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The ontologist always rings twice: two more stones about structure and agency in reply to Hollis and Smith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1996

Vivienne Jabri  and
Stephen Chan
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Extract

The focus of inquiry for a critical, post-positivist International Relations requires a shift away from concern over universalist epistemological legitimacy and a move towards understanding the ontological underpinnings of international social, political, and economic life. Recent debates over the ‘agency—structure problem’, as represented in the Wendt vs Hollis and Smith debate and more recently in the latter's response to Walter Carlsnaes, have centred around Hollis and Smith's assertion that there are always ‘two stories to tell’, both ontological and epistemological, and that because of an assumed causal relationship between agency and structure, epistemology is as important as ontology, or stands on the same footing. In providing two further stories in our reply to Hollis and Smith, we argue firstly, that an ontological discourse, such as that suggested in Giddens's theory of structuration, must precede substantive epistemological questions, and secondly, that an assumed universalist epistemology negates difference in international social life.

Type
Comment and Response
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 107 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1996

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References

1 A. Wendt, ‘Bridging the Theory/Meta-theory Gap in International Relations’, and Hollis, M. and Smith, S., ‘Beware of Gurus: Structure and Action in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 17, no. 4 (October 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Carlsnaes, W., ‘The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis’, International Studies Quarterly, 36 (September 1992), pp. 245–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollis, M. and Smith, S., ‘Two Stories about Structure and Agency’, Review of International Studies, 20 no. 3 (1994), pp. 241–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Hollis and Smith, ‘Beware of Gurus’.

4 For further elaboration of the central importance of Giddens's structuration theory to International Relations, see Jabri, V., Discourses on Violence (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar.

5 Giddens, A., The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, 1984), p. xxGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 2.

7 Ibid., p. 3.

8 Ibid., p. 25.

9 A . Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 56.

10 Cohen, I. J., Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life (London, 1989), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hollis and Smith, ‘Two Stories’, p. 251.

12 Smith, S., ‘Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Ship called Modernity: Rosenberg, Epistemology and Emancipation’, Millennium, 23, no. 2 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 As suggested by Brown, C., International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Hemel Hempstead, 1992)Google Scholar.