Despite the recent profusion of historical scholarship in International Relations (IR), there has been little questioning of the positivist assumptions upon which much of that work is premised. This is important because if the assumptions upon which historical knowledge within IR scholarship is constructed were found to be flawed, then explanations that appear to successfully account for historical cases might not be as accurate as we would like to believe. In response to this problem, this article explores John Dewey's pragmatist approach towards history, arguing that Dewey's pragmatism views historical knowledge as socially constructed, but not necessarily to the exclusion of alternative perspectives. The article concludes that Deweyan pragmatism not only provides a more useful way to go about historical research, but also recovers for IR the ability to engage in work that is explicitly for something, and in particular, for the improvement of the public good.

When doing political science research, how do we know that one story is not just as good as the next? Every historical school of thought purports to provide a “true” account of its subject matter. But contradictory schools of thought can not all be given equal weight. While much has been written on the epistemological question of objectivity in history, remarkably little work has been done regarding the practical problem encountered by political scientists faced with multiple narratives and historical bias. This essay develops a pragmatic method, which aims to evaluate historical narratives according to their utility in solving analytic and political problems. I illustrate the approach through the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where multiple, conflicting accounts of the “story” are vivid and copious. I conclude that while historical objectivity is elusive, some narratives are better than others at adjudicating both political science debates and “real-world” political problems.Jonathan B. Isacoff is assistant professor of political science at Gonzaga University (isacoff@gonzaga.edu). The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Bob Vitalis, Ian Lustick, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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This article argues that international relations (IR) theory, defined by its paradigms, theories, and models, has responded not to questions of human experience in world politics, but rather, has been primarily an exercise in self-definitional or privately satisfying research interests. I demonstrate this through analysis of two of the most cited and discussed IR approaches of the past half-century, Waltz's structural realism and Wendt's constructivism. The article argues that a reconstruction of IR premised on John Dewey's pragmatism would enable IR to succeed in responding to questions of practical import. Such questions inherently cannot be determined by privately satisfying research interests of academia, but rather, are defined as problems of lived human experience in world politics as determined by the public itself.

In addressing the interplay of international forces and domestic policy, materialist frameworks such as neorealism and neoliberalism emphasize the influence of exogenously given systemic incentives on state and societal choices. However, these approaches are insufficient to the extent that material incentives must be interpreted and shifts in such interpretations may legitimate transformations of state and societal interests. In this article, we therefore offer a constructivist analysis of international and domestic interactions that emphasizes the importance of interpretation to the definition of state and societal interests. We then apply this approach to a study of shifting constructions of the Vietnam War through the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administrations and argue that these explain variation in definitions of US interests. In the conclusions, we address implications for the purposes of International Relations theory, arguing for a constructivist-pragmatist approach that relaxes distinctions between critical and problem-solving theories.