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A Return to Innocence? The Social Construction of the Geopolitical Climate of the Post-Invasion Caribbean1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Barry B. Levine
Barry B. Levine*
Affiliation:
Florida International University in Miami (FL)
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Extract

Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's “climate” is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an “oversocialized conception of man” (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an “overly psychological conception of society,” ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , Volume 31 , Issue 3: Special Issue: The International Dynamics of the Commonwealth Caribbean , Fall 1989 , pp. 183 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1989

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Footnotes

1

This essay is an attempt to further develop several of the arguments first initiated by Barry Levine (1983b). The reader should be forewarned that it is done from a perspective that is avowedly in favor of representative democracy and state-committed capitalism.

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