Recovering International Relations The Promise of Sustainable Critique [Paperback]

Recovering International Relationsbridges two key divides in contemporary IR: between 'value-free' and normative theory, and between reflective, philosophically inflected explorations of ethics in scholarship and close, empirical studies of practical problems in world politics. Featuring a novel, provocative and detailed survey of IR's development over the second half of the twentieth century, the work draws on early Frankfurt School social theory to suggest a new ethical and methodological foundation for the study of world politics-sustainable critique-which draws these disparate approaches together in light of their common aims, and redacts them in the face of their particular limitations. Understanding the discipline as a vocation as well as a series of academic and methodological practices, sustainable critique aims to balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other. Each must be brought to bear if scholarship is to meaningfully, and responsibly, address an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

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Introduction: Sustainable Critique and the Lost Vocation of International Relations
The Lost Vocation
Critique and the Loss of Vocation
Sustainable Critique (1): The Problem of Reification
Sustainable Critique (2): Reification in International Theory
Sustainable Critique (3): Chastened Reason
Plan of the Work

Chapter One: For We Born After: The Challenge of Sustainable Critique
Between Comte and Catastrophe
Sustainable Critique as an Ethical Commitment: The Animus Habitandi
The Ethical Lacuna in IR: Three Examples
From Critique to Sustainable Critique
'Non-Identity' and Negative Dialectics
A Logical Impasse?

Chapter Two: Sustainable Critique and Critical IR Theory: Against Emancipation
A New Hope: Emancipation in Critical IR Theory
Post-National Liberalism and Pragmatism
The Adornian Alternative: Constellation anl¤