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Philosophy after theory: transdisciplinarity and the new / Peter Osborne -- Theory as a research program: the very idea / Cary Wolfe -- Theory after critical theory / William Rasch -- Extinct theory / Claire Colebrook -- Perception attack: the force to own time / Brian Massumi -- The will of the people: dialectical voluntarism and the subject of politics / Peter Hallward -- The persistence of hope: critical theory and enduring in late liberalism / Elizabeth Povinelli -- The practice of judgement: Hannah Arendt's 'Copernican revolution' / Linda Zerilli -- When reflexivity becomes porn: mutations of a modernist theoretical practice / Rey Chow -- The canny subaltern / Eva Cherniavsky -- Theory after postcolonial theory: rethinking the work of mimesis / Simon Gikandi -- After life: swarms, demons, and the antinomies of immanence / Eugene Thacker -- Inclining the subject: natality, alterity, ethics / Adriana Cavarero -- The person and human life / Roberto Esposito -- The wrong turn of aesthetics / Henry Staten -- Literature after theory, or: the intellective turn / Laurent Dubreuil -- The liberal aesthetic / Amanda Anderson -- The arche-materiality of time: deconstruction, speculative materialism, and radical atheism / Martin Hagglünd -- Concepts, objects, gems / Ray Brassier -- The pharmacology of the spirit / Bernard Stiegler

Waltz's 1979 book, Theory of International Politics, is the most influential in the history of the discipline. It worked its effects to a large extent through raising the bar for what counted as theoretical work, in effect reshaping not only realism but rivals like liberalism and reflectivism. Yet, ironically, there has been little attention paid to Waltz's very explicit and original arguments about the nature of theory. This article explores and explicates Waltz's theory of theory. Central attention is paid to his definition of theory as `a picture, mentally formed' and to the radical anti-empiricism and anti-positivism of his position. Followers and critics alike have treated Waltzian neorealism as if it was at bottom a formal proposition about cause—effect relations. The extreme case of Waltz being so victorious in the discipline, and yet being so consistently misinterpreted on the question of theory, shows the power of a dominant philosophy of science in US IR, and thus the challenge facing any ambitious theorising. The article suggests a possible movement of fronts away from the `fourth debate' between rationalism and reflectivism towards one of theory against empiricism. To help this new agenda, the article introduces a key literature from the philosophy of science about the structure of theory, and particularly about the way even natural science uses theory very differently from the way IR's mainstream thinks it does — and much more like the way Waltz wants his theory to be used.

Waltz's 1979 book, Theory of International Politics, is the most influential in the history of the discipline. It worked its effects to a large extent through raising the bar for what counted as theoretical work, in effect reshaping not only realism but rivals like liberalism and reflectivism. Yet, ironically, there has been little attention paid to Waltz's very explicit and original arguments about the nature of theory. This article explores and explicates Waltz's theory of theory. Central attention is paid to his definition of theory as 'a picture, mentally formed' and to the radical anti-empiricism and anti-positivism of his position. Followers and critics alike have treated Waltzian neorealism as if it was at bottom a formal proposition about cause--effect relations. The extreme case of Waltz being so victorious in the discipline, and yet being so consistently misinterpreted on the question of theory, shows the power of a dominant philosophy of science in US IR, and thus the challenge facing any ambitious theorising. The article suggests a possible movement of fronts away from the 'fourth debate' between rationalism and reflectivism towards one of theory against empiricism. To help this new agenda, the article introduces a key literature from the philosophy of science about the structure of theory, and particularly about the way even natural science uses theory very differently from the way IR's mainstream thinks it does -- and much more like the way Waltz wants his theory to be used. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The author refers to and use as scholarly inspiration Charmaz's excellent article on constructivist grounded theory as a tool of getting to the fundamental issues on why grounded theory is not constructivist. The author shows that constructivist data, if it exists at all, is a very very small part of the data that grounded theory uses.' (author's abstract)|