Reviewing logics of action: incommensurable paradigms or crisscrossing horizons?

The entrenched understanding, for the most part implicit, of the relationship across logics of action in our field is one of incommensurability.Footnote 3 The story goes something like this. There is the logic of consequences, which assumes that actors weigh costs and benefits in order to figure out what to do. Within this logic, two scholarly interpretations of how actors weigh costs and benefits can be distinguished. On the one hand, there are the adherents to rational choice. For the sake of parsimony (Keohane, Reference Keohane1988: 379; Kydd, Reference Kydd2008: 430), they assume that individuals calculate – based on consistent, stable and exogenously given preferences – what makes for the optimal course of action for them to get what they want.Footnote 4 On the other hand, psychological approaches criticize that actors do not compute endlessly until they have found the optimal course of action. Instead, these approaches hold that actors put heuristics (analytical short-cuts such as a historical analogy)Footnote 5 to use that tell them when to stop searching for alternative options. Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality (Simon, Reference Simon1957) rests on heuristics and so do a number of approaches that build on this notion, such as prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, Reference Kahneman and Tversky1979) and fast and frugal heuristics (Gigerenzer and Todd, Reference Gigerenzer and Todd1999).

This is only the beginning of the incommensurability story; the plot thickens. Although the differences between these two strands of consequentialism are already highly pronounced, the schisms among different logics of action cut even deeper. With the Constructivist Turn in IR came the logic of appropriateness. Following March and Olsen (Reference March and Olsen1989), many Constructivists started to maintain that actors do not weigh costs and benefits but abide by identity-constituting norms (Berger, Reference Berger1996; Herman, Reference Herman1996). More recently, two other logics of action have become forceful contenders. The logic of argumentation holds that individuals, embedded in a shared stock of taken-for-granted knowledge (lifeworld), figure out what to do together by exchanging arguments with one another. Most theorizing about argumentation in IR (Müller, Reference Müller1994; Risse, Reference Risse2000) draws heavily from Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, Reference Habermas1995a, Reference Habermasb). At its core is the ideal-speech situation, which configures the social context of the argumentative encounter in a way that it does not interfere with the ‘force of the better argument’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas1991: 132).Footnote 6 Finally, there is the logic of practice. Mainly drawing from the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977, Reference Bourdieu1990), a number of authors emphasize the habitual dimension of international relations (Hopf, Reference Hopf2002; Adler, Reference Adler2005; Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2008). Agents take their reasons for action too much for granted as that they could reflect upon these reasons by themselves, not even to speak of debating them among themselves. Instead, they act upon common sense, which is generated out of the interplay of habitus and field (Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2008). The habitus is the ‘matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1977: 83) into which the individual has been socialized, and predisposes actors to pursue certain practices rather than others. The field is about the organizing principles of social encounters among individuals, which put actors into (unequal) relationships with one another.

This incommensurability story, however, is misleading. It is not that it entirely misses the point. Without any doubt, what has been sketched above amounts to important differences across logics of action (and different strands within them). But this story is entirely one-sided. There are not only differences but also overlapping concerns. Two of these are particularly noteworthy. First, across the logics of action, many scholars are concerned about avoiding determinism. Human beings are not machines that do everything in perfectly predictable manner as it is postulated by the core assumptions of rational choice (Wendt, Reference Wendt1999: 125–130). Instead, there is a very human element in how actors make up their minds that cannot be squeezed into neat scholarly boxes. This human element has a lot to do with creativity. Actors use their imagination to compose pictures of the world that make this world intelligible to them. Second, across the logics of action there are scholars who attempt to capture these creative assemblages with the term judgement. They write about judgement in order not to gloss over the less tangible aspects of human reasoning.Footnote 7

Among consequentialists, psychological approaches are at the forefront of circumventing determinism. Rejecting overly rigorous assumptions of rationality, there are frequent references to judgement. The term is juxtaposed to rational choice's assumptions on human calculation and computation (Kahneman et al., Reference Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky1982; Vertzberger, Reference Vertzberger1990; Tetlock, Reference Tetlock2005). Self-critical adherents to rational choice, broadly understood, also reject determinism and put judgement at the centre of their inquiries (Elster, Reference Elster1989; Sen, Reference Sen2002). Elster (Reference Elster1983: 88) puts it very well: ‘If people are agents in a substantive sense, and not just the passive supports of their preference structures and belief systems, then we need to understand how judgement and autonomy are possible’. This concern makes Elster doubt the core assumptions of rational choice outlined above. Similarly to the rational choice strand of consequentialism, there is also a slippery slope from the logic of appropriateness to determinism. As Sending (Reference Sending2002) points out correctly, ‘pure’ applications of this logic in IR are rather deterministic. They assume that a given social structure always makes people do the same things, thus perpetuating the re-construction of this structure. Scholars infusing this logic with other logics react to this problem. The logics with which appropriateness is infused – argumentation (Finnemore and Sikkink, Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Checkel, Reference Checkel2001) and practice (Wiener, Reference Wiener2009) – all have notions of judgement at their very core.

Habermas's thought on communication is deeply influenced by Arendt's notion of political judgement (Habermas, Reference Habermas1977). Composing arguments, for Habermas, is a creative act. It involves putting the lifeworld to use to make sense of a political issue. How actors do this is up to their imaginative reasoning and their deliberation with others. It is not the individual on his or her own who is the arbiter of what is a convincing argument but a community of actors, exchanging arguments with one another. Habermas shares the emphasis on creatively composing arguments and deliberating them in a community with classical rhetoric. This cluster of thought is all about connecting judgement and argumentation (Aristotle, Reference Aristotle1995; Cicero, Reference Cicero2003). Judgement is one of Bourdieu's key concepts and closely tied to his notion of practice, especially in his highly influential Distinction (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1984). Social embeddedness, constituted by the interplay of habitus and field, features very prominently. It does not determine how actors figure out what to do but merely predisposes them to making certain judgements rather than others.

The gist of all of this is that logics of action are not incommensurable paradigms but, in Gadamer's language (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer1972; Kornprobst, Reference Kornprobst2009), overlapping horizons. It may take some effort to uncover them but avoiding determinism and appreciating the importance of judgement – two sides of the same coin – constitute important overlaps across contending perspectives. What to make of this overlapping? In the first place, it should make us take judgement seriously. The perspectives reviewed above differ widely in terms of their meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological assumptions. If these perspectives – these notable differences notwithstanding – point into the same direction, we do have reason to believe that there is something to this direction. Furthermore, the task of improving our grasp of judgement invites a ‘multiperspectival mode of social inquiry’ (Bohman, Reference Bohman2002: 502) and ‘eclectic theorizing’ (Katzenstein and Sil, Reference Katzenstein and Sil2008: 109). With clues about how to study judgement being scattered across different horizons, there is a need to draw from all of these horizons to improve our understanding of judgement.

When it comes to logics of action more generally, some scholars, rejecting the conventional wisdom of incommensurability, have explored three eclectic pathways. First, there is the attempt to identify scope conditions under which different logics of action apply (Checkel, Reference Checkel2001). Second, other studies ‘constructivise’ the choice mechanism of the logic of consequences. These explorations come from the Rationalist side, with rational choice scholars putting more emphasis on the ideational dimension of calculating costs and benefits (Goldstein and Keohane, Reference Goldstein and Keohane1993; Bates et al., Reference Bates, Figueiredo and Weingast1998); and they come from the Constructivist side, with endeavours to enquire into the formation of identity and interests (Klotz, Reference Klotz1995; Hopf, Reference Hopf1998).Footnote 8 Third, there are authors who distinguish – some more explicitly and others more implicitly – between different phases of the political process through which actors come to make up their minds. Some of these phases are dominated by consequentialism and others by alternative logics such as argumentation (Finnemore and Sikkink, Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Crawford, Reference Crawford2002; Kornprobst, Reference Kornprobst2008).

When it comes to studying judgement, however, these three pathways do not suffice. Taking the existing scholarly categories (i.e. the four logics of action) for granted is not a viable research option. Metaphorically speaking, this would take them to be islands to be bridged (or, with regard to scope conditions, simply to be located but kept apart). The findings of this section, however, point towards another direction. They point towards developing something innovative – informed by these logics but transcending them at the same time – out of the clues provided by different horizons. In other words, an endorsement of eclecticism alone is not enough. We need to remain open to a transformative research agenda that develops beyond existing logics of action (in Gadamer's language, one that may even end up fusing horizons).Footnote 9 The following sections embark on this endeavour, first by defining judgement and then by outlining a map for studying how actors come to make judgements.

Defining political judgement: the agent's logics of action

In our discipline (and not only there), uses of the concept of political judgement are characterized by an intriguing paradox. On the one hand, there are frequent references to judgement. These all strongly suggest that judgement is not just any aspect of human agency but a central – perhaps even the central – one. On the other hand, the concept suffers from a lack of conceptual clarification. It seems that judgement appears to be such a self-evident and pervasive aspect of political life to scholars using this term that they hardly ever bother defining it. Even psychological approaches that are full of references to judgement all too often neglect to reflect about the concept itself (Kahneman et al., Reference Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky1982; Vertzberger, Reference Vertzberger1990; Tetlock, Reference Tetlock2005).Footnote 10

IR, and even Psychology, overlook that there is a rich literature on judgement in Political and Social Theory. These writings, going back to ancient Greek philosophy, deal with conceptualizations of judgement in great detail. This makes them an important reservoir of insights on this phenomenon. What is more, contending conceptualizations of judgement in Political and Social Theory underpin much of the debates on logics of action in our field. Thus, not only is this literature an important reservoir of insights but it is also extraordinarily well suited for eclectic-transformative efforts to move beyond the confines of logics of action.

Political and social theorists do not agree on every nuance of the concept. But it is possible to identify four features of judgement, which take the main thrust of what these theorists have written on judgement seriously. First, political judgement is a human faculty. Classical thought is somewhat ambiguous on this. On the one hand, Plato writes about judgement in his texts about political leadership, such as the Statesman (Plato, Reference Plato1925) and the Meno (Plato, Reference Plato1961). Taken together with the caste system he outlines in the Republic this may very well be interpreted as a statement that only good rulers have judgement (or at least good judgement). The same may be said of Aristotle. Judgement appears in the Nichomachean Ethics in the shape of good judgements made by good rulers (Aristotle, Reference Aristotle1934), and in the Rhetoric (Aristotle, Reference Aristotle1995), where it is the good orator who wins over the audience to follow his judgement (but it is unclear whether the audience judges). Sophists, by contrast, welcome feedback by the audience (Sprague, Reference Sprague1972). They appear to having been more willing to understand judgement as a human faculty, as opposed to a unique capacity defining the ruling elite. Kant, the major Enlightenment thinker about judgement, sides more with Aristotle than with the Sophists. For him, judgement is a capacity (Vermögen), more precisely a talent (Talent) nurtured by training (geübt; Kant, Reference Kant1956: B171–172; Reference Kant1974, Einl. II). In other words, no judgement without talent and not everyone has talent. Arendt's highly influential work on judgement, for the most part a re-interpretation of Kant's writings on judgement, makes a very strong case that judgement is a human faculty (Arendt, Reference Arendt1961, Reference Arendt2003, Reference Arendt2006). Whether people always exercise this judgement and how they do so is another question. In current debates on judgement, there is a far-reaching consensus that judgement is a human faculty (Beiner, Reference Beiner1983; Benhabib, Reference Benhabib2001).

Second, judging is practical reasoning by subsuming particulars under universals. Universals are the taken-for-granted ideas that individuals employ to make sense of political life such as causal and constitutive relationships, ideas of belonging and positioning vis-à-vis others, and standards of behaviour. Some of these ideas are rather abstract (e.g. legal principles), whereas others are more concrete (for instance historical analogies). For the most part, universals are more or less widely shared across communities. Yet there are also some idiosyncratic universals that an individual acquires during his or her peculiar socialization process. Furthermore, even universals that are pervasive in a community are not necessarily shared ‘all the way down’. Universals tend to be multivocal, that is, they are interpreted differently by different actors (Beiner, Reference Beiner1983: 132; Ansell, Reference Ansell1997: 373). Taken together, universals make up the ‘tool kit’ (Swidler, Reference Swidler1986: 277) from which individuals draw to make sense of the world.

Particulars, by contrast, are much more specific. They are the concrete ideas through which individuals define the key features of a given political situation. The interpretations of these key features become intelligible only in light of the interpretation of the universals that actors apply to them. There are no particulars without universals. This process can be further specified as subsuming particulars under universals. In its most simple form, P (particular) becomes intelligible to me because I find a category U (universal) that is familiar to me and I interpret P to be an instance of U. U contains the clues for how to make sense of P. My subsuming of P under U is a creative endeavour. Subsuming is not automatic and it is not a logical inference to be evaluated by an analyst as objectively sound or unsound. Instead, it is my creative linkage of the general (U) and the concrete (P) through which I come to see the latter and, thus, make it intelligible to myself.

Most cases of judgement are more complex than this because there are several Us and Ps, making judgements intricately woven webs of subsumptions. Two simplified illustrations, both taken from current British debates about renewing the Trident programme (nuclear warheads carried by ballistic missile submarines), may clarify what it entails to subsume particulars under universals. One of the positions in favour of renewing the programme reads something like this: threats from first uses of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons persist (universal). Effective deterrence can prevent these first uses (universal). Effective deterrence against these kinds of threats requires nuclear capabilities (universal). The renewal of the nuclear programme provides effective deterrence, and, thus, should be done (particular). Subsuming the issue of Trident under these universals makes it an issue of deterrence and a requirement of national security. One of the positions against renewing Trident may be summarized as follows: the United Kingdom is a signatory to the non-proliferation Treaty (universal). The non-proliferation Treaty requires nuclear disarmament from its signatories (universal). The United Kingdom ought to abide by international law (universal). Renewing the nuclear programme is a violation of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and, thus should not be done (particular).

Judgement, understood as subsuming particulars under universals, makes for a much broader concept of reasoning than found in current debates in IR. How an agent subsumes may resemble one of the established logics of action. In the simplified examples above, the pro-Trident stance follows the logic of consequences while the anti-Trident position follows the logic of appropriateness. However, the reasoning of political actors rarely ever follows a certain logic of action in a pure form. Judgements usually move back and forth between – even intertwine – what scholars think of as logics of action.Footnote 11 To return briefly to the examples above, proponents of Trident also subsume particulars under universals as adherents to the logic of appropriateness would expect. They interpret the NPT (universals) very different from the opponents, and thus end up concluding that the treaty permits the renewal of the nuclear programme (particular). Conversely, there are also opponents who proceed as consequentialists might predict. Opponents interpret the universals of 21st century threats and ways of dealing with these threats differently (universals), and thus end up concluding that the renewal of the nuclear programme amounts to an anachronistic policy (particular).

Third, judging is orienting oneself in a political situation. This orientation consists of two dimensions: On the one hand, agents orient themselves substantively. The individual figures out whether something constitutes a political problem; if so, how her community is to explain the dynamics of this problem; and how it is to act accordingly. The above illustration is an example of a substantive orientation. As far as the subject matter is concerned, proponents and opponents of renewing the nuclear programme agree that this issue constitutes a political problem, but, interpreting universals differently, they reach different conclusions about explaining the dynamics of the problem and prescriptions for how to act accordingly. Most of the current literature on judgement defines judgement exclusively as making substantive judgements. Yet a careful look at Arendt's work hints that there is also another dimension of judgement. According to her account, Adolf Eichmann refused to make substantive judgements. But he did make judgements nevertheless. Eichmann judged himself to be in a role where he simply had to obey the law and orders given to him (Arendt, Reference Arendt1964). His self-denial of any political efficacy and responsibility amounted to a series of catastrophic political judgements.

On the other hand, therefore, agents orient themselves procedurally. The individual figures out what her relevant community is in a given situation, how she relates to other members of this community, and what she can do to make herself heard in this community. Among contemporary key authors on judgement, it is especially Bourdieu who emphasizes this often neglected dimension of judgement. His Distinction is about struggles, deeply shaped by socialization processes, of actors to position themselves vis-à-vis other actors. In a similar vein, he emphasizes the socialization of actors into strategic practices (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1977: 76). In the political field, for example, such strategies are crucial to produce and reproduce the status of an authorized spokesperson (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1991: 171–202). To return to our illustration from above, among all people in the United Kingdom making substantive judgements about nuclear capabilities only very few arrive at procedural judgements that their input into the political process matters. For example, nobody ever listens to the public (universal). I am just a member of the public (universal). Thus, voicing my rejection of Trident is futile (particular). Vice versa, some actors make much more politically savvy procedural judgements even if they may not feel that strongly about their substantive judgements. For example, I am a political leader (universal). Political leaders must be outspoken about issues that the public sees as important (universal). Trident is such an issue, and thus, I have to take initiative (particular).

Agents cannot pluck universals for judgements – no matter whether substantive or procedural – out of the air. Agents cannot employ just any idea as universal but only taken-for-granted ideas into which they have been socialized, that is, universals that are part of their tool kit. Carrying the tool kit metaphor a bit further than Swidler, we can distinguish between two compartments of the tool kit, containing different kinds of tools. There is a procedural repertoire, which contains all clues that are available to agents to position themselves. There is also a substantive repertoire, which contains all clues that are available to agents to take a political stance.

Fourth, judgements range from habitual to reflective. Kant distinguishes between determinant and reflective judgements (Kant, Reference Kant1974: Einl. V). He argues that some judgements are bound by clear-cut rules for how to subsume particulars under universals. Other judgements, he stresses, are reflective. Here it is a matter of searching and finding an adequate universal for a particular as well as a plausible linkage between the two. In Kant's view, aesthetic judgements are reflective. It is Hannah Arendt, who discovers the significance of reflective judgements for politics. Political judgements, she maintains, are reflective judgements because the selection of the universals and the exercise of subsuming particulars under them are anything but automatic. Conceptualizations of unreflective judgements return in the work of Bourdieu, who makes a convincing argument that agents often subsume particulars under universals habitually. They do not reflect upon how to subsume particulars under universals. Instead, the universals, deeply taken for granted, loom so large that they leave only a small margin for actors to be creative and improvise how to subsume particulars under universals in a given situation. These improvizations are not made explicit; they stay underneath the radar-screen of discourse. Exercising political judgement is best understood on a spectrum from habitual to reflective. To return to the illustrations above, political leaders are unlikely to reflect much about their role as political leaders every time they have to make judgements, even if this is as important and divisive an issue as Trident. These kinds of judgements become rather habitual and may best be understood as a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1998: 77). By contrast, substantive judgements about what to do with Trident are more likely to be reflective because they deal with a subject matter that deviates substantially from the everyday political affairs in the United Kingdom.

Given these four features, political judgement may be understood as the human faculty to orient oneself in a political situation procedurally and substantially by subsuming the particulars of this situation, sometimes more reflectively and sometimes more habitually, under selected universals of political life. This definition is located at a higher and more inclusive level of abstraction than the entrenched scholarly logics of action. It does not preclude any of these logics but it does caution against being fixated on just one of these established scholarly categories. For example, agents may orient themselves procedurally by computing costs and benefits (rational choice variant of logic of consequences), by habitually following their political strategies (Bourdieuan understanding of the logic of practice), or, much more likely, by a more complex hybrid of the two. At the same time, they may orient themselves substantially by relying on a simple heuristic (fast and frugal heuristics variant of the logic of consequences), by exchanging arguments and agreeing with the better one (Habermasian variant of the logic of argumentation), or, again more likely, by various shades of grey located between the fully habitual and fully reflective poles of judgement.

Studying political judgement: a map for empirical research

How can we study how agents make and unmake their judgements? Psychology is a discipline that comes immediately to mind when asking this question. After all, it is the only field of study in (and around) which an analytical and normative research programme on judgement has developed. Although this research has been highly influential in other fields – such as Kahneman and Tversky (Reference Kahneman and Tversky1979) in Economics – it has found its way into IR only slowly.

Psychological approaches, often informed by experimental psychology, pursue a theoretically ambitious pathway for studying judgements. On the one hand, they share some important starting points for their research with rational choice. There is the conceptual commitment to the logic of consequences; actors are assumed to weigh costs and benefits when making their choices (Baron, Reference Baron2004; Hastie and Dawes, Reference Hastie and Dawes2010). There is the ontological commitment to individualism; social embeddedness does not feature when individuals make their choices.Footnote 12 There is the epistemological commitment to explaining and predicting; to this end, many authors develop sophisticated mathematical models (Griffin and Brenner, Reference Griffin and Brenner2004; Lagnado and Sloman, Reference Lagnado and Sloman2004). On the other hand, psychological approaches on judgement distance themselves from what they criticize as rational choice's simplistic assumptions of how actors come to choose. As alluded to earlier, Simon's notion of bounded rationality features prominently in attempts to conceptualize practical reasoning along more realistic lines, for instance for fast and frugal heuristics as well as for prospect theory.

It is unclear, however, to what extent holding on to some of rational choice's key conceptual, ontological, and epistemological assumptions is compatible with studying judgement. There is the conceptual issue that judgement – as defined above – is much broader than the logic of consequences. Narrowing judgement down to this one scholarly box only seriously misrepresents the winding roads through which actors come to orient themselves. Among other things, it radically reduces the habitual-reflective spectrum of judgements to one single point on this spectrum as well as the many possibilities of assembling an intelligible picture of the world to the weighing of costs and benefits. There is the ontological problem of disembedding the individual from any social context. This simplification misses many aspects of judgement. Perhaps most notably it does not allow for studying procedural judgements because these are all about relations among communicators as well as between communicators and receivers. Finally, there is the epistemological constraint that the study of judgement sits uneasily with ambitions to predict. Judgement is about creativity and autonomy; it is about the peculiar human dimension of reasoning that cannot be squeezed into narrow scholarly categories, and, therefore, is not easily predictable.

Prospect theory, for example, highlights these three sets of problems. Kahneman and Tversky's conceptual move reduces judgement to the logic of consequences, albeit a sophisticated variant. The authors understand judgement as the process through which actors determine a reference point (editing phase) and then figure out whether, given this reference point, an expected outcome would be a loss or a gain (evaluation phase). Any other lines of reasoning on the part of the agents are excluded although they may have a lot to do with how actors come to judge. The authors’ ontology is individualistic. In their account, framing and editing has very little to do with social relationships. This is a problem for any theory of judgement but especially for Kahneman and Tversky. It makes it difficult for them to counter a standard criticism of their theory, that is, that it lacks a theory of framing. Framing has a lot to do with social interaction. As far as epistemology is concerned, the authors engage in exactly the kind of broad generalizations on which a research endeavour that aims at prediction has to embark but which is very difficult to reconcile with studying judgement. The authors contend that actors are risk-prone in their decisions if – given their reference point – their options are in the realm of loss, and risk-averse if they are in the realm of gain. We are back at Elster's criticism. The postulate of understanding people as ‘agents in a substantive sense’ sits uneasily with mechanistic conceptualizations of agency, which downplay their autonomy and, thus, end up assuming – on one level or another – that they all tick the same.

These problems encountered by ambitious theorizing leave us with a research option that is more carefully balanced between theory and empirics. In the first place, we need to ‘follow the actors’, as Latour (Reference Latour2005: 12) puts it. What ultimately matters is not elegant scholarly categories but how agents, trying to cope with the world, figure out what makes sense to them. This does not mean that scholarship should refrain from any theorizing. We require some theoretical anchoring in order to be able to follow the actors. We need what some authors refer to as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, Reference Glaser and Strauss1967; Locke, Reference Locke1996; Pouliot, Reference Pouliot2007: 364), and what this section – staying within the metaphor of following the actors – refers to as research map. The purpose of this theorizing is to map the roads available to actors for their travels (and their occasional venturing-off into areas more difficult to access) while figuring out what to do. In other words, the map is meant to help the researcher follow the actors as they make their judgements rather than arrive at sweeping generalizations about how they supposedly always do so. The ink with which the map is written is the social dynamics of political judgement. These dynamics are of key importance. Individuals do not act in a social vacuum when they make their judgements. They very much interact with others when trying to figure out what to do.

The map depicts four interaction patterns that profoundly shape the processes through which individuals come to judge politically. First, individuals re-enact their history of interaction with others to a considerable extent. When they make judgements, they pick their universals for these judgements from the tool kit. The procedural judgements contain universals taken from the procedural repertoire and substantive ones from the substantive repertoire. Both repertoires are full of taken-for-granted ideas that assumed the status of taken-for-grantedness by having been selected for past judgements again and again. To be sure, individuals do have some room to manoeuvre. Most importantly, they can select the universals that appear pertinent to them to make sense of a situation and, interpreting them, they have some room for putting their own twist on them. Yet it is difficult for actors to escape the history of past interaction. It forms the perimeter of interaction.

Second, individuals are exposed to the repercussions of the resonance circuit.Footnote 13 The circuit connects three components: procedural judgement, substantive judgement, and persuasion. Ideal-typically, there are two flows of interaction that shape procedural and substantive judgements. On the one hand, the receptive direction of flow connects – in this chronological order – procedural judgement, persuasion, and substantive judgement. The procedural judgement makes the individual open to someone else's efforts of persuasion; he judges the sender as a spokesperson worth being listened to and himself as a receiver. Thus, the receiver's substantive judgements can be moulded. In extreme cases, the receptive procedural judgement makes the receiver accept the sender's message without reflection; the judgement to listen carries the message. Yet, usually, the receptive procedural judgement merely prepares the way. It makes sure that the receiver listens but persuasion also requires a convincing message. If such communicative encounters successfully mould the substantive judgement of the receiver, the latter adapts his procedural judgement again and the sender of the persuasive message further increases her positioning. This, in turn, has positive repercussions for the sender's persuasion efforts and so on. Of course, the exact opposite effect is possible as well. Messages and their senders may become increasingly unpersuasive.

On the other hand, there is the strategic direction of flow. Here, the procedural judgement is quite different. It is not receptive but oriented towards leaving a mark on the communicative encounter. This strategic orientation is connected to the substantive judgement. There is no reluctance or waiting for others to provide an input for making judgements but the individual, seeing herself as an actor to be listened to, makes her substantive judgements with confidence and tries to persuade others with the same confidence. Depending on how these persuasion efforts resonate with the audience, the procedural judgements make the individual revisit her substantive judgements and so on. In extreme cases, the substantive judgement is relegated to a mere filter. Substantive judgements filter the procedural judgements and provide guidance to strategic communicators as to how much change of an argument is possible in order for them to improve their performance without violating their own deeply held beliefs.

Figure 1 summarizes the two ideal-typical flows of the resonance circuit. Note that these two flows of interaction are ideal types. There is a large grey area between full reception and complete lack of reception. Especially ‘pure’ strategic procedural judgements are rather rare. Agents do require at least some measure of interaction with others to make up their mind about an issue in substantive terms. They rarely arrive at a substantive judgement simply on their own. Most resonance circuits play out in the grey area between ‘pure’ reception and ‘pure’ strategy.

Figure 1 Resonance circuit.

Third, judgements – substantive as well as procedural – and political situations are connected by a co-configurative cycle. On the one hand, judgements attach meaning to a situation. They make it a political situation – a situation to be dealt within the realm of politics – in the first place, and they provide orientation as to what to do in this situation. Depending on this orientation, actors try to intervene into the situation or not. Interventions and non-interventions, in turn, may affect changes and continuities of this situation. On the other hand, situations shape political judgements. Political actors cannot attach just any meaning to a situation but they are constrained in doing so by the very situation they face. So-called brute facts are of special salience here. An earthquake, flooding, volcano eruption, major oil spill, etc. requires interpretation through political judgements. But these situations prompt linkages of different particulars and universals than, say, war or genocide. This co-configuration of situation and judgement is not something that is settled once and for all in the course of this situation. Understanding judgement requires going beyond the static understanding of decision-making that permeates our discipline. Judging is a constant challenge. Situations prompt agents to make many judgements – some smaller and some bigger; reducing all of this to one single big decision is oversimplifying how agents figure out what to do. To make matters even more complicated, these situations rarely ever stay the same (e.g. due to new brute facts or the doings of others), thus pushing actors towards revisiting, adapting, and even changing their judgements.

Fourth, the judgements of individuals are shaped by a structuration effect. How agents figure out what to do, shaped by the resonance circuit and the co-configurative cycle, feeds back into the tool kit, thereby adding yet another layer of history.Footnote 14 In most cases, the resonance circuit simply reproduces the content of the tool kit that agents use as universals. In some cases, however, the interplay of the resonance triangle and the structuration effect changes the content of the tool kit. The interaction in the triangle, especially the strategic flow, may develop new universals out of already existing ones, out of particulars, or out of linkages between universals and particulars. These changes are, for the most part, not sharp breaks. New universals developing out of old ones, for example, bear a considerable resemblance with the old ones. Yet more marked shifts may occur. Various pathways are possible. When particulars become universals that originally addressed an extraordinary political situation, for example, these new universals can introduce a novelty into the tool kit that breaks markedly with the past. From a judgement perspective, it is not a coincidence, therefore, that many authors emphasize the importance of exogenous shocks as impetus for deep ideational change (Hall, Reference Hall1986; Adler, Reference Adler1991). Agents are likely to embrace extraordinary particulars to make sense of these shocks and keep these particulars very much at the forefront of their minds, thus letting them sink in as universals for successive judgements that break with the past.

Reading the map: following Robert McNamara during the Cuban Missile Crisis

How does this research map fare empirically? This section asks the question whether political judgement provides an added value for explaining Robert McNamara's assertion of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis (16–28 October 1962). With all the thorough research already conducted on the case, examining whether political judgement delivers an added value sets the benchmark high. Furthermore, McNamara is often portrayed as a computational machine. The military used to criticize McNamara for his ‘computer logic’ (Kaufmann, Reference Kaufmann1964: 2). Robert Kennedy notes that this portrayal was not confined to the military. Even in his social life, ‘they all call him “the computer” ’ (Beschloss, Reference Beschloss1991: 402). If anything, therefore, the manner in which McNamara figured out what to do should follow rational choice, and no alternative map for studying judgement should be necessary.

The case study relies on multiple sources, ranging from The Kennedy Tapes, edited by May and Zelikov (Reference May and Zelikov2002), to McNamara's writings, and from biographical pieces of McNamara's life to the extraordinarily rich scholarly literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The account that follows is organized chronologically. It starts with describing the tool kit of taken-for-granted ideas – the procedural and substantive repertoires – with which McNamara and the other members of the Executive Committee (ExComm) entered their deliberations on the missiles in Cuba. It continues with analysing McNamara's judgements, being shaped by and shaping the resonance circuit in the ExComm in the face of a crisis that is again and again remoulded by Washington's and Moscow's interventions with the crisis. Finally, the account addresses the legacy of the crisis by looking into structuration effects.

McNamara's substantive repertoire for making sense of politics was very much shaped by his generation's experiences. With many of his political decision-making peers, he shared a number of historical lessons. Two of these were taken from WWII: Munich served as a shorthand for the dangers of appeasement, Pearl Harbor for sudden surprise attacks by despicable enemies. The remainder were taken from the Cold War. The Iron Curtain, the Korean War, and the Berlin Crises were markers for an understanding of the United States as the leader of the free world, responsible for protecting this world against communist advances (Trewhitt, Reference Trewhitt1971: 1; Weldes, Reference Weldes1999: 42–47). Cuba, especially the Bay of Pigs disaster, was a sore spot because the United States had failed stopping this advancement in its own back yard (Stone, Reference Stone1968). Related to these historical lessons, a conceptual triad occupied a central place in McNamara's thinking about world politics: balance of power, deterrence, and flexible response. When McNamara used the term balance of power, he did not have a balance proper in mind. Instead, he postulated a distribution of power in favour of the United States (McNamara, Reference McNamara1968; Kahan and Long, Reference Kahan and Long1972: 581). It was this preponderance that was supposed to deter enemies, especially Moscow, from harming the United States. In turn, the key to deterrence – McNamara and many deterrence scholars held unisono – is credibility. This credibility cannot be attained by relying on nuclear capabilities alone. McNamara's lessons from Cold War crises such as Korea and Berlin was that threatening the Soviet Union with the use of nuclear capabilities lacks credibility in most cases. It was all too clear to Moscow that the United States would not answer many of the usual Soviet infringements on US interests with a nuclear strike. Thus, the United States needed to be capable of adapting its response flexibly to the extent of Soviet infringements. Depending on this extent, the United States would have to respond with a proportionate measure that would signal resolve. If the Soviet Union would answer on its part with an escalatory measure, the United States would have to be firmly committed to play this escalation game, but – for as long as possible – underneath the threshold of a nuclear attack (Trewhitt, Reference Trewhitt1971: 111; Beschloss, Reference Beschloss1991: 401; Grattan, Reference Grattan2006: 428). This conceptual triad, in particular the need for flexible response was widely shared among key decision-makers, including President Kennedy.

McNamara's procedural repertoire revolved around strategies of communication. The art of making himself heard had become a second nature for him. Having made his way from a Harvard MBA, statistics teacher and – by 1960 – the first President of Ford who was not a member of the Ford family, he had acquired unique skills for improving his positioning in decision-making circles. A particularly notable one among these was buying time. If a discussion did not go his way and McNamara sensed that he could not persuade his opponents for the time being, he used to buy time. He often did this by requesting more information on the topic (Trewhitt, Reference Trewhitt1971: 120–122). Related to this, McNamara was a master of manipulating understandings of options for his purposes. Acting in seemingly impartial manner, he used to outline many options to deal with a situation, nudge the overview of the pros and cons of these options in favour of the option he preferred, and thus channelled decisions into directions that he preferred while leaving the advisee with the impression of full decision-making autonomy (Beschloss, Reference Beschloss1991: 402). McNamara's skills in improving his positioning made him a force to be reckoned with in Washington. He was extraordinarily well positioned to make himself heard already well before the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although admiring him, Robert Kennedy considered McNamara ‘the most dangerous man in the Cabinet, because he is so persuasive and articulate’ (quoted in Beschloss, Reference Beschloss1991: 405). Most importantly, President Kennedy had a very high opinion of McNamara. Kaufmann (Reference Kaufmann1964: 1) notes that the President ‘reportedly told visitors that McNamara was the most satisfactory member of his Cabinet’. As one of less than a handful of Cabinet members, McNamara was even welcome to participate in the social life of the President and his wife. The President's brother, Robert Kennedy, shared this appreciation for McNamara. This appreciation, of course, did not come from nowhere. As Beschloss (Reference Beschloss1991: 401) puts it, President Kennedy ‘was dazzled by McNamara's toughness, quickness, fluency, competence, incorruptibility, freedom from political cant, and force of personality’.

To put this into the conceptual language of judgement, McNamara and the other members of ExComm approached the Cuban Missile Crisis with the help of a number of unquestioned universals. As far as the substantive repertoire was concerned, McNamara shared many universals with his ExComm members, again most notably with the Kennedys: the interpretation of the historical lessons of Munich, Pearl Harbor, Iron Curtain, Korean War, Berlin Crises, and the Bay of Pigs, as well as the conceptual triad of balance of power, deterrence and flexible response. As far as the procedural repertoire was concerned, McNamara's authority on defence matters and international affairs was a universal firmly entrenched with ExComm members, in particular the Kennedys, whose judgements mattered the most (but less so with the military). McNamara, on his part, had an astute sense of how to seize the opportunities of this strong position. His universals of buying time and manipulating options to win over an audience are particularly noteworthy.

Armed with these priors, McNamara and the other members of ExComm proceeded to figure out what the United States should do amid the build-up of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Moscow's and Washington's interventions with the course of events yields four phases in which the resonance circuit played out in the ExComm. First, a Soviet intervention started the Cuban Missile Crisis in the first place. By 16 October, it had become clear to the Kennedy administration that the Soviet Union had started to build medium-range ballistic missile launch sites in Cuba. Furthermore, evidence that Moscow also delivered nuclear warheads for these missiles was mounting. McNamara's procedural and substantive judgements followed the strategic direction of the resonance circuit. He agreed with the other members of ExComm that the missiles constituted a problem to be solved. But he did not concur that it was a military problem. For him, the problem was political (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 61). He judged that the missiles (particular) did not change the balance of power (universal). But they (particular) required the United States to show resolve in order to maintain a credible deterrence (universal). If the United States failed to show resolve, Khrushchev would continue to challenge the United States, especially in Berlin (universal). Even at this early phase in the crisis, McNamara already advocated for a naval blockade and an increased surveillance of the entire island (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 58). In McNamara's judgement, this was an option that showed resolve while avoiding an overreaction and could be further escalated depending on the Soviet Union's reactions to these measures (particular). It was an application of the principle of flexible response (universal), ‘starting with a mounting sequence of threats short of nuclear war’ (Kahan and Long, Reference Kahan and Long1972: 573).

Initially, McNamara isolated himself with these judgements to a considerable degree. Not only did most of the ExComm members see the missiles as a military problem but they also favoured airstrikes over any other actions including a naval blockade. Mastering the strategic direction of the resonance circuit, McNamara was an astute observer of this lack of support. He resorted to his procedural universals of buying time and manipulating options. He proceeded to request more information and time to digest this information, and he started to dissect the airstrike option. He equated the airstrike option with an invasion of Cuba – fully knowing that President Kennedy was opposed to such a large-scale military involvement: He argued: ‘Full blast military involvement or no airstrikes at all. Invasion is risky’ (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 48). President Kennedy (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 88), and his brother as well (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 105), remained sceptical of the blockade option. By 19 October, however, they followed McNamara in quizzing the airstrike option with hard questions (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 109–123). On 20 October, McNamara's attempts of persuasion helped yield not only procedural but also the first substantive successes. Robert Kennedy became an advocate of the blockade option but demanded that this blockade should show more teeth than the one advocated by McNamara. Khrushchev would have to remove the missiles. The airstrike option would be back on the table if Khrushchev would not comply. President Kennedy, Llewellyn (‘Tommy’) Thompson, Douglas Dillon, and John McCone concurred (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 137). McNamara was not in a receptive mode yet. On the contrary, ‘he was more emphatic than usual’ (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 136) in stressing the need for negotiation. In his judgement, the United States should offer Moscow a withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal of its missiles from Cuba. In McNamara's reading, the principle of flexible response required providing the opponent with a way out of the escalation game. This softer version of the blockade option was supported by Adlai Stevenson, the negotiation dimension more generally also by Dean Rusk.

The second phase of the resonance circuit started with the US intervention into the crisis. The quarantine, coupled with open surveillance, moved into its position on 23 October and it was fully operational from 24 to 30 October. This changed the character of the crisis markedly. The central question became how the Soviet Union would react to the measures and how the United States could influence this reaction by managing the quarantine and open surveillance. In the ExComm, the question of how to manage the blockade became increasingly central to the discussions. In this phase of the crisis, McNamara's judgements were both strategic and receptive. On the one hand, he cautioned his fellow ExComm members about running the blockade carefully. On 23 October, McNamara was confronted with Robert Kennedy's call to pursue Soviet ships even if they had turned away from Cuba (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 207), and with Maxwell Taylor's demand to shoot off the rudder of ships trying to break the blockade (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 212). McNamara used again his procedural judgement to weaken these proposals. With regard to Robert Kennedy's suggestion, he bought time by arguing that there would be no need for an immediate decision on this matter. The next day, McNamara simply mentioned in passing that there would be no pursuit of ships turning away from Cuba, and nobody challenged him (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 233). With regard to Maxwell Taylor's proposal, McNamara quizzed the option with hard questions. What if the United States would target a ship with wheat or medicine? How would world opinion react to that? The hard questions were effective. Taylor's suggestion never surfaced again. On the other hand, McNamara was also receptive to Robert Kennedy's postulate to show more military determination. On 25 October, McNamara advocated to fully prepare for an airstrike, if such an escalation was necessary (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 251–252). Two days later, McNamara made the same argument with regard to invading Cuba (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 335). McNamara had been persuaded to amend his substantive judgement. Note that this is only an amendment and not a radical change. McNamara subsumed the airstrike and the invasion, advocated by others, under the universal of flexible response. Having all the options on the table and ready to be executed, guaranteed – in his judgement – a credible US response to the Soviet infringement on its interests; no matter what the next Soviet move would be. An escalation would be possible from negotiation to airstrike and even invasion.

The third phase of the resonance circuit started when the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 on its surveillance mission over Cuba on 27 October, and the Cuban Missile Crisis reached its peak. Again, the resonance circuit shaping his and the others’ judgements had strategic and receptive dimensions. On the one hand, McNamara had no doubts at all that the new situation amounted to an escalation of the crisis (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 356). He quickly subsumed this new situation under his interpretation of flexible response. In a chilling assessment of the situation, McNamara sketched the following possible scenario: The United States continues surveillance and is fired upon again. Thus, the United States has to proceed with massive airstrikes and an invasion. Thus, the Soviet Union attacks the Turkish missiles. Thus, the United States and NATO have to defend Turkey. There was, in other words, a slippery slope towards nuclear war (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 364–365). McNamara considered three exit routes from this escalation scenario. (1) The Soviet Union would have to be prevented from firing on US planes again. McNamara concurred with President Kennedy to announce to the Soviet Union that Washington would protect its aircraft from now on and respond to attacks (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 359). (2) McNamara encouraged pursuing negotiations with the Soviet Union. He continued to call for trading the Cuban missiles for the missiles in Turkey (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 366). (3) Even if the trade would not work out, NATO should make the missiles in Turkey inoperable. In this way, at least the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis beyond Cuba – with a Soviet attack on the missiles in Turkey – could be prevented (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 367). After an ExComm marathon session, steps were eventually decided upon that were compatible with McNamara's judgements and that proved crucial to diffusing the crisis. Yet before this happened, McNamara's procedural judgements were vital in preventing a prompt retaliatory action that, in his substantive judgement, would have been seriously out of sink with his understanding of flexible response and that would have moved the world closer towards nuclear holocaust. Immediately after the news came in that the U-2 was shot down, he started to buy time to prevent an instantaneous retaliatory strike – seriously considered, for example, by McGeorge Bundy – against the SAM site that had shot the U-2 down. He cautioned that it was too late in the day for this (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 357) and encouraged to think all options through carefully (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 366–368). On the other hand, McNamara relied heavily on the judgements of others, in particular the Kennedys, when it came to formulating the United States's responses to Khrushchev. There were two such responses: a letter to Khrushchev, also made public (May and Zelikov, Reference May and Zelikov2002: 387–388); and an oral message that Robert Kennedy communicated to Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, who in turn, sent it as a telegram to Khrushchev (Lebow and Stein, Reference Lebow and Stein1994: 523–526). It was the latter message that was decisive. In essence, the United States offered the Soviet Union to withdraw the missiles from Turkey secretly in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba.

Eventually, the crisis winded down when Khrushchev announced via Radio Moscow that the Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba. With the exception of the Joint Chiefs, who continued to pressure for a military solution, the judgements of the ExComm members concurred. As May and Zelikov (Reference May and Zelikov2002: 404) put it, ‘[t]he mood at the ExComm meeting was euphoric’. It still took over a month for Washington and Moscow to agree upon the modalities of the missile withdrawal and verification mechanisms. But the Cuban Missile Crisis had found a peaceful solution.

The end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, did not mark an end to its influence on world politics. Several structuration effects made sure that the crisis has had its legacy. The structuration effects strengthened existing universals, most importantly the need for a credible deterrent and – in McNamara's case – also the concept of flexible response. In McNamara's thinking these two universals featured prominently during the United States involvement in Vietnam. They did not serve him very well because the Cuban Missile Crisis was very different from the Vietnam War. But the legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis mattered way beyond Vietnam and McNamara. Lebow and Stein (Reference Lebow and Stein1994) make a convincing case that the reinforcement of the deterrence logic as lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis may have had destabilising effects for the Cold War more broadly. The problems with the deterrence universal even during the Cuban Missile Crisis became all too obvious after the end of the Cold War when scholars and practitioners alike started to revisit the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allyn et al., Reference Allyn, Blight and Welch1989; Blight and Welch, Reference Blight and Welch1989; Lebow and Stein, Reference Lebow and Stein1994; Scott and Smith, Reference Scott and Smith1994; Allison and Zelikow, Reference Allison and Zelikow1999; Blight and Lang, Reference Blight and Lang2005; Grattan, Reference Grattan2006), with McNamara (Reference McNamara1986, Reference McNamara1989, Reference McNamara1995) playing an important role in questioning the received wisdom.

The added value: tracing how actors intertwine what scholars keep apart

The case-study strongly suggests that there is, compared to focusing on simply one logic of action, a considerable added value to the research map on political judgement. The research map helps the researcher follow the actors more closely, yielding a more comprehensive and nuanced account of how they figure out what to do.Footnote 15 This applies to each of the four components of the research map.

First, the research map overcomes the scholarly compartmentalization of background knowledge. With the exception of the entrenched rational choice variant of consequentialism, all four logics of action help us identify the salience of the history of past interaction for how individuals figure out what to do. But their respective foci for what kinds of ideas derived from past interaction matter are too narrow. McNamara's thinking was shaped by individually held ideas, as psychological approaches to consequentialism tend to stress. But it was also deeply influenced by shared ideas. The logics of appropriateness, argumentation and practice, while neglecting the individually held ideas, are better equipped to deal with the shared ones. Yet even when it comes to the shared ones, the analytical lines that appropriateness, argumentation, and practice draw are somewhat arbitrary. As the logic of appropriateness would suggest, some of these shared ideas may be understood as norms, for example an anti-appeasement norm. Yet other shared ideas cannot be reduced to norms. They are widely accepted and rather elaborate interpretations about how politics works, for example, understandings of deterrence and flexible response. The logics of argumentation and practice, given their broader focus on shared background knowledge, are helpful in this respect. But they are still too limiting because argumentation focuses on explicitly articulated knowledge, whereas practice deals with tacit knowledge. McNamara clearly drew from both. At the risk of oversimplification, his procedural repertoire stayed largely implicit, whereas he made those parts of his substantive repertoire explicit that seemed of key relevance to him in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Second, the resonance circuit provides a more complete account of the various modes of reasoning employed by individual actors, including how these modes are influenced by social interaction, than any of the logics of action on their own. Consequentialism is a fruitful starting point. McNamara carefully weighed costs and benefits. At the very beginning, he asked the question of how the United States would get out of this crisis with the least costs. Soon, he came to ask the more specific question of how the United States could make sure that the missiles are withdrawn from Cuba with minimum costs to the United States. This does not mean, however, that McNamara was the kind of computational machine depicted by widely held rational choice assumptions. McNamara figured out what to do by putting background ideas to use to which psychological variations of consequentialism as well as the logics of appropriateness, argumentation, and practice allude. He came to see the Cuban Missile Crisis, including the evolving political constellation in the ExComm, in light of these background ideas. In the conceptual language of judgement, he subsumed what was going on in the former under the latter. This subsuming was a much broader process of reasoning than envisaged by the four logics of action. Subsuming particulars under universals provided him with much needed substantive and procedural orientations for how to make up his mind. Neglected by other logics, the logic of practice captures his procedural orientations rather well. McNamara drew from a stock of tacit commonsense on strategies for winning over others in personal communicative encounters and applied these to the Cuban Missile Crisis. This provided him with guidance for how to play his cards in the ExComm. The logic of practice yields considerably less explanatory power when it comes to the substantive orientations. Most of McNamara's subsumptions of universals under particulars (e.g. his subsumption of the Cuban Missile Crisis under the Cold War maxim of flexible response) were very much out in the open in the ExComm. The logic of argumentation, with its emphasis on arguments anchored in explicitly articulated commonplaces is well equipped to conceptualize these kinds of subsumptions. Compared to other logics, argumentation is also much more attuned to helping researchers grasp the workings of communication through which McNamara influenced and was influenced by others in the ExComm. But without the feel for the political game sketched by the logic of practice any account of this communication remains incomplete. The research map on judgement shows a way out of this compartmentalization, too. The resonance circuit puts together what the logics of argumentation and practice keep apart.

Third, analysing the interplay of resonance circuit and co-configurative cycle cautions us that individuals do not just make one giant leap figuring out what to do but many steps – some bigger some smaller. For sure, McNamara soon settled for a naval blockade. This was his most important substantive judgement. But he made many more consequential judgements such as substantive judgements for how to categorize the crisis (first as a political, later on also as a military problem), how to run the blockade, and how to negotiate with the Soviets; and a series of crucial procedural judgements for how to have his views prevail at the ExComm. All these judgements were critically influenced by the judgements of others in the ExComm and, very much related to this, the course of events surrounding Cuba more generally. In other words, the political situation never stood still, constantly challenging McNamara, interacting with others who were equally challenged by an evolving situation, to make judgements. The logic of consequentialism, including formal psychological approaches to judgement, misses crucial dimensions of this process. It puts its emphasis on what is taken to be the continuity of a decision-making situation (this makes it more plausible to assume consistent and stable preferences) and the one big decision by a big decision-maker to shape this situation. This glosses over the many – and in overall effect – crucial orientating steps through which McNamara came to make up his mind. It even makes analysts likely to gloss over the very person of McNamara because he, being only an advisor, hardly qualifies for the role of big decision-maker. The logics of appropriateness and argumentation leave room for analysing the many orientating steps. But they provide hints for studying reflective judgements only. The logic of practice, given its focus on practice, is very well equipped to deal with successions of orientating moves. But, as discussed above, it limits these orientating moves to habitual judgements, thus neglecting reflective judgements.

Fourth, the structuration effects depicted on the research map on judgement echo what psychological approaches as well as the logics of appropriateness, argumentation, and practice have written on how today's action, sedimenting into actors’ backgrounds, comes to guide tomorrow's action. Among the protagonists of logics of action, there is probably no author who has placed more emphasis on this than Bourdieu. After all, he (1977–82) argues that the habitus, as ‘the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history’. The fourfold research map on judgement underlines this emphasis. However, at the same time, it casts its net again wider by prompting the researcher not only to look at tacit background knowledge but also at knowledge that is very much out in the open. In McNamara's case, this is especially the deterrence logic, which came to be reinforced through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once again, therefore, it is not so much that the research map uncovers something entirely new. However the map, being located at a higher level of abstraction and inclusivity than the logics of action, helps the researcher understand the process through which actors orient themselves in more comprehensive fashion. It does not keep separate or even exclude what actors weave together in order to figure out what to do.