Abstract
David Long recently wrote a critique in the Millennium special issue that forms the back-drop for this edited collection of what he called the ‘Harvard School of Liberal International Relations Theory’. His principal objection to arguments made by myself and my former Harvard colleagues was that we had constructed a narrowly focused and uncritical version of liberalism, which virtually subordinates it to realism. He suggested, as an alternative, reflection on ‘the development of liberalism as a political tradition or ideology and its application to international relations/world politics’.Since I undertook such a task in a modest way in an essay published in 1990, which he cites, most of my response to Long will simply involve restating the core of that argument.
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Notes
1. David Long, ‘The Harvard School of Liberal International Relations Theory: A Case for Closure’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Winter 1995), p. 502.
4. Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye and Stanley Hoffman (eds.), After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane and Marc A. Levy (eds.), Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective Environmental Protection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); and Robert O. Keohane and Marc A. Levy (eds.), Institutions for Environmental Aid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
6. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), introduction and conclusion by the editors.
10. Michael W. Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1986), p. 1152.
15. Immanuel Kant, ‘Eternal Peace’ (1795), in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), The Philosophy of Kant (New York: Modern Library, 1949), pp. 437–9.
20. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 80.
22. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p. 86. Twenty years before Waltz’s book, E. H. Carr argued that liberalism was essentially Utopian in character, and that the liberal engaged in ‘clothing his own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it on the rest of the world’. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 27 and 75
23. Larry L. Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1985), p. 43.
Eugene Staley, The World Economy in Transition (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1939), p. 103.
29. The pioneering works are: Karl W. Deutsch et ah, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), and Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).
30. For an impressive work of scholarship that emphasizes the European ability to obstruct American plans and implement their own, see Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
31. John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War Economic Order’, International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1982), pp. 379–415.
32. For a discussion, see Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1977).
33. Barry Buzan, ‘Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case’, International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 4 (1984), p. 603.
34. Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 228.
For a book that revives this thesis, in a not entirely consistent or persuasive form, see Richard N. Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Rosecrance drifts too much, in my view, into seeing the ‘rise of the trading state’ as a more or less inevitable trend, ignoring some of the qualifications that must be made to the thesis, as observed above.
39. See, for instance, Paul McCracken et ah, Towards Full Employment and Price Stability (Paris: OECD, 1977), for an analysis along these lines by a ‘blueribbon panel’ of economists.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), para. 57, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 323.
42. For an elaboration of this argument, see Robert O. Keohane, ‘The World Political Economy and the Crisis of Embedded Liberalism’, in John H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 22–6.
45. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 244.
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Keohane, R.O. (2002). Moral Commitment and Liberal Approaches to World Politics. In: Hovden, E., Keene, E. (eds) The Globalization of Liberalism. Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230519381_2
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