Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the (...) New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

This article is by design a response to Alastair M. Taylor's "For Philosophers and Scientists: A General Systems Paradigm." That work is an advance over stage theories. But its focus on modernization tacitly accepts marginalization. Its focus on an undifferentiated evolving human species disregards intra- and intersocietal conflicts. Its uncritical talk of societal energy shifts obscures the reality of conquest and exploitation. If general systems theory is to be truly objective, it should take into account world-around system imbalance and the (...) relevance of Newton's Third Law. (Publisher omitted title of this article and used only its subtitle.). (shrink)

Around the time of World War II, just as the American state was acquiring new levels of capacity for autonomous action, the state was dropped from American social science, as part of the reaction to the rise of totalitarianism. All traces of state autonomy, now understood as “state coercion,” were expunged from the image of American democracy. In this ideological climate, the “society‐centered” frameworks of pluralism and structural‐functionalism that Skocpol criticizes swept the field. Skocpol's call for a return to a (...) Weberian understanding of the (potential) autonomy of government administrators may be complemented by a Weberian understanding of the (potential) autonomy of democratic leaders. (shrink)

Since its coinage in the eighteenth century, the concept of ideology has been recurrently invoked as a tool of analysis, a term of abuse, or both together. The concept is central to the theories of Marx, Mannheim, and others, and the whole subject of the sociology of knowledge is an elaboration upon it. But just what the concept is meant to convey is normally so unclear or controversial, even question-begging, that it is natural to want to dispense with the concept (...) entirely. That, in part, was what the advocates of the end-of-ideology—like Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, and Daniel Bell—urged back in the 1950s. But these would-be defenders of reason, pragmatism, and political centrism were almost immediately and quite predictably attacked for themselves being the victims or purveyors of an ideology. Whether or not they were, the lesson is evident: the issues of ideology are not likely to go away. (shrink)

(1990). Perfecting the machine: Instrumental rationality and the bureaucratic ideologies of the state. World Futures: Vol. 28, Cross-Cultural Dialogue, pp. 141-161.

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the concept of ideology to contemporary sociological analysis. To this end, the article draws upon central arguments put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski in ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The Production of the Dominant Ideology’]. Yet, the important theoretical contributions made in this enquiry have been largely ignored by contemporary sociologists, even by those who specialize in the critical study of ideology. This article intends to (...) fill this gap in the literature by illustrating that useful lessons can be learned from Bourdieu and Boltanski’s critical investigation, as it provides crucial insights into the principal characteristics and functions of ideologies, including the ways in which they develop and operate in advanced capitalist societies. The article is divided into two main parts: the first part examines various universal features of ideology; the second part aims to shed light on several particular features of dominant ideology. The paper concludes by arguing that the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, despite the fact that it raises valuable sociological questions, is ultimately untenable. (shrink)