Authors’ Responses

Abstract

Discussants are usually given the last word, and justly so. It is a task in itself to try to integrate a set of articles and then move them forward; to have a discussant who is also willing to let authors pick over his or her efforts is rare indeed. I doubt I am the only contributor, therefore, who is doubly grateful to Read-for shouldering the traditional task and for agreeing to allow us our critical returns.Read's principal critique, focused mainly on the articles by Peregrine, Ember, and Ember and by Graber, concerns the validity of empirically projecting the past into the future. Like several previous theorists (Hart, Naroll, Marano, and Carneiro), these contributors have taken empirical trends in past political integration and, with various statistical tweaking, projected them forward to pinpoint future global unification. Read finds these approaches inadequate because the authors do not justify their assumption that past trends will continue without major change. "Without an adequate theory that accounts both for why fusion or coalescence of societies should take place and for why fissioning of societies occurs, these projections are simply conjectures, not rigorous estimates" (Read, 2004 [this issue]).Read's cautions on the dangers of empirical projection are certainly sound, and I should doubt that any contributor would disagree with them. But his diagnosis of the problem and his prescription for a solution-an "adequate" theory of political integration to underwrite the projections-are epistemologically problematic, as fraught, in fact, as the practices he criticizes. Read's critique is Popper's critique of inductivism: We cannot assume from the fact that the sun has always risen in the past that it will do so tomorrow, for the next 300 years, or whatever. Read's proposed remedy 196