Introduction

Abstract

The concept of culture has had a long and interesting career in the human sciences. The broad aim of this study is to examine key aspects of that career, together with allied notions of context, and to critically assess the implications for the study of world politics and the normative theorizing that accompanies it.¹ There are two related starting points for this study. First, is the ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences has had a profound impact on how the notion of context in both historical and cultural terms, is conceptualized and applied. Very briefly, those who have taken the cultural turn have generally been concerned to challenge established ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, especially those of a positivist or empiricist character which focus on material facts, presuppose fixed universalist foundations for their various projects and thereby presume to produce objective knowledge. Such challenges have focused much more attention on the cultural contexts within which people are embedded and that operate as the primary realm of intersubjective meaning and understanding. One commentator suggests that the study of culture and the modes in which knowledge is produced has precipitated a crisis of intellectual confidence while providing an opportunity to ‘reconfigure the terrain of the human sciences’, thus carrying with it the promise of a new social theory paradigm.² This is quite a claim, and one that will be subject to critical scrutiny in the course of the study.