International relations: thinking about thinking about it
Fascinating international relations reading at Duck of Minerva about a series of conferences seeking to find middle ground between realism and constructivism.
I do wonder, though, how much time IR scholars spend on questions such as these, which I had originally thought were primarily the territory of those in the political theory subfield.
(At many/most U.S. universities, political science departments contain the subfields of international relations, political theory, comparative politics, and American politics.)
Of course, every academic should know the theories behind his or her area of study, but as some of the commenters at this Abu Aardvark post, which inspired the above Duck post, point out -- policy makers probably don't give a second thought to the structure of any of these camps.
Again, I do appreciate that scholars must know the root of what they study, and it is intruiging to see informed minds argue over the type of motor driving the gears. Or rather, whether gear movement is caused by the the conditions of the factory workers, or if it's inevitable...
I am concerned that undergrads at other universities learned a lot more about this topic than I did. We lightly covered rationalism, constructivism, etc. in maybe two classes only.
On another note, but rather related to the idea of peeling back multiple layers of knowledge to better understand the topic:
A professor of mine, who received his Ph.D at Chicago, liked to say:
"If you go to Harvard or one of those other places, you think about how to think about political science, but at Chicago, you think about thinking about how to think about political science."
I always thought that was neat. I think.
I do wonder, though, how much time IR scholars spend on questions such as these, which I had originally thought were primarily the territory of those in the political theory subfield.
(At many/most U.S. universities, political science departments contain the subfields of international relations, political theory, comparative politics, and American politics.)
Of course, every academic should know the theories behind his or her area of study, but as some of the commenters at this Abu Aardvark post, which inspired the above Duck post, point out -- policy makers probably don't give a second thought to the structure of any of these camps.
Again, I do appreciate that scholars must know the root of what they study, and it is intruiging to see informed minds argue over the type of motor driving the gears. Or rather, whether gear movement is caused by the the conditions of the factory workers, or if it's inevitable...
I am concerned that undergrads at other universities learned a lot more about this topic than I did. We lightly covered rationalism, constructivism, etc. in maybe two classes only.
On another note, but rather related to the idea of peeling back multiple layers of knowledge to better understand the topic:
A professor of mine, who received his Ph.D at Chicago, liked to say:
"If you go to Harvard or one of those other places, you think about how to think about political science, but at Chicago, you think about thinking about how to think about political science."
I always thought that was neat. I think.
posted by bp at
2:21 PM
2 Comments:
That's a great quote.
I did my undergrad at Western Michigan U. The dept didn't require theory courses, but of course a few were elective options. I took all I could - the theory was where the good stuff lay.
By
t'su, at 12:24 PM
There have been times when I've wondered if resources are overused on the abstract when they could be more helpful elsewhere, but theory is quite important.
By
bp, at 2:49 PM
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