Is the liberal paradigm distinctive?

Jahn believes that since liberal mid-range theories are not unambiguously deduced from paradigmatic assumptions, testing the former tells us nothing about the utility, fruitfulness or veracity of the latter. This standard of universal laws rigorously deduced from fixed premises is a straw man – a pipedream of libertarian economists, extreme rational choice theorists, a few political philosophers, or Kenneth Waltz in an ill-considered moment (e.g. Becker, Reference Becker1976). In the previous round, citing my work on the philosophy of science, I responded:

Social scientists working within a paradigm advance specific theories and hypotheses consistent with paradigmatic assumptions, but in order to rigorously define them, they incorporate what Imre Lakatos calls ‘auxiliary assumptions’. So, for example, all liberal arguments assume rational state behavior, the decisive importance of variation in state preferences, and social pressures as a source of state preferences, but use different auxiliary assumptions to specify the nature of social pressures, the translation mechanisms of social pressures into state preferences, and the nature of preference-based interstate interaction. This give rise to various strands of liberal theory, such as commercial, republican, and ideational liberalism. In this case, as in all applied social scientific claims, the result is a set of bounded and conditional statements, which we then test empirically. We have confidence in them only to the extent they test out.Footnote 7

In her latest rebuttal, Jahn simply restates her old ‘straw man’ view.Footnote 8

As applied to liberal theory:

Again, Jahn portrays the choice as one between positivism and relativism.

This sort of dichotomous reasoning is at best misleading, at worst incoherent.Footnote 9 The mere fact that liberal theories predict widely varying behavior implies neither that actors are non-rational, nor that the liberal paradigm is logically indeterminate. Social scientific theories do not predict single specific outcomes (e.g. ‘free trade’), but variation (e.g. a continuum from free trade to protection), and they do so by defining mechanisms through which varying outcomes take place under certain conditions.Footnote 10 These antecedent conditions, mechanisms, processes, and outcomes are observable, and we evaluate theories – always, of course, against other potential explanations of the same phenomenon. Paradigms play the same role at a deeper level, ordering sets of theories into categories based on their core assumptions.

Jahn seems concerned that there exist a seemingly infinite number of theories consistent with assuming rational behavior of social actors driving varying state preferences, and the auxiliary assumptions are arbitrary. Here Jahn misunderstands the Lakatos/Laudan heuristics.Footnote 11 In evaluating a paradigm, we do not (as Jahn implies) ask: What are all the (infinite) theories and hypotheses that could be derived from the core assumptions? We ask: Have research programs consistent with the assumptions proven fruitful empirically? If these prove finite, focused, and parsimonious, then the paradigm is useful. This is why my articles on liberalism contain ex post assessments of the empirical trajectory of a limited number of empirically successful liberal theories. This standard is empirical more than theoretical – a point Jahn seems to miss entirely. Thus, curiously, she does not dispute the extraordinary empirical fruitfulness of these theories, but only their deductive relationship to core assumptions.

‘Impossible to test’? ‘Cannot be tested’? Why? Even if auxiliary assumptions add some complexity, we are still indirectly, over time, evaluating core assumptions. The increment of one study of, say, the democratic peace on a very widespread assumption of state rationality may be small, but surely it is positive.

Jahn’s only response is to reiterate another argument she has already made, namely that there is nothing distinctive about the specific core assumptions of the liberal paradigm. Hence any findings about liberal hypotheses, while they may tell us something about the assumption, do not tell us anything about liberal core assumptions. In my previous response, I documented that liberalism’s three core assumptions – namely (1) variation in state preferences (over states of the world, not over strategies), (2) state-society relations as a source of those preferences; and (3) rational state behavior as a result of those preferences – collectively constitute a distinctive paradigmatic position. As I have now twice documented from their writings, rejection of the importance of variation in state preferences is central to Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz’s formulations of realism, Robert Keohane’s formulation of regime theory, and Alexander Wendt’s formulation of systemic constructivism. In her latest response, Jahn now maintains she ‘never denied’ the ‘distinctness’ of liberal ‘mid-range theories’ vis-à-vis other arguments from other paradigms, but only the distinctness of the liberal core assumptions. Therefore, she says by way of rebuttal, ‘this literature (i.e. Morgenthau, Waltz, Keohane, and Wendt) is not relevant for my argument’ (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010: 4n.).

This response is bewildering. Jahn misstates the work of Morgenthau, Waltz, Keohane, and Wendt so completely, one wonders if she actually bothered to consult the relevant passages. They are paradigmatic thinkers par excellence – who more than them? – and quite explicitly so in the cited passages. More fundamentally, Jahn’s distinction between mid-range and core assumptions is logically incoherent. She agrees that mid-range liberal theories are paradigmatically distinctive, but how would we know this to be the case unless they shared distinctive core assumptions? What else does paradigmatic distinctiveness mean? (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010). Similarly, if the rationality assumption were doing no work, how could Jahn criticize liberal theory – even if incorrectly – as inherently incapable of engaging in true pan-disciplinary ‘dialog’ because its core assumptions systematically exclude non-rational behavior?Footnote 12 As is often the case with relativists, Jahn is drawn into contradictions when advancing even the simplest criticisms.

Jahn has never –not in this debate, not in her published work, nowhere – offered a single substantive reason to doubt that the three assumptions distinguish liberal theories from realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and other paradigmatic alternatives.Footnote 13 Indeed, she has never even discussed other paradigms in substance. She provides airy meta-theoretical speculation, rather than exegesis or empirical analysis to back her claim. Absent one or the other, further consideration of her critique is pointless.

Are paradigms useful?

The liberal paradigm is distinct, but is it useful? This is a more interesting question. In theory, paradigmatic language can help us to identify the common theoretical assumptions underlying bodies of theory. Paradigms in social science are, at the very least, an instrument for ex post reconstruction – following Lakatos and Laudan, they permit us to, retrospectively, assess the underlying meaning of a body of empirical research. It is possible, also that they can play some heuristic role in structuring scholarly debates going forward.Footnote 14 Perhaps the most important potential role of a comprehensive set of paradigms would be to structure research so as to consider important theoretical alternatives. This involves expanding the set of alternatives, but also tailoring them to our prior expectations. In addition, paradigms help relate specific claims to broader social theories, broad assumptions and antecedent conditions, familiarize us with frequent-encountered causal mechanisms, alert us to the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of certain categories of theory, direct research in more promising empirical directions, to outline promising modes of theory synthesis, and, yes, help us generalize findings by highlighting more fruitful basic assumptions.Footnote 15

Introduction, for example, of an explicit ‘liberal’ paradigm – or, in the language of rational-choice theorists, explicit attention to distinctiveness of theories that stress variation in state preferences (over states of the world) – helps highlight the extraordinary empirical advances over the past two decades that liberal preference-based theories have made vis-à-vis theories that stress coercive power (realism), informational norms (institutionalism), and means–ends beliefs (constructivism) in almost every issue area. It permits us to see also that many ‘neo-classical realist’ or ‘constructivist arguments are in fact dependent in one-way or another on “degenerative” arguments invoking exogenous state preference shifts (Oye, Reference Oye1986: 7; Legro and Moravcsik, Reference Legro and Moravcsik1999). At the same time, it alerts us to various distinctive challenges, issues, and methods involved in elaborating and testing such theories. For liberals, for example, perhaps the most consistent challenge is that attributing of a set of goals to a social group, state or other political actor as a “preference”.’ It is exceptionally difficult to distinguish ‘preferences’ (across states of the world, induced by exogenous factors) from ‘strategies’ (across actions, induced by the distribution of coercive power, information, beliefs and other strategic concerns; Frieden, Reference Frieden1999; Moravcsik, Reference Moravcsik1997). Paradigmatic categories help keep us focused on such issues.

Properly constructed paradigms also help us to aggregate empirical findings. Republican, commercial, and ideational liberal theories – like other rationalist and non-rationalist ‘positivist’ paradigms – rest on a considerable body of empirically verified theory of just this kind. None to my knowledge claim ‘universal’ validity for specific liberal causal mechanisms, as Jahn’s dichotomizing criticisms imply, but there exists an expanding set of interesting bounded generalizations about behavior. The empirical success of these various liberal ‘research programs’, even in explaining the behavior of pre-modern, non-democratic, conflictual behavior, creates a presumption in favor of generalizing by material or institutional conditions. Liberal explanations are expanding in influence not because they are elegant or ideologically attractive, but because they test out (Moravcsik, Reference Moravcsik1997, Reference Moravcsik2003, Reference Moravcsik2008; Moravcsik and Schimmelfennig, Reference Moravcsik and Schimmelfennig2009). Were someone to combine one of these theories with empirical data, extending it to another case, as Jahn proposes to do, this would – on the conventional social scientific reading – constitute further evidence of the strength of liberal theory.

Jahn adopts a curious double standard with regard to this view. She argues that those (such as liberals) who explicitly seek to support generalizations in an orderly and self-conscious fashion are doomed to fail, but those (such as Jahn) who do not theorize such efforts explicitly, but simply offer particularistic historical generalizations, will prove able to do so without qualification.

Jahn chides liberals, and all other ‘positivists’, for generalizing. She repeats, ‘This liberal theory of international relations contains some important truths – if not about international relations in general’ (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010: 153). Jahn is not simply making the obvious point that decision-makers fail to appreciate and implement most of the lessons they should learn from the world around them. She is saying that it is in principle impossible for even the best scholars to learn anything at all by examining comparative historical cases. Suppose, for example, under certain conditions we observe competitive exporters looking for opportunities to trade freely and non-competitive import-competing firms seeking state protection or subsidy. According to Jahn, we cannot use theory to generalize any aspect of this claim to similar cases under similar conditions.

This is nothing if not extreme: are domestic regime type, globalization, value change, and other liberal factors really of no relevance whatsoever in understanding modern global politics?

What justification does Jahn offer for this sweeping claim? Only, as we see from the quotation above, that the ‘democratic peace’ is of concern only to democracies, and thus limited. This is nonsense at every level. As a practical matter, the influence of the ‘democratic peace’ is hardly limited to democracies: US and European foreign policy have rested since the end of the Cold War (and during it as well) on democracy promotion in various guises.Footnote 16 From a social scientific perspective, the assertion that the ‘democratic peace’ is limited to democracies is an even more dubious. All theories explain variation on causal variables, thus the ‘democratic peace’ proposition necessarily implies various claims about non-democracies – with theories of ‘aggressor states’ and the less cooperative behavior of non-democracies being only the most obvious (Moravcsik, Reference Moravcsik2008: 241–245). And even if Jahn’s specific claims about the narrow scope of the ‘democratic peace’ proposition were valid, they would apply only to one narrow line of liberal theory. Such criticisms are manifestly inapplicable to commercial liberal arguments about interdependence and globalization, ideational liberal arguments about the impact of varying national values, other republican liberal arguments about domestic political institutions, or positivist IR theory in general – none of which is in any sense limited to democracies. Finally – in a truly ironic inconsistency – Jahn is essentially arguing, first, that theories should not generalize, and then, to support her view, that liberal claims are insufficiently … general.

Jahn’s position might be salvageable as coherent – only just – if she retreated at this point to thorough-going historical particularism. There is evidence that she believes this in her text. At one point she speaks, in regard to the democratic peace claim, of ‘the impossibility of a purely empirical refutation of such theoretical claims’ because while the ‘thesis invites empirical testing,…the conditions under which the thesis could be refuted cannot be specified, this method sends scholars off onto a wild goose chase for empirical evidence that can never reach its goal’.Footnote 17 But no, evidently Jahn like many relativists, finds a world in which specific findings lack any general implications to be uncongenial and unrealistic. To avoid this, she – like her intellectual inspiration Karl Mannheim – adopts a neat double standard: while criticizing others for their attempts to generalize, she heroically insists upon her own ability to do so. Her historical study of the emergence of 16th century proto-liberal politics is, ‘surely relevant for concrete political questions’ today because, she asserts – with no apparent irony – its core claims are more general.

So, according to Jahn, we can generalize within particular historical trajectories (e.g. from the liberal movement in 1700 to the liberal movement in 2010) but not across similar institutional, material, or institutional formations (e.g. competitive industries, systems of political representation in different times and places, forms of political ideology), as commercial, republican, and ideational liberal arguments often imply.

This double standard is audacious and arbitrary. Jahn offers no argument in its favor – or, indeed, any philosophical position with regard to historical generalization at all. The simplest way to see the absurdity of this is simply to note that Jahn’s own generalization about the effects of early modern liberal theory falls comfortably under the liberal paradigm as I redefined it – so there is really no difference between the claims she makes and those she criticizes.Footnote 18 The notion that intellectual views of property rights, along with market opportunities, encourage certain distributive settlements, thereby predisposing countries to conduct international politics in particular ways, is a classic liberal claim that mixes ‘ideational liberal’ and ‘commercial liberal’ elements.Footnote 19

So the real question is this: Why should we accept, before we even consider at the empirical evidence, Jahn’s arbitrary blanket privileging of some (liberal) generalizations rather than others? Jahn doesn’t offer any prima facie reason to draw such distinctions. My view is far more even-handed – and more democratic. These claims are no different from any other. I submit we should subject Jahn’s claim, like those advanced by theorists of interdependence, the democratic peace, and social identities to the same standards. The only valid reason for accepting any of these would be the existence of a theoretical argument grounded in plausible assumptions and mechanisms, backed by empirical evidence, which tests out against the strongest alternative explanations.

Thus, in the end, Jahn’s labored philosophical and methodological criticisms of ‘positivism’ are simply irrelevant. We are all in the same boat. The real question is not what philosophy of science or methodology we espouse. It is how persuasive our theories are and how well the evidence supports them.

Yet Jahn’s criticisms of this kind are sparse and strikingly unpersuasive. They are (as is all her analysis of liberalism) entirely focused on the democratic peace claim, thereby ignoring commercial and ideational liberalism – a point to which I shall return. She notes it is difficult to decide whether to code countries as democracies and non-democracies, with some cases (e.g. Imperial Germany) ambiguous. Because such codings are sometimes disputed, she concludes that comparative social science is impossible (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010). This criticism is another example of Jahn’s unnecessarily dichotomous view of social science: if it is not perfect, do not do it at all. In fact, few debates illustrate more clearly than the ‘democratic peace’ debate that scholars can debate and improve coding and measurement. The particular coding criticisms she cites are minor, 10–15 year old anachronisms, long since surpassed in scholarly debates. The more striking finding from that controversy is that the empirical relationship underlying the democratic peace is so strong that we cannot reverse its sign even if we bias the results by coding all the ambiguous cases against the claim – an extraordinary finding in social science. In any case, one cannot seriously argue that because no perfect measurement exists, there can be no criteria for better or worse measurement, and thus scholarship must make do with unreflective interpretation and conjecture. True, the debate has grown more diverse, in part in response to multiple methods, but it has also evolved away from certain explanations and toward others in response to empirical findings.Footnote 20

The most important point is that the only way we would know whether Jahn’s criticism is correct or not is by evaluating the empirical fruitfulness of the entire ‘democratic peace’ research program. This is precisely the ‘bottom-up’ Lakatosian standard I propose. Nothing Jahn has written calls it into question. This may seem an abstract issue, but it is not. It goes to the heart of why, on the conventional social scientific account, we have theories, paradigms, methodology and all the other elements of formal social science with which Jahn would dispense. Jahn’s own work provides a clear example. Proper paradigmatic thinking might improve Jahn’s critique and her empirical work.

In her attack on liberal theory, Jahn invokes almost exclusively the democratic peace theory. Her justification is one of convenience: ‘I will return to this example of the democratic peace thesis throughout the text simply because it is such a well-known case that Moravcsik himself also uses’ (Jahn, Reference Jahn2010: fn. 24). It is also the only aspect of liberal theory on which she has ever written. And in this case convenience comes at the cost of rigor. We have seen that Jahn’s abuse of synecdoche – reading all of liberal IR theory through the specific theory of democratic peace – leads her to a number of overtly invalid criticisms. She argues that liberal theory applies only to democratic states, open trading systems, modern rather than religious actors, etc. Had she considered the matter paradigmatically, rather than in terms of the single research program on the democratic peace, it would have instantly become clear that such criticisms are untenable: the claim that ‘democratic peace’ arguments are limited to democracies is wrong; the claim that globalization and national identities arguments are so limited is unthinkable. A more thoughtful, nuanced, relevant criticism might have been the result.

By viewing her own empirical work in a paradigmatic context, that is, as connected to other scholarly traditions besides political philosophy, Jahn might also have been led to set forth causal mechanisms with greater precision, and to apply more rigorous methods. No one would ever know that the claims she advances about early modern Europe seem broadly consistent with liberal theory – or perhaps with positivistic formulations of realist or constructivist theories. Jahn acts as an unquestioned authority: she considers no alternative explanations, states her theory loosely, offers no falsifiable implications or standards for disconfirming her claims, states, and considers no alternative theories, backs her favored conjecture with citations from a few sympathetic secondary sources (mostly other political philosophers), advances extraordinarily broad claims for generality. This style of scholarship reduces the probability of the reader encountering contrary evidence or explanations to zero. The bias is too obvious to require elaboration.Footnote 21

This mode of inquiry – at once solipsistic and authoritarian – is not happenstance. It is related to Jahn’s overt rejection of paradigmatic generalization.Footnote 22 Social science, as opposed to philosophy, literature, or the arts, is about placing your favored theory (for, as Jahn rightly points out, everyone has a favored theory) at risk, by putting it up for evenhanded testing against the other plausible theories. The more methodological challenges one creates for oneself, the more confidence others can have in the empirical results. Yet in Jahn’s non-paradigmatic world, in which neither general alternative views nor meaningful empirical testing exist, there exists neither incentive nor means to convince the reader that one has fairly considered the issue, or any way to convey the broader significance of an empirical result.

Jahn’s self-regarding approach is doubly ironic. It not only contravenes conventional research methods; it violates her own espoused methodological authorities. Near the conclusion of her rebuttal, Jahn criticizes me and other liberals for failing to engage in ‘real intersubjective communication’ or sincere ‘dialog’ with those of other philosophical, theoretical, methodological, ideological and cultural persuasions. Characteristically, she offers no specific criterion to tell precisely what such a ‘dialog’ or ‘communication’ entails.Footnote 23 Nor, again characteristically, does she mention any particular scholarship of mine that qualify me for this criticism.Footnote 24 Yet, when it comes to the one sort of dialog that matters most – letting others have an equal shot at explaining the empirical phenomenon one is researching – Jahn’s own sense of tolerance deserts her. Her position is that one cannot simply ‘test’ interpretations or theories against patterns of crude facts, but we should view facts in a theoretical context – a point for which she cites an excellent essay by Fritz Kratochwil. Yet, she neglects the methodological consequence, which Kratochwil notes a few pages later: ‘We cannot test our ideas against reality as all our questions to nature are already phrased in a theory (or language); we test only theories against other theories’.Footnote 25 This makes sense. We know scholars are exposing themselves to a serious risk of disconfirmation when they take other theories seriously. Kratochwil is quite correct that we can have no confidence in the naïve empiricism practiced by Jahn.

Thus, in the end, the only concrete function served by Jahn’s belabored meta-theoretical and philosophical arguments against paradigms has been – unconsciously, I am sure – to relax the rigorous methodological, theoretical, and empirical standards to which normal ‘positivistic’ social science must adhere. She has spent dozens of pages tilting at paradigmatic windmills rather than doing the hard empirical and mid-range work required to establish her argument vis-à-vis those of other scholars who have invested in the topic. This isolates her work intellectually. In the end, the conventional paradigmatic and methodological limitations we place on ourselves, onerous and frustrating though they may often be, are the signs of respect and deference we pay our colleagues. It permits us to learn from them, and they from us. The aim is to facilitate conversation on an equal basis. In social science, as in most things, you cannot get something for nothing. Jahn seems unaware of alternative theories, even in an area on long-standing debate and current controversy, adhere to no standards that should encourage a skeptical reader to believe her claims, and launches criticisms with little or know knowledge of her targets. Like Don Quixote, she has lost touch with the outside world, misinterprets the intentions and statements of her ‘enemies’, and – although, well intentioned – has caused more harm than good.