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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.]

This article offers a history of the wave metaphor in social theory, examining how waves became rhetorical forms through which to think about the shape of social change. The wave analytic—"waves of democratization," "waves of immigration," "waves of resistance"—wavers between high theory and popular model, between objectivist sociological explanation and hand-waving sociobabble, between vanguardist predictions of social revolution and conservative prognoses of political inevitability, between accountings of formal change and claims about material transubstantiation. The article examines usages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that techniques of inscription—graphical, numerical, diagrammatic—have produced formal claims about rising and falling tendencies in the social body. It argues, too, that in such deployments, waves are either (1) overpowering forces of social structuration or (2) signs of the animating effects of world-transforming collective social agencies. The "wave" thus generates questions—and uncertainties—about the relation of structure to agency.

In diesem Beitrag verdeutliche ich meine Besorgnis über zahlreiche Umformungen der Grounded Theory (GT), die mit deren Rezeption durch Methodologien der qualitative Datenanalyse (QDA) einhergehen, und hieraus folgende Erosionen. Ich skizziere zunächst einige Beispiele hierfür, um danach die essentiellen Bestandteile der klassischen GT-Methodologie zusammenzufassen. Ich hoffe, dass dieser Beitrag meine Besorgnis über die wachsende, aber meines Erachtens missverstandene Einvernahme von GT durch QDA-Methodologien veranschaulicht und zugleich als einführender Leitfaden für Novizen und Novizinnen dient, die daran interessiert sind, die grundlegenden Prinzipien der GT nachzuvollziehen.

This working paper contains an intervention by Corentin Debailleul and an extended reply by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. The exchange was first posted on the Capital as Power Forum in January 2016. Debailleul's original questions are articulated at greater length here, while Bichler and Nitzan's reply is reproduced as is. ; http://www.capitalaspower.com/2016/02/no-201601-debailleul-bichler-and-nitzan-theory-and-praxis-theory-and-practice-practical-theory/ ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Recently, alternatives to both the structure and content of 'orthodox' just war theory have been proposed by Jeff McMahan and David Rodin. In this paper, I draw on this debate to show that key ideas in just war theory can be disputed in both of these respects. More broadly, it is unclear how we should assess the debate between differing conceptions of individual principles (such as just cause and proportionality) and the competing wider theories in which they might be situated. I employ the idea of reflective equilibrium, taken from John Rawls, to show how these conflicting viewpoints might be understood and assessed. I argue, then, that contemporary just war theory faces both important questions of substance, and a set of difficult meta-theoretical issues concerning the grounds on which competing just war theories can be assessed. Futhermore, I contend, this should influence the character of – and our expectations for – real-world just war institutions.

The recent prominence of the ideal/non-ideal debate is largely due to the fact that it offers a vocabulary in which to diagnose what many see as a key problem of political theory: its relative unwillingness to provide solutions to urgent problems facing people here and now; or for people as they are rather than as they should be. The primary aim of this article is to offer an improved understanding of the territory that the ideal/non-ideal debate relates to.

"In dem Beitrag wird Hartmut Essers Anspruch, eine 'general theory of action' vorgelegt zu haben, kritisch untersucht. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, dass Essers Handlungstheorie behebbare Inkonsistenzen aufweist, die sich auf die Modellierung der theoretischen Aussagen beziehen. An dieser Stelle wird der Einsatz von Fuzzy-Logic für eine angemessenere und einfachere Modellierung vorgeschlagen. Grundsätzlich wird in Frage gestellt, ob die mit dem Framing-Konzept einhergehende 'Psychologisierung der Soziologie' der richtige Weg für eine Soziologie ist, die an der Erklärung sozialer Aggregationen interessiert ist." (Autorenreferat)