Frequent instances of intervention in current world affairs have threatened the status of nonintervention as a rule of international relations. Gathering evidence from history, law, sociology, and political science, R. J. Vincent concludes that the principle of nonintervention can and must remain viable. The author approaches the question from several angles, seeking to discover why the principle of nonintervention has been asserted as part of the law of nations; whether states in the past and present have conducted their foreign relations according to the principle of nonintervention; and w
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Frequent instances of intervention in current world affairs have threatened the status of nonintervention as a rule of international relations. Gathering evidence from history, law, sociology, and political science, R.J. Vincent concludes that the principle of nonintervention can and must remain viable. The author approaches the question from several angles, seeking to discover why the principle of nonintervention has been asserted as part of the law of nations; whether states in the past and present have conducted their foreign relations according to the principle of nonintervention; and w.
Burke did not count himself a theorist. Metaphysics, abstraction, was stuff for professor So If the speculation of the classroom was brought too close to the life of politics the result was unsettling, dangerous, revolutionary. Politicians should be people of practice not theory, attending to circumstance before principle, working within a tradition not innovating, reforming before countenancing revolution. They should be concerned with the whole of human nature and not just with human reason, with feeling as well as with thought.
A common theme of all the books under review is the neglect of change by scholars in the social sciences generally, and especially in the study of international relations. A number of reasons are offered in explanation of this. One is that change is hard whereas continuity is comparatively easy. What stays the same over time is simpler to map than that which changes. In any young science static comes before dynamic analysis. (Gilpin, p. 4) Another reason for the neglect of change is the dead weight of tradition. The argument in the volume is that established theoretical approaches to the field have over-emphasized continuity at the expense of change.' (Buzan and Jones, p. 2; see also Holsti et al., p. xvii) A third reason is the decline in grand theory. (Gilpin, p. 4) We are reluctant to ask big questions about society any more and are concentrating on small and middle-sized ones. Fourthly, of course, there is the now well-known western bias in the study of international relations, and a parochialism which allows no purchase on the non-western systems whose study would be important for a theory of international political change. (Gilpin, p. 5) A fifth reason for the failure to do justice to change is anti-intellectualism. The search for laws of change is futile because of the uniqueness, and complexity of historical events. (Gilpin, pp. 4–5) No order can be imposed on the empire of circumstance. Finally, there is the idea that the conservatism of the western practitioner of political science conditions his or her treatment of the subject. (Gilpin, pp. 6–7) A preference for stability, or for, at most, orderly social change, makes it difficult to give a proper account of the radical change that would make the life of the observer uncomfortable. It is not surprising, says Chris Farrands, that one looks in vain to conservative thinkers for 'an account, still less a theory, of international social change'. (Buzan and Jones, p. 87)
