Lamarckian with a vengeance: human nature and American international relations theory

Sterling‐Folker, Jennifer

doi:10.1057/palgrave.jird.1800092

Cited by 25 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Yet, discussions of change in world politics may be “subconsciously” influenced by evolutionary models or have evolutionary models in their background. Sterling‐Folker () identifies this influence as pre‐theories of social change, especially the tendencies toward progressiveness and teleology in Lamarckian thought—the rubbish that Darwin hoped to avoid in the nineteenth century. Further, we can also identify whether models of change in international relations can be imagined better as Lamarckian or Darwinian models.…”

Section: Moving Beyond the Surprising Dominance Of Darwinmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jennifer Sterling‐Folker () claims that Lamarckian ideas have always implicitly underlain both societal ideas of change as well as change as a concept in international relations theory. She (2006:239) claims that in US social science there is a “Lamarckian pre‐theory of human nature,” a contention that fits well with Wendt's () claim that most social scientists are implicit Lamarckians.…”

Section: Moving Beyond the Surprising Dominance Of Darwinmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Darwin's Finches or Lamarck's Giraffe, Does International Relations Get Evolution Wrong?

Gilady

Hoffmann

2013

Int Stud Rev

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Following the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, we are in the midst of a surge of Darwinian models of social change in international relations and even genetic and sociobiological analyses of politics more generally. But does being correct biologically make the Darwin/Mendel synthesis an appropriate model of change in world politics? This is an open question and one made interesting by the existence of multiple discarded models of biological evolution, most prominent among them being Lamarck's model of inheritance of acquired characteristics. So we can also ask, conversely, does being incorrect biologically disqualify a model for use in international relations? In this article, we explore this question by examining the challenges of evolutionary analysis and analyzing Lamarckian evolution side by side with Darwinian evolution. If IR is to pursue evolutionary analysis, we argue that Lamarck deserves a second look.

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Section: Moving Beyond the Surprising Dominance Of Darwinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Moving Beyond the Surprising Dominance Of Darwinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Darwin's Finches or Lamarck's Giraffe, Does International Relations Get Evolution Wrong?

Gilady

Hoffmann

2013

Int Stud Rev

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“…Classical realism, then, to the extent that it explicitly won the first great debate, implicitly lost the second. One could argue that it lost this debate because disciplinary international relations in the United States was generally located in political science departments that were participants in the behavioral revolution, because of physics (or economics) envy, or because social science in the United States has a fundamentally liberal view of the individual that gradually overcame the European perspectives of many of the early realists (on this last possibility, see Sterling‐Folker 2006; see also Walker 1993; Gunnell 1993). Whatever the explanation (and all of those noted here may well be contributing factors), the process of scientization of the discipline of international relations, particularly in the United States, marked a turning point for realism.…”

Section: Realism and The Great Debatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Realism, Prediction, and Foreign Policy

Barkin¹

2009

Foreign Policy Analysis

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Attempts by some contemporary realists to both claim that international politics are objectively predictable and at the same time prescribe particular foreign policies cannot hold together logically, because they are internally contradictory. The core argument of this article is that these attempts not only fail to fulfill their goal, but that the attempt to be scientific, to see the world as predictable, is ontologically incompatible with the core insight of classical realism, that we must see the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be. There are two ramifications of this observation for a realism that is not internally contradictory. The first is that a prescriptive realism must be a theory of foreign policy, not a theory of systems structure. And the second is that a realism that works as a theory of foreign policy prediction needs to be reflexive, needs to examine its own assumptions and biases as an integral part of the process of studying international politics.

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“…IR scholars have long concerned themselves with questions of whether the American public is opposed to political realism, with many scholars arguing that the public is allergic to realism altogether (Mearsheimer 2001; Holsti 2004; Sterling‐Folker 2006) and others positing it to be more sympathetic than previously thought (Drezner 2008). This question has real political implications, since if American national interests are indeed best served by the very Realpolitik that ordinary citizens find abhorrent, policymakers need to either brace themselves for political backlash, or camouflage their policies in anti‐realist rhetoric.…”

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confidence: 99%

Folk Realism: Testing the Microfoundations of Realism in Ordinary Citizens1

Kertzer,

McGraw

2012

International Studies Quarterly

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Kertzer, Joshua D. and Kathleen M. McGraw. (2012) Folk Realism: Testing the Microfoundations of Realism in Ordinary Citizens. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2011.00715.x  © 2012 International Studies Association International Relations scholars have long debated whether the American public is allergic to realism, which raises the question of how they would “contract” it in the first place. We argue that realism isn’t just an IR paradigm, but a belief system, whose relationship with other ideological systems in public opinion has rarely been fully examined. Operationalizing this disposition in ordinary citizens as “folk realism,” we investigate its relationship with a variety of personality traits, foreign policy orientations, and political knowledge. We then present the results of a laboratory experiment probing psychological microfoundations for realist theory, manipulating the amount of information subjects have about a foreign policy conflict to determine whether uncertainty leads individuals to adopt more realist views, and whether realists and idealists respond to uncertainty and fear differently. We find that many of realism’s causal mechanisms are conditional on whether subjects already hold realist views, and suggest that emotions like fear may play a larger role in realist theory than many realists have assumed.

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Lamarckian with a vengeance: human nature and American international relations theory

Cited by 25 publications

References 32 publications

Darwin's Finches or Lamarck's Giraffe, Does International Relations Get Evolution Wrong?

Darwin's Finches or Lamarck's Giraffe, Does International Relations Get Evolution Wrong?

Realism, Prediction, and Foreign Policy

Folk Realism: Testing the Microfoundations of Realism in Ordinary Citizens1

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