Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public – with Jack Knight

Henry Farrell and Jack Knight (2021), “Useful for What and Useful to Whom? IR and Its Public,” International Studies Review, 23,4:1933-1958.

The contributors to this forum all draw significantly from pragmatist philosophy and social theory for making sense of international politics. Collectively, we affirm the value of pragmatist work beyond metatheory and methodology, both politically and epistemically—that is, as both a moral project and an explanatory one. Indeed, we are especially united on the notion that pragmatism “bridges” the divide between these things, and several contributors focus their discussion on how. However, we differ in what exactly it means to offer a distinctly pragmatist explanation or a “substantive” pragmatist theory, as well as in how pragmatism allows us to navigate the analytical and ethical challenges of the field. Over ten years ago, an earlier forum in this journal helped establish that pragmatism had something to offer; with over a decade of scholarship and reflection since, we revisit and expand on the question of how to deliver on it.

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Other Writing:

Essay

Globalized Green Lanternism

American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president’s ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and ...
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Academic Article

Institutions and Majority Rule in Online Communities – with Melissa Schwartzberg

Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online Much work in political science and political theory, ranging from the arguments of eighteenth-century political theorists, such as Condorcet and Rousseau, to modern social-choice theory, concerns the relationship between decision rules and collective choice. It is emphatically clear that the former have important consequences for the latter. Individuals’ preferences ...
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