Within the past week, we've been able to examine whether actors attribute particular focus to ideal interests or to socially informed intentions. Before the discussion I had a general understanding of how social theory provides us with a political lens for international actors. Now, I have questions as to what separates rationalist literature and constructivist literature? These different modalities of "personhood" draw distinctions among the different types of social actions. And, because of these key roles, social modality theories create differences based on boundaries. It was explained by Professor Jackson's Soliloquy that these broad world views assume are merely analytical tools to identify common goals and intersecting preferences. But, does this interest based approach to Foreign policy/IR falls short from the perspective of a constructivist (Laffy and Weldes)? --Yes. According to the text it focuses on the empirical investigation between our capacity to validate knowledge from the social condition and conduct, which challenges constitution.
Building on these ideas, I'd like to revisit a claim made in " Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of IR", in which the authors challenge parallel associations between ideas and interests. They argue that in maintaining the distinction between Ideas and interests, " the investigation of the social constriction of interests is in practice disavowed because it is assumed, despite theoretical pronunciations to the contrary, that interests are given and can be determined in isolation from 'ideas'" (Laffey and Weldes, 200). This view criticizes a social construction of interest, which assumes that interest and ideas are an extension of value commitments shared beyond an individual. How So? --Such commitments are socialized and located into an environment where norms drive actions. Laffey and Weldes try to show that existing theories on ideas depend on metaphors and assumed analogies of "personhood" and ideas.
They primarily focus on the constitution of a person, the constitution of an environment, and the dynamic between the two. They conceive rationality as a social characteristic, not an individual one. In thinking this way do they really achieve a stronger conceptualization of ideas? How do symbolic technologies improve or rethink social theory from rationalist literature?
Hi Greg, What I got from Laffey and Weldes is the notion that interests are themselves constituted by ideas, not separate and independent of them; and that ideas are not "commodities" that have a life of their own, fixed in space and time and objects separate from persons, but in fact are socially constructed. Connecting the dots, the authors then argue that interests are socially constructed ultimately since they are a product of ideas, and are not just "given." That is why the use of "symbolic technologies" is used in seeking to describe ideas: Ideas themselves are representations of reality, not reality itself. These representations are constituted by the people who seek to understand reality as they experience it - usually not as individuals but in groups, through dialogue and engagement with the question: What is the meaning of the information they have gathered?
ReplyDeleteOne implication is that assumptions matter, and need to be owned. For example, economists argue that markets "work" because they create repeatable incentives for people to gain returns as investors, profits as sellers and value as buyers. This is based on a powerful idea of utility in economic theory, which posits that people will always seek to maximize benefits to themselves at lowest cost, if given a choice of alternatives in contractual bargaining with other actors in a marketplace setting. The problem is not that this construct is good or not good, but that this "idea" has been transformed into a "law." This means that we now "assume" it applies to all people at all times in all places, that it is not based on any idea about human behavior, that it is simply a given fact of social reality. That is one reason why economics uses the term "rational" to describe behavior that is utility maximizing. This implies that for someone to choose to act differently is not "rational." To use such terminology in describing human behavior places "choice" into a fixed framework that is beyond questioning. It is not constituted by ideas, not socially constructed, and not changeable. When this reification is complete, an "interest" can exist independent of ideas.
Laffey and Weldes are questioning this, because it appears to deny the possibility that people would "rationally" choose to think and act differently under certain conditions. This is somewhat radical. In today's world of markets, the very suggestion that utility itself is a socially constructed idea, and that utility maximizing behavior is not an immutable element of social reality, would likely be dismissed by scientists and economists alike as intellectual insanity.
The promise of constructivism is that it opens the option of questioning assumptions that can lead to outcomes that nobody wants, but are nonetheless justified as "inevitable." The difficulty with constructivism is that it can't escape the inexorability of its own logic in its extreme version. If everything about social reality is ultimately a social construction, and we can never approximate reality in our representations because reality is "fluid" and elusive and all we can do is try our best to "represent it," then everything we see and claim is open to questioning at some level. But if nothing is beyond questioning, then even the idea that everything is open to question is questionable. The bottom line, I think, is that we need to find some epistemological middle ground between the reification of ideas on the one hand, and denial of any stable reality beyond our socially constructed representations on the other.