Beate Jahn

Kimberly Hutchings, International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era, Sage, London, 1999. xvi + 208 pp., £15.99 pb., 0-7619-5516X pb.

Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. xx + 295 pp., £37.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 521 63050 9 hb., 0 521 63965 4 pb.

This review article appeared in Radical Philosophy 104, Nov/Dec 2000; reproduced with kind permission.

If all theory is normative, as both Kimberly Hutchings and Molly Cochran acknowledge, then what is normative theory? And what is normative theory in International Relations? These are important questions at the end of a decade of wars and civil wars, massacres and bombings, interventions and sanctions. And yet, it is widely asserted that within International Relations attempts to answer them have reached an impasse. Both Hutchings and Cochran set out to analyze the reasons for this impasse and accept the challenge to suggest a way out. Consequently, we should be able to tell, at the end of these two books, what Normative Theory in International Relations can or should be.

Both authors order the theories with which they engage in ‘debates’ - Hutchings begins with the debate between Realists - the Realpolitik approach - and Idealists - the liberal approach - and is joined by Cochran in the analysis of the cosmopolitanism/communitarianism debate followed by the discussion of various critical approaches in response to traditional ones. There is, they argue, a common problem to the seemingly opposed positions which is in turn responsible for the impasse: They share, as Hutchings formulates it, an ontological conception of nature and reason as distinct and mutually exclusive realms from which politics and morality are derived. Realists and Idealists disagree only about the realm - nature or reason - from which moral principles properly have to be derived. Consequently, the dilemma both approaches face is to bring moral principles and politics together, each derived in abstraction from the other - an undertaking bound to fail in light of the fact that the underlying concepts are formulated in opposition to each other to begin with. Normative theory in both cases is reduced to the shrunken form of applied ethics - moral principles unsuccessfully imposed on politics.

Both Hutchings and Cochran argue that this pattern repeats itself in the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate since cosmopolitans depend unreflectively on ontological assumptions - about reason, the individual, the state, the world - which cannot in fact be grounded. Meanwhile communitarians like Michael Walzer use both, arguments based on nature as well as arguments based on reason, without, however, overcoming the distinction. In Cochran’s words, all these authors derive a ‘non-contingent ethics’ - Hutchings’ applied ethics - from weak, contingent, foundations.

Hutchings maintains that this problem is not overcome either in international society, marxist, postmodernist, or feminist approaches while Cochran further adds poststructuralist and neopragmatist approaches to this list. Marxist approaches, for instance, although radically different in their ontological assumptions, reproduce these contradictions on the epistemological and prescriptive levels where they hold that all claims are historically contingent while at the same time maintaining that some are objectively true. Both Hutchings and Cochran argue that postmodernism and poststructuralism albeit accepting the impossibility of ontological as well as epistemological truth claims nevertheless reproduce the traditional vocabulary, only now in inverted commas, and derive from it a non-contingent ethics which claims universal validity for the questioning of all boundaries and claims to sovereignty - thus presenting their own theoretical practice as universally valid and politically correct ethics.

Whilst largely sharing a diagnosis of the impasse in normative international theory, Cochran and Hutchings radically differ in their solutions to the problem. For Cochran, American pragmatism based on a radical critique of epistemology as such appears a promising candidate to cut through that Gordian knot. She replaces Rorty’s emphasis on the private/public divide with Dewey’s assumption that individuals fulfill themselves in constant interaction with the community; and she replaces Dewey’s emphasis on methodology with Rorty’s insistence on language, metaphor, aesthetics and irony. By thus leaving epistemological debates behind and concentrating on ironic redescriptions of the world and creative inventions of new traditions and identities - always mindful of their fallibility - Cochran believes that we can overcome the earlier impasse of normative theory. This pragmatic ethics would liberate feminism, for instance, from wasting time on the attempt to develop a feminist theory of oppression, on endless debates about the proper concept of ‘woman’, and the proper way to present women’s experiences. Instead, pragmatic feminists could simply invent new languages, traditions, identities.

This solution, however, falls squarely into what Hutchings calls applied ethics - only now without the attempt to ground it. While Cochran may be quite right in pointing out that ethics needs to be created, not discovered, it remains unclear how socially constructed individuals can create or invent new and critical traditions without any systematic attempt to understand or explain the system in which they have become themselves in the first place. Hutchings’ solution, therefore, attempts to do just that. The impossibility of grounding our ontological and epistemological assumptions deprives us of external categories by which to judge our theories and our ethics, but not of the possibility to produce an immanent critique along the lines of a Hegelian phenomenology. Normative theory can provide a systematic investigation of the norms and values embodied in political institutions, social practices and theoretical reflections in a particular historical period. In this sense, normative theory is a practice of self-understanding and the validity of such normative theorizing will be entirely determined by the number of people who can recognize themselves in such a theory. In addition, normative theory needs to engage in Foucauldian genealogical investigations of our regimes of truth in order to denaturalize the present by uncovering alternatives which have become suppressed and which may provide a basis for critique.

Hence, where Cochran has given up theory, in the sense of any systematic investigation of the world we live in, and opted for applied ethics, Hutchings has defined the task of a proper normative theory - phenomenological adequacy and genealogical honesty - and given up ethics. For although Foucauldian genealogical honesty may provide some grounds for judgement, these grounds are always only immanent. And the validity bestowed upon a theory through the recognition and identification of readers is one of accurate description or reflection. It does not necessarily produce transcendence and even less so a certainty that any form of transcendence will be morally ‘progressive’.

What, then, finally, is normative theory? For Cochran it is applied ethics based on imagination and the ‘manipulation of sentiments’; for Hutchings, meanwhile, it is a phenomenological and genealogical analysis of ethico-political life. The two books themselves, however, do not provide an imaginative ethics or a phenomenological and genealogical analysis but rather an epistemological critique of the practice of epistemology and an abstract theoretical critique of the practice of abstract theorizing. And for this reason we never learn what normative theory in International Relations is. The answer to that question would, as Hutchings clearly states, require an alternative analysis of the norms and values embedded in the political institutions and social practices constitutive of international relations. Without this, we are left to speculate about the ethico-political system which reproduces ad infinitum the separation of morality and politics, theory and practice.