Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique

Abstract

We are...in a in which power figures and reconfigures; in which human artifice must struggle with human necessities; in which notions such as justice, freedom, compassion, and autonomy, authority, legitimacy, security and force animate, constrain, and enable human beings in each and every arena within which they engage one another. Jean Bethke Elshtain In our own times we can neither endure our thoughts nor task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking framed. William E. Gonnolly The role of language in constitution of social and political life has long been overlooked in academic study of international relations. The most influential theoretical approaches, those that dominate debate in U.S. political science, remain firmly wedded to a correspondence theory of truth and elusive quest for a scientific understanding of world. (1) Concerns about language and intersubjectivity are deemed irrelevant in positivist mission to explain pattern(s) of politics. It as if much of twentieth-century social theory and philosophy had never been written. Nevertheless, over last few years, a plethora of critical voices have sought to challenge this pervasive attitude, and their work has made an indelible impression on topography of field, undermining its boundaries, questioning its questions and problematizing its practices. (2) The starting point for many of these critical approaches--which include postmodernism(s)/poststructuralism(s), most forms of feminism, and some constructivists--has been work produced in wake of linguistic in social and political theory. (3) This turn has followed a number of diverse routes, encompassing universal pragmatics propounded by Habermas and Apel, transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin, and hermeneutics of, among others, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, in social and political theory in general, and international-relations theory in particular, much of this intellectual terrain remains under-explored. One important project that developed by what in this article I am calling Cambridge School (CS) of historians--in particular, by Quentin Skinner. Kari Palonen, for example, has claimed that Skinner should be regarded as one of the few dissidents in contemporary academic world who concentrat e on role of conceptual-linguistic transformation in unfolding of history; and Charles Taylor argues that Skinner has formulated an interesting and challenging political theory. (4) This article outlines Skinnerian position in relation to IR, and as such it a partial response to Ken Booth's contention that it is vital that students of IR give language more attention than hitherto, as words shape as well as reflect reality. (5) The CS approach has much to offer theorist of international politics, especially through its focus on historicity of conceptual change and its understanding of how political legitimacy embedded in and constrained by set of political vocabularies available at any given time. Why have implications for political theory inherent in CS project been largely overlooked? The CS authors, and Skinner in particular, are usually bracketed as historians, and aspects of their work that relate to political theory remain unnoticed or are assumed to refer primarily to study of history of ideas. (6) This characterization a mistake, for within arguments sketched by CS authors can be discerned an important approach to understanding social and political life. By concentrating on conceptual change and constitutive role played by language in shaping normative architecture of (any given) society, we can reach a more sophisticated understanding of language in both reproduction of social norms and conventions and consequently in process(es) of change itself. …