Through Dialogue to Engaged Pluralism:. The Unfinished Business of the Third Debate

Abstract

In what has frequently been referred to as the “third debate,” postmodern, postpositivist, critical, feminist, and constructivist scholars who have alternative assumptions about social inquiry and knowledge construction have vigorously challenged conventional scholarship in international studies. Issues of theoretical pluralism, cross-paradigmatic communication, incommensurability, reflexivity, and theory choice have been raised in this discussion but until recently dialogue, as such, has received only indirect and sporadic attention. Presently, however, the rising tide of interest in dialogue concerning social theory seems to have reached the shores of the international relations discipline. Therefore, the present is as good a moment as any to ask the inevitable question: Is this new preoccupation with dialogue yet another metatheoretical diversion (see Moravcsik in this forum)—whereby international relations scholars divert precious and scarce scholarly resources from productive “first order” (for example, empirical) investigations to sterile “second order” navel gazing—or are we witnessing here a potentially important development that may eventually help us leave the isolated intellectual realms into which we have drifted over time? In what follows, this author will argue that the latter is clearly the case. Borrowing from Richard Bernstein (1992), if “flabby” (anything goes) and “fortress-like” (incommensurable) forms of pluralism are the dubious legacies of the third debate and “engaged pluralism” rather than “inevitable synthesis” (Moravcsik, this forum) or even “dialogical synthesis” (Hellmann, this forum) is the most feasible and deserving destination for the international relations theory enterprise in the foreseeable future, then dialogue must figure prominently on our agenda at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The successful harnessing of dialogue as a potential remedy to our long-enduring knowledge problems, however, will necessitate a well-targeted metatheoretical prelude (for example, a reflexive disciplinary dialogue about dialogue) to ensure that this putative “dialogical turn” will itself be genuinely dialogic. Such appears to be the …