Beyond the Veil of Knowledge wagers that engaged scholars of international relations (IR) can reinvigorate public argument over questions of foreign and security policy. Although parliamentary democracy places great faith in public argument, the terms of such argument have been “hegemonized” in the Gramscian sense: co-opted to serve existing elites and ideologies. Such co-optation proceeds through a hollowing out of the terms of political discourse, strategically emptying rhetoric of its power to create new alliances, positions, or imaginaries. “Public deliberations [thus] ossify into different doxa, and criticism is set aside, weakening democracy”; the “cheap chatter of noise” occludes “the speech of enlightened deliberation” (pp. 196, 33) .
On Piki Ish-Shalom’s account, IR’s constructivist turn has become complicit in this state of affairs, whether by oversight or intent. Committed to documenting the emergence of “social kinds”—intersubjectively shared, politically “decontested” concepts, practices, institutions, and procedures—IR constructivists have largely eschewed the work of critiquing them. And yet, the author avers, “There is rarely any ‘social’ without [a] ‘political.’” A constructivist IR worthy of the name would place not merely social facts at the center of its analysis, but the emergence of sociopolitical ones: “the sociopolitical construction of sociopolitical reality” (p. 195).
Think here of J. L. Austin’s “moderate-sized dry goods” read against a well-known critique of commodity fetishism (viz. Nicholas Onuf, “Constructivism at the Crossroads; Or the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods,” International Political Sociology 10(2), 2016). Just as manufactured goods retain no visible external sign of the labor that went into their manufacture, so too the “manufactured” compromises, categories, and self-serving half-truths that comprise our political common sense constitute a “well-wrought veil” that obscures the truths it purports to disclose. Dispelling this veil would require a “politically attuned constructivism” with a “dual analytical gaze” (p. 97).
Such a constructivism, on Ish-Shalom’s account, would comprise a number of interlocking reflexive practices. At the individual level, Ish-Shalom calls for zooming in and zooming out: “focus[ing] our theoretical rigor on reaching a better definition of our concepts” even as we “affirm the inadequacy of exhaustiveness, exclusiveness, and operationalization as standalone criteria” for such definitions (p. 112). Second, it would involve a commitment to and expansion of the basic values of the academy as a diversely constituted moral community: “public truth seeking” carried out “openly, rigorously, and with a sense of healthy skepticism” (p. 119). Third, it would demand engagement with both state institutions and the public, notwithstanding the tensions inherent in each.
Of particular interest is Ish-Shalom’s experience as the editor of Migalim Olam (Discovering the World), a Hebrew-language collaboration between the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University and Ynet, one of Israel’s largest news websites. In a brief, programmatically suggestive postscript, Ish-Shalom lays out a vision for a “participatory and deliberative” mode of academic engagement in which “self-reflexive theoretician-citizens” address a wide, popular readership (p. 198).
Although the broad strokes of this argument will ring familiar to many students of normative and critical IR, Ish-Shalom is a deeply individualistic thinker and writer. He is to be praised for drawing on scholars and idioms that are widely overlooked in contemporary international theory (Saul Kripke, Martin Buber), and for teasing nuanced, communitarian sensibilities out of texts often read too narrowly or programmatically as liberal (Will Kymlicka, John Rawls).
At the same time, however, this tendency to ‘go it alone’ means that Ish-Shalom often fails to engage precisely those who might complicate what at times seem like his own rather pat academic proclamations. Consider Ish-Shalom’s treatment of Kymlicka’s multiculturalism in the context of cultural practices such as genital mutilation or the non-education of girls. Given that “IR scholars do not face genital mutilation or schooling prevention,” he explains, one might expect them to take on these issues as ethical questions as well as empirical ones. Critical theorists in departments “overpopulated by positivists” may find that there are professional costs for doing so, “assuming they were hired in the first place” (p. 121). The effect is to create a kind of academic self-censorship that is antithetical to the pluralism that sustains scholarly community.
“True enough—and Ish-Shalom takes care, where others have not, to note that the reverse might also be the case, a point that too often goes unstated. But these arguments, it must be said, have been made before: from DA-RT to perestroika, from the pages of this journal to those of New Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, and the European Journal of International Relations. Ish-Shalom knows this work and cites some of it. A deeper engagement with it might have yielded more than an admittedly bracing restatement of a problem that already feels well understood, but one for which solutions remain either elusive or unsatisfying.
By way of example: some consider generally-accepted practices of (male) genital circumcision to constitute a form of mutilation, if practiced for religious reasons – essentially similar in kind to the practices alluded to above, and distinguished from them only by degree. One might argue that the practices in question are in fact quite different and that “binning” them together is either ideologically tendentious or a case of conflation-by-nomenclature. This is precisely the sort of thing that zooming in and zooming out might help one to reflect upon. Imagine now that having done that, one remains fast in one’s initial convictions: the practices are, in ethical terms, essentially similar. How to engage “dialogically” with those who systematically abuse children?
One might wish, in that vein, that more had been said about Ish-Shalom’s experience as editor of Migalim Olam. There are several reasons for this, but I focus on two. First, the experience seems to have been challenging but invigorating. Although the work was considerable and its practical effects hard to assess, Ish-Shalom remains sanguine: “the audience is out there, and surely larger than our usual academic readership” (p. 209). One wonders if Beyond the Veil and Migalim Olam competed for his time and if the author’s insights into tensions between academic timelines and the news-and-policy cycle were obtained the hard way (pp. 42–44). More systematic reflection on such tensions, pulled through the book’s scholarly narrative, might have proved instructive.
Second, the title of the series reveals a tension that runs through Beyond the Veil, which Ish-Shalom may not have explored fully. “Discovering the World” is certainly a fitting translation for Migalim Olam. But the verb in question (migalim>ligalot) has both an intransitive sense and a transitive one: “revealing” would work about as well as “discovering.” This is not merely a grammatical quibble. Reading prose is not unlike reading music: one must decide what sense is to be supplied to the printed notations. That decision lies with readers no less than authors. Whether the essays published on Ynet constituted dialogical efforts in facilitating understanding or expert pronouncements revealed ex cathedra by “imperious, know-all…philosopher-kings,” is no less its readers’ call than his (p. 198).
My point is not that Ish-Shalom has misrepresented his intentions. It is rather to suggest that the problem of meaning may be more open-ended than Beyond the Veil allows. This, at bottom, is why essential contestation has such salience when scholarly knowledge and the diversity of the political intersect. Concepts are at bottom mediations, and the power of I-Thou relations to “overleap” them may be no less a pious dream than was neo-positive value-freedom or objective history. To be sure, the indeterminacy of language has limits. That said, generalized awareness of those limits does not, on its own, produce a fully worked-out understanding of them, of the full universe of positions that may take root in their folds. The “play” of the sociopolitical lies precisely there. Yet Beyond the Veil, even so, substantially clarifies both the scope of the problem and the nature of the need, and for this it merits considerable praise.
