Customer Reviews

Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)

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This is a mixed bag of sometimes splendid, sometimes tedious, and pretty much always difficult-to-access essays. The writing is too often impenetrable upon first (and second, and even third) take, but the unifying theme is there and -- by providing a nuanced counterweight to (simple-minded) notions of what "plain meanings" are in seminal political science texts -- it has real value. Over the course of his career, Alker became a leading "problematizer" of inherited understandings of historical theorists and their writings. In the end, he was rarely effective in communicating his ideas with clarity, but those who stick with a book like this one can find true gems of insight. It is useful to learn that -- and how -- seemingly canonical documents such as the Melian Dialogue may contain far more lessons than the lazier thinkers among us are happy to assume.

The author is concerned with somehow creating connections to the world of humanistic interpretations of international relations and voyaging between these various interpretations and the more formal interpretations of logical and economic analysis. The collection of essays in this book is a republication of Alker's previously published articles.

The book makes plain things confusing, which is, I guess, how you become an illustrious academic in the dark forest of irrelevance and obfuscation that some social sciences have become. For example, the Milean dialogue from a well-known book by Thucydides is converted from its plain meaning that "might makes right" into a pretentious quasi-logical puzzle full of some portentous "humanistic" meaning.

Much of the book is unreadable. And all of it is irrelevant for understanding what is going on in world politics. In reality, the author moved from MIT to Santa Monica; and intellectually he moved from abstract econometrics (which has little to do with the way the real economy works) to abstract analysis of "humanistic" doctrines (which are completely irrelevant in the real world of politics). This book gives you a sanitized world of concepts that cannot be applied to reality. In fact, there is no reality here. The author worries about things that do not exist in the real world.

He is (pathetically) trying to get some mileage out of attacking Ronald Reagan for calling nuclear-tipped missiles "peace keepers." Am I the only Danish storyteller who sees that the emperor's new clothes still leave him naked? How can one fail to recognize a typical, stereotypical, hackneyed liberal attack under a highfalutin veil of "narrative" analysis, or some other such ruse?

This book shows just how much out of touch the upper echelon of power within the profession has become.