
discourse, they are not dependent on the behaviour of any particular
individual. Rather they will always confront members of a society as a
social fact (as Durkheim argued regarding the French language).78 Thus,
‘[i]n all but society’s most reflexive moments, there is a distinction
between subject and object’.79 Therefore, despite having admitted that
social theory is part of the world it examines and having accepted that, in
the social world, the subject-object distinction can at times be overcome
through reflection (in the manner of Linklater’s dismantling forms of
necessity), Wendt insists on the possibility of apolitical social science the
concepts of which can correspond to the world without shaping it.80
In light of Wendt’s concessions to Post-Positivism and reflexivity this
insistence on apolitical science seems arbitrary. Indeed, in this context the
simple assertion of the possibility of the autonomous scientific perspective
which is criticised by Post-Positivists is even starker than in the case of
Positivism. If, as Wendt admits, the subject-object distinction is not
absolute – if social theory is part of the social world – and if reflection
can support social change, then it is unclear why we should accept the
assertion of a scientific international theory characterised by Positivistic
detachment. More specifically, once the subject-object distinction breaks
down in this way, it is unclear how truth can be adequately captured by the
idea of correspondence between theory and reality. Whilst the shortcom-
ings of Wendt’s position do not undermine the SR critique of Post-
Positivism altogether, they do show that the total separation of the activity
of science from the constitution of society is untenable.
Bhaskar’s Truth-Based Critique

The difficulty upon which Wendt founders is that of striking a balance
between the assertion that truth is a matter of relations with objective
reality, on the one hand, and the recognition that we cannot hope to gain
the same level of detachment from the social world as we apparently can
from the natural world, on the other. His mistake is to suppress the latter
half of the equation simply by emphasising the former. Fortunately for
Scientific Realists working in IR, Wendt’s is not the only theory available.
Others have been more attuned to the nuances of truth-seeking in the
social sciences.
At this point it will be useful to distinguish between SR and the Critical
Realism formulated by Bhaskar, whom we have already encountered in the
account of SR outlined above. The Critical Realist philosophy of which he

is the founder has been particularly influential in IR, where it is as common
to read or hear speak of ‘Critical Realists’ as of ‘Scientific Realists’. Like
Wendt, Bhaskar recognises that knowledge of the social differs in signifi-
cant ways from knowledge of the natural world. Bhaskar acknowledges
that, in contrast with natural objects, social structures depend on human
thought and action. Like Wendt, he asserts that they are nevertheless ‘real’
and that this is no barrier to the truth-seeking scientific study of the social
world.81 Despite these similarities with Wendt, however, Bhaskar takes a
different view of the relationship of truth-seeking social science to politics.
Despite his naturalism, he insists that social science is far from apolitical
and value-free. This is the defining feature of CR.
Bhaskar’s understanding of truth is in many respects similar to Wendt’s.
As we saw with Wendt, Realists occupy a somewhat awkward position
when it comes to truth. From a ‘common-sense’ perspective, their philo-
sophy would seem to imply a correspondence theory. Whilst this is
Wendt’s view, he is at pains to distance himself from the idea that SR
entails claims to have discovered ‘the Truth’. In contrast, Bhaskar dis-
misses the notion of correspondence altogether, stating that
A proposition is true if and only if the state of affairs that it expresses

(describes) is real. But propositions cannot be compared with states of affairs;
their relationship cannot be described as one of correspondence . . . There is
no way in which we can look at the world and then at a sentence and ask
whether they fit. There is just the expression of the world in speech (or
thought).82
Nevertheless, Bhaskar retains the idea, captured by the correspondence

theory and Wendt’s causal theory of reference, that truth should be under-
stood as a two-part relationship between subject and object – propositions
express real states of affairs – rather than a matter of intersubjective activity
alone. Whilst we cannot ignore the importance of the transitive dimension
in which truth claims emerge, the concept of truth must encapsulate
more than epistemic conditions. To this extent the intuition behind the
correspondence theory is correct.83 For this reason, Bhaskar has argued
that truth has a dual aspect. On the one hand, it must refer to epistemic
conditions and activities such as reporting judgements and assigning
values. On the other, however, it has an inescapably ontic aspect which
involves ‘designating the states of affairs expressed and in virtue of
which judgements are assigned the value “true”’.84 In many respects the
epistemic aspect must dominate; since we can have no direct access to
reality we can only identify the truth through epistemic procedures in
which different theories are compared. Nevertheless, and whilst it would
be wrong to think that truth ‘inheres in being’, these procedures are
orientated towards independent reality; the status of the conclusions
they lead us to is not dependent on epistemic factors alone but also on
independently existing states of affairs.85 For this reason, Bhaskar argues
that the concept of truth has a ‘genuinely ontological’ use.86 That is to say,
the real world plays an integral role in truth – it has ‘truth-making’ powers
over our judgements. Therefore, for Bhaskar, we will not be able to
explain the notion of truth without bringing in the idea of an objective
world in virtue of which our claims are true or false. Bhaskar’s truth
involves the assertion of the subject-object relationship against the eleva-
tion of intersubjectivity found in Post-Positivist epistemic truth. This need
not, however, mean that we must claim that our judgements somehow
‘correspond’ in any real sense. This is just a term used to capture the fact
that our judgements do refer to an independent reality. Indeed, Bhaskar
uses the term ‘expresses’ to avoid the implication that our concepts can
‘fit’ with or ‘reflect’ the world.87 Rather, they are subjective human
‘expressions’ of something objective and non-human. We will return to
the idea that truth might involve expression when we consider Adorno’s
conception of truth in Chapter 6.
There are clear similarities between Bhaskar’s understanding of truth
and Wendt’s claim that it involves causal reference. Nevertheless, Bhaskar
would reject Wendt’s assumption that the scientific pursuit of truth entails
detachment from political matters. For Critical Realists science is not a
value-free affair, but is inherently critical. Whilst this does not take them
back to the Post-Positivist view that truth is tied up with the norms and
practices constitutive of social reality, it does mean that the identification
of truth has political implications. The critical nature of Realist social
science is captured in Bhaskar’s notion of ‘explanatory critique’ in which
the identification of truths about the social world can point to the need for
political change within it.88 According to Bhaskar, Realist referential
detachment – the idea that the objects of reference exist independently
of our claims about them – means that not only social scientists but also
social actors can be mistaken in their understandings; their beliefs or ‘lay
theories’ about social reality might be inaccurate.89 It is equally the case
that social scientific investigation might lead to a more accurate account of
a given aspect of social reality. As in natural science, the formulation of the

new account implies criticism of the original one.90 All other things being
equal, truth is to be preferred to falsehood.91 If we have reason to believe
that one account of some aspect of society is truer than another, we have
reason to compare the old account unfavourably with the new one.
Significantly, however, in contrast with natural science, social science
can extend its investigations to the sources of the false belief, since
these are also part of social reality. In identifying these sources it will also
criticise them since, just as true beliefs are preferable to false ones, social
structures that cause true beliefs are surely preferable to those that cause false
ones. Moreover, false beliefs might even sustain the structures which gen-
erate them.92 For example, according to Marx false beliefs about the nature
of wage-labour both sustain that institution and are generated by it.93 In
cases such as this, identifying the truth might undermine the institution
itself.94 The importance of explanatory critique will, however, generally lie
in drawing attention to underlying structures which are at once sources of
and sustained by illusory beliefs. Recognition of the falsity of such beliefs
implies the need to remove them.95 The pursuit of truth in social science is
therefore inherently ‘evaluative’ and necessarily oriented towards the political
goal of emancipation – hence Bhaskar’s philosophy is Critical Realism.96
The idea of explanatory critique draws on the Realist subject-object
distinction and on its limits in social science to formulate a critique of the
fact-value distinction – identification of the truth about the world has
normative implications. We can remember at this point that Realists
hold both that, on the one hand, structures pre-exist individual agents
and are recalcitrant in the face of their aims and, on the other hand, that
social structures depend for their existence on the behaviour of social
actors. Patomäki points out that this dialectical relationship between
structure and agency, subject and object means that agents have an inter-
est in structures which may interfere with their understanding; agents
confront structures both as something about which they can know and
as something which they can at times affect through their behaviour, often
in accordance with their own interests.97 At times this latter possibility
means that interests may interfere with the former, cognitive relationship
with objective reality – there is a ‘short circuit’ which disrupts our knowl-
edge. The result of this interference might be the rationalisation of self-
interested behaviour on the part of social actors or the reification of social
structures – the assumption that they are forms of necessity of the kind
which concerned Linklater in Men and Citizens.98
Patomäki identifies this feature of human relationships with social

reality as the ‘ontological ground’ of explanatory critique – the feature
of reality which explains its possibility.99 On the one hand, then, explana-
tory critique is possible and necessary because the blurred boundaries
between subject and object in social science mean that social knowledge
can be distorted by interests. As we have seen, this blurring is acknowl-
edged by Wendt. Whereas he refuses to link the limited merging of subject
and object to his account of social science, however, Critical Realists like
Patomäki recognise that it cannot be without implications. On the other
hand, if it is to be claimed that any account of social reality can be distorted
or inaccurate it is necessary to maintain the subject-object distinction;
only if reality is distinct from what we think about it can we be mistaken
(hence Bhaskar’s insistence that there is an ineluctable ontic dimension to
truth).100 Moreover, such mistakes can only be revealed if it is possible to
discover the truth (with a small ‘t’) about social reality.
Bhaskar’s theory of truth-based explanatory critique shows that the
pursuit of truth in science cannot be, as Wendt assumes, a value-free,
apolitical endeavour. In a limited sense, this reduces the scope of the
criticisms of Post-Positivism outlined above. Whilst Post-Positivists are
still wrong to derive accounts of politics from accounts of truth and
knowledge, CR does recognise a connection between truth and a parti-
cular form of political activity – that of critique. It is, however, important
to be clear about what most Critical Realists want to claim as a result. In
particular, whilst the link between truth, critique, and political change
appears, in a limited sense, to bring Realists back within the orbit of the
critical epistemological problematic, most Critical Realists reject the idea
that reflection on concepts like truth can point to a framework for eman-
cipatory political practice, let alone a theory of world politics.101 From the
perspective outlined by Bhaskar, the identification of false beliefs and their
sources is one thing, identifying the action we should take as a result quite
another.
Bhaskar himself emphasises that there are, of course, values other than
cognitive ones and social practices other than science, and that it is there-
fore a mistake to claim that science can settle questions of morality and
action. Truth-based explanation does not point to any particular set of
practices. Rather, such explanation points to the need for action which
may always be overridden by other considerations. The nature of action is
to be decided by some other form of theory which will no doubt involve
consideration of values other than truth.102 Truth, practice, and social
ontology do not, then, link up in Bhaskar’s CR in the same way that they
can in the context of an intersubjectivist understanding of truth and social
reality. Indeed, the ontic aspect of truth identified by Bhaskar serves as a
reminder of this; truth involves an element of reality distinct from inter-
subjective epistemic activity, and therefore reminds us of the disjuncture
between the two.103 On this view, a critical theory should involve attempts
to understand reality as fully as possible rather than efforts to legislate for it
on the basis of epistemological reflection.
Patomäki and the Normativity of Truth

Bhaskar’s theory of truth-based critique demonstrates the difficulties
which accompany attempts to return to an apolitical science of IR, but
there is a price to be paid. In renewing the link between truth and politics
Bhaskar has, at the very least, brought questions concerning political
practice within the orbit of discussions of truth and knowledge. Whilst
the significance of truth is not understood in terms of a constitutive
relationship with political reality, the identification of truth by the social
scientist is an impetus to practice. Despite their best efforts to separate
philosophical reflection on truth from accounts of political reality and the
possibilities for its transformation, as a result of this move Realists’
attempts to separate science from political practice look less than certain.
This observation has been made from within CR itself. In After
International Relations, Patomäki argues that explanatory, truth-
based critique does in fact point to a particular form of action. As we
have just seen, in carrying out explanatory critique the social scientist
identifies false beliefs and their sources and tells us that, all other things
being equal, we must act to remove the latter. Patomäki points out that
this is precisely the kind of means-ends reasoning integral to the
instrumental, technical rationality the dangers of which Post-Positivist
IR theorists like Campbell and Linklater have been concerned to high-
light.104 Such a form of rationality sustains the sorts of political prac-
tices which are associated in IR with Political Realist statecraft, balance
of power politics, state sovereignty, and administrative control. As
Campbell demonstrates, truth judgements can have violent implications
for which we must take responsibility.105 On this view, the claim that
questions about the nature of truth can be safely isolated from ques-
tions about the nature of political activity simply serves to conceal the
assertion of a particular form of political practice. Bhaskar suggests that
neither the nature of truth nor the way in which it is pursued tells us
anything about political reality or the practices of which should or does
consist, whilst all the time working with a theory of critical truth-
seeking which points to a specific form of action.
Patomäki argues that the problem in question can be traced to the
shortcomings of Bhaskar’s understanding of truth, and in particular his
failure to recognise the extent of the connection between the pursuit of
truth and political practice. Bhaskar’s account of truth is problematic in
three respects. Firstly, the dualistic conception of truth is unnecessarily
complex – why introduce the ontological aspect of truth as anything
other than metaphor which reminds scientists that they are dealing with
an independent reality? The effect would surely be the same. Truth
must be a property of claims about reality, not of reality itself. Indeed,
the tendency to think otherwise can have violent implications – why
bother to discuss your claims with others if truth is not ultimately a
property attributed to claims and judgements by human beings, but
something they are endowed with by independent reality?106 Realism
simply tells us that there is a reality which exists independently of our
knowledge of it, and to which our theories refer. As noted above, it
does not require us to adopt a correspondence theory of truth.
Secondly, insufficient emphasis is placed on the normativity of truth
in Bhaskar’s account – it is, as Bhaskar emphasised, one value amongst
many and as a result we cannot simply pursue it without considering
others. Patomäki argues that this recognition needs to be more fully
incorporated into the procedures of explanatory critique.107 Third, he
suggests that the full implications of the lack of neutral criteria for
deciding between truth claims in the social sciences are not recognised
by Bhaskar.108 An integral part of the scientific pursuit of truth is the
discursive justification of claims to the wider scientific community.
In the context of social science, this community expands to encompass
all those with an interest in the issue in question. This points, once
again, to the normativity of truth and to a particular form of political
practice based on communicative interaction of the kind discussed in
Chapter 4.109
For Patomäki, then, explanatory critique in its original form, which
maintains a level of scientific detachment, risks fostering political violence
for reasons identified by the Post-Positivists discussed in Part I – by failing
to take account of the need to be responsible for the truth claims we raise,
by failing to recognise the potential for violence that often accompanies
the assertion of truth, and by ignoring the way in which we must raise such
claims within the context of rational discourse.110 As such, the suggestion
that the identification of false beliefs and their sources simply points to the
need for their removal is insufficient. This procedure will always be a
communal enterprise; we cannot simply ignore those who disagree with
us, as would seem to be the case in Bhaskar’s account where we have
reality ‘on our side’.
Patomäki argues that, rather than instrumental action to change the
sources of false belief, the nature of truth points to the need to engage in
discursive attempts to persuade others that such action is necessary.111
Whilst the defining Realist concern with ‘getting it right’ is still key, we
need to take care to ‘specify the rules and conditions of communication,
which are necessary for adequate truth-judgements’.112 By examining
these conditions, Patomäki re-establishes the connection identified by
Post-Positivists between the nature of truth and the norms and practices
which should be deployed in world politics. According to this revised
theory of explanatory critique, which has much in common with the
Habermasian position described in Chapter 4, those being criticised are
equal partners in dialogue.113 Bhaskar’s implicit endorsement of instru-
mental action must therefore be replaced with an emphasis on commu-
nicative action. Explanatory critique now identifies the sources of false
belief and points to the need to engage in discourse in order to persuade
others of the need for their removal. As a result, Patomäki’s CR has more
extensive implications for emancipatory praxis in world politics than
Bhaskar’s. Patomäki states that
[b]ecause truth has normative force, an explanatory model, which is judged

to be true by virtue of its explanatory statements being true, has normative
implications
and, more specifically, that
because of the normative nature of truth and epistemological relativism,

there is an essential connection between explanatory or any normative
criticism and the non-violence of political action.114
Whilst, for Patomäki, truth is to be seen as solely the product of human

activity, and in particular of the discourse through which judgemental
rationality is exercised, a minimal ontic dimension is retained since it
functions as ‘a regulative metaphor of correspondence, a virtue of scholarly

practices and a condition of many discourses’.115 In other words, it
reminds social scientists that they should be Realists. The pursuit of
truth involves both the social scientific task of identifying the possibilities
that exist for the transformation of current political reality and the norma-
tive task of peaceably moving others to act on the truth that is thereby
revealed. The metaphor of correspondence points to the former task, the
discursivity of truth to the latter.
Patomäki demonstrates that a return to the subject-object axis does not
erase the question of the practical and normative implications of truth –
including its role in constituting international realities – which has
concerned IR Post-Positivists. His revised understanding of truth and
explanatory critique represents an attempt to formulate a Critical Realist
response to questions about the potential role of truth in feeding social
division, violence, and repression on the one hand, or reconciliation and
progress on the other – the very questions examined by Campbell and
Linklater. It seems, therefore, that Patomäki might have succeeded in
identifying a via media between Post-Positivism and objectivism, one
attuned to both the importance of truth and its dangers, to the existence
of a relationship with objective reality and the importance of intersubjective
epistemic practice. As a result, the impact of the Realist criticisms of
the critical epistemological problematic outlined above now seems to
be significantly reduced. Whilst the transcendental Realist argument does
suggest that Post-Positivists’ attitude to objectivity is problematic, Realists
themselves cannot avoid addressing the issues raised in the critical episte-
mological problematic and in particular seeing the pursuit of truth itself as a
normative matter with implications for the conduct of international politics.
However, whilst he demonstrates that Critical Realists cannot escape
from these questions, in addressing them Patomäki adopts an intersubjec-
tive understanding of truth. In doing so, he risks losing sight of one of the
fundamental insights of CR, one captured by the ontic aspect of Bhaskar’s
conception of truth. This is the recognition, also encapsulated in the
notion of the epistemic fallacy, that there is something problematic with
attempts to reduce relations to the world to relations amongst human
subjects. Whilst Patomäki shows that appeals to the subject-object distinc-
tion should not be allowed to obscure questions about the constitutive
relationship between truth and politics, there is still reason to believe
that political prescriptions based on intersubjective epistemic practices
alone are unlikely to meet with success. The Realist criticisms of the critical
epistemological problematic outlined above do not stand, but the accusa-

tion of anthropocentrism and critique of the intersubjective understanding
of truth do. In other words, critical Post-Positivist theorists are right to
consider the constitutive nature of truth but, at the same time, their
theories are limited by their attitude to subject-object relations. The
concept of truth seems to play a particularly important role in reminding
us of this latter relationship, hence Bhaskar’s insistence that it has an
ontological dimension.
That there is reason to be wary of the attempt to reduce the political
significance of truth to that of the intersubjective procedures associated
with the justification of truth claims was recognised by early Critical
Theorists. The history of the twentieth century is certainly littered with
the wreckage wrought by ‘truths’ asserted rather than justified but there
have also been times when what Horkheimer called ‘the knowledge of the
falling fighter’ has been of the utmost importance. That is to say, just as we
might currently worry that the pursuit of objective truth might obscure
the role of communication, it might at other times matter that the truth
about social reality is not identified too closely with success, discursive or
otherwise.116 From this latter perspective at least, the identification of
truth with intersubjective epistemic practices seems as dangerous as linking
it too closely to ‘objective’ reality. It involves the implicit assertion that
only certain forms of activity are ever justified, usually those involving the
exchange of opinions. As we saw in Chapter 4, Adorno was concerned that
a turn to intersubjectivity did not lead away from technical rationality at all
but, under current social conditions at least, served to increase its grip. In
this case, intersubjective communication cannot in fact represent a source
of context-transcendence or praxis.
The intersubjectivisation of truth cannot be detached from historical
circumstance, and it is by no means clear that it is always on the side of
progress. Critical Realist allegations of anthropocentrism serve the
valuable function of highlighting the rejection or denigration of the
objective it involves. As Habermas came to recognise, the realist or
objective aspect of truth is not easily erased – it is one of the reasons we
find the concept so valuable. It is, moreover, far from clear that the
notion of a metaphor of correspondence proposed by Patomäki, or of
realism being a pragmatic assumption necessary for discourse, as sug-
gested by Habermas, can capture what is at stake here. It is possibly of
great significance that we do not equate truth with consensus or con-
sider the relationship between our beliefs, practices, or discourse and
the objective world to be merely metaphorical. As Scientific Realists

recognise, the experience of a reality recalcitrant in the face our prac-
tices, epistemic and otherwise cannot be so easily dismissed. This
relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is part of what makes
truth important. We will return to the question of forms of experience
repressed by the emphasis on subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the
next chapter.
There is, then, an apparent tension between two different interpreta-
tions of the political significance of truth. Kratochwil notes such a tension
in his analysis of Wendt’s SR. On the one hand, he suggests, the notion of
truth points to the idea of a final, correct judgement which corresponds
with the facts of objective reality. On the other hand, as Patomäki recog-
nises, the pursuit of truth is a normative activity in virtue of its connection
with practices of communal justification. Kratochwil himself endorses
Harré’s view that science has a special status ‘not because it is a sure way
of producing truths and avoiding falsehood, but because it is a communal
practice of a community with a remarkably rigid morality’.117 Kratochwil
suggests that the analogy of a court and its formal procedures as a means of
establishing the truth is preferable to Wendt’s view that truth is a matter of
accurately representing reality:
The fact that scientists have even asked for such a ‘court’, and that many
scientific associations and enterprises increasingly use quasi-juridical proce-
dures, suggests a deep-seated change in both the practice of science and in
the public’s acceptance of scientific statements as self-justifying instruments
of ‘truth’.118
On Kratochwil’s view, and that of the theorists examined in Part I, truth is

to be understood in terms of intersubjective epistemic procedures. The
value of truth lies, as Habermas argues, (if anywhere) in its role in promot-
ing procedures of justification, and thereby social justice and harmony.
The danger lies, as Campbell argues, in the assertion of final, fully formed
truth. Either way, the significance of truth is normative and practical,
relating to its role in the constitution of social reality.
Against this view, as we have just seen, Scientific and Critical Realists
enable us to expand on the element of objectivity clung to by Critical
Theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno. Realists argue that human
knowledge does not make sense when seen in terms of intersubjective
epistemic practices alone. Moreover, it seems that our experience of the
world gives us reason to believe in the reality of external structures and

mechanisms – natural and social. As Bhaskar points out, we live in a social
world that pre-exists us and is recalcitrant in the face of our goals. From
this perspective, the concept of truth is valuable because it captures
something of our relationship with this reality – something the inter-
subjective conception of truth removes from social and political theory.
The ontic aspect of truth which Bhaskar maintains despite his suspicion
of the correspondence theory serves to block this erasure. It points
towards an ‘objective’ or ‘scientistic’ understanding of the significance
of truth.
Patomäki’s revised CR is an attempt to reconcile these two attitudes –
he emphasises the normativity of practices of justification alongside the
Realist belief in objective reality. There is, however, something proble-
matic about resolving the tension between two understandings of truth
in the way Patomäki suggests, and in particular with the assumption that
the turn to communal justification and the intersubjective understanding
of truth more broadly are necessarily progressive. The problem was
apparent in the critique of the Veriphobic and Veriphiliac strands of
Post-Positivism in Chapters 3 and 4 and emerges again with the Critical
Realist identification of anthropocentrism. In Chapter 3 it was argued
that Campbell’s rejection of truth on the grounds that it was inherently
violent involved the elevation of philosophy in a manner which which left
him ill-equipped to account for political practice. In Chapter 4 we saw
how the attempt to salvage truth on the basis of communication led to a
normative and philosophical deficit. In particular, the elevation of com-
munication only seemed to be achieved through a philosophical coup de
force which relegated to secondary status certain dimensions of experience
and social activity. These dimensions were the relationships with the
‘objective’ or ‘material’ world typically associated with traditional under-
standings of truth. Finally, in the present chapter, we have encountered
the idea that the equation of truth with epistemic practices alone is closely
linked to the anthropocentric elevation of subjectivity over objectivity.
Whilst, as has been argued in the second half of this chapter, this does not
mean that epistemology has no bearing on politics, it does suggest that
we should take into account the importance of relations between sub-
jectivity and objectivity in such a way that the latter is not swallowed up
by the former. As we have seen, early Critical Theorists like Horkheimer
and Adorno were concerned about the political implications of such a
process. At each stage, we have found that for every claim that the idea of
objective truth is tied up with a violent metaphysics, there is a counter-

claim which shows that that its denial is philosophically and politically just
as dubious.
If Patomäki demonstrates that Realism does not dissolve the critical
epistemic problematic and that questions about political violence and
reconciliation are still questions about truth, Bhaskar’s conception of
truth reminds us of our relationship with a recalcitrant reality which
might always undermine any intersubjective agreement. Patomäki is
aware of this; he makes clear that the problem of praxis is not simply
that of reaching a consensus but involves acting in accordance with the
possibilities which can be scientifically identified in a given political rea-
lity.119 Once this admission is made, however, his emphasis on the inter-
subjective aspects of truth seems unsustainable, since truth must then
involve a relationship with the structures of an independent reality in a
way which it does not for the theories examined in Part I. He attempts to
capture this element of the conception of truth with the notion of truth as
‘regulative metaphor of correspondence’.120 To consign the ‘subject-
object’ axis of truth to the realm of metaphors, however, seems to be to
surrender too readily; ‘correspondence’ might be a problematic notion,
but it surely does not exhaust the ways in which we can think about the
subject-object relationship. The strength of Bhaskar’s position lies in his
insistence that the significance of truth lies in part in this relationship. The
problem with his argument is that in maintaining the objective dimension
of truth, he is too ready to detach the scientific attitude itself from the
world of political practice – objectivity is rightly brought back in, but at
the cost of a return to scientism.
4 CONCLUSION
The Realist critique of Post-Positivism meets with only limited success.
Whilst Realists demonstrate that an emphasis on intersubjective epistemic
activity should not be allowed to obscure the subject-object relationship,
they do not succeed in separating the question of truth from those con-
cerning the norms and practices constitutive of political life. Patomäki shows
that, despite the limitations of their theories, Campbell and Linklater
address important questions about the relationship between epistemic prac-
tice and world politics. The Realist attempt to replace this form of theorising
with scientistic objectivism, as reflected in Wendt’s work and (in a more
limited sense) Bhaskar’s, must fail. Rather than dissolving or overcoming the
critical epistemological problematic, Realists still face the problem of

accounting for the relationship between truth and political practice.
Nevertheless, by considering Scientific and Critical Realist philosophy
we have enhanced our understanding the problems which were identified
with critical Post-Positivist IR theories in Part I. In particular, it has shown
that adoption of an intersubjective understanding of truth and denigration
of objectivity generates a lopsided account of knowledge, which in turn
generates a lopsided account of politics and society. The flaws of this latter
position are manifested in Campbell’s struggle to account for political
practice and in Linklater’s struggle to incorporate human relations with
non-human reality into his theory.
The contribution of SR to IR lies in part in its highlighting the tension
between two ways of understanding the significance of truth – as inter-
subjective and constitutive or as objective and non-constitutive – in a
context where critical IR has previously been dominated by the former
understanding. SR itself does not seem to contain the resource necessary
to overcome the tension between the two. The question is therefore how,
given the shortcomings of the Scientific Realist theories examined here,
the theoretical terrain which their critique reveals can be negotiated. The
next chapter will consider the possibility of a Critical Theory which can
bring together the concern with subject-object relations with the insights
of Post-Positivist IR theorists.
NOTES
1. Hilary Putnam, ‘Introduction’ in Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers,
Volume 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. vii–xviii,
reference pp. viii–ix. Putnam points out that Berkeley, Hume, and Kant each
realised that the mind can never compare a word or image with an external
object; it is never in a position to ‘fix’ any such correspondence.
2. Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 381.
3. William Outhwaite, New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism,
Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 19.
4. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 52; Jonathan Joseph, ‘Philosophy
in International Relations: A Scientific Realist Approach’, Millennium 35, 2
(2007), pp. 345–359, reference p. 346.
5. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, (London: Routledge,
1998), p. 8.
6. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 9.

8. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd Edition, (London: Verso,
1978), p. 44.
9. Patomäki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism?’, pp. 213–237.
10. Bhaskar, Realist Theory of Science, p. 25.
11. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 5–8.
12. Ibid.
14. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 9–10.
15. Milja Kurki.
16. Roy Bhaskar, Realist Theory of Science; Hilary Putnam, ‘What is Mathematical
Truth?’, in Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 60–78, reference p. 73.
Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 64–65; Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 383. It should be
noted that not all realists agree with this ‘miracle argument’ for Scientific
Realism. See for example James Robert Brown, ‘The Miracle of Science’, The
Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (1982), pp. 232–244.
17. Wendt, Social Theory; Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International
Relations: Politics as Ontology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
18. Patomäki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism?’, p. 222.
19. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 1–12. Outhwaite, New Philosophies of
Social Science, p. 15.
22. Waltz; For a Realist critique of instrumentalism in Positivist and Post-
Positivist IR see Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 380.
23. Of course, as pointed out at the end of Chapter 2, what Post-Positivists
object to most is the Positivist view of subjectivity and epistemic practice. To
this extent they seem to recognise, like Realists, that the Positivist subject
and object distinction is in fact a very limited one.
25. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, p. 15.
26. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
27. Ibid., p. 25.
28. Ibid., p. 36.
29. Ibid., p. 39.
30. Wendt, Social Theory.
31. Bhaskar, Naturalism, p. 11.
33. Heikki Patomäki, After international relations: Critical Realism and the
(Re)Construction of World Politics, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 99.

36. Bhaskar, Realist Theory of Science, p. 36. See also Wight and Patomäki, ‘After
Post-Positivism?’, p. 217; Wight, Agents and Structures, p. 28; Joseph,
‘Philosophy in IR’, p. 350.
37. Bhaskar, Realist Theory of Science, pp. 44–45.
38. Wight and Patomäki, ‘After Post-Positivism?’, p. 217; Andrew Collier,
Critical Realism, (London: Verso, 1994), p. 76.
39. Patomäki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism?’, p. 217; Bhaskar, Realist
Theory of Science, p. 34.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Patomäki, After International Relations, p. 99.
44. Joseph, ‘Philosophy in IR’, p. 346.
45. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 51.
46. Wendt, Social Theory.
47. Jonathan Joseph, ‘Philosophy in IR’.
49. This example is taken from Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 391.
53. Ibid., p. 381.
55. Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 35.
57. Ibid., p. 40.
58. Ibid., p. 20.
59. Ibid., p. 40.
60. Ibid., p. 47.
61. Ibid., p. 58.
62. Ibid., p. 57.
63. Ibid., pp. 54–57.
64. Ibid., p. 57.
65. Ibid., p. 58
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., p. 59.
69. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘New Orthodoxy’.
70. This seems to be Kratochwil’s view. Ibid., pp. 91–93. For a response, see
Wight, ‘Manifesto’, p. 386.
71. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 39.
74. Ibid., p. 40.
75. Ibid., p. 75.
76. Ibid.
77. Kratochwil, ‘New Orthodoxy’, p. 88.
78. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 73, p. 75
79. Ibid., p. 77. It is important to remember that Wendt does believe that
reflexivity is important, arguing that it means that there is the possibility
for ‘self-intervention’ by states in international society to bring the states-
system under ‘a measure of rational control’. However, this recognition is
deployed in his Constructivist critique of Neorealist ‘materialism’ and ‘indi-
vidualism’, rather than in his account of social science. Ibid., p. 376.
81. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism.
83. Patomäki, After International Relations, pp. 145–147.
84. Roy Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, (London:
Verso, 1986), pp. 99–100.
86. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism, pp. 99–100.
90. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, p. 63. Bhaskar owes this argument to Roy
Edgely, ‘Reason as Dialectic: Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science’
in Critical Realism: Essential Readings, ed. Margaret Archer (London:
Routledge, 1998), pp. 395–408.
92. Collier, Critical Realism, p. 171.
93. Ibid., p. 172.
94. Ibid., p. 171.
95. Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, p. 63; Collier, Critical Realism, pp. 194–
195.
98. Ibid., p. 151; Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. 165.
101. Joseph, ‘Philosophy in International Relations’, pp. 345–359.
103. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism, pp. 99–100.

104. Patomäki, After International Relations, pp. 155–157.
105. Ibid., 154–155.
106. Ibid., p. 148.
107. Ibid., p. 154.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid., p. 155.
110. Ibid., pp. 156–157.
111. Ibid., p. 156.
112. Ibid., p. 160.
113. Ibid., p. 156.
114. Ibid., p. 144.
115. Ibid., pp. 148–149, pp. 157–158.
116. Horkheimer ‘On the Problem of Truth’, pp. 428–429; See also Theodor
Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’, trans. Henry W. Pickford, The Yale
Journal of Criticism 10, 2, (1997), pp. 227–245.
117. Kratochwil, ‘New Orthodoxy’, p. 93. In keeping with the disjuncture
identified above between realism and any particular theory of truth, Harré
advocates such a view of truth over the correspondence theory despite being
a realist. Harré’s work has influenced Patomäki’s IR theory. Patomäki, After
International Relations, p. 148.
120. Ibid., pp. 157–158.
CHAPTER 6
Adorno, Truth, and International Relations
1 INTRODUCTION
The tension between the Post-Positivist positions discussed in Part I, on
the one hand, and the Critical Realist stance considered in the previous
chapter, on the other, represents an instance of what Hilary Putnam terms
‘recoil’. This occurs when
one is dominated by the feeling that one must put as much distance as
possible between oneself and a particular philosophical stance one is not like
by refusing to acknowledge that the defenders of that stance possess any
insights.1
The result, Putnam argues, is the ‘besetting sin of philosophers’ which

‘seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.2 The conceptions
of truth discussed in the preceding chapters seem to reflect just such a
tendency. Recognition of the constitutive side of truth has been accompa-
nied by the recoil against any concern with objectivity. The latter has been
condemned through association with ‘scandalous anti-humanism’. In suc-
cumbing to this recoil, Post-Positivists throw out the subject-object ‘baby’
with the ‘bathwater’ of unreflective Positivist objectivism. Critical Realism
(CR) offers a non-Positivist conception of objectivity and identifies the
dangers of anthropocentrism, only to recoil from constitutive truth into a
problematic scientistic faith that truth can be separated from political life.
Patomäki identifies the problem, but his solution draws him back towards an

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_6
intersubjectivist account of truth and therefore to the other side of the recoil.
Thus, critical international thought needs to discard two lots of ‘bathwater’ –
anthropocentrism and scientism – whilst retaining two valuable theoretical
‘babies’ – awareness of the constitutive significance of truth and the concern
with subject-object relations.
To this end, we turn in this chapter to Adorno’s Critical Theory.
Adorno has appeared in the preceding chapters as a dissenting voice largely
absent from discussions about Post-Positivist knowledge in International
Relations (IR) but easily brought into conversation with the theories
involved. He can help IR by providing a conception of truth which
might overcome the pattern of recoil which has emerged from the pre-
ceding chapters – as both objective and constitutive. In doing so, he points
to a means of reworking and reinvigorating the critical tradition in the
discipline, confirming the importance of the critical epistemological pro-
blematic in the face of allegations of abstraction whilst rejecting the over-
arching intersubjectivist understanding of truth which has shaped and
restricted the most influential responses to it.
The first part of the chapter describes Adorno’s Critical Theory and the
place of his conception of truth within it. This is worth describing at some
length, since it is at odds with the more familiar or intuitive conceptions of
truth which we have considered so far. As we shall see, Adorno addresses
the questions of the problematic with a conception of truth which has
three key features: it is objective; it is unintentional; and it is emphatic. The
second part of the chapter considers the implications of Adorno’s concept
of truth for IR. It starts by returning to the pattern of recoil, before
comparing Adorno’s position with those of the Post-Positivists discussed
in Chapter 3 and 4.
2 SUBJECT AND OBJECT IN CRITICAL THEORY

Verum-Factum
Of course, we do not have to turn to Adorno for an account of truth
as both objective and constitutive. Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ con-
tain a well-known sketch of a dialectical conception of ‘objective’
truth. The recoil from the objective in IR has been accompanied by
the relative neglect of the epistemological dimensions of Marx’s work,
and of dialectics in particular. Whilst, as we have seen, Critical
Theorists and Critical Realists have made reference to dialectics there
6 ADORNO, TRUTH, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 183
have been few detailed attempts to extend it to IR’s knowledge

debates.3 According to Marx subject and object stand in a dialectical
relationship. On the one hand, ‘the thing, reality, sensuousness’ must
be thought of ‘subjectively’ as ‘sensuous human activity, practice’
rather than as ‘the object or of contemplation’.4 On the other hand,
activity must be reclaimed from idealism and understood as ‘objective
activity’.5 In the absence of this dialectical approach a ‘theoretical
attitude’ tends to obstruct ‘practical-critical’ activity.6 This is proble-
matic for Marx, for whom, as is well known
[t]he question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking

is not a question of theory but a practical question. Man must prove the truth
– i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.7
Truth must be understood in terms of interaction – of humans with each

other and with an objective world of which they are a part. This interaction
should not be equated with the forms of activity generally associated with
cognising subjects, such as the formation of ideas or observation of facts.
Rather, the subject always relates to objects as an objective subject
engaged in objective social activity – labour. Thus truth can be inherently
political, practical, and objective.
One of the most influential attempts to extend this Marxist theory of
truth can be found in the work of Lukács, who was largely responsible for
challenging scientistic and positivistic understandings of Marxism held by
adherents and critics alike in the years following Marx’s death.8 Lukács
argued that the prevailing form of knowledge under capitalism reflected
limited bourgeois consciousness and conditions of social reification. The
bourgeoisie tried to understand a world which was created through the
activity of others by adopting a contemplative, objectifying attitude to an
apparently law-like, social reality. In contrast, the proletariat were the
creators of the reality which they sought to understand. They were there-
fore the the universal subject-object of history. For Lukács, society would
cease to be opaque once they were empowered9:
the self-understanding of the proletariat is . . . simultaneously the objective

understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own
class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realisation of the –
objective – aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract
possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention.10
According to Lukács, then, truth – correspondence between subject and

object – was not to be achieved in thought, as assumed in bourgeois
philosophy, but through the practical empowerment of the proletariat.
In contrast with contemplative bourgeois knowledge, this would be
‘knowledge that has become flesh of one’s flesh and blood of one’s
blood; to use Marx’s phrase, it must be “practical critical knowledge”’.11
Lukács appears to offer the sort of approach to truth which might deal
with the impasse identified above. As for IR’s Post-Positivists, truth can-
not be understood apart from the processes shaping political community.
At the same time, it involves relations between subjectivity and objectivity
as well as between subjects. The difficulty is, however, that Lukács’ theory
also appears to reflect the very tendencies of Marxian epistemology which
have led most Post-Positivists to adopt an intersubjectivist approach to
truth.12 As Benno Teschke and Can Cemgil explain, the prevailing view in
critical IR has been that Marxism’s ‘epistemological status’ is that of a
‘holistic and objectivist’ approach which ‘could not be freed from the
burden of Enlightenment versions of grand teleological narratives’.13
Lukács might have salvaged Marxism from crude, positivistic materialism
but he still saw history as ‘a coherent and meaningful unity . . . a pro-
gressive longitudinal totality’.14 Cognitive progress was progress towards
a communist society – the emergence of a totality in which subjectivity
and objectivity, thought and reality will be reconciled. As we have seen,
IR scholars have been rightly concerned that such visions are proble-
matic, especially given that world politics is characterised by the greatest
possible level of diversity.
Nevertheless, the difficulties with Lukács’ position provide a useful
starting point for our attempt to reconcile the two sides of the recoil
identified above. His theory is certainly problematic, but it is less clear
that problems arise from his concern with subject-object relations. They
can in fact be traced, in part, to the influence of an idea which has a close
connection to the intersubjectivist currents which have shaped critical IR –
Vico’s claim that verum et factum convertuntur or ‘the true and the made
are convertible’.15 Vico adopted this position in the seventeenth century as
part of his humanistic critique of Descartes. Whilst the latter insisted on
the superiority of knowledge of the natural world, Vico argued that men
could better understand the social world since it was one they had con-
structed themselves and could therefore know from within.16 Marx him-
self had approvingly mentioned Vico in a footnote in Capital, which in
turn inspired Lukács and other Hegelian Marxists.17 For Lukács, unlike
Vico himself, verum-factum only applied when history was made by

individuals who were active, cognising participants, rather than pawns of
historical processes.18 As Martin Jay explains, for Lukács, writing shortly
after the Russian revolution, ‘[i]nsofar as a collective subject
[the proletariat] was embarked on the rational totalization of the world,
the symmetry of action and knowledge . . . was now in the process of
being achieved’. As the object of the social sciences – the social world –
became more rational, the possibility of knowing the truth about it could
be realised.19
The verum-factum principle has been of considerable (if under-
acknowledged) appeal in IR. Hayward Alker grants Vico a leading role in
the critical heritage upon which ‘reflectivist’ IR has drawn.20 As we saw in
Chapter 2, Cox – ostensibly the most materialist of the Critical IR Theorists
examined at the start of this book – has been clear about the influence of Vico
on his work.21 This influence is far more important than that of the Frankfurt
School, which is commonly – and according to Cox wrongly – assumed to
have shaped his influential distinction between problem-solving and Critical
Theory.22 Indeed, Cox has claimed that Vico has been a greater influence
upon his work than Marx.23 His dialectical truth, described in Chapter 2,
has a distinctly Vichian flavour. Vico shows, via Gramsci, that ‘[t]he truth of
a philosophy lies in its fit with the configuration of social forces that
shape history’ and ‘a shared mental framework or intersubjectivity, consti-
tutes the objectivity of an epoch’.24 This appears to represent an alternative
to the more familiar Habermasian strand of intersubjectivist Critical IR
Theory.25 Richard Devetak suggests that if its implications are pursued,
Vico’s theory points beyond Cox’s Marxist inspired Critical IR Theory to
one conducted in a ‘historical mode’. In keeping with the intersubjectivist
recoil identified above, such an approach is ‘less interested in the truth or
otherwise of political doctrines and arguments expressed by past thinkers
than in their constitutive effects, that is, their relation to institutional facts’.26
Whilst Lukács has not played a significant role in IR debates, the influ-
ence of Vico in his work points to an interesting possibility: that the sorts of
problems apparent in his work – its totalising tendencies, the way anticipates
a meaningful social unity – are not the result of any Marxian concern with
the objective, but of Vichian intersubjectivism. Indeed, despite each adopt-
ing an ostensibly historical materialist position, neither Lukács nor Cox
actually presents us with a constitutive conception of truth in which the
objective is ultimately given much weight. As we saw in Chapter 2, Cox
claims that truth is dialectical, but he appears to mean by this that it ‘changes
with the movement of history’ rather than that it involves the interaction of
subjectivity and objectivity.27 As with Linklater’s Critical Theory, when it
comes to truth the objective is subsumed within the intersubjective.
Likewise, whilst his theory was intended as a materialist critique of bourgeois
epistemology, Lukács displays distinctly idealist tendencies – nothing is,
ultimately, beyond the world the collective subject has created.28
It is rarely recognised in IR that verum-factum might have troubling
implications. However, this realisation had an important impact on the
theories of some of Lukács’ successors in the Western Marxist tradition,
who recognised that the totalising and teleological character of his theory
arose not from any concern with the objective but from the anti-objectivist
implications of verum-factum.29 Horkheimer and Adorno accepted that the
world was to a great extent ‘made’ but pointed out that despite being
increasingly rationalised, it seemed to be becoming more confusing and
opaque.30 In this context, the idea that making and truth were interchange-
able was problematic. Increased proficiency in social planning, including in
post-revolutionary Russia, seemed to have generated little in the way of
transparency. Moreover, if humanity made the world, it did so partly by
working on nature. As Jay explains, this being the case, ‘[n]atural objects
could never become solely objects for, of, and by men; the dialectic of
technology, indeed of labour per se was thus a non-identical dialectic’.31 Any
theory sensitive to this – and any conception of truth it sustains – would
have to retain a central place for ‘an objectivity beyond all “making”’.32
Thus, in the early Frankfurt School’s extensions of Marx’s dialectic of
subject and object – which were, as we shall see, keenly attuned to the
constitutive significance of truth – the totalising tendencies critical IR
scholars have associated with objectivism arose not from the concern
with the objective, but from its suppression.33 Totalising Marxism took
its place alongside idealism and Positivism in succumbing to a subjectivist
‘identity thinking’, suppressing the objective or ‘non-identical’ which lay
beyond categorisation and control. The non-identical dialectic in question
has, unfortunately, had a negligible impact on the development of critical
conceptions of truth in IR.34
Dialectic of Enlightenment
A conception of truth based on a non-identical dialectic, in which the
objective is not understood simply as something constituted, moulded,
captured, or categorised by subjects, lies at the heart of Adorno’s Critical
Theory. For Adorno, as for Lukács, society and politics cannot be under-
stood apart from the relationship between cognition and the forms of
organisation, experience, and interaction available to its members. In
Western societies and the global capitalist system they have established
these are characterised by the elevation of the subject to the status of
‘dictator’ over things.35 The psychological, social, and political impacts of
this process have created an enlightened society in which ‘disaster reigns
triumphant’ – the technologically advanced but genocidal world of the
twentieth century.36 The operation of globalised capitalism, violent hatred
of minorities and outsiders, self-destructive exploitation of the natural
environment, and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation were
entangled with this specific form of subjectivist cognition. The possibility
of addressing such problems was, Adorno believed, tied to the possibility of
an alternative, which it is the job of Critical Theory to begin to reconstruct,
tentatively, from the fragments of contemporary ‘damaged life’.37
In responding to this crisis, Adorno asserts the ‘primacy of the object’38
against ‘the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’.39 Truth is, he insists,
‘objective’.40 His theory of truth emerges through the negotiation of
the same tripartite problematic which we reconstructed from within the
work of critical IR scholars in Part I, the elements of which are to be
understood in their interrelation. The sociology of knowledge must be
combined with reflection on context-transcendence; the possibility of
truth cannot, ultimately, be separated from that of societal transformation.
However, Adorno rejected Lukács’ Marxian equation of truth with the
advance of the proletariat towards a rational totality, concerned at the way
in which the association between truth and revolutionary practice was
reducing the space available for critical thought.41 He therefore replaced
Marx’s famous claim that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the
world, the point is to change it’ with the assertion that ‘[p]hilosophy,
which once seemed obsolete, lives on as the moment to realize it was
missed’.42
Adorno’s understanding of the connection between knowledge and
society emerges in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with
Horkheimer during their wartime exile in the United States. To describe
Adorno as offering a ‘sociology of knowledge’ in any simple sense would
be misleading. The subtitle of Dialectic of Enlightenment – ‘philosophical
fragments’ – provides a clue as to his philosophical approach to socio-
logical issues.43 The task pursued in this work is not simply to describe
society and its development as if it were a coherent system but to subvert
the self-understanding of enlightened society by drawing attention to real

contradictions and tensions. We cannot understand society, including the
activity of cognition, without epistemic and normative reflection.
At the heart of Dialectic of Enlightenment is the characteristically chiastic
claim that ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to
mythology’.44 Starting with the ways of life against which enlightenment
defines itself, Adorno and Horkheimer challenge the image it projects of
the linear advance towards a rational society. Enlightenment has defined
itself in contrast to myth and superstition, which supposedly leave indivi-
duals in a state of immaturity.45 The rise of enlightened reason has aided
the destruction of old forms of tyranny and driven new capabilities through
which humanity can meet its needs. Despite this, it has calcified into a form
of compulsion which sustains the very immaturity it was supposed to
overturn – leaving humanity with a reduced capacity for critical judgement
and diminishing possibilities for meaningful experience. The social and
political structures created through the rationalisation of society are a
source of suffering – an external ‘weight’ for most individuals which con-
stantly threatens to drive them to violence or self-annihilation.
If enlightenment remains entangled with myth, the idea that an ‘unen-
lightened’ world was one without reason is similarly misplaced. Pre-mythi-
cal ways of relating to the world through ‘magic’ were already forms of
cognition – any romantic hope for escape to a pre-modern world is there-
fore misplaced.46 In magic, however, images and dreams were not signs
which correspond to natural objects, but are rather bound up with them
by similarities and names; they are part of reality. It was by means of this
mimesis, rather than the radical separation of the knowing subject from
the world, that humanity related to nature.47 At this stage there were
no radical distinctions between thought and reality, subject and object, no
‘sovereignty of ideas’.48
Through fear of a heterogeneous world and the desire to control it in
pursuit of survival, humanity drew subject and object apart and elevated
the former over the latter. The demons and spirits which inhabited
the specific objects and places of a living, meaningful world came to be
intellectualised as ‘pure ontological essences’.49 For example, in Ancient
Greek religion the Olympic deities are no longer identical with the
elements but rather have come to signify them. As a result, subject (god)
and object (element) begin to separate. The gods are, in a sense, the
concepts which represent the elements. In this way, being divides
into logos, on the one hand, and ‘the mass of all things and creatures
without’, on the other.50 Eventually, the difference between man and god
diminishes until man too stands as master over existence.51 From this
position he can manipulate nature according to his will – ‘[m]yth turns
into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity’.52
Through this elevation of the subject, humanity has been able to
establish technical control in both the natural and social worlds. This is
real progress, but it has been ‘forgotten’ how much humans are them-
selves material (objective), sensuous creatures, part of the natural world,
and the possibility of a meaningful relationship with particular objects –
human beings included – all but disappears. Both society and nature are
known only insofar as they can be categorised and manipulated.
In modern Positivism this ‘subjectivism’ is manifested in the detachment
of language from reality which produces a closed ‘system of detached
signs’.53 Any attempt to step outside of this system is seen as meaningless,
at best being relegated to a ‘cognition-free special area of social activity’.54
Positivism might believe itself to represent ‘the court of judgement of
enlightened reason’, but in fact maintains its power through a taboo on
reference to that which cannot be subsumed under general categories and
concepts and thereby moulded into fungible units.55 The idea that reality
‘goes into’ the subject’s concepts ‘without remainder’ – ‘identity-thinking’ –
is the main ill of all subject philosophy.56 It drives the compulsion as a result
of which enlightenment falls back into the rigidity of myth and establishes
criteria for truth which are tautological insofar as they start and end with the
subject. The purpose of the ‘negative dialectics’ which Adorno later devel-
oped was, as Levine has put it, to ‘chasten’ thought and in doing so to
prevent its self-destruction.57
The process by which enlightenment elevates the subject to the
status of dictator has always been social as well as intellectual. The possi-
bility of separating subject and object first emerges with the division
between master and labourer.58 The reign of identity thinking is intensi-
fied in modern times by the market logic which prioritises exchange – over
use-value, and thereby fungible units over the significance and value of
particular objects, human beings included.59 At an individual level, despite
liberal claims to the contrary, apparently free and rational subjects are
becoming incapable of genuine rationality, sharing Positivism’s mythic
fear of anything which escapes the grasp of the concept or of facts:
The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by fear of departing from

the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of
science, commerce, and politics – cliché-like – have already moulded; his

anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation.60
The possibility of substantive experience – of relating to concrete, particu-

lar objects (including other human beings) – and of substantive meaning –
of relating to objects which are significant for us – all but disappears.61
In achieving enlightenment the individual has all but destroyed the capa-
city to relate to a world beyond thought which is the very prerequisite
of cognition.
Much of Adorno’s work is concerned to explore the social and political
manifestations of identity thinking and the ‘damaged life’ it creates.62
The damage to experience is apparent in the ‘culture industry’. Aesthetic
experience once contained precisely the form of subject-object relation-
ship which is enlightenment eliminates – a relationship to concrete parti-
cular objects which were a source of pleasure and meaning.63 However,
with the rise of a ‘culture industry’, individuals seek meaning in fungible
cultural commodities and eventually in the products of instrumental rea-
son themselves.64 To the extent that this process succeeds, the possibility
of thinking beyond the image that society presents of itself disappears.
Eventually, we will be left with a triumphant Positivist ideology which tells
us that we must accept reality as it appears and that all else – even the
aspirations reflected in older liberal ideology based on concepts such as
‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ – is superstition.65
Fascism represents an extreme example of the political results of this
process, but reveals the ease with which it degenerates into violence. In the
case of anti-Semitism the thwarted promise of immediacy – the fact that
supposedly free and enlightened subjects find their rationalised society to
be opaque and indifferent to their needs – leads individuals to search for
readily identifiable scapegoats to blame and for fulfilment through immer-
sion in myths of nationhood.66 Formalised enlightenment subjectivity and
destruction of experience through the culture industry render individuals
amenable to fascist propaganda.67 Thus, the culmination of subjectivism is
the destruction of the enlightened subject.
Clearly, as Adorno was all too aware having fled Nazi Germany for the
United States, it would be quite wrong to equate liberal and fascist
societies. However, the former displays cruelty of its own and possesses
few resources to prevent decline into the untrammelled celebration of
power reflected in the latter. Adorno was dismissive of the distinction
which was assumed to exist between the ‘pathological’ opinions of
extremists, on the one hand, and mainstream liberal common-sense, on

the other. He described the complacency of German liberals whose faith in
the reasonableness of liberal newspapers and their readership led them to
overlook the Nazification of German public opinion.68 Certainly, the
liberal exchange of opinions was to be preferred, but there was no reason
to assume that it had any inherent strength as a result of which it would
triumph. Whilst giving the appearance of a reasonable pluralism, it bore
the marks of the self-destruction of cognition though which our capacity
for critical judgement had declined. Behind this lay the process through
which intersubjectivity had become detached from the objective and non-
identical.69
Residual Truth
The danger identified in Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere in
Adorno’s writings is that, whilst the emergence of the modern subject
has brought real progress, the possibility of relating to the non-identical is
diminishing. Since cognition must involve a relationship with the non-
identical, to the extent that it succumbs to identity thinking it becomes
caught in a self-destructive spiral. The preceding ‘sociology of knowledge’
cannot be separated from Adorno’s account of a form of cognition which
would avoid this trap – that is, from his theory of truth. This theory points
to the nature of a non-subjectivist context-transcendence which can pro-
vide the basis for critique. It does so partly by engaging with the third
question of the problematic, pointing to the possibility of thinking and
living in a manner other than that which has been established through
subjectivism. Before outlining this conception of truth it will be useful
briefly to consider Adorno’s objections to alternative conceptions.
One of the philosophical manifestations of identity thinking is, Adorno
suggests, a broad ‘residual’ conception of truth in which ‘everything that
can be regarded as ephemeral, transitory, deceptive, and illusory is left to
one side, so that what remains is supposed to be indispensable, absolutely
secure, something I can hold permanently in my hands’.70 This attitude is
‘common to almost the entire philosophical tradition’ but it is also closely
associated with logic of modern science and common-sense understand-
ings of truth.71 On the one hand, residual truth reflects what happened to
philosophy once its claim to have identified metaphysical truths was
undermined by the success of science. For example, the starting point of
Kant’s philosophy is the supposed truth of Newtonian mechanics; the
philosophical task he seeks to address is the legitimisation of this truth.72

In pursuing this approach, Kant surrendered the ‘objective’ side of things
to the natural sciences, whilst leaving philosophy with the ‘subjective’.73
However, as we have seen, separated from the object and from all that is
‘ephemeral’ the subject becomes increasingly impoverished. This is appar-
ent in the Kantian subject, which was reduced to a ‘repository for a series
of logical rules whose provenance is mysterious’.74
The residual conception of truth is also apparent in the prevailing
conceptions of science, in which the objective is ‘what remains after the
crossing-out of the so called subjective factors’.75 That is to say, it is
assumed that ‘objective’ knowledge involves subtracting the particular,
the meaningful, and the corporeal – in removing our ‘investment in the
object’ from the equation. Objectivity is supposedly what we are left with
after this process of purification. As suggested above, of course, this
process of eradicating the non-identical is really best characterised as one
of subjectivism. Common-sense understandings of truth tend to reflect
much the same assumption – truth must be permanent and free from the
input of particular subjects.76
Adorno argues that there is no reason to accept this view, asking
whether ‘it does not predetermine the truth in line with a particular
model, a model characterised by the handiness of its methods, reliable
scientific methods for all eventualities’. This handiness is undeniable, but it
‘says nothing about the nature of truth in reality, even though the truth is
the goal of the method’.77 Understanding truth ‘in reality’ means under-
standing it as fundamentally social and historical – in terms of the socio-
historical articulation of subject–object relations. In fact, residual truth is
associated with ‘urban exchange societies’ and a fear of change on the part
of those who benefit from them. As a result of this conservatism the
‘emphatic claim to truth’ – that is, its normative force – is attached only
to that which is a source of stability.78 Thus, the prevailing understanding
of truth has emerged from the social process described above, whereby
thought has succumbed to the tautology and compulsion. The truth
which is thereby maintained is barely worth the name, becoming ‘the
leftover, the dregs, the most insipid thing of all’.79
The self-destructive nature of residual truth reveals that it is a mistake to
associate the Western tradition solely with Veriphilia – a more complex
dynamic is at work. Accompanying subjectivist attempts to secure knowl-
edge is a latent tendency towards Veriphobia. Truth is reduced to the mere
‘dregs’ because a more substantive conception appears to require precisely
the sort of metaphysics which subjectivism has sought to eliminate.

Relativism reflects this tendency carried through to the point at truth
turns out to be ‘merely’ a historical and social product. Far from reflecting
the sensitivity to particularity which most relativists would assume, this is a
manifestation of identity thinking. Whilst he thinks their arguments are
self-defeating, Adorno criticises relativists not so much for any a perfor-
mative contradiction – ‘the allegation that relativism assumes its own
validity as absolute is shabby – the denial of a principle should not be
elevated to something affirmative’ – as for representing a ‘limited form of
consciousness’.80
For this reason, and despite some obvious affinities, Adorno was keen
to distance Critical Theory from the ‘sociology of knowledge’ tradition
associated with Mannheim. He characterised this as a ‘sociologism which
has dissipated its own enlightened impulse in the sense that it has ceased to
acknowledge any concept of truth at all and thus finds itself in conflict with
its own intentions’.81 Adorno was concerned that Mannheim’s reduction
of truth to the status of a mere superstructure resting on a societal base
obscured what Simon Jarvis terms the ‘qualitative specificity of social
experience’. The latter lies in precisely the subject-object interaction
which subjectivism – including the residual conception of truth – glosses
over.82 Indeed, this problematic tendency is apparent in the concept of
‘society’ itself, which suggests some external ‘thing’ about which it might
be possible to know.83 As Weber demonstrated, society is not simply
knowable as an object but consists of shared ideas and values which social
theorists must seek to ‘understand’. At the same time, as Durkheim
claimed, social relations really do take on the character of an object apart
from the individuals involved in them.84 A theory which reduces society
either to intersubjectively shared values or to objective structures fails to
capture this constitutive tension.
The tendency of Mannheim and others to view societal beliefs –
including truths – simply as the ‘secondary results of a prior social
process’ was therefore self-defeating.85 The relativisation of truth
requires the elimination of precisely the dialectical relationship between
subject and object constitutive of the society which the sociology of
knowledge seeks to understand. Contradictions of the kind which con-
cerned Adorno, whereby progress degenerated into barbarism or the rise
of the subject disempowered the vast majority of individuals, disappeared
from view. They were replaced with positivistic categorisations of levels
or types of knowledge which ‘glossed over’ social antagonisms and
were too ‘kindly disposed to the real world’.86 Just as importantly, the
subject-object tension is internal to the activity of theorisation itself. As
argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘facts’ were already shaped by the
wider social totality – Adorno says of the sociologist of knowledge that
‘the material of his experience is the social order’.87 The attempt to
deflate the problem of truth by rendering it relative to context simply
obscures this difficulty, ignoring the question of context-transcendence
as a result of subjectivist faith in the power of the individual intellect.88
Unsurprisingly, Adorno aligned himself with theorists who rejected the
residual conception. Along with Marx, the most significant of these is
Hegel, for whom truth emerges from the historical interaction of subject
and object. However, whilst this is a powerful corrective, Hegel equated
this movement with the development of Spirit in which subject and object
are unified. Whilst the historical articulation of subject-object relations is
at the heart of Adorno’s Critical Theory, he is fundamentally opposed to
the Hegelian equation of truth with the unity of the two, stating that ‘[t]
he whole is the false’.89 As we have seen, the same error characterises the
marriage of Hegel and Vico central to Lukacs’ theory. In the equation of
truth with totality we find the same denial of the non-identical which
undermines enlightenment thought in its other manifestations, along with
similarly problematic implications.90
Adorno’s Truth
Objective
Central to the Critical Theory with which Adorno believes these proble-
matic conceptions of truth can be avoided is his identification of the
‘primacy of the object’.91 In the context of a critical IR tradition which
has emphasised intersubjective nature of truth, his resultant claim that
‘truth is objective’ seems problematic.92 In Adorno’s view, however, in
associating the objective with Positivism or crude materialism we succumb
to a dangerous misunderstanding which reflects implicit acceptance of the
dictates of subjectivist reason.
His work contains several philosophical arguments for the ‘primacy
of the objective’. First, we can always conceive of an object which is
not a subject, but not vice versa – any subject will also be in some way
objective.93 Moreover, following Kant, a knowing subject presupposes
an object which is known. However, Kant’s claim that things in
themselves are unknowable is problematic. Indeed, the Kantian idea

that the subject constitutes the objects it perceives is mistaken; it is
always possible to point to the objective conditions which shape the
categories through which the subject engages with the world.94 These
arguments appear to bring Adorno close to the Critical Realist position
outlined in the previous chapter.95 Like Critical Realists, he believes in
the importance of the appearance-reality distinction and that truth
matters because it involves our relationship to a neglected objectiv-
ity.96 Similarly, he rejects the prioritisation of epistemic subjectivity
which allows the subject to ‘swallow the object’.97 Moreover, whilst
he is deeply critical of scientistic accounts of truth, he believes that
modern scientific achievements point to the distinction between
appearance and essence:
in modern natural science the ratio peers over the wall it has built and grabs a
snippet of what differs from its categories. This broadening of the ratio
shatters subjectivism.98
Finally, like Critical Realists, Adorno feared the political implications of

the Veriphobia and anti-objectivism.99
Despite these similarities, Adorno’s understandings of objectivity and
truth differ significantly from those of Critical Realists and have different
implications for IR as a result. Most importantly, for Adorno, the sharp
distinction between subject and object is not a transcendental fact but a
‘coercive development’ achieved with the rise of the subject.100 What
matters is the historical articulation of the subject-object relationship and
the interaction of its two elements in the context of the preponderance of
the object. As a result, confronting illusion with truth involves some-
thing quite different to the ‘truth-based critique’ proposed by Critical
Realists.
In order to understand the specific sense in which truth is ‘objective’ for
Adorno it will be useful to consider his understanding of the relationship
between subjectivity and objectivity in more detail. The first thing to note
is that, simply to define each side of the relationship would represent self-
defeating acceptance of a subjectivist epistemology. The attempt to do so
would be especially problematic in this case, since it would assume a
solution to the very question being considered – that is, that the relation-
ship between subject and object was such that concepts could capture
reality, thereby allowing us to identify fixed definitions.101 The closest
Adorno comes to a definition is his claim that ‘[t]he notions of subjective

and objective have been completely reversed’, with the result that
[o]bjective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unques-

tioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the
subjective; and . . . subjective anything which breaches that façade,
engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made
judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority
consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it –
that is the objective.102
In conventional ‘objectivism’ the objective is the paltry ‘residue’ of data

left after the elimination of everything ephemeral – ‘something secondary,
something graciously dragged along by the operational ideal’. In this way,
‘[w]hat is central’ – a substantive relationship with objectivity – ‘becomes
peripheral’.103 ‘Objectivism’ is therefore something of a misnomer – what
we have is an instance of extreme subjectivism. On the other hand, in
common parlance ‘subjective’ refers to those experiences and relationships
in which we encounter objects as having significance and meaning beyond
categorisation. This sort of relation to things in their particularity and as
invested with meaning is unfavourably compared with ‘objective’ truths,
or else confined to its own special sphere – artistic, moral, familial, erotic,
etc.104 This is a mistake, since here we find the traces of the non-identical
as opposed to the subjectivist ‘façade’ of data. This non-identity is the
ultimate ‘locus of truth’.105
Reviving the non-identical and discovering a form of cognition which
does not obscure it cannot simply mean reversing conventional definitions,
however. The current understanding is not merely an intellectual error but,
as explained above, is a practical social achievement. If we are to avoid the
problems of the residual conception of truth it is necessary to recognise the
interaction of subject and object, their mutual mediation. On the one hand,
the subject is ‘a subject also an object’.106 In one sense this means that
subjective concepts and perceptions are shaped by social structures. In addi-
tion, however, consciousness is to be understood as ‘a function of the living
subject’ and physical urges the origin of the mind. For Adorno, pure thought
would not be thought at all; just as it requires an external object, it also
requires an element of bodily affectivity.107 Whilst some form of subjective
consciousness and identification are of course necessary, the illusion of pure
subjectivity leads us to repress this material aspect of cognition.108
The objective might have primacy, but just as we should beware a

subjectivity which impoverishes the objective, we should avoid an ‘objec-
tivism’ which would erase the subject. As we have seen, such ‘objectivism’
is generally more properly understood as a latent ‘subjectivism’. However,
there is no escape in rejecting the moment of subjective intentionality
altogether. Some level of identification is essential for thought and any
attempt to liquidate the subject rather than sublate it into a new form will
result in ‘a regression to real barbarism’.109 In approaching the object we
must therefore include the ‘input of the subject’.110 In doing so we can
begin to escape the influence of the residual conception of truth and move
towards a position quite different from conventional ‘objectivism’. This
position is encapsulated in Adorno’s emphasis on:
whatever does not let its law be laid down by the given facts, yet transcends
them in the closest feeling with the objects . . . .
This is connected to the following account of truth:
That wherein thought is beyond that to which it resistingly binds itself,

is its freedom. It follows the subject’s drive for expression. The need to
let suffering become eloquent is the condition of all truth. For suffer-
ing is objectivity with which the subject is burdened: what it experi-
ences as its most subjective element, its expression, is objectively
mediated.111
As Jarvis explains, Adorno’s point here is that a truth beyond that of

identity thinking requires that we ‘allow what thinking lives off to speak
in thinking’.112 Current forms of subjectivity have an unacknowledged
‘debt’ to objectivity, and their conceptions of truth are impoverished as a
result. The concrete yet subjective experience of suffering is not to be
excluded from truth, but rather lies at the heart of cognition properly
understood as a response to human needs, grounded in the current
articulation of the subject–object relationship but containing the aspira-
tion to a new one. This aspiration reflects the possibility that we might
escape the confines of subjectivism. Far from being ephemeral, the experi-
ences and aspirations of corporeal, vulnerable creatures are at the origin of
our desire for truth. Efforts to subtract this dimension from cognition
were, as Adorno was writing, proving themselves to be disastrously self-
defeating. As he explains,
The moment called cathexis in psychology, thought’s affective investment in

the object, is not extrinsic to thought, not merely psychological, but rather
the condition of its truth. Where cathexis atrophies, intelligence becomes
stultified.113
Axel Honneth summarises the resultant position as follows:
the appropriateness and quality of our conceptual thinking is dependent

on the degree to which we are capable of remaining conscious of the
original connection of our thought to an object of desire – a beloved
person or thing.114
Clearly, this meaningful relationship to concrete objectivity and the suffer-

ing which results from its suppression are quite different from the truth
and objectivity envisaged by Critical Realists in IR. From a Critical Realist
point of view, objectivity has been supressed primarily in the sense that it
has been ignored at the level of theory. The institutions and social struc-
tures with which Critical Realists concern themselves are assumed to be
always already ‘objective’ (albeit malleable) in a relatively unproblematic
sense. Whilst Critical Realists are right to note the neglect of objectivity,
therefore, they remain caught-up in the subject philosophy according to
which the objective remains quite isolated from the act of cognition. It is
only in this way that truth can be held to be of instrumental rather than
constitutive political significance – that is, that Bhaskar can assert that
replacing false belief with true points only to a need for change but does
not represent any sort of constitutive activity in itself.
For Adorno, the fact that social structures are experienced as some-
thing which ‘weighs’ upon the subject is a reflection of the extent to
which identity thinking has permeated social relations. The objectivity of
the social as currently experienced cannot, therefore, be seen as a neutral
transcendental fact, but is rather to be viewed as a manifestation of a
deep social pathology. Truth is not simply a possibility arising from the
‘reality’ of the social, but also a response to suffering which involves
implicit recognition of the possibility of rearticulating the relationship
between subject and object which lies behind it. In addition to the
objectivity of social structures as currently experienced, truth points to
an a situation in which objectivity will no longer be either obscured or
experienced as a weight.
Unintentional
We will return to this ‘emphatic’ dimension to truth in a moment. First, it
is necessary to consider how, given Adorno’s critique of subjectivism, con-
text-transcendence might be possible. At this point we must consider a
second key feature of Adorno’s conception of truth – its ‘unintentionality’.
This feature of truth refers to the way in which, in contrast with identity
thinking, it does not involve the directedness of mind against world.115
Unintentional truth reflects acknowledgement both of subjectivity’s ‘indebt-
edness’ to objectivity and of the limits of concepts and categorisations.116
Rather than trying to capturing reality with our concepts, Adorno suggests
that theorists must look for the marks left upon social and cultural phenom-
ena – including concepts themselves – by that which escapes them.117
Underlying conditions are manifested in various cultural artefacts, philoso-
phical concepts, and social and political institutions which can be seen as
‘expressions’ of the social totality which underpins them.118
The distinctive features of this conception of truth are apparent in the
contrast between Adorno and a hermeneutician such as Dilthey. Whereas
the latter wishes to understand the psychological intention of the creator
of a given cultural artefact, Adorno wants to discover what the artefact is
saying despite this, to uncover its ‘truth-content’.119 It is not his aim,
however, simply to reduce social and cultural phenomena to some material
‘base’.120 Rather than dismissing them as illusory in a straightforward
sense, it is necessary to reinterpret them in order to reveal the underlying
relationship. This means that Critical Theory must be attuned to the
‘reality of illusion’.121 That capitalist society takes on the appearance of
‘second nature’, that is, that illusion is real, is the result of our distorted
relationship with the natural world which it serves to obscure.122 We
should not expect to ‘break the spell’ with theory alone.123
Adorno’s clearest explanation of the method to be used in identifying
unintentional truth can found in the idea of ‘constellations’, derived from
his account of the nature of language.124 Language, Adorno argues, cannot
be understood as a system of signs. Rather, concepts cluster around their
objects in ‘constellations’, investigation of which can reveal the substantive
characteristics of the object in a way which is not possible if concepts are
taken individually. The theorist can pursue truth not by trying to match her
concepts with the facts, but by arranging groups of concepts to illuminate
the particular objects to which they refer: ‘[a]s a constellation theoretical
thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly
open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a
single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.’125 We

have already encountered something of this approach with Adorno’s refusal
to define subjectivity and objectivity. He believes that something like it is
apparent in the work of Weber who refused to start the Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism by defining capitalism, recognising that ‘[t]he place
of definitive comprehension cannot . . . be the beginning of inquiry, only the
end’. Social scientific concepts must, he argued, be ‘gradually composed’
out of ‘parts taken from historic reality’.126
The unintentionality of truth is also apparent in Adorno’s approach to
philosophy. For example, in his lectures on Kant, he criticises those
approaches which seek simply to debunk other theories or – to use the
terminology adopted above – to recoil against them in a manner which
gives rise to statements of the kind ‘Look, he has made a mistake! He has
got it wrong! Old Kant as really made a fool of himself here’.127 It is much
more illuminating to read philosophy in the manner of an ‘X-ray’ or ‘force
field’ in which ‘abstract concepts that come into conflict with one another
and constantly modify one another really stand in for actual living
forces’.128 In the case of Kant the conflicting elements are, on the one
hand, the idealist ‘impulse towards system, unity and reason’ and, on the
other, ‘consciousness of the heterogeneous, the block, the limit’ reflected
in the claim that we cannot know ‘things in themselves’.129 His philoso-
phy can be read as a philosophical expression of the relationship between
subjectivity and objectivity under capitalism and as implicit recognition of
the compulsion through which cognition has become trapped within the
‘chalk circle’ which obscures the non-identical.
Coupled with Adorno’s dialectical account of the relationship between
subjectivity and objectivity, the unintentionality of truth also explains the
fact that there are to be found, scattered throughout his work, apparently
contradictory claims that a given attitude or theory is at one and the same
time true and false. Such a claim is made of Positivist social science, of the
theoretical separation of history and nature, and of the dichotomy between
subject and object itself. The confusing nature of such statements begins to
dissolve when we remember that both the ‘illusory’ surface appearances of
society and the underlying relations can be ‘real’. As we have seen, Adorno is
concerned with the disjuncture between the ‘real’ illusions generated by
identity thinking and the tension on which they are based. Many forms of
subject philosophy will unintentionally (in both senses of the word) express
the underlying nature of modern society, and to that extent be ‘true’. At the
same time, in accepting society as it appears by freezing the subject–object

relationship they participate in the ‘illusion’ and are ‘false’.
Rather than seeking to resolve this tension in the realm of theory,
Adorno retains it in order to reflect the contradictions of modern
society.130 Thus, Positivism is ‘true’ insofar as it is an expression of the
atomistic, alienated form of social relations shaped by the calculative
rationality of capitalist society. It is ‘false’ because it is incapable of recog-
nising the distortion these social relations involve.131 The separation of
history and nature is ‘true’ because it expresses the way in which we have
come to suppress our relationship with nature.132 It is ‘false’ because it
‘apologetically repeats the concealment of history’s natural growth by
history itself’ – that is, it replicates the suppression of nature which has
occurred within human history.133 Finally, the subject-object distinction
itself is ‘true’ to the extent that ‘in the cognitive realm it serves to express
the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive
development’. It is ‘false’ because ‘the resulting separation must not be
hypostatised, not magically transformed into an invariant’.134
Emphatic
This latter kind of falsity reveals the extent to which truth is, for Adorno,
an ‘emphatic’ concept – it has normative content, pointing to a relation-
ship between subjectivity and objectivity which has yet to be achieved. Of
course, such claims are often met with the response that truth is one thing,
how we would like the world to be quite another. However, we have
already seen that what we commonly take to be ‘objective’ or neutral
knowledge already conceals the conservative concern with obstructing
societal change. Understood in the manner outlined above, truth points
beyond the systems established through identity thinking. It reflects the
aspiration to a different relationship between subject and object in which
the debt of the cognising subject can be acknowledged.135
In identity thinking this harmonious relationship between subjectivity
and objectivity is assumed to be easily achieved through the accurate
application of concepts. However, just as this assertion is cognitively self-
defeating and socially pathological, cognitive success is inseparable from
social progress. Thus, Adorno can be found asserting that ‘[i]t is no less
meaningful to speak of the truth of a societal institution than of the truth
of theorems concerned with it’.136 To the extent that they serve the
utopian goal of reconciling subjectivity and objectivity, institutions can
approach truth in the emphatic sense. Ultimately, however, such truth

could not be achieved in individual institutions since each would be
defined by the contradictions which characterise the totality currently
defined by identity thinking. Adorno’s ultimate concern is therefore with
the possibility of a ‘true society’ which would be – in notable contrast with
that envisaged by Lukács – ‘free from contradiction and lack of contra-
diction’137; ‘free from contradiction’ because it would have reconciled
subjectivity and objectivity and ‘free from lack of contradiction’ because
the ideal of subsuming reality under the subject’s concepts ‘without
remainder’, of absorbing the particular in the universal, would have been
overcome.
3 ADORNO AND IR
The implications of Adorno’s theory of truth for IR can be best under-
stood through its application at three levels: to explain and contextualise
the pattern of recoil identified at the start of this chapter; to highlight and
extend those insights of Post-Positivists and Critical Realists which point
beyond this recoil; and to address the specific political and normative
concerns of the critical IR scholars examined in Part I. Consideration of
the first two levels will help us to outline the significance of Adorno’s
approach in general terms. By turning to the third level, we can consider
the connections between Adorno’s approach and critical IR in more detail.
Recoil and Beyond

Adorno’s conception of truth suggests that the way out of the impasse
reflected in recoil need not lie in debunking either side. Nor, as sug-
gested by some of the participants in the ‘End of IR Theory’ debate,
would it lie in sidestepping such discussions altogether in the hope of
engaging with supposedly more substantive international issues.138
Rather, we should approach recoil unintentionally, as a ‘force field’, ‘X-
ray’, or ‘constellation’ in order to discover what it might express.139 In
adopting this approach, it will be useful to recall Adorno’s rejection of
attempts to characterise ‘society’ as either intersubjective or objective. If
we prioritise either side, we lose sight of the specific nature of ‘society’ as
the collective product of partly objective subjects, relationships between
whom have taken on the character of an independent force and external
weight.140 The recoil of Post-Positivists against objectivity and Critical
Realists against the constitutive character of truth seem to reflect a similar

error; international politics is understood as either the product of inter-
subjective practices which ‘objectivism’ would suppress, or in terms of a
set of objective structures which the constitutive view of truth threatens
to obscure. Once we allow that there might be truth and falsity to each of
these sides, it becomes apparent that the recoil itself might express
features of the modern ‘international’ similar to those Adorno wanted
to illuminate in ‘society’.
On the one hand, IR’s Post-Positivists have demonstrated that cogni-
tion cannot be detached from the interaction through which international
realities are constituted. For example, Campbell shows that in approaching
Bosnia we should not view epistemic matters as something to be dealt with
prior to our construction of an account of events. Rather, truth is tied to
the discourses, and identities which constitute the situation in question –
and in this case to the enactment of political violence. For Linklater, the
collective articulation of new truths has a context-transcending force that
can be fostered in pursuit of emancipation. In either case we find that, as
Adorno puts it, ‘[a]ction within bourgeois society, as rationality, is indeed,
objectively, to a great extent, just as much understandable [verstehbar] as it
is motivated’.141 In other words, cognition is a meaningful as well as
technical and instrumental activity. One of the achievements of Critical
IR Theorists and Poststructuralists – Veriphiles and Veriphobes alike – has
been to recognise this and thereby to connect practices of cognition to the
interaction partly through which international relations is constituted. To
this extent, the intersubjectivist side of the recoil is ‘true’.
Problems arise when this intersubjectivism subsumes the objective. As a
result, the theories examined in Part I fail to acknowledge the debt to the
non-identical – that cognition is a meaningful activity but also one which is
shaped by both the corporeality of subjects and their location in a wider
social totality. This anti-objectivism is not entirely ‘false’, since it reflects
the way in which the debt in question really is obscured. Modern inter-
national politics rests on identity thinking; it consists of the interaction of
fungible units – states, commodities, or individuals – in political, eco-
nomic, and legal systems in a manner which requires that individuals really
do lose sight of the non-identical. Intersubjectivism is false, however,
insofar as Post-Positivists have transformed the suppression of the objec-
tive into a philosophically identified invariant. As we have seen, both
Poststructuralist IR and Critical IR Theory suffer as a result – the prior-
itisation of the intersubjective leads Campbell to move ‘upstream’ into the
realm of quasi-transcendentalism and Linklater to the arbitrary relegation

of materiality.
Moreover, the Post-Positivist reduction of truth to intersubjectivity tends
to obscure the extent to which the international really does confront indivi-
duals as a set of external, recalcitrant structures. As Critical Realists have
argued, whilst the structures of international politics require our participa-
tion, they cannot be reduced to it.142 Indeed, in international politics we are
faced with systems and events which are perhaps especially recalcitrant – less
easily moulded by collective action or political participation than domestic
institutions, less obviously grounded in any set of values to which an indivi-
dual might subscribe. Such observations have, of course been at the heart of
Political Realist scholarship, as reflected in E.H. Carr’s emphasis on ‘thinking
over wishing’.143 In this context, reflection concerning ‘how we know’
appears – as Critical Realists argue – to be an abstraction.
This broad theoretical hostility to reflection is problematic but in impor-
tant respects, confronted with a global ‘second nature’ of unresponsive
political and economic structures, reflection really is abstract. Adorno
acknowledged as much, pointing out that whereas self-consciousness
was once, in Hegel’s words, the ‘native realm of truth’, today it ‘no
longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realiza-
tion of impotence: knowing that one is nothing’.144 Similar problems are
apparent for the intersubjectivist reflection which has driven critical IR. Even
where we are conscious of our participation in the social practices which
sustain the international system, it still confronts us as an external source of
compulsion. One of the theoretical manifestations of this problem is the
formalistic character of the reflexively derived prescriptions for emancipatory
change emanating from Critical IR Theory, as described in Chapter 4.145 The
recommendations generated by Linklater’s Habermasian approach tend to
take on the character of ‘normative theory’ rather than a real political pro-
gramme.146 Next to the real effectiveness of the instrumental action and
identity thinking which drive inter-state rivalry or the global financial system,
this aspect of Critical IR Theory should be seen as an expression of the real
weakness of emancipatory programmes under current conditions rather than
an insight into the ways in which they might be transformed.
These are not simply theoretical problems. It is now easier than ever to
reveal the power-knowledge relations which shape international politics
through the creation and control of information in processes of govern-
ance to which we are subjected but also in which we are, to varying
degrees, participants. The emergence of Wikileaks was an important
development in this regard, but the Snowden revelations and release of the
Panama papers have also served as reminders that the international poli-
tical and financial systems are not ‘natural’ but must be maintained
through knowledgeable practices on the part of powerful actors.
However, these moments of insight have done little to change the fact
that these systems confront most individuals as objective structures which
they seem powerless to reshape. We know that they are creations and that
we participate to varying degrees in the activity which sustains them –
generating the data which can be harvested by security agencies, consum-
ing goods from companies which engage in tax avoidance – but we are
swept along nonetheless.147 Cognition is in some respects intersubjective
and meaningful, and we are aware of this, but it still sustains structures in
relation to which we are powerless.
Turning to Scientific Realism (SR), we can see that it is ‘false’ because,
as argued above, it takes this recalcitrant character of social and political
structures to be invariant rather than the result of the current articulation
of subject-object relations. To subtract the activity of cognition from
international reality creates, as Post-Positivists have long argued, the illu-
sion that prevailing forms of knowing and being are natural. As Patomäki
demonstrates, herein lies the falsity of CR; having blocked such reflection,
it gives the impression that instrumental action is a necessity. Such
assumptions serve to maintain identity thinking and thereby contribute
to the very ‘weight’ of international structures which they present as a
transcendental fact.
The pattern of recoil identified here expresses the way in which identity
thinking leads individuals to participate in international structures and
systems in a manner which renders them increasingly opaque and alien.
The ‘international’ is a realm in which intersubjectively held identities and
values – including those involved in cognition – are performed, encoun-
tered, asserted, and negotiated. At the same time, it does confront indivi-
duals as a set of recalcitrant, opaque, and distant structures which we have
few means of reshaping. The limitations apparent in each side are the result
of critical IR’s entanglement with the underlying subjectivism which
sustains the recoil as a whole. Diametrically opposed at one level, at
another each side diminishes the objective in the manner described by
Adorno. Through their indiscriminate anti-objectivism, Post-Positivists
have tended to explain the ‘active’, political character of cognition in
terms of interaction between subjects. Objectivity is understood only as
the product of this constitutive intersubjectivity, or as the unknowable
realm of things-in-themselves about which it is best not to speak. Rightly

concerned at this anthropocentrism, Critical Realists recoil by presenting
the ‘way we know’ as having little bearing on ‘how things are’. The
objective is thereby reintroduced, but is to be approached by ‘crossing
out’ such epistemic factors – a subtraction in keeping with the separation
Adorno identifies in residual conceptions of truth. Patomäki’s attempt to
overcome the recoil further demonstrates the extent to which we remain
within the subjectivist terrain – the constitutive significance of truth is only
recaptured by reducing objectivity to the status of a metaphor.
Adorno’s conception of truth is at the heart of his attempt to reveal the
totality within which we rebound between such limited options. The need to
approach society by thinking in terms of constellations, force fields, and X-
rays is ‘forced on us by the real course of history’, by ‘the capitalist system’s
increasingly integrative trend, the fact that its elements entwine into a more
and more total context of functions’.148 In many respects, IR’s subject
matter consists of the outcomes of this integrative trend, through which
the world has been incorporated into systems based on identity thinking –
the interaction of ‘functionally identical’ units in the political and economic
spheres.149 As explained in the first part of this chapter, this process generates
a self-destructive dynamic in cognition. As a result, the possibility of arriving
at any critical position is increasingly small – denaturalise the structures of
international politics by pointing to the interactive, meaningful dimension
and one succumbs to the subjectivism upon which they depend; spin round
to confront the objective ‘reality’ which has been neglected and one finds
oneself resigned to its ‘weight’. The two sides of the recoil reflect the extent
to which, by eliminating the non-identical, identity thinking tends to draw
resistance – theoretical and practical – back into its orbit. Thus, as described
in Part I of this book, Post-Positivists’ attempts to challenge the epistemic
and political status quo lead into a formalism at odds with their goals of
difference sensitivity and emancipation. CR promises to challenge triumphal
subjectivism only to repeat the scientistic assertion of a particular kind of
purified instrumental reasoning. These are not simply theoretical problems,
but reflect the nature of IR’s subject matter – a social totality which requires
our participation but which we encounter as an opaque and recalcitrant set of
forces and structures.
Escape from the theoretical recoil requires a sense of the contradictory
and non-identical with which we might rub the integrative trend ‘against
the grain’.150 Despite their shortcomings, such resources can be found in
the critical theories considered here. This is apparent if we remember that
approaching theory as a force field does not entail that as expressions of

reality all theories are equally true or false.151 For example, as explained
above, whilst Adorno viewed Positivism as ‘true’ to the extent that it
reflects the atomistic, alienated character of modern society, the falsity as
a result of which it is incapable of capturing anything of the wider pro-
cesses through which this society is sustained is much more significant.152
In contrast, despite their limitations, IR’s Post-Positivists and Critical
Realists each succeed in pointing beyond identity thinking and therefore
beyond the recoil in which they are caught.
In the former case, it is important to distinguish between the two
defining features identified in the first part of this book – the critical
epistemological problematic and the intersubjectivist conception of truth
with which it has been addressed. The problems identified here arise solely
from the latter. Where the work of Post-Positivist IR scholars has seemed
abstract it is the result of the denigration of the objective, rather than the
concern with the constitutive aspect of truth which points to the questions
of the problematic. As we saw in Chapter 5, the critique of intersubjectivist
truth did not absolve Critical Realists of the need to address these ques-
tions. Adorno’s own work demonstrates how concern with the constitu-
tive political significance of truth can be detached from anti-objectivism.
The possibility of reconstructing the questions of the problematic
from within their work reflects the extent to which critical IR scholars
have been sensitive to tensions of the kind revealed by Adorno. The
problematic provides the basis for theoretical resistance to identity
thinking – the latter has no time for the contradictions, tensions, and
fluidity which they concern. In addressing the problematic, scholars
such as Linklater and Campbell have made the connection between
such tensions and the experiences, dynamics, and structures of interna-
tional politics. As our account of Dialectic of Enlightenment shows, the
problematic itself need not be established through philosophical fiat,
but rather appears in response to the self-understanding of modern
society. By addressing the question of the sociology of knowledge,
critical IR scholars have made the connection between the epistemic
self-confidence of modern forms of reason and the structures of inter-
national politics. The question of context-transcendence reflects the
impossibility of assuming a separation between the perspective of the
theorist and these practices, as is apparent in Ashley’s concern with
avoiding ‘Mannheimian simplisms’, for example.153 This in turn reflects
limited acknowledgement of the very indebtedness of reason which is
obscured in the intersubjectivist understanding of truth. The concern

of IR’s Post-Positivists with the question of praxis reflects the same
awareness, along with recognition that the articulation of relations
between subjects and a reality they can never master is (contrary to
the implications of identity thinking) an open-ended, collective process.
Nevertheless, if such insights are to be properly developed, the critical
sensibility reflected in the problematic needs to be coupled with an explicit
acknowledgement of the non-identical. Here, it is CR which points
beyond the recoil, providing a substantive, albeit flawed, notion of objec-
tivity previously unexplored in the discipline. On this view, reality is to be
understood in its particularity, rather than only as the product of consti-
tutive intersubjectivity, as in Post-Positivism, or in terms of the data of
experience, as in Positivism. On this basis, Wight and Patomäki can
identify the problematic subjectivism common to Political Realism and
Idealism, Positivism and Post-Positivism in a manner similar to the
account of the common roots of recoil outlined here.154 However, in
CR this subjectivism is presented as a largely theoretical error. Adorno’s
account of the totality established through identity thinking demonstrates
otherwise. As a result, the concern with the objective must be understood
as having critical and emphatic content through which it can be applied to
the questions of the problematic.
Difference and Communication

The critical problematic has not, of course, been addressed out of purely
philosophical interest in the questions it contains. In Part I it therefore had
to be reconstructed from within attempts to address questions of more
obvious significance for IR, concerning the relationship between univers-
ality and difference and the possibility of the transformation of political
community. Having outlined in general terms its connection to key
strands of critical IR, we can further explore the implications of
Adorno’s Critical Theory by returning to these specific issues. Doing so
enables us to provide a more detailed comparison of his position with the
work of Critical IR Theorists and Poststructuralists.
In many respects, Adorno’s critique of subjective reason has more in
common with Poststructuralist assaults on the sovereign knowing ego than
with Habermas’s reformulated Critical Theory. When Poststructuralists
like Campbell point to the links between conventional truth claims and
real violence, they do so from a position remarkably similar to that
established by Adorno. As Frederic Jameson notes, Adorno’s concern with

‘[t]he repression of the particular by the general and the individual by the
universal’ seems, at first glance to point to the convergence between his
theory and those of Foucault and Derrida.155 The similarities were not
missed by Poststructuralist thinkers themselves. Towards the end of his life
Derrida aligned deconstruction with Adorno’s philosophy, describing him-
self as Adorno’s adoptive ‘son’.156 Likewise, late in his career Foucault
explained that he ‘realized how the Frankfurt people had tried ahead of
time to assert things that I too had been working for years to sustain’.157
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to characterise Adorno as a proto-
Poststructuralist.158 From a deconstructionist point of view negative
dialectics, like any dialectics, must assume a ‘processual totality’ in which
relations between the identical and non-identical unfold but is unable to
encapsulate the ‘donative moment’ which must set that totality in
motion.159 However, Adorno reveals problems with the philosophy
behind this criticism. The theoretical framework which underpins his
concern with the heterogeneous differs significantly from those of
Poststructuralists, and in ways with important implications for Critical
international Theory.
In Chapter 3, Campbell was criticised not for his assertion that truth
claims might be linked to violence – he provided a powerful illustration of
that connection in Bosnia – but for the assumption that, this connection
having been identified, we have said all there is to say about truth and
politics. This Veriphobia emerged from an account of the quasi-transcen-
dental structure of language – différance. This mode of critique, which
provided the basis for Campbell’s solution to the critical problematic,
replaced one problem with another – the transcendental subject with the
quasi-transcendental scene of writing. Campbell’s solution to the problem
of context-transcendence was dependent on a claim to philosophical
insight into the conditions of thought ‘as such’. Despite his insights in
to the connection between truth claims and violence, political practice
appeared to be inexplicable except in relation to this invariant lodestar,
thereby undermining efforts to formulate an IR theory sensitive to poli-
tical actors in their particularity rather than in relation to general laws and
categories. In a similar manner, Campbell’s account of praxis turned out
to depend on the moment of unity provided by problematic concepts such
as ‘madness of the decision’ and ultimately, the principle of différance
itself. The result was that his attempt to place sensitivity to difference at
the heart of IR theory was self-defeating.
Adorno offers a means of maintaining the concern with heterogeneity

whilst avoiding these difficulties. Context-transcendence is not to be
achieved by moving ‘upstream’ to quasi-transcendental conditions but
by moving ‘downstream’ to acknowledge the subject’s debt to the non-
identical. The objectivity, unintentionality, and emphatic nature of
Adorno’s truth reflect this movement – truth cannot be equated with
closure as Campbell suggests, but would involve the open-ended interac-
tion of subject and object. Within this framework, the concept of truth is
salvaged rather than undermined by identification of that which escapes
identity thinking. As Dews argues, for Adorno ‘the very concept of truth
points beyond philosophy to politics’ – properly understood it reminds us
of the relationship to the non-identical, and therefore points beyond the
sorts of self-sustaining technical systems which Campbell rightly fears
would spell the end of politics.160
Viewed from this perspective, the idea that truth, objectivity, and
identity are illusions, undermined by difference as soon as they appear,
repeats the subjectivist mistake of assuming a fundamental structure of
thought free from ‘entwinement with a social and historical reality which it
cannot claim to master alone’.161 Adorno’s pursuit of truth by means of
constellations, force fields, and X-rays points to the means by which
context-transcendence can be pursued at the same time that this lack
mastery is acknowledged – of allowing the non-identical to be expressed
through the concepts and categories which are currently deployed in
identity thinking. As Jarvis puts it ‘there is no way round false identifica-
tion other than through it’.162 In pursuing this approach, we are con-
cerned not with that which is fundamentally other than the subject but
with that to which it has an unacknowledged debt – the task is to ‘think
what thinking lives off’.163
This approach to context-transcendence reveals that insofar as there is
political problem with Western metaphysics, it is the claim to capture the
world ‘without remainder’ – that is, without a debt – rather than the claim
that thought involves the subject-object relationship. Because it subsumes
the objective within intersubjectivity, Campbell’s critique – which rightly
recognises the impossibility of successful identification – must rely on
problematic generalisations and invariants. In contrast, Adorno’s approach
directs us to the experiences of concrete particular individuals located
within the historical articulation of subject–object relations.164 This dia-
lectical move ‘downstream’ provides the basis for a more nuanced and
flexible picture of the forms violence and domination might take in world
politics, and of their connection to the activity of cognition. In this

sociology of knowledge the subject-object relationship can be articulated
in different ways with the result that domination can take different forms.
Certainly, in modernity these are associated with subjectivism and to this
extent Campbell’s criticisms of the metaphysics of presence are not mis-
taken – the assertion that the world can be successfully categorised is
central. However, this identity thinking can give rise to a variety of
forms of politics – most notably the liberal culture industry and fascism –
which is obscured if we focus on the contrast between the ‘metaphysics of
presence’ and fundamental alterity.
Nor is there room for nostalgia for a world before the imposition of
Western metaphysics. As explained in our account of Dialectic of
Enlightenment, the romantic idea of a world other than or prior to the
enlightened one – of a society in which subjects do not face the challenges
associated with cognition – is the product of enlightenment’s efforts to
elevate itself through comparison with earlier or non-Western cultures.
Moreover, the absence of subjectivity would bring its own terror. Any
liquidation of the subject, ‘trustful bondage to the outside world as it is
and as it appears this side of critique’, would be ‘regression to real barbar-
ism’.165 Indeed, this latter possibility partly explains the emergence of
identity thinking.166 Subjectivity is ‘an instrument of praxis and survival’
and its identifications a concrete historical development.167 As Levine
explains, for example, from the perspective of Adorno’s theory sovereignty
need not simply be equated with domination but can be seen partly as a
response to the chaos and violence of the age in which it was established as
the central principle of political interaction.168
Violence against difference arises not from the Western ‘metaphysics of
presence’, but from the concrete pursuit of identity thinking. Modern
political violence with which Campbell is concerned is distinguished not
by identification per se but by the extent to which it is allowed to proceed
unchecked, without acknowledging its debt. Adorno believed this
unchecked identification – identity thinking – was accelerating in late
modernity – through the rise of Positivism, through the equation of the
‘façade of data’ with the essence of society, through commodification and
the culture industry. He was concerned with the transition from a liberal
ideology – which, for all its problems, retained emphatic concepts of rights
and freedom which could be turned against it – to a Positivist ideology, in
which such ideals are mere superstitions and it is demanded that indivi-
duals accept the world as it appears.169 Such a distinction is a useful one in
the context of widespread faith in the power of ‘transparency’ and data to

provide the basis for peace and political progress.170 Indeed, that this
political faith in access to the facts appears alongside globally resurgent
nationalism – in Russia, the United States, the EU, and India, for example
– suggests the continuing relevance of Adorno’s approach and the fears
which inspired it.
If his critique of identity thinking provides the basis for a more
nuanced account of the forms violence and domination might take,
the significance of Adorno’s approach for IR seems less clear in relation
to the question of praxis. In this case, difference cannot be an affirma-
tive category, a guiding concern or principle. Adorno opts for the
negative concept of nonidentity because, since the sway of identity is
firmly ensconced in modernity, that which escapes it can only appear as
contradiction – that is, as ‘nonidentity under the rule of a law that
affects the nonidentical as well’.171 As we saw in Chapter 3, attempts to
prioritise a positive principle of difference rebound to give rise to even
more abstract moments of unity at odds with the particularity which
Poststructuralism tries to shelter. Attempts to explain praxis in terms of
an ‘undecidability’ which ‘brings the domain of the possible into being’
or of the unavoidable ‘coup de force’ all represent the sort of philoso-
phical ‘invariant’ which Adorno seeks to avoid.172 They emerge from a
form of ‘transcendence’ remote from the specific experiences of parti-
cular individuals.173
At this point it will be useful to turn to the relationship between the
Critical Theories of Adorno and Habermas. As discussed in Chapter 4,
Habermas has appeared to offer IR an account of how the relationship
between universality and difference can, through communication, be
articulated in a progressive manner. However, the suppression of the
objective within this theory generates problems with the Habermasian
response to the critical problematic, giving it a formalistic character.
That this neglect of the non-identical leads to difficulties is, from an
Adornian point of view, no surprise. Adorno was not, however, insensitive
to the praxeological appeal of communication. He argued that:
If speculation on the state of reconciliation were permitted, neither the

undistinguished unity of subject and object nor their antithetical hostility
would be conceivable; rather, the communication of what was distin-
guished. Not until then would the concept of communication, as an
objective concept, come into its own. The present one is so infamous
because the best there is, the potential of an agreement between people
and things, is betrayed to an interchange between subjects according to
the requirements of subjective reason. In its proper place . . . the relation-
ship of subject and object would lie in the realization of peace among
men as well as between men and their other. Peace is a state of distinct-
ness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.174
As Simon Jarvis points out, Adorno’s Critical Theory directs us to ‘recog-

nize that society is not pure culture, not subjectivity and not (only)
intersubjectivity’.175 Adorno places objectivity alongside individual and
collective subjectivity as part of a tripartite constellation – subject–object–
intersubjectivity.176 Intersubjective communication can only make good
on its promise to lead beyond violence and domination once subject and
object are reconciled.177 Communication might seem an obvious means
of ensuring peace but pursued on a subjectivist basis it will have proble-
matic implications. Drawing on Adorno, Jay Bernstein has argued that
the Habermasian emphasis on discourse is in fact as scientistic as the
Archimedean assumptions of Positivists, since it aims to exclude ‘inter-
ference’ by those non-identical factors peculiar to the life of concrete
particular subjects. As a result of this suppression of the non-identical,
the communicative theory of truth cannot provide the basis for escape
from scientism or instrumental rationality.178 Tackling the same problem
with a more concrete example, Fred Dallmayr suggests that the emphasis
on discourse resurrects the antinomy between reason and nature which
Adorno criticised in Kant. Adorno believed Kant ignored the concrete
historical mediations of freedom, and the way in which in everyday life
multiple external factors shape what are presented as the decisions of
rational, ‘free’ subjects.179 As Dallmayr points out, for example:
It is not only conceivable but current practice that human society collectively
(at least in its large majority) concurs consensually that exploitation of
nature is in the common interest and required for further progress . . . This
communicatively established or sanctioned control, however, reverberates
beyond its initial target – first of all into the sphere of inner or ‘internal
nature’ . . . From there – and this was one of the main insights of the older
Frankfurt School – the road is not far to social and political domination.180
This Adornian argument allows us to elaborate on our account of the

problems with Linklater’s position identified in Chapter 4; we should
not think of the relationship to materiality only in terms of the possession

of a sufficient level of resources to allow us to engage in communication.
Rather, the quality of the relationship itself plays a role in shaping inter-
subjectivity. There is, therefore, a ‘short-circuit’ in the Habermasian
account of communication; whatever agreement we reach will always be
undermined by the exclusion of the non-identical. The nature of the
problem is further apparent if we remember that subjects are also objects.
As explained above, subjective reason does not simply exclude the material
world; it prevents us from properly recognising each other as concrete
particular individuals.181
Adorno’s account of context-transcendence in terms of the objectivity,
unintentionality, and emphaticness of truth points to an alternative to this
purified reason. His vision of communication between subject and object
extends this account to the question of praxis. In general terms, such
communication would represent a form of praxis in which the elements
of objectivity discussed above are not excluded or relegated, in much the
same way that the expression of the objective in unintentional truth is at
the heart of theoretical knowledge. With this, a non-formalistic mode of
social organisation would be possible, one in which reflection on the needs
and experiences of concrete human individuals shapes the structure of
social organisation. In a general sense this points to the need for IR
scholars looking for new forms of political practice which draw in the
currently neglected dimensions of subjectivity, interaction, and experi-
ence. This project has been taken up by Linklater – as explained in
Chapter 4, his more recent work has explored the moral significance of
corporeal vulnerability.182 Other theorists have emphasised the need for
IR to consider the emotive or aesthetic aspects of world politics.183
However, Adorno tells us more than that we should include such things in
IR theory or look for practical measures through which a politics based on
their recognition might emerge. He also points to the limits of the question
of praxis. Adorno does not offer a framework for emancipatory political action
of the kind generally sought by critical IR scholars – there is no Adornian
equivalent to the global communication community around which to estab-
lish an emancipatory IR theory. Because context-transcendence can only be
achieved by recalling our debt to the non-identical, Adorno’s approach to the
question of praxis is far more cautious than that of Habermas. It was this that
led the latter to characterise his predecessor’s position as one of ‘traditional
“contemplation”’ and negativity, condemned by the ‘philosophy of con-
sciousness’ to ‘renounce its relations to practice’.184
Certainly, for Adorno the question of praxis must occupy a less

prominent place in the critical problematic. However, Habermas’s
criticisms obscure the thinking behind this position. On the one
hand, the abstractness of philosophy is closely connected to the nature
of modern society and cannot be got rid of by a theoretical act of
will.185 Indeed, there are times when theory is needed, and the crisis of
modernity apparent in the totalitarianism and turmoil of the twentieth
century was one of them. It was in this context that Adorno warned
against the ‘practical pre-censorship’ of theory which threatened to
further the work of identity thinking by reducing the ‘thinking space’
available in modern society. The insistence on practicality was, he
claimed, more a symptom of than a means of overcoming or illuminat-
ing the forms of domination that prevail in modern society.186 He
claimed that possibilities existing for genuine emancipatory praxis are
almost entirely obscured by the ‘general coercion towards praxis in a
functional and pragmatized world’.187
On the other hand, if theory needed to be defended again ‘praxism’,
Adorno was also concerned not to drown praxis in theory.188 The theorist is
not in a position to legislate for practice – to claim otherwise reflects the
dictatorial attitude of the modern subject. Theorists would be better off
trying to cultivate sensitivity to historical circumstance than issuing political
instructions: ‘[a] theory is much more capable of having practical conse-
quences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected
itself to praxis from the start.’189 The very project of setting political goals
such as creating a universal communication community already reflects a
subjectivist self-confidence which suppresses the non-identical – before we
even get to the content of proposals, we have endorsed a particular way of
relating to the world and to each another. This is partly what we found in
Chapter 4, where this latent subjectivism undermined the Habermasian
attempt to identify the means by which to pursue the progressive transfor-
mation of world politics. Adorno’s modest approach to praxis is an impor-
tant corrective for Critical IR Theory. As Levine has explained, he provides
an alternative to the prevailing view of Critical IR Theorists, who have
tended to assume that Positivist, value-free theorising is best challenged
with proposals for the pursuit of emancipation.190
Nevertheless, just as we need to take care not to deploy Adorno’s work
as the basis for a new normative IR theory, it is important to avoid the
assumption that he does not have a positive vision of praxis at all. As
explained above, there is an ineradicably emphatic dimension to cognition
and, whilst incautious emancipatory theory is to be avoided, this element

is not an optional add-on mistakenly applied by critical IR scholars.
Adorno’s conception of truth involves a positive account of the sort of
cognition required if praxis is to be possible.191 Communication
between subject and object could be achieved were we to cultivate an
‘impure reason’ conscious of its debt to an objectivity which it cannot
fully subsume and to its rootedness in human needs. Such a vision is
reflected in Adorno’s account of context-transcendence, as applied to the
pattern of recoil above. By pursuing such a form of reason, it would be
possible to avoid the descent of thought into compulsion and to main-
tain sensitivity to the experiences of individuals confronted with the
systems and structures established on the basis of identity thinking.
Moreover, because it points to the non-identical which always escapes
our identifications, this negative dialectic is, as Shannon Brincat has
explained, also an open one. The significance of Adorno’s approach for
IR is that by retaining a sense of the non-identical it aims to ‘save the
autonomy of the subject against its identifications’.192 The goal is to
combat the self-destructive process of identification described in this
chapter, to highlight the open-endedness and dynamism which is with-
ering away under identity thinking. As suggested here, the latter process
is not simply an intellectual one, but is reflected in the practices and
structures of globalised modernity.
Although his efforts are seldom acknowledged, Adorno did take con-
crete steps to promote the form of practical cognition involved in nega-
tive dialectics. In a series of radio lectures he sought to establish a
‘democratic pedagogy’ through which individuals might engage with
the products of the culture industry by exercising critical judgement.193
More generally, his praxeological concerns are only obscured by his
pessimism when we abstract them from the context in which they were
expressed. At the broadest level, the epistemic concerns of Adorno’s
theory are a response to the epistemic self-confidence of modern society
described in Dialectic of Enlightenment. More specifically, his emphatic
vision of communication between subject and object appeared at a time
when grand visions of global reform or national destiny were being
pursued to devastating effect. It was also directed against the central
role of identity thinking in the globalising exchange-based system of the
modern liberal West. The pursuit of a different way of thinking is
undoubtedly a modest goal, but in this context a more modest cognition
was what was urgently required.
Adorno himself was keen to emphasise that his theory was a product of
its time.194 However, there is reason to think that the identity thinking
which so concerned him has now been even further extended: the vision of
society as a ‘façade of data’ enjoys unprecedented levels of acceptance;
identity thinking as pursued through the exchange principle in the capi-
talist world economy has no rival; the commodification of culture pene-
trates deeper into our lives than ever. This reflects precisely the process of
self-destruction Adorno sought to describe and, it seems likely, might
involve political reactions similar to those he feared. Thus, alongside
contemporary identity thinking are the elements of crisis, frustration,
and nationalist backlash. In this context, recognition of the indebtedness
of cognition in all spheres – not only in academia – is an urgent political
task. We have only been able to describe these issues in general terms in
the present work but, as suggested above, Adorno’s sociology of knowl-
edge and account of context-transcendence point to some of the ways in
which it can be studied in IR. His account of praxis reminds us that things
might be otherwise.
4 CONCLUSION
Adorno’s conception of truth has helped us to confirm what has become
apparent over the course of the preceding chapters; that current Post-
Positivist IR theories are considerably hindered by their attempt to sub-
sume the objective within the intersubjective. Linklater’s concern with
communicative reconciliation between communities is legitimate, but the
intersubjective understanding of truth leads him to detach communicative
intersubjectivity from all but the most minimal relationship with objectiv-
ity. Likewise, Campbell’s legitimate concern with difference and the vio-
lence of technocratic truth claims leads him to address important issues,
but his Veriphobic intersubjective understanding of truth means that this
concern is pursued in a way which leads to abstraction. Against this broad
consensus, and in keeping with the criticisms directed against it by Critical
Realists, Adorno shows that truth must be understood in terms of the
relation between subjectivity and objectivity, as well as between subjects.
Whilst the idea that truth involves the historical interaction of subject and
object in the practical pursuit of human interests directs us away from
intersubjectivist truth, it also guides us, after the Critical Realist detour
into scientism, back to one of the key original insights of Post-Positivists.
This is the recognition, reflected in the critical epistemological problematic,
that truth is of constitutive political significance. Thus, Adorno lends

support to the thirty-year Post-Positivist project in IR whilst pointing to
the means by which it might be rejuvenated. Despite the reassertion of
objectivity – and contrary to the assertions of Critical Realists – the nature of
truth is intrinsically linked to the nature of political community and practice
and, as a result, it is important for IR theorists to understand this
relationship.
NOTES
1. Hilary Putnam, ‘Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the
Powers of the Human Mind’ The Journal of Philosophy 91, 1 (1994),
pp. 445–517, reference pp. 447–448.
2. Ibid., p. 445.
3. Shannon Brincat, ‘Dialectics and World Politics: The Story So Far . . . ’,
Globalizations 11, 5 (2014), pp. 587–604, ref. pp. 594–595. But see
Christian Heine and Benno Teschke, ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Dialectical
Awakening: On the Potential of Dialectic for International Relations’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 25, 2 (1996), pp. 399–423;
Shannon Brincat, ‘Negativity and Open-Endedness in the Dialectic of
World Politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34, 4 (2009),
pp. 455–493.
4. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, p. 171.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 102.
9. Martin Jay, ‘Vico and Western Marxism’, in Fin de Siècle Socialism and
Other Essays, ed. Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 49–59.
10. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 149.
11. Ibid., p. 262.
12. Benno Teschke and Can Cemgil, ‘The Dialectic of the Concrete:
Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis’,
Globalizations, 11, 5 (2014), pp. 605–624, ref. p. 607.
13. Ibid.
14. Jay, Totality, p. 105.
15. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 112 & p. 145; Hayward Alker,
Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International
Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210–211;
Richard Devetak, ‘A Rival Enlightenment? Critical International Theory in
Historical Mode’, International Theory 6, 3 (2012), pp. 417–453; Schouten,

‘Cox on World Orders’.
16. Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 50.
17. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 112; Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 49.
18. Jay, Totality, p. 108.
19. Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 54.
20. Alker, Rediscoveries, p. 207.
21. Robert Cox, ‘Influences and Commitments’, in Approaches to World Order,
ed. R. Cox and T. Sinclair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 19–38, ref. pp. 28–29; Schouten, ‘Cox on World Orders’.
22. Devetak, ‘Rival Enlightenment’, p. 422.
23. Schouten, ‘Cox on World Orders’.
24. Cox, ‘Influences’, p. 30.
25. Devetak, ‘Rival Enlightenment’.
26. Ibid., p. 443.
27. Cox, ‘Influences’, p. 30.
28. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), p. 27.
29. Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 55.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 56; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 376.
33. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, (New York: Routledge,
1998), p. 188.
34. But see Levine, Recovering and Brincat, ‘Negativity’.
35. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 9.
36. Ibid., p. 3.
37. Adorno, Minima Moralia.
38. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 502.
39. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. xx.
40. Ibid., p. 41.
41. Theodor Adorno, Gerhard Richter, trans. & ed. ‘Who’s Afraid of the Ivory
Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno’ in Language Without
Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010; (1969)), pp. 227–238.
43. Jarvis, Adorno, p. 21. As Yvonne Sherratt points out, the history outlined in
Dialectic of Enlightenment is ‘ideal’ rather than empirical. Yvonne Sherratt,
Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), p. 79.
44. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xvi.
45. Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, p. 46.
46. Jarvis, Adorno, p. 28.

48. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 8
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., p. 9.
53. Ibid., p. 18.
54. Ibid., p. 25.
55. Ibid., p. 10.
57. Levine, Recovering International Relations. p. 33.
59. Ibid., p. 10. Frederic Jameson emphasises this aspect of Adorno’s philoso-
phy, arguing that ‘exchange value’ is ‘strictly identical with “identity”’.
Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism, (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 23–24. See
also Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist
Production, (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), pp. 43–47.
60. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv.
63. Sherratt suggests that Adorno associates this relationship with the Freudian
id. For Jameson the connection is with use – as opposed to exchange-value.
Honneth labels it ‘recognition’ and suggests that a concern with this rela-
tionship to the world can be found, in different forms, in the work of
Dewey, Heidegger, and Lukacs. Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic;
Jameson, Late Marxism; Honneth, Reification.
65. Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique’, Philosophy &
Social Criticism 21, 1 (2001), pp. 1–20.
67. Ibid.
68. Adorno, ‘Opinion Reality Delusion’.
69. Ibid.
70. Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, (Cambridge: Polity
2001), pp. 25–26.
71. Ibid., p. 25; Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press 1993), p. 7.
72. Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, (Cambridge: Polity
2013), p. 41.
73. Ibid.; Adorno, Kant, p. 25.
74. Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, p. 41.
75. Adorno, Hegel, p. 7.

76. Ibid.
77. Adorno, Kant, p. 26.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., note 2, p. 25 & p. 244.
80. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 35–36.
81. Adorno, Kant, p. 168; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 197.
83. Ibid., p. 44.
84. Ibid., p. 46
85. Ibid., p. 153.
86. Theodor Adorno, ‘The Sociology of Knowledge and its Consciousness’, in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt
(Oxford: Blackwell 1978), pp. 452–465, reference p. 454.
87. Ibid., p. 459.
88. Ibid., p. 453.
89. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50.
90. Adorno, ‘Opinion Reality Delusion’.
94. Ibid., pp. 503–504.
95. Alan Norrie, Law and the Beautiful Soul, (London: Glasshouse Press,
2005), p. 166.
96. Bhaskar, Naturalism, p. 10
98. Ibid., p. 503.
99. Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’.
100. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 498–499.
101. Ibid., p. 498.
102. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 69–70.
105. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘T.W. Adorno and the Dilemma of Bourgeois
Philosophy’, in Theodor W. Adorno Volume 1, ed. Gerard Delanty
(London: Sage, 2004); Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative
Dialectics, (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 77.
107. Simon Jarvis, ‘Adorno, Marx, Materialism’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
pp. 79–100., pp. 97–98.
108. Ibid.

110. Ibid.
111. Quoted in Jarvis, Adorno, p. 227. Jarvis’s translation of this passage is
clearer, but see also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 17–18.
113. Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’.
114. Honneth, Reification, p. 57.
115. Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 77.
117. Buck-Morss, ‘Bourgeois Philosophy’, p. 39.
118. Ibid., p. 41. As we saw in Chapter 5, Bhaskar also uses the term ‘expression’
to avoid the suggestion of ‘correspondence’.
119. Ibid., p. 40.
120. Ibid.
121. Jarvis, Adorno, p. 94; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 80.
122. Cook, ‘Adorno’s Materialism’, p. 720.
123. Ibid.
125. Ibid., p. 163.
127. Adorno, Kant, p. 32.
128. Ibid., p. 5.
129. Ibid., p. 18.
130. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of
Theodor W. Adorno, (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1978), p. 15; Jay, Marxism
and Totality, p. 255; Martin Jay, Adorno, (London: Fontana, 1984).
131. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 505–506; Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 1976.
132. Cook, ‘Adorno’s Materialism’, p. 721.
133. Adorno, quoted Ibid.
136. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.
137. Ibid., p. 27.
138. Lake, ‘Theory is Dead’; Sil and Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism’.
139. Cf. Levine, Recovering International Relations.
140. Jarvis, Adorno, pp. 44–46.
141. Adorno quoted Ibid., p. 45.
143. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study
of International Relations, (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 8.
144. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50.
145. Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 97.
146. Ibid., p. 98.

147. Adorno identified a similar tendency in the culture industry in which
consumers know that they are being manipulated but participate all the
same. Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German
Critique, 6 (1975), pp. 12–19.
148. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 166. Adorno believed identification to be
necessary for thought to take place at all. On the other hand, his concern is
with the identity thinking which characterises modernity, in particular in the
form of the exchange principle. This is a hard line to tread. For example, in
Recovering International Relations Levine presents negative dialectics as a
response to the ‘crisis of modernity’, but also as a solution to the reificatory
tendencies which inhabit thought as such. The present work tips the balance
slightly further towards Adorno’s critique of modern ‘ways of knowing’ and
their specific manifestations.
150. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968), pp. 253–264, ref.
p. 256–257.
151. Cf. Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 101.
152. That is not to say, of course, that Positivist theories provide no insights, or
that specific positivistic theories might not provide greater insights than
more ‘critical theories’ in specific cases.
154. Patomaki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism’.
155. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 22.
156. Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Adorno’s Other Son: Derrida and the Future of
Critical Theory’, Social Semiotics 16, 3 (2006), pp. 421–433.
157. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori,
trans. James R. Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(E),
1991), p. 117.
158. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 22.
161. Ibid., p. 44.
163. Ibid., p. 216
164. Thus in Minima Moralia – the very title of which indicates this movement
downstream – Adorno seeks to represent ‘the moments’ of the philosophy
developed with Horkheimer ‘from the standpoint of subjective experience’.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 18.
166. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
167. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 17, p. 20.

168. Levine, Recovering International Relations, pp. 107–108.
169. Cook, ‘Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique’.
170. Daniel McCarthy and Matthew Fluck, ‘The Concept of Transparency in
International Relations: Towards a Critical Approach’, European Journal of
International Relations, forthcoming.
171. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6;.Alberto R. Bonnet, ‘Antagonism and
Difference: Negative Dialectics and Poststructuralism in View of the
Critique of Modern Capitalism’, in Negativity and Revolution: Adorno
and Political Activism, ed. John Holloway et al. (London: Pluto Press,
2010), pp. 41–78, reference p. 43.
173. Ibid.
176. Jay, Adorno, p. 65.
178. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, pp. 105–106.
179. Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiberg and Frankfurt: Towards a Critical
Ontology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991),
pp. 117–118 & p. 122.
180. Ibid., p. 94.
181. Honneth, Reification.
182. Linklater, ‘Towards a Sociology of Morals’; See also Sylvester, ‘War
Experiences’.
183. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison ‘Fear No More: Emotions and World
Politics’, Review of International Studies, 34, S1 (2008), pp. 115–135.
184. Habermas, Communicative Action Vol. 1, p. 366
185. Jarvis, Adorno, p. 5
186. Adrian Wilding, ‘Pied Pipers and Polymaths: Adorno’s Critique of Praxism’
in Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, ed. John
Holloway et al. (London: Pluto Press, 2010), pp. 18–38., reference p. 25;
Adorno, ‘Ivory tower’.
187. Adorno, ‘Ivory Tower’, p. 237.
188. Ibid.
189. Adorno, ‘Ivory Tower’, pp. 233–234.
190. Levine, Recovering International Relations, pp. 80–81.
191. Brincat, ‘Negativity’.
192. Ibid., p. 473.
193. Shannon L. Mariotti, ‘Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as
Democratic Pedagogy’, Political Theory 42, 4 (2014), pp. 415–442.
194. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. ix.
CHAPTER 7
Conclusion
This book has explored conceptions of truth which have characterised

International Relations (IR)’s critical Post-Positivist tradition since its
inception. The motivation for this investigation had several sources. The
book responded to the widespread view that IR’s epistemic concerns are a
distraction from more concrete international issues. That, in contrast with
the implication that it is time to move on, the best response to such
concerns might be to re-examine critical conceptions of truth in IR was
suggested by three initial observations. First, even if IR scholars are tiring
of epistemic concerns, this disinterest is not matched at a wider societal
level, where an epistemically infused attitude to politics is apparent.
Second, the epistemic underpinnings of critical IR cannot be put to one
side, but are constantly open to challenge. A significant critique of the
prevailing conceptions of truth has appeared in the form of Critical
Realism. Third, there are significant gaps in Post-Positivist IR’s engage-
ment with Critical Theory, not least in relation to the understanding of
truth which shaped Adorno’s work. The book has focused primarily on the
latter two areas, but in doing so points to the means by which popular
epistemic concerns and assumptions might be engaged with in greater
depth in future research.
The picture which has been presented here is a relatively complex one.
The division between the two main schools of Post-Positivist thought in
IR – Critical IR Theory and Post-Positivism – can be partly encapsulated
in terms of the a confrontation between Veriphilia and Veriphobia of the

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_7
kind which has characterised discussions of truth beyond IR. However,

more significant than this has been a broad, underlying consensus consist-
ing of two elements. First, the socialisation of truth which accompanied
the critique of Positivism in IR is accompanied by a specific set of ques-
tions concerning: the link between truth, society, and world politics; the
possibility of context-transcendence and avoiding relativism; and the links
between truth and emancipatory praxis. This critical epistemic problematic
has provided the framework within which Post-Positivist IR scholars have
explored truth’s constitutive political significance. It was not addressed in
the abstract but had to be reconstructed from within the work of critical
IR scholars as they addressed issues of more obvious relevance to the
concerns of IR scholars – particularly relating to universality, difference,
and progress in international politics. The element of epistemic reflection
was tied to accounts of the way in which world political conditions are
constituted and the ways in which they might be remade. It is partly on the
basis of theories of truth that the Critical Theoretical emphasis on com-
municative interaction and the Poststructuralist concern with difference
were introduced to IR.
The second element of the consensus is the broad intersubjective under-
standing of truth common to Critical IR Theorists and Poststructuralists.
This emerged partly as a result of concerns about the ‘scandalous anti-
humanism’ of mainstream objectivist IR theories and of the influence of
interpretivist currents in social theory. From this perspective – which can take
Veriphiliac and Veriphobic forms – truth need not involve any relationship
with objectivity, but rather involves intersubjective epistemic activity such
as discourse or writing, along with idealisations about the conditions in
which those activities could best be pursued. It has helped to sustain a
widespread taboo concerning objectivity in IR according to which the
concern with objectivity is philosophically naïve and politically dubious. As
we saw in Part I of the book, this understanding of truth has had a significant
impact on Post-Positivist IR via its application to the questions of the
problematic by Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists.
To the extent that the critical IR theories examined here did prove
formalistic or abstract, this was the result of the intersubjectivist account of
truth rather than the issues addressed in the critical problematic. Post-
Positivists have been concerned to challenge a form of rationality and
political practice which asserts a politically problematic, isolated sovereign
subjectivity. As explained in Part I, they have done so with a view to
highlighting the way in which it sustains violence against heterogeneity
7 CONCLUSION 227
and obscures the fluidity of political processes. Whilst it has become an

article of common sense, the intersubjectivist conception does not provide
the point of contrast with mainstream ‘objectivist’ assumptions which its
adherents assume. Both Poststructuralism and Critical IR Theory bear the
marks of the same denigration of the objective which has characterised
Positivism. In the case of Poststructuralism, the legitimate concern with
heterogeneity in international relations was addressed in a manner which
led ‘upstream’ to an account of the fundamental conditions of knowledge
and truth rather than ‘downstream’ to engage with a reality it cannot
master. Problems were also apparent in the imbalance in Linklater’s
Critical IR Theory, where issues to do with materiality were arbitrarily
sidelined compared to those concerning the relationship of universality
and difference.
Part II of the book considered the ways in which objectivity might
be reintroduced. Critical Realists have reinvigorated the field by rein-
troducing the notion of politically significant appearance-reality and
subject-object distinctions, and therefore the importance of truth is
seen as a cognitive relationship with objective reality. On the one
hand, this highlights the unwarranted anthropocentrism involved in
the intersubjective understanding of truth, confronting Post-Positivist
IR with the question of the subject-object relationship and its political
significance. However, the Realists lose sight of the constitutive sig-
nificance of truth identified by Post-Positivists. In doing so, they mis-
takenly assume that the scientific pursuit of truth has no inherently
political properties. Patomäki recognises the problems with this posi-
tion, pointing out that it does in fact identify truth with an implicitly
favoured form of instrumental political practice.
Whilst Critical Realists have highlighted the problem of anthropo-
centrism, they fall into the mirror image of the anti-objectivist recoil
which is apparent in Post-Positivist IR. If the latter recoils against rather
than reworks objectivity, the former reacts against the notion of a con-
stitutive relationship between truth and politics in a similar manner. In
Chapter 6 we turned to the Marxian dialectical tradition in search a
means of recognising both the constitutive significance of truth and the
importance of the subject-object relationship. Adorno’s philosophy pro-
vided a theory of truth based on a negative dialectic of non-identity and
the ‘primacy of the objective’. This offered a means of which addressing
the legitimate concerns of both sides of the recoil whilst avoiding their
mistakes.
There are three main elements to Adorno’s conception of truth – it is

objective, it is unintentional, and it is emphatic. On the one hand, as for
Post-Positivists, truth is of constitutive significance. It is connected to
current and possible articulations of the subject-object relationship. At
the same time truth is, as Critical Realists recognise, a matter of the human
relationship with objectivity. The prevailing tendency in modernity has
been one of steadily encroaching subjectivism in which this non-identical,
objective moment in cognition is suppressed. Adorno recognises that
attempts to overwrite the objective with the subjective or intersubjective
are a form of real as well as theoretical abstraction which generates social
structures which are experienced as an external ‘weight’. As we saw, IR’s
Post-Positivists’ failure to identify this tendency leads them to accept a
conception of truth which undermines their attempts to establish a critical
position in relation to contemporary international politics. Adorno also
shows that, understood in its fullest sense, the concern with objectivity
must be connected to the needs, experiences, and aspirations of material
human subjects and their indebtedness to a world their thought cannot
fully encompass. The political significance of truth lies in the need for
reconciliation with the non-identical and the interest in a society free from
suffering.
Adorno offers a conception of truth with which to address the ques-
tions of the problematic whilst avoiding the formalism and abstraction
generated by the intersubjective understanding of truth. As Levine, has
argued, his approach offers a useful general means of avoiding reification
in IR.1 However, Adorno’s truth has several other important implications
for the discipline and for critical IR in particular. Firstly, it shows that
debates about truth and knowledge need not be a distraction from the
proper business of studying IR. The concerns of the book have been
primarily theoretical, but Adorno’s work suggests that epistemic problems
should not be solved, ignored, or dismissed but are interwoven with
substantive political issues. Engagement with the question of truth is
engagement with the conflicted reality with which the inhabitants of
modern international society are presented.
This points to the need for empirical work to explore these issues in
IR. World politics is infused with epistemic anxieties, tensions, and
concerns. Modern politics continues to be shaped by the denial of the
objective, the increasingly restrictive subjective definition of cognition,
and the thwarted promise of immediacy. In more concrete terms, as
suggest in Chapter 6, IR has been concerned with a world shaped by
7 CONCLUSION 229
the integrative trend of identity thinking in political, economic, and legal

systems which render human individuals and the natural world into
fungible units. There is a particular need to engage further with ‘popular
epistemology’ as reflected in the epistemically infused responses to this
context reflected, for example, in appeals to ‘big data’, ‘transparency’,
and in widespread conspiracy theorising. In Adorno’s work, the consid-
eration of such issues – through examination of the political faith in the
progressive power of public opinion, the significance of widespread
superstition, or the relation of such trends to liberalism and fascism, for
example – is intimately connected to the pursuit of more ‘philosophical’
concerns.2 Such popular responses to the political environment of mod-
ernity involve implicit and explicit claims about the nature of knowledge
and truth. A detailed investigation of this issue was beyond the scope of
this book, but represents an important avenue of future research in IR.3
Such issues are related primarily to the question of sociology of knowl-
edge. However, as we have seen, Adorno’s truth involves a unique way of
tackling the question of context-transcendence, according to which reality
cannot simply be seized with concepts. It is therefore necessary to look for
‘expressions’ of underlying reality in cultural phenomena and institutions.
As well as indicating the means by which empirical issues can be
approached, this points to another, equally important implication of
Adorno’s work. As explained in Chapter 6, it offers an account of con-
text-transcendence in which the competing perspectives examined in this
thesis can be seen as elements in a ‘constellation’ or ‘force-field’ which
expresses the tensions and contradictions of international reality. This is
not to say that IR should only be studied philosophically, but it does
indicate that the discipline should be rather more sanguine about its
epistemic debates, and less ready to turn away from apparent abstractions
to supposedly more substantive issues. Adorno reminds us that such
theoretical concerns are not as remote from the experience, activity, and
interests of vulnerable human beings as is generally assumed. Indeed,
those who are excessively concerned about avoiding ivory towers often
blunder into the more pernicious form of subjectivist abstraction he
identifies, one which masquerades as a ready source of empirical truth or
practical guidance.4
Another important lesson of Adorno’s theory emerges from his mod-
est approach to the third question of the problematic – that of praxis. He
shows that the question of praxis cannot be avoided – there is an
inherently emphatic dimension to all conceptions of truth – but negative
dialectics shows that it must be approach in way different to that gen-

erally taken in critical IR. The anti-subjectivist, unintentional form of
truth promoted by Adorno as the appropriate approach to social theory is
inextricably linked to the vision of reconciliation between subjectivity
and objectivity in future practice. However, the precise nature and
sources of praxis are not easily identified – nor should it be pursued
from any theoretical position currently available to us. As a result, his
theory of truth does not point to any particular plan for the emancipatory
transformation of world politics. Adorno was at pains to emphasise that
the possibilities existing for genuine emancipatory praxis are currently
almost entirely obscured by the ‘general coercion towards praxis in a
functional and pragmatized world’.5 Any attempts to move to easily from
theory to praxis ignore the scale of the obstacles erected by the subjecti-
vism which has come to dominate human thought and practice. The
theoretical pursuit of an unintentional truth must remain incomplete,
since truth would be achieved only with the practical reconciliation
between subject and object in a ‘true’ society ‘free from contradiction
and lack of contradiction’.6
The unintentionality of theoretical truth does, however, provide a
hint of what an emancipated society would be like – one of non-alienated
objective activity, where human subjects stand in a non-instrumental
relationship to the objectivity of which they are a part. Ultimately this
is a question of the ways in which the openness, flexibility, and respon-
siveness of thought might survive the self-destructive calcification which
occurs as it becomes increasingly detached from the non-identical. Given
the influence of identity thinking, this resistance is necessarily hard to
imagine. However, as Adorno realised, it requires our urgent attention.
His Critical Theory gives a sense of the ways it can be tentatively
promoted in IR.
NOTES
1. Levine, Recovering International Relations.
2. Adorno, Stars Down to Earth; Adorno ‘Opinion Delusion Society’.
3. Fluck, ‘Theory, “Truthers”, Transparency’.
4. Adorno, ‘Ivory Tower’, p. 233.
5. Ibid., p. 237.
6. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, p. 27.
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INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denotes end notes.
A B
Adorno, Theodor, 5, 9, 11–12, Beardsworth, Richard, 102n94,
130, 137, 140n36, 172, 103n114
219n41, 221n86, 223n147, Benhabib, Seyla, 129, 140n35,
223n148, 224n172, 141n75
228–230 Benjamin, Walter, 223n150
and Habermas, 212–213 Bernstein, J.M., 121, 141n66, 213
and Derrida, 209 Bernstein, Richard (The Restructuring
and Poststructuralism, 208–209 of Social and Political Theory), 26
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Beyond Objectivism and
186–191 Relativism, 104n128
emphatic truth, 201–202 Bhaskar, Roy, 151–152, 162–168,
residual truth, 191–194 175n5, 176n16, 177n36, 178n90
subjective and objective, 194–198 Blackburn, Simon, 2
unintentional truth, 199–201 Bleiker, Roland, 224n183
Anti-objectivism, 25–29, 44, 52, 55, Brincat, Shannon, 216, 218n3
57, 78, 186, 195, 203, 205, Buck-Morss, Susan, 221n105
207, 227
Ashley, Richard, 3, 5, 6, 24, 25, 27,
63n130, 86, 99n1 C
cognitive interests, 32–33 Campbell, David, 6, 17n24, 58n9, 68,
emancipatory realism, 33 90–96, 100n3, 101n71, 102n96,
Habermas, 31–32, 34 104n128, 122
practical realism, 32 Bosnia, Ottoman, 71, 73, 84–85,
technical realism, 32 87–88

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0
244 INDEX
Campbell, David (cont.) D

coup de force, 71–74 Dallmayr, Fred, 213
Derrida, 69–70 Deconstruction, see National
Foucault, 88 Deconstruction (Campbell, David)
iterability, 95 Deitelhoff, Nicole, 118, 141n72,
Levinas, Immanuel, 73–76 141n76
multiculturalism, 77 Der Derian, James, 6, 50, 81
truth, 74, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 9, 16n8,
Veriphilia, 74, 89, 90 27, 48, 55, 69–70, 71, 75,
Veriphobia, 78, 89, 90, 97–98 79–80, 83, 91, 92–93, 94–95,
Western metaphysics, 86–87 122, 209
Carr, E.H., 204, 222n143 Devetak, Richard, 185
Cox, Robert, 3, 5, 24, 25, 28, 54, 185 Dews, Peter, 83, 84, 86, 90, 91, 94,
and Frankfurt School, 185 95, 210
Critical Theory, 35 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 186–191,
Positivism, 35–36 194, 207, 211, 216, 219n43
problem-solving theory, 35 Diez, Thomas, 25, 34
sociology of knowledge, 37–38 Différance, 79–85, 89, 91, 96, 97
Vico, 36–37 Durkheim, Emile, 115, 152,
Critical Realism (CR) 162, 193
and Adorno, 202–208
Bhaskar, Roy, 162–168
E
Patomäki, Heikki, 165–166, 170, 173
Edkins, Jenny, 6
Critical Theory, 35
Emancipatory cognitive
Adorno’s truth, 194–202
interest, 32–33, 53, 149
and Poststructuralism, 10, 49, 56,
Epistemic fallacy, 152–154, 157, 170
117–118, 137, 227
and Truth, 112–113
communicative, 54, 55
Cox, Robert, 35–38 F
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault, Michel, 1, 6, 9, 27, 48, 50,
186–191 51, 55, 63n142, 88, 97–98, 209
Frankfurt School, 11–13, 112–113 Frankfurt School, 5, 12, 33, 45,
Habermas, 106–107, 109–111, 58n15, 112–113, 118, 130, 185,
113, 115, 118–121, 127, 129, 186, 213
130, 133, 147
Linklater, Andrew, 186
praxeology, 31 G
Rengger, Nicholas, 44 Gasché, Rodolphé, 83, 94
residual truth, 191–194 George, Jim, 6, 24, 58n9
truth and, 118–120 Geras, Norman, 125–128
verum-factum, 182–186 Goldman, Alvin, 48
INDEX 245
H Intersubjective truth, 52–56, 128

Haacke, Jürgen, 18n32, 139n6 Intersubjectivism, 29, 185, 203
Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 9, 11, 27, 53, 108,
109, 112–118, 140n39, 142n101 J
and Adorno, Theodor, 212–215 Jameson, Frederic, 209, 220n59
and Marxism, 111, 127 Jarvis, Simon, 197, 213, 221n107
Ashley, Richard, 31–32, 34 Jay, Martin, 185, 186, 218n8, 218n9
communicative action, 113–115,
118–119
communicative rationality, 115–116
K
Critical Theory, 106
Kant, Immanuel, 30, 38, 39, 62n94,
discourse ethics, 109
108, 120, 124, 153, 192, 194,
Interpretation of in IR, 118–120
200, 213
Knowledge and Human Interests, 54
Katzenstein, Peter, 7
Linklater’s approach, 120–128
Kratochwil, Friedrich, 5, 15n3, 138n1,
Naturalism, 133–135
160, 172, 179n117
on objectivity, 131–135
Kuhn, Thomas, 26–27
Poststructuralists, 117–118
Kurki, Milja, 8
realism, 129–131
truth, 55, 105–107, 111, 112–118
Harald, Müller, 118
Harré, Rom, 105, 172, 179n117 L
Herz, John, 33 Lapid, Yosef, 6, 17n25
Hoffman, Mark, 44, 58n6, 60n37, Levinas, Immanuel, 73–76, 84
63n127 Levine, Daniel, 11, 19n53, 102n93,
Honneth, Axel, 198, 219n28, 220n63 189, 211, 215, 219n34,
Horkheimer, Max, 5, 9, 11–12, 223n148, 228
17n21, 19n49, 112, 171, 172, Linklater, Andrew, 3, 5, 24, 25, 28
179n116, 186, 187 achievements of Critical IR
Hutchings, Kimberly, 142n114 Theory, 110
Geras, Norman, 125–128
Habermas’s theory, 120–128
I Kant and Marx, 39–40
International Relations (IR) knowledge, 41–42
critical theories, 4–15 Men and Citizens, 38, 53, 54,
epistemic matters, 8 62n94, 108, 109
Linklater’s approach, 120–128 on Marxism, 110–111
objectivism and Positivism, 42
structuralism, 27–28 realism, 38
objectivity, 129–131 Transformation of Political
Post-Positivists, 3–13, 15 Community (TPC), 107–112
pragmatism, 7–8 triple transformation, 123–124
246 INDEX
Linklater, Andrew (cont.) Postone, Moishe, 127, 128, 142n112

truth, 38–39, 120–128 Post-Positivism, 23–24
universal communication, 121 anti-objectivism, 25–29
Lukács, Georg, 112, 125, 142n104, Ashley, Richard, 31–35
183–187, 202, 218n15 Cox, Robert, 35–38
critical epistemological
M problematic, 29–31
Mannheim, Karl, 33–34, 193 intersubjective truth, 52–57
Marx, Karl, 62n110, 124, 182–183 knowledge and truth, 30
Minima Moralia (Adorno, Linklater, Andrew, 38–43
Theodor), 223n164 neorealism, 28
Müller, Harald, 118, 141n72, 141n76 Veriphilia and Veriphobia, 44–52
Murphy, Craig, 7, 17n31 Poststructuralism, 10, 51, 56, 137,
212, 227
Poststructuralists, 13, 14, 47–48,
N
49–52, 55–56, 63n142, 81,
National Deconstruction (Campbell,
86–87, 89, 99, 100n3, 108, 117,
David), 68, 90–96
137, 149, 208
and Derrida, 69–70
Practical cognitive interest, 32
and Foucault, 88
Pragmatism, 7–8, 114
anti-foundationalism, 69
Problem-solving theory, 35–37,
Bosnia, Ottoman, 71, 73, 84–85,
134, 185
87–88
Putnam, Hilary, 175n1, 181, 218n1
coup de force, 71–74
différance, 79–85
iterability, 95 R
Levinas, Immanuel, 73–76 Rawls, John, 15n2
multiculturalism, 77 Rengger, Nicholas, 25, 44, 45, 52,
truth, 74–77, 80 19n53
Veriphilia, 74, 89–90 Residual truth, 191–194
Veriphobia, 78, 89, 90, 97–98 Risse, Thomas, 7, 118
Western metaphysics, 86–87 Rorty, Richard, 2–3, 48, 49
Rose, Gillian, 222n130
O
Outhwaite, William, 175n3 S
Scientific Realism (SR), 148–154, 205
Bhaskar, Roy, 151–152, 162–168
P critical epistemological
Patomäki, Heikki, 148, 153, 165–166, problematic, 154–156
167–174, 208 Patomäki, Heikki, 167–174
Peirce, C.S., 105, 117, 138n3 Wendt, Alexander, 159–162
Pluralisation, 23, 24, 57 Shapcott, Richard, 129
INDEX 247
Shapiro, Michael, 47, 51, 63n140 U

Sherratt, Yvonne, 220n63 Universal communication
Sil, Rudra, 7 community, 108–110, 117, 120,
Smith, Steve, 24 121, 123, 126, 136, 138, 215
Snowden revelations, 9, 205
Steans, Jill, 25
Subjectivism, 189–193, 195–197, V
199, 205, 206, 208, 211, 215, Veriphilia and Veriphobia, 44–52, 57,
228, 230 225–226
Sylvester, Christine, 8 Veriphilia and violence, 69–77
Veriphobia, limits of, 97–98
Verum-factum, 182–186
Vico, Giambattista, 23–65, 184–185
T
Technical cognitive interest, 32
Teschke, Benno, 184, 218n12
Thirkwell-White, Ben, 25 W
Transformation of Political Walker, R.B.J., 99n1
Community (TPC), 107–112 Wallace, William, 16n6
Truth, International Relations Waltz, Kenneth, 27, 151
(IR), 1–4 Wendt, Alexander, 175n4
Adorno, Theodor, 194–202 Scientific Realism (SR), 159–162,
and Critical Theory, 118–120 172
and objectivity, 129–131 Wight, Colin, 101n52, 153, 208
Bhaskar, Roy, 162–168 Williams, Bernard, 2
Habermas, 112–118 Winch, Peter, 26
intersubjective, 52–57
Linklater’s approach, 120–128
Patomäki and normativity, 167–174 Z
political significance, 4–8 Zeitschrift für Internationale
residual, 191–194 Beziehungen (ZIB)
role of, 8–13 debate, 141n70

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The Concept of Truth

ISBN 978-1-137-55032-3 ISBN 978-1-137-55033-0 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration © aleksandarvelasevic and Lee Powers / Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: A Political Question 1

Part I Post-Positivism and Truth

2 The Parameters of Post-Positivism 23

3 Truth, Violence, and Difference 67

4 Truth and Communication 105

Part II Truth and Objectivity

5 Critical Realism and Truth-Based Critique 147

6 Adorno, Truth, and International Relations 181

Introduction: A Political Question

The political question . . . is truth itself.

© The Author(s) 2017 1

government in Russia, which aims not to persuade the world of a particular

On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness – or, at any

In philosophy and social theory the confrontation between these two

there is something diabolical in the region of relativism, multiculturalism or

In contrast, one of the best-known Anglophone critics of the desire for

2 THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUTH

which international political life consists. In the words of Friedrich

major inﬂuence has been that of Poststructuralist thinkers, in particular

Thinking Space’ are especially concerned with the implications of the

of policy and practice’. It does so by adopting a pragmatist attitude which

3 WHY TRUTH NOW?

described in epistemically loaded terms – we live in a supposed ‘informa-

to assume that philosophical questions of truth and knowledge were

not be equated with utility or consensus. Horkheimer wanted to retain

IR points to the means by which this critical tradition might be

intersubjective understanding of truth function when the political signiﬁ-

32. Jürgen Haacke, ‘Theory and Practice in International Relations: Habermas,

45. Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’; Theodor Adorno, Negative

Post-Positivism and Truth

The Parameters of Post-Positivism

© The Author(s) 2017 23

‘opening up’8; and in terms of a pluralisation of ‘dissident voices’

2 THE ‘BREACH IN THE DYKE’

As described above, this epistemological critique of Positivism has typically

development – in contrast to Positivists standing apart from the world,

members operate within different worlds containing different ‘facts’ which

in the international system.33 Linklater expressed similar concerns when

culture as integral elements in an attempt to identify sources of moral

The Critical Epistemological Problematic

politics. In other words, the critique of Positivism did not leave IR

embarking on a new form of epistemologically reﬂexive IR theorising

realist concepts, knowledge claims, and modes of inquiry and grounding, on

He argues for the existence of different forms of knowledge which relate

Finally, the emancipatory cognitive interest is concerned with ‘securing

communication”’.63 It arises from the human ability to communicatively

of knowledge and for treating all socially determined truths as equally

is not adequate . . . if social reality has, prior to every theoretical ordering

Positivists think that their knowledge is objective when it in fact shapes

Social and political theory is history-bound at its origin, since it is always

Thus, knowledge of international life requires reﬂection on knowledge

of change, partiality, and normativity into the mode of knowledge points