ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TEORİLERİ II

With Habermas, the Frankfurt School turned global, influencing methodological approaches in other European academic contexts and disciplines.

The idea of both “suffering” and “happiness” takes place in Horkheimer’s works. Horkheimer’s thoughts on suffering owe a great deal to Marx’s views on the capitalist system that enslaves people.

The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was the creation of Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father’s grain business to finance the Institute.

The consideration of psychoanalysis by the Frankfurt School was also due to Horkheimer’s encouragement. It was Eric Fromm, nevertheless, who achieved a significant advancement of the discipline. His central aim was to provide, through a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, “the missing link” between the ideological superstructure and socio-economic base.

Speech act is a theory on the actual communicative function of language, attempting to find out the extent to which impartial interaction is possible between speakers. The theory was particularly developed by John L. Austin and John Searle, who argued that the order of words has primary meaning and clearly convey the messages of the speaker.

Epistemology, in a generic sense, is a theory of knowledge. It deals with how the very concepts that constitute a theory are constituted and organized.

Overall, positivist epistemology is supported by the claims of a neutral, non-normative, and value-free production of knowledge.

Praxeology is the study of aspects of human action, especially political action and ethics. It is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means, and so forth.

Cox challenges the idea that “truth” is absolute, as in realism’s assertion that there is a timeless logic to international relations, or liberalism’s assertion that the pursuit of global capitalism is positive. Instead, he argues that theory is always for someone and for some purpose.

Linklater’s work is marked by the awareness that modernity is an unfinished project in its potential for accomplishing human freedom, namely through the transformation of the competitive system of separate states into a global community.

The idea particularly originates from the work of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advanced different revolutionary ideas of how the world could be reordered and transformed.

However it is defined or understood, the central argument is that all knowledge is broadly political in nature. Critical theorists argue that knowledge is shaped by human interests of different kinds, rather than standing “objectively” independent from these interests. Human interests are understood as multiple and sometimes even contradictory. Hence, knowledge itself is also seen as fundamentally pluralistic and incongruous, rather than unitary and monolithic.

Furthermore, Horkheimer states that a theory can only be considered a true critical theory if it is explanatory, practical, and normative. That means that the theory must adequately explain the social problems that exist, it must offer practical solutions for how to respond to them, and it must clearly abide by the norms of criticism established by the field. With this point of view, Horkheimer also condemns traditional theorists for producing works that fail to question power, domination, and the status quo, in general (Horkheimer, 1937).

Base and superstructure are two linked theoretical concepts developed by Marx. In a generic sense, base refers to the forces and relations of economic production. Superstructure, on the other hand, refers to all other aspects of society. It includes politics, culture, ideology, values, norms and expectations, in general. In Marxist philosophy, the superstructure grows out of the base. That is, economic base determines, at least influences to a great extent, the political and ideological superstructure.

Of course, neither the scholars of the Frankfurt School nor those prior to them were not international relations theorists in the contemporary sense. They were essentially philosophers and sociologists. Yet there were two particular scholars who played a crucial role in connecting critical theory to international relations by influencing two other significant scholars in the area. The first was Antonio Gramsci, who influenced Robert Cox, and the second was Jürgen Habermas from the Frankfurt School, who influenced Andrew Linklater.

There are basically three pillars of critical theory. The first concerns its epistemology, the second its ontology, and the third its praxeology

Each “science” has its specific sphere of knowledge production where disciplinary boundaries preclude the overlapping of scientific objects.

In this respect, Cox challenges realism’s assumptions, specifically the study of interstate relations in isolation from other social forces. He stresses the need to see global politics as a collective construction evolving through the complex interplay of state, sub-state, and transstate forces in economic, cultural, and ideological spheres.

Linklater’s critical project aims at reconstructing cosmopolitanism, drawing not from some abstract or utopian moral principles but from non-instrumental action and ideal speech (open and non-coercive communication), the assumptions actually developed by Habermas. Ideal speech is the critical tool used in the reconstruction of political communities, from local to global levels, through open dialogue and non-coercive communication, a process whereby all affected by political decisions put forward their claims and justify them on the basis of rational and universally-accepted principles of validity (Linklater, 2007a).

In the same way, the conclusion drawing from critical theory with regard to contemporary international relations is that cosmopolitan in its character, critical theory refuses to see states as bounded moral communities by nature. Instead, it finds in them the potential to protect strangers in need and includes them in a broader notion of national interest. To critical theory, solutions to human problems, broadly defined, must be sought in open dialogue, resorting to rational arguments that take into consideration everyone’s concerns and interests. Leaving solutions to national governments alone is not an option due to their rather strict positions on national interests. On the contrary, a more balanced position would result from the active involvement of civil society and local authorities