We would like to begin by thanking Jennifer Mitzen for her extremely thoughtful review of our book. She raises a number of important points about the relationship between history and social science, and what this means for the way we approach concept formation and generalization in The Global Transformation. In this brief rejoinder, we concentrate on what we take to be Mitzen’s main concern: “the contours” of a historical social science and how our book might contribute toward its formation.
The Global Transformation assumes a much closer relationship between theory and history than much contemporary international relations usually adopts. Our view is that systems of thought are derived in and from concrete historical practices: Marx the revolutionary, Clausewitz the soldier, Freud the analyst. At the same time, doing historical work is, like theoretical inquiry, an act of occlusion. Most histories are causal narratives, by which we mean structured stories that shape particular sequences of events into intelligible plots. These narratives are necessarily interpretative exercises. In this sense, theory emerges from history, while history itself is a theoretical enterprise.
Although this point may seem obvious, it involves a considerable reorientation of much contemporary IR away from a view of social science as equivalent to mathematics or physics and toward historical sciences, such as biology or geology. Although biology and geology work within broad overarching paradigms—natural selection and plate tectonics, respectively—it is only through analysis in which processes are traced, patterns deduced, and taxonomies constructed that knowledge is seen to accumulate. Historical sciences knot together causes, contexts, and nonlinear interactions into wider plotlines that are logically consistent. These plotlines, in turn, act as a means for generating contextually oriented interpretations. The result is accounts that, like ours, assemble historical events into meaningful causal sequences.
It is this view of historical social science with its reliance on context, nonlinear confluences, and meaningful causal sequences that animates our book. Its central claim is that global modernity arose through a particular configuration of industrialization, rational statehood, and ideologies of progress. This configuration was contingently formed in that these dynamics assembled in historically specific form. There was no necessary reason for the global transformation to emerge when, why, and how it did so. Rather, global modernity was a particular historical crystallization rather than a necessary set of structural dynamics or mechanisms.
This orientation means that the book is concerned less with “why” questions than with “how possible” questions. The former are usually seen as the default position for credentializing social scientific work in the contemporary academy. But there is no particular reason why this should be the case. To the contrary, how-possible questions are logically, analytically, and theoretically prior to why questions. After all, if we cannot explain how it was possible that international order assumed a core—periphery shape during the global transformation, we are unlikely to tell a convincing story about its current contours. One of our main goals was precisely to highlight what Mitzen calls the “epistemic constraints” on contemporary IR that result from its blinkered historical imagination.
If we share this concern in common with Mitzen, we have some disagreements with her about what other aspects a historical IR contains. In particular, we do not think that concepts “nail down” an “object’s properties.” To the contrary, we see concepts as open-ended formations that are constitutive rather than categorical—they change in meaning and significance as they are put to work across time and place. Similarly, we do not see generalizability as a necessary “ingredient” of social science. Rather, we see the configuration that enabled global modernity as a historically specific—and therefore unrepeatable—formation. Far from such a view limiting the social scientific credentials of the book, we think that it opens up a range of exciting questions: the relationship between contingency and determination, composite and monocausal accounts, theory and history, and more. We look forward to continuing the stimulating dialogues that such questions provoke. And we thank Mitzen for raising them.
