Social rules and the state as a social actor

World Politics

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1975, Pages 521-540

  Andrews, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84974378854     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: 10863338     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2010013     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. For an extended treatment, see Andrews, “Foreign Policy: Explaining and Understanding State Action,” mimeo (1975), and John G. Gunnell, “Social Science and Political Reality: The Problem of Explanation,” Social Research, xxxv (Spring 1968). “An action is first made intelligible as the outcome of [or, actually, as the expression of] motives, reasons, and decisions; and is then made further intelligible by those motives, reasons and decisions being set in the context of the rules of a given form of social life. These rules logically determine the range of reasons and motives open to a given set of agents and hence also the range of decisions open to them.” Alasdair Maclntyre, “The Idea of a Social Science,” in Bryan R. Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1970), 115–16.
2. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York: Viking 1959), 99.
3. If, for example, we find a domestic rationale for an international action that opens with an untested assumption such as “It goes without saying that …,” the presence of such constraining rules should be suspected. For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan 1958), #231: ‘”But surely you can see … ?’ That is just the characteristic expression of someone who is under the compulsion of a rule.” A similar theme is nicely treated by Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytic Framework,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 57 (September 1963). “Indeed, the more important the rule, the greater is the likelihood that knowledge [of the nature of rule-guided activities and the consequences of breaching the rules] is based on avoided tests.” Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1967).
4. For a discussion of the synchronic nature of such an analysis in other fields of inquiry, see Frederic Jameson’s important work, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1972), and Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971). Compare Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1958); Alan F. Blum and Peter McHugh, “The Social Ascription of Motives,” American Sociological Review, xxxvi (February 1971), 98–109; R. Harré and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behavior (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams 1973); and Gerard Radnitzsky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (Chicago: Henry Regnery 1973).
5. See Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster 1972).
6. See Thomas P. Wilson, “Concepts of Interaction and Forms of Sociological Explanation,” American Sociological Review, xxxv (August 1970). See also Ralph Turner, “Role-Taking: Process versus Conformity,” in Arnold M. Rose, ed., Human Behavior and Social Process: An lnteractionist Approach (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1962), 23, cited in Wilson, p. 700: “The idea of role-taking shifts emphasis away from the simple process of enacting a prescribed role to devising a performance on the basis of an imputed other role. The actor is not the occupant of a status for which there is a neat set of rules—a culture or set of norms—but a person who must act in the perspective supplied in part by his relationships to others whose actions reflect roles he must identify.” The literature on the “level-of-analysis” problem in international relations is also relevant.
7. See, for example, Morris Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Schocken 1965), 76ff, 80: “The artist’s role is to violate the rules, though he may fail to violate the rules enough to interest a particular perceiver.” Or compare Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972), 50–53, for a discussion of common law, where the rules are somewhat refashioned with each case, and are derivative of particular cases or are abridgements of the activity itself, not something completely prior to it.
8. see A. R. Louch’s list of increasing departures from a game model in his Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press 1966), 212.
9. For a fuller treatment, see Andrews, “Of the People, By the People, For the People: Public Constraint and American Policy in Vietnam” (Sage Professional Papers in International Studies, forthcoming).
10. Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill 1970), chaps. 6 and 7.
11. R. D. Laing, The Politics of the Family (New York: Pantheon 1969), 105.
12. In spite of its reluctance or disinterest in extending its analysis to the deeper domestic levels and linkages which I suggest are essential to any completely adequate account, Allison’s work remains one of the few sophisticated treatments of the problem of explanation in the study of foreign policy. Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown 1971).
13. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press 1971), 165; emphasis added. Compare his impressive “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” in Toward a Rational Society (London: Heineman 1971). As David Braybrooke warns, “action investigations easily degenerate into complacent and self-limiting recitations of cultural peculiarities: they readily impute to the fabric of the world the concepts and norms associated with contingent social arrangements; and in spite of the lessons to be found in history and anthropology find it difficult to envisage any basic variations on these arrangements.” Braybrooke, ed., Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan 1965), 16.
14. This is a closely interrelated task which I must unfortunately defer. Compare Wittgenstein (fn. 3), #564: “The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point.” For some recent discussions applicable in the case of the United States, see Walter Dean Burnham, “Crisis of American Political Legitimacy,” Society, x (November/December 1972); Gabriel Kolko, “Power and Capitalism in Twentieth Century America,” in J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, eds., Radical Sociology (New York: Basic Books 1971); Milton Mankoff, “Watergate and Sociological Theory,” Theory and Society, 1 (1974); Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination (New York: George Braziller 1973), chap. 7.
15. Terms adapted from recent art and literary criticism. See, for instance, the related discussions in David Antin, “Some Questions About Modernism,” Occident, viii (Spring 1974), 7–38; Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, v (June 1967); Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel (New York: Grove Press 1965); and Andrews, “Surface Explanation,” Ironwood, in, No. 1 (#5, 1975), and “Index: On Reference, Objects, and Language,” in Open Letter, Second Series (forthcoming 1975). I will treat this issue more extensively in a future monograph, “The Social Embeddedness of State Action.”
16. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (fn. 15), 91–94, 113–20, and passim. A fragmented social order may parallel the “decline of the referentials” (to borrow Henri Lefebvre’s term), so that the government can attempt to forge the rules rather than refer (and defer) to them. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper & Row 1971), chap. 3. Compare Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang 1972), 109–59; Jeremy J- Shapiro, “One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience,” in Paul Breines, ed., Critical Interruptions (New York: Herder and Herder 1972); Sheldon Wolin’s discussion of rules and Leviathan in Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown i960); and Habermas, “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,” in Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed., Recent Sociology No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior (New York: Macmillan 1970).