Left without foundational guarantees for certifying the known, philosophically informed inquiry has been coerced into a continuous self-reflection, and the cast of negotiators dealing with the value and implications of knowledge claims (knowledge for what, for whom, and how?) has been broadened. Decreasing the certitudes of epistemology has weighed as heavily on ethical inquiry as it has on social and political inquiry. The suspicion that the world does not tell us how we should act has accompanied the loss of faith in a search for worldly signs that tell us what we should know. Ultimately, as the philosopher John Caputo has discerned, responsibility has no unimpeachable warrant: it happens. Instead of a search for warrants, ethico-political practice requires recognition of radical contingency and the need for new ways to negotiate the implications of theory.

Throughout much of the past millennium, the social sciences and the social science-inflected domain of international studies functioned within a set of pre-Kantian conceits. The challenge of post-Kantian-inspired critique in recent decades—articulated in poststructuralist and other critical modes of inquiry that have awakened international studies from its pre-Kantian slumber—has provoked a variety of reactions. One type of reaction, exemplified in Molly Cochran’s Normative Theory in International Relations, is an attempt to heed the implications of post-Kantian modes of critique, to place their contributions to international studies within a range of disciplinary practices, and to assess their ethico-political implications. Another type of reaction is—to invoke Friedrich Nietzsche’s term—reactive. It is exemplified in D. S. L. Jarvis’s International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, which seeks to defend a pre-Kantian perspective within which the fetishism of empirical method has thrived (in the social sciences and particularly in international studies). I review these two exemplary reactions in turn.

Molly Cochran has written a competent, sophisticated, and challenging book. In addition to reviewing many of the familiar epistemological and ontological orientations in ethico-political thinking, insofar as they bear on global political issues, she offers an innovative philosophical synthesis, a form of pragmatism aimed at overcoming the impasse constituted within the cosmopolitan–communitarian debate. Given the philosophical acumen that Cochran displays in her investigation, it is puzzling that she holds onto the expression “normative theory.” This expression is peculiar to the thinking of those social scientists who maintain the empiricist conceit that normative and empirical referents are qualitatively different and that an empirically oriented discourse can be free of normative taint. As Cochran’s analysis proceeds, it is clear that she resists the naive empiricism from which normative theory emerged, so perhaps her use of the expression can be explained by her construction of the implied readership—the philosophically challenged field of international relations (IR).

Cochran begins her analysis by arguing that while both cosmopolitans and communitarians seek to “extend human freedom and moral obligation among persons in international practice” (p. 6), they are distinguished by their different positions on the concept of the person, the moral relevance of the state, and their presumptions about the universal versus the particular. She then proceeds to elaborate the impasse with an assessment of the cosmopolitanism of John Rawls and Charles Beitz and the communitarianism of Michael Walzer. These sections are followed by what she terms Hegelian attempts, in the writings of Andrew Linklater and Mervyn Frost, to transcend the impasse. The discussion then turns to confrontations with the impasse, where she provides an extensive elaboration and critique of poststructuralist and neopragmatist antifoundationalism.

So much for the first five chapters, in which Cochran is comprehensive, fair minded, and critical in the best sense of the term. She subjects each position to the same template, beginning with its concept of the person. She then moves on to the moral relevance of the state and presumptions about the universal versus the particular, and follows with assessments of each position’s potential for maintaining philosophical coherence and illuminating the ethics of international relations. The contribution of these chapters lies primarily in their pedagogy; they provide an excellent critical review of the ethical thinking relevant to those who operate within an international imaginary.

In “International Ethics as Pragmatic Critique,” Cochran the thinker replaces Cochran the critical reporter, as she offers a synthesis of the pragmatisms of Richard Rorty and John Dewey, stressing its potential for overcoming the impasse, which provides the rationale of the investigation as a whole. I think that her treatment of Rorty is overly generous. For example, it ignores both the philosophical and political conservatism in his hermeneutic idiom, which seems to contradict the contingency Rorty wishes to affirm. Yet her rereading and appropriation of John Dewey is an important contribution to refiguring an anti-foundationalist critique of the ethics of international relations. Her treatment of Dewey is nuanced, original, and challenging. I would recommend it to anyone within or outside of the field of IR.

Normative Theory in International Relations is a significant challenge to the IR discipline, and this constitutes both its strength and its limitation. Although Cochran is sensitive to the historical contingency of the system of state sovereignties, her geographic imaginary and state-oriented discourse throughout the book confines her implications to policy problematics that are tied to an international relations frame of meaning. And her neopragmatism, aimed at encouraging an “experimental attitude,” is insensitive to the historicity of the subjects and objects that disport themselves in contemporary policy issues (even though she explicitly affirms the historicity of ethical claims).

Despite her acceptance of the perils of the primacy of epistemology, Cochran in effect reverses the Heideggerian insight that epistemological issues are predicated upon ontological positioning. As a result, she neglects how much individuals, as they exist, for example, in contemporary policy problematics, are a recent historical presence; individuals emerge from ways of being (the system of involvements with the world, or, in Heideggerian language, “worlding” ways) at particular historical moments. Such moments can be investigated with attention to what Michel Foucault called the “events” of discourse. This kind of Foucauldian insight places pressure on Cochran’s neopragmatism and her charge that neo-Foucauldian approaches endorse the radical autonomy position—i.e., the value of individual autonomy without adequate warrant.

I also disagree somewhat with Cochran’s explication of poststructuralist antifoundationalism, but I think she has given this orientation the same fair and comprehensive reading that she applies to all of the schools of thought with which she deals. Although Cochran’s contribution will be congenial primarily to those for whom the intelligibility of global issues is confined to the discourse of international relations, the book is a critique rather than defense of the discipline’s ethico-political concerns. As such, it is timely, skillful, and demands serious attention.

D. S. L. Jarvis’s International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline constitutes a radical alternative to Cochran’s practice of critique. Manifesting a serious allergy to critique and especially to what he calls “postmodernism,” Jarvis presumes that he must defend traditional, neopositivist IR against (in the words of the book jacket) “the various postmodern and poststructuralist theories currently sweeping the discipline of International Relations.”

To put the matter simply at the outset, Jarvis appears to be almost entirely ignorant of the philosophical predicates of the critical IR literature he attacks. He invents a model of thought that he finds vulnerable and then proceeds with his method of argumentation, mostly to scoff at the enemy he has invented. But Jarvis’s scoffing amounts to whistling in the dark. He has entered a field of critique with predicates that are mysterious to him, and he shows signs of being genuinely anxious about the consequences of critical work.

The monster Jarvis creates is a work of fiction, for he begins with the presumption that postmodern orientations are “sweeping” and therefore threatening the discipline. (I estimate that roughly one percent of the papers at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association reference postructuralist philosophy.) Returning to the Victorian genre of Gothic fiction in which the constitutive practice involves two primary roles—the monster and the victim—Jarvis portrays Richard Ashley as the Frankenstein monster and the victim as the entire IR discipline. Moreover, Jarvis’s overwrought style of characterization of the dangers of postmodern IR fits Gothic fiction’s motivational profile as well. As is noted in Fred Botting’s treatment of the genre: “The terrors and horrors of transgression in Gothic writing become powerful means to reassert the values of society, virtue and propriety.... They warn of dangers by putting them in their darkest and most threatening form” (p. 5).

Why fiction? Jarvis’ makes “the postmodern” (which he seems to know primarily on the basis of rumor, for most of his citations are not to postructuralist texts but to thinkers hostile to them) an elastic category that applies to everything that he perceives to be antagonistic to his pre-Kantian empiricism. It encompasses most of feminist IR and anything that uses interpretive method. Although the use of a deconstructive mode of critique is extremely rare in international studies (the major practitioner is David Campbell), Jarvis frequently uses the term “deconstruction” as a synonym for postmodernist method. He assumes, without showing any evidence that he has read a word of Jacques Derrida’s writings, that deconstruction is hostile to theory building and is opposed to all forms of affirmation. This characterization is belied by Derrida’s statements and demonstrations and by Campbell’s deconstruction-inspired writing on war, security, and the ethics of responsibility. Symptomatic of his woeful ignorance of critical work in general, Jarvis refers at one point to the expression “structure of feeling” as a “postmodern phrase” (p. 32). Structure of feeling is initiated in the work of Raymond Williams, the late (and famous—though not sufficiently to alert Jarvis) Marxist literary critic whose work cannot be remotely related to poststructuralist critique and has inspired such prominent postmodernism bashers as Terry Eagleton.

Jarvis’s ignorance is not confined to contemporary critical interpretive theory (postmodern or otherwise); it even extends to the neoempiricist philosophy of science. For example, he chides postmodernists for holding the outrageous view that theorizing constitutes fact (p. 27), while he wants to uphold a model in which the integrity of theory—in international studies or elsewhere—requires that the domains of theory and fact be understood as radically separate. One need not resort to a Foucauldian treatment of discourse as event or a Deleuzian critique of representational thinking to challenge Jarvis’s approach to theory. Jarvis’s view of the theory–data relationship was seriously impeached by enough neoempiricist philosophers by the 1960s to field a softball team (among the heavy hitters in the starting lineup would be Willard V. Quine, Patrick Suppes, and Norwood Russell Hanson).

The critical work for which Jarvis has contempt is not the threat he imagines to “the discipline,” unless we construct the IR discipline as a trained inattention to the problematics, within which the work of theory proceeds. The writings of Michel Foucault (some of whose work Jarvis seems to have read) have implications for a critical and affirmative perspective that does not compromise the kind of theory building that IR empiricists do. It extends the arena—in which to theorize while encouraging a historical sensitivity—to regimes of discourse and suggests an ethico-politics of freedom from the impositions of identity. Although Foucault’s conception of the problematic points to how concepts and the modes of fact assigned to them are historically contingent, explicable in contexts of value, and complicit with modes of power and authority, this does not thereby invalidate theory. Rather, it opens the way to work on the ethico-political context of theory and, among other things, to theorize with a sensitivity to theory’s constituencies (beyond the policymakers that seem to be prized by Jarvis). As Molly Cochran, whose work is based on knowledge and critique rather than rumor and contempt, implies, an important legacy of contemporary critical work is the expansion of political and moral inclusion.

Finally, there is one other genre that is (regrettably) embedded in Jarvis’s fable of the dangers of postmodernism, a biographical speculation about a five-year hiatus in Richard Ashley’s publishing life. Obsessed with the dangers of postmodernism, Jarvis attributes these years of silence to the “deep resignation” (p. 183) that he thinks Ashley’s version of postmodern theorizing invites. Without insisting on a counterspeculation, I want to point out that Ashley’s publishing hiatus coincides with the period shortly after an automobile accident claimed the life of his wife and seriously maimed his two sons. At a minimum, the information renders Jarvis’s biographical fable crass and uninformed—like the rest of the book.