Authors will always be grateful when their book is called “excellent” and “an intellectual treasure trove.” But experienced authors also know that quite frequently such praise is accompanied by serious criticisms. In the present case, the critique is not directed at any one of the specific interpretations by me or my coauthor of thinkers between Hobbes and the present. It is instead directed at 1) a lack of clarity regarding the question of how our concluding proposal, based on Dieter Senghaas’s “civilizational hexagon,” can in any way “ameliorate” the suppression of war; 2) a fuzziness in the precise identification of the disciplines that our “postdisciplinary history” is dealing with; and 3) a certain neglect of the literature from “international Relations,” a subdiscipline of political science.
The first point seems to be based on a misunderstanding. Our aim in the concluding section was to offer an alternative not to the suppression of war but to all monocausal and monothematic explanations because they all can be easily misused for propagandistic purposes. Such an intention should be rather familiar to the reviewer since he is the author of an important book on the misuse of one such one-sided attempt, namely, the theory of “democratic peace.”
The second point marks a real problem. Sociology is a discipline that is not much older than a hundred years. Restricting our argument to the institutionalized discipline would have been artificial and narrow-minded. But as soon as one includes the pre- or nondisciplinary discourse of “social thought,” the boundaries indeed get fuzzy. Fortunately, the reviewer himself calls the problem “unavoidable.” I think it is not fair to say that “the book hovers indecisively” between different options here, but it is obvious that our attempt to explain our rationale in the introductory chapter has not been completely successful. In concentrating exclusively on the liberal tradition, the reviewer tends to neglect the fact that we also included thinkers who recognized the potentially attractive character of violence, from Hegel to Georges Bataille.
Thirdly, it is true that our book is not a history of international relations. We would never deny that this subdiscipline has produced a vast amount of important empirical and theoretical work. But instead of blaming us for not offering a comprehensive overview of this field in our book, would it not have been better to say a few words about how the picture we have painted would change if we had said more about this area of specialization?
Perhaps the best conclusion one can draw from this exchange is that social theorists and IR experts should engage much more in a process in which both sides seriously learn from each other.
