Comments on R. Harrison Wagner’sWar and the State: The Theory of International Politics

Abstract

I have long thought that Harrison Wagner's work was significantly underappreciated. To give one example, in 1993 Wagner published 'What Was Bipolarity?' in International Organization, which seemed to me to provide an important set of criticisms of common realist arguments about the distribution of power and international relations, as well as a fascinating positive argument about how to think theoretically about the international politics of the Cold War era. I thought that self-described realists would feel compelled to engage Wagner's argument that no one has stated how one can distinguish bipolarity from multipolarity, and that the standard formulation misunderstands what was consequential about the international distribution of power after the World War II. I was completely wrong. Self-described realists have proceeded to engage in a long discussion of the consequences of 'unipolarity' (a newly discovered distribution of power that was not only never imagined by Waltz (1979) but arguably is inconceivable from his point of view) with scarcely any reference to Wagner's article and no engagement of its arguments. I worry that Wagner's (2007) excellent book, War and the State: The Theory of International Politics, may be similarly underappreciated, for two sets of reasons. The first concerns what might be called the rhetorical economy of the International Relations (IR) subfield in the United States, which has been structured as a contest among competing 'isms'. As Wagner says, 'although the brands [Isms] are ostensibly in conflict with each other, they all actually give indirect support to each other' because the rhetorical competition leaves people with the impression that each 'ism' must have something to it. 'A recognition that they all shared the same flaw [of not providing valid arguments for their major claims] would

War and the State: reply to comments

“…I was relieved that Fearon (2010) did not find any major mistakes in the book, though he doubts whether some of the things I said in it could withstand careful criticism. But his biggest criticism is that ‘while the argument in the first chapter of the book is clear and important …, it is not so clear what the core question is in the subsequent chapters, or what Wagner’s answer is’.…”

“… 1 This article is a response to Schweller (2010), Williams (2010), Barkawi (2010), and Fearon (2010). …”