International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

 
Empiricism ............................................................................................. 
44 
 
Materialism/physicalism/ontological naturalism ................................... 
45 
 
Atomism/particularism/individualism .................................................... 
46 
Phenomenalism 
...................................................................................... 
48 
 
Objectivism ............................................................................................ 
48 
2.2.2. Complex 2 .............................................................................................. 
49 
 
Operationalism and instrumentalism ....................................................... 
49 
 
Nominalism ............................................................................................ 
51 
 
Methodological individualism ................................................................ 
53 
Logical 
atomism 
..................................................................................... 
55 
 
Reductionism .......................................................................................... 
55 
Unity of science ...................................................................................... 
57 
 
Causal, law-like explanation and the belief in prediction ...................... 
58 
 
In sum ..................................................................................................... 
61 
2.3. 
Competing philosophies of science in IR ............................................... 
61 
Step 3: 
Check your understanding: key aspects and review questions .............. 
63 
Step 4: 
Consolidation ................................................................................................... 
64 

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37 
Introduction 
As you have learned in Unit 1, the discipline of International Relations was 
born after the Great War out of the desire to systematically find the causes of 
war and the conditions for a lasting peace. Since then, IR’s contribution to 
the practice of international politics has been closely tied to the idea of (so-
cial) science. However, even though there was a general acceptance that IR 
could and should be a science, the exact meaning of the term “science” itself 
was not quite clear. According to Czempiel (1965: 280), a consensus already 
existed at the end of the 1930s that, in order to define International Relations 
as “science”, the methods of the natural sciences had to be applied: to collect 
facts, to arrange them in some sort of “order”, and to explain them. For ex-
ample, in the late 1930s, E.H. Carr argued that realism could provide a scien-
tific theory because of its emphasis on the acceptance of facts and on the 
analysis of their causes and consequences (Carr 1939). Czempiel’s assertion 
raised an interesting point that shows how the idea of IR as a science pro-
gressed towards a very specific understanding of science as closely bound to 
the idea of natural science. This signalized a departure from an earlier under-
standing of International Relations as an area of study that synthesizes 
knowledge from other disciplines, drawing on judicial, economic, historical 
and technical aspects (Czempiel 1965: 280-281). 
In the early years, the issue of science was not a core concern in the theo-
retical work being done on interstate relations. This situation stands in sharp 
contrast to later stages in the discipline’s development, when debates and 
controversy about the nature of a scientific study of IR became a permanent 
feature. This remains true for today’s International Relations. As will be 
shown, however, at the heart of the discipline exists a particular understand-
ing of science – positivism – which has come to dominate and shape the dis-
cipline since the 1950s. Positivism provides the philosophy of science back-
ground for those IR theories that count as the most influential today. In the 
time period before, the scientific, or broadly speaking the systematic and 
methodical study of IR, is often called “traditional” or “classical”. In con-
trast to the positivist understanding of science, the “traditional”/“classical” 
inquiry into international relations is not based on an understanding of the 
concept of science drawn from the natural sciences (Little 1980: 7; Wight 
2002: 28).

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