International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

ciological method, 1895), often also called structuralism. Explanations here 
are given in terms of social wholes or structures and not in terms of the par-
ticulars/individuals. For instance, methodological holism claims that the 
property of a social system cannot be explained by its component parts alone 
(because ontologically, the whole is more than the sum of its parts). The 
“system” (whole) determines how the parts behave. Structuralism therefore 
claims that understanding social practices requires a focus on the structures 
and organizing principles within which those social practices are framed (a 
decentering of individual subjectivity). Structuralism is an attempt to scientif-
ically describe the structural principles (or the “logic” of structures) under 
which an activity could be explained. You will find this view in many vari-
ants of structuralism, historicism or other explanatory models that, for exam-
ple, view the role of social class, gender roles, ethnicity or identities as de-
terminants of individual behavior.
In Part II of this book, we will learn about theoretical approaches to IR 
whose models of explanation are based on methodological holism/struc-
turalism in more detail. It is important to understand the differences be-
tween these methodological positions because they result in different ex-
planations of phenomena of international politics. These different explana-

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55 
tions in turn have far-reaching consequences for the practice of internation-
al politics.
From what has been discussed so far, you can see that atomism/particular-
rism/individualism can be found in the ontology, epistemology and method-
ology of positivist science. This core argument will be now further exempli-
fied by a brief introduction to “logical” atomism” (or logical positivism). 
Logical atomism 
The term atomism as described above for the world of material particulars is 
also used for elementary theoretical terms and statements that cannot be ex-
plained or reduced any further. This position is called logical atomism (also 
called logical positivism or sometimes logical empiricism) – in contrast to 
material atomism. Logical atomism became an influential position within 
analytical philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s and throughout the 20
th
century 
(for example with Bertrand Russell’s works The Philosophy of Logical Atom-
ism, 1918 and Theory of Knowledge, first published in the Collected Papers 
1984). Logical atomism was highly influential to the Vienna Circle (especial-
ly for the work of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap).
For logical atomism, the smallest indivisible elementary “units” (the “at-
oms”) are elements of logic. This stands in contrast to ontological materialist 
atomism, where the “units” are physical particles. In logical atomism, all 
meaningful statements are functions of truth of elementary propositions. 
They can be finally represented by atomic propositions. Theoretical state-
ments are required to be reducible to elementary “protocol statements” or, in 
other words, statements whose validity can either be proved intersubjectively 
by sensual experience/observation or at the very least can be brought into a 
logical relation to protocol statements. Once this relation is established, they 
can finally be proven (verified) by accepted protocol statements. Accepted 
protocol statements are understood as conventions – based on intersubjective 
agreement. For logical positivists, science implied that the content of scien-
tific theories could be finally reduced to truths of logics and mathematics.
Reductionism 
You will have noticed that the term “reduced” has been mentioned in the 
previous sections on atomism and methodological individualism several 
times. In positivist science, a system or a thing is not only assumed to be