On the Ontology of Structural Realism

Markus Fischer

doi:10.4236/ojps.2019.91008

Abstract

Due to its systemic approach, structural realism (or neorealism) can be subsumed under methodological holism, which takes social phenomena to be wholes that cannot be reduced to their parts. The wholes posited by structural realism are the state and the international structure. Recent developments in the philosophy of social science suggest that methodological holism ought to be limited to causal explanation and complemented by ontological individualism, which requires an account of how social wholes derive from individuals. Structural realism lacks such an account because it takes the state as an empirical given, mistaking for a fact what is really a concept in need of deductive derivation from individuals. To bring the theory methodologically up to date, this essay undertakes such a derivation of the state from individuals, proceeding in the deductive manner of political theory. It thus provides structural realism with a methodologically valid ontology, which, in turn, enables the theory to better defend itself against liberal and constructivist critics who reduce the state to a transient phenomenon.

Highlights

Due to its systemic approach, structural realism can be subsumed under methodological holism, which takes social phenomena to be wholes that cannot be reduced to their parts
Recent developments in the philosophy of social science suggest that methodological holism ought to be limited to causal explanation and complemented by ontological individualism, which requires an account of how social wholes derive from individuals
Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism famously takes a systemic approach in order to explain the behavior of states by the constraining effect of the international structure

Summary

Introduction

Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism (or neorealism) famously takes a systemic approach in order to explain the behavior of states by the constraining effect of the international structure Since both the structure and the state are social wholes, that is, collectivities with emergent properties and causal effects of their own, and since Waltz assumes the state to be an empirical entity, he can be said to embrace methodological holism—an approach in the philosophy of social science that gives explanatory and ontological priority to higher-level social entities and their properties. Applied to Waltz’s theory, this argument means that its explanatory account of how the social whole of the international structure causally affects the behaviors of the social wholes of the states needs to be complemented with an ontological account of how the international structure and the state depend on the existence of individuals. We need to undergird Waltz’s systemic explanation of the behavior of states with an ontological generation of the state from individuals

Generating the State

The Realist Boundary Condition

The Hobbesian State of Nature and Realist Man

Revising Realist Man

The Formation of the Realist State

The Necessity of the Realist State