Linklater has reminded us that Stanley Hoffman many years ago proposed that the
‘architectonic role that Aristotle assigned to the study of politics should be assigned
to International Relations’.^42 (In Philosophy ‘architectonic’ refers to the systemat-
ization of knowledge, and more generally it means ‘directive’ and ‘controlling’.)
Linklater went on: ‘This reallocation of architectonic status warrants support on the
grounds that IR is the social science which is most concerned with understanding
long-term processes of change that affect humanity as a whole.’ I agree, but want
to make the case even more strongly.
International Politics/IR deserve special architectonic recognition because they
represent the branch of learning that asks the biggest questions in Politics (What is
real? What can we know? How might we act?) in the biggest political arena of all.
This is not to claim that the International Politics/IR discipline is necessarily in good
shape, but it is to suggest that it is important that it be in better shape. Within the
academy, what I am urging is greater recognition for the discipline because of the
world-historical-rationality of focusing social and political theorising at the
international level. At that level good ideas always bump up against a obstinate
political reality that so far has, as Waltz said earlier, a ‘texture’ that is ‘enduring’.
The standing of International Politics/IR demands reappraisal. Generally, those
who call themselves political scientists tend to look down upon ‘IR’(when they do
not ignore it), as is evidenced by according it in their timetables the status of Public
Administration or US Politics. This is a historically sanctioned organisational
nonsense. Meanwhile, despite the interdisciplinary character of International Politics
from the very beginning,^43 there is a constant refrain that ours is a ‘backward
discipline’, and that we must ‘catch up’ with trends in the other Social Sciences.^44
The charge of backwardness is simply wrong: it is the rest of the Social Sciences that
are backward and need to catch up. Until they level with the international they will
have only limited things to say about human society globally. One looks in vain in
the works of most leading figures in other Social Sciences for evidence that they
have got inside the dynamics of the international. My claim is that political theory
in the absence of an international dimension may be interesting or even important
as far as it goes, but that if it only goes as far as the waterfront it is not very interesting
or important in today’s globalised world. The planet has shrunk, and its problems
demand good ideas that have universal reach through the resistant medium. I call
Kant in my defence. He recognised the limits of the inside/outside distinction,
characterised by the traditional view of the inside being about the search for the
good life, with the outside being about the search for survival. His view was that
the search for the good life should be universal (the ‘categorical imperative’) and
that the search for the good life within one’s own boundaries could not be successful
without the universal project being completed.^45
In short, if we are to level with the international as scholars, we need to promote
the architectonic position of International Politics. This requires the academy to
recognise the unique feature of this branch of learning: it is the inconvenient truth
and hardest test for political and social theories. At its grandest, the discipline has the
potential to contribute something to changing global realities by changing ideas
338 The inconvenient truth