Theorizing at the Highest Levels

Abstract

The Great Powers and the International System: Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective. By Bear F. Braumoeller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 276 pp., $29.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-65918-6). Studies of international relations theory experience something of a paradox. On the one hand, systems theories are relatively infrequent in contemporary scholarship. The 1950s and the 1960s were perhaps its heyday, with works such as Morton Kaplan's System and Process in International Politics (1957) among the works championing the system level of analysis. Interdisciplinary efforts, manifested in the publication General Systems Yearbook , sought to generate theories across a wide set of human and animal behavior. Yet such theory gradually went out of fashion in favor of rational choice and other approaches that focused on state and leader decision making; a quick survey of articles in major journals in the field over the last decade reveals few that look at international system properties. Yet, curiously, most syllabi in graduate international theory seminars devote substantial attention to systemic theories, with such works as Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979), Wallerstein's multivolume works on the world economy (for example, 1979), and Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics (1999) treated as canon. Systems theory has not necessarily produced the payoffs in terms of prediction and explanations that social scientists have sought, but it remains the “ark of the covenant” that international relations …