A Rambo come to judgement: Fred Halliday, Marxism and International Relations

Abstract

According to Fred Halliday's ‘Vigilantism in International Relations: Kubálková, Cruickshank and Marxist theory’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, July 1987) our article entitled ‘The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, July 1986) along with the rest of our work suffer from serious defects. It appears according to Halliday that we ‘do not understand’, we ‘wouldn't understand’, ‘couldn't understand’, nor could our readers ‘divine from our work’. We are, according to Halliday, ‘simplistic’ and ‘given to overstate’. We are ‘ideological’ and ‘tendentious’, our work is ‘inapposite’ and ‘misleading’. It ‘misrepresents’ and it ‘ignores’, it is ‘disputable’ and ‘contentious’, ‘historically and theoretically inaccurate’, ‘dense and meandering’, ‘spurious’ and ‘ill-intentioned’. We ‘obscure issues with polemic’, our ‘simplifications are underpinned by other simplifications’, we ‘erect on a flimsy base’. ‘More attentive reading’, Halliday feels, would ‘tell us a thing or two’. We are guilty of ‘elisions of argument’, ‘dubious imputation of motive’, and ‘foreshortening of logic’. Others have a ‘historical and theoretical erudition’ that we, Halliday feels, ‘as yet’ cannot ‘muster’. There is more: Halliday finds it necessary to make comparison of our credentials and writing with those of others whose writing he finds less difficult to follow. The credentials of some gain recognition as (somewhat obscurely) ‘second to none’, and the works of some others are judged ‘fine’, ‘able’, and ‘most competent’. He extends his approbation to yet other authors who unlike Kubálková and Cruickshank manage to talk about their subject (Marxism and International Relations) ‘appreciatively’, ‘calmly’, and ‘positively’. In an ad hominem turn Halliday expresses his misgivings as to Kubálková’s scholarship for he again feels she ‘transposes’ (‘with ease’) ‘totalitarian method’ and the ‘conformist disciplining’ of debate ‘from the eastern bloc’ on to Western academia.