In this chapter we apply a Weberian analysis to selective foreign policy decisions made by US and European elites in the twentieth century concerning war and peace. We look at the behavior of individual actors and the groups they form because, following Max Weber, individuals “give meaning” to the world around them. They interpret the historical setting in which they find themselves and act to shape the world they seek in the future. Individual and group worldviews overlap and compete. They overlap to become the basis of relationships and structures that shape a particular historical period, and they compete to establish a range of options from which leaders may choose. They operate against an objective reality of power, institutions, and ideas. We can test their effectiveness and hold the individuals or groups that espouse them accountable. At times, as we will show, ideas trump power in determining an actor’s behavior; at other times, power trumps ideas. Causation is discrete and sequential.

Relationalist worldviews say this type of analysis is a mirage. Individuals and the groups they form are not free to interpret and choose the circumstances around them, let alone play a significant role in shaping their future. The past and future are baked in the cake. A quantum rather than Weberian worldview prevails in which individuals and groups do not exist except as they emerge upon investigation. They materialize from a quantum world of wave functions in which every possible action is already prescribed by multiple probabilities. What exists after investigation is not a substance such as an individual but an entangled relationship of the observer, observed, and environment. This entangled “subject” is ephemeral and cannot be tested against an objective world because there is no objective world beyond what is observed. From a relationalist perspective, the free individuals we emphasize in this chapter are not free at all. They are deeply embedded in historical processes and contemporary relationships. They don’t choose their political party, class status, national citizenship, interpretation of history, or alliance preferences. They are those relationships. Actors have little room in the present to reinterpret the cosmological and historical context they inherit. Causation is mutual and holistic.

This is a worthwhile debate.Footnote ¹ We see worldviews as substantive and individualist ideas by which individuals define their identities and decide which groups or communities they wish to join or remain a part of. These ideas in turn prescribe their objectives and their use of power and diplomacy in international affairs. We recognize that individuals and the separate groups they form are never completely autonomous. There is always overlap (“smearing,” as relationalists say). Bundles of relationships, fuzzy boundaries, and even structures of relationships exist that may be hard to change. The Cold War, for example, was thought to be permanent. But the whole point of Weberian rationalist thinking, which we affirm, is that individuals can be educated liberally to become self-critical and eventually form and change their worldviews on rational and accountable grounds. Because worldviews are substantive, their differences and relative significance can be measured. What Haas calls “ideological distance” tells us whether worldviews are close or far apart and, over time, converging or diverging. It shows us where boundaries between worldviews lie and how far individuals or groups must move to cross over from one worldview to another. Now, we can compare ideological worldviews relatively against the influence of other variables, such as the distribution of power and the role of institutions (relationships). The “distribution of ideologies,” for example, may involve similar ideologies across states (all democracies), while the “distribution of power” is skewed – the democratic peace under American hegemony. An objective world remains against which worldviews can be tested.Footnote ² Ultimately, individuals make choices; they are not simply prisoners of deep-seated cosmological and historical processes or ciphers for atoms and wave functions in a purely materialist world.

Our focus in this chapter is on distinct, individualist worldviews associated with political rather than religious or cosmological ideas.Footnote ³ Having made clear our worldview as scholars, we now apply the worldview concept to specific political leaders acting in the foreign policy arena. We examine in particular two types of political worldviews: domestic political ideologies (e.g., liberalism, fascism, communism, and Islamism) and foreign policy orientations (nationalism, realism, institutionalism, and constructivism). We ask in each case how these worldviews interact and affect policy outcomes, especially at the international level. In both cases, distinctive ideas and how they converge and diverge and interact causally with one another in the international system play a central role in creating threats and opportunities for the advancement of actors’ international interests, and thus are critical to the likelihood of war and peace, confrontation and cooperation. In short, ideational orientations espoused by specific individuals or groups of individuals define the map of international contestation, much in the way that power disparities define conflict in materialist ontologies, or institutional rules and roles define conflict in liberal ontologies.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. Section 2.1 examines the role of distinctive political ideologies as causes of world affairs. It details the pathways that connect political ideologies to perceptions of threat and consequent foreign policy behavior. Section 2.2 explores the role of distinctive foreign policy worldviews and demonstrates how these worldviews compete with one another to shape foreign policy outcomes. It demonstrates how distinctive individualist worldviews (what we call type as opposed to role identity) sometimes override realist, institutionalist (relationalist), and social constructivist worldviews.

2.1 Ideological Worldviews

Ideological worldviews operate at all levels of analysis: individual leaders, political parties, national identities, foreign policy orientations, transnational groups, and international institutions. We are particularly interested in ideologies at the individual and domestic levels of analysis: the goals and self-image actors articulate that motivate, guide, and give meaning to their international pursuit of power and participation in international institutions.Footnote ⁴ What core institutional, political, economic, and social goals do leaders advocate and try to realize in their group or country? This domestic worldview in turn conditions their view for ordering international society.Footnote ⁵ Do individual politicians or political parties, for example, advocate for their country and for the world the creation or continuation of representative or authoritarian political institutions? Capitalist or socialist economies? Theocratic or secular values? Ethnic or civic citizenship? Prominent ideologies that meet this definition include communism, fascism, liberalism, monarchism, and Islamism. These ideologies do not map neatly on the more holistic worldviews examined in other chapters of this volume. Nevertheless, liberal ideologies tend to emphasize rational faculties (explicit knowledge, reason) and lower levels of analysis along Weberian worldview lines. Authoritarian ideologies tend to emphasize nonrational faculties (tacit knowledge, traditions) and higher holistic levels of analysis along quantum worldview lines.

Political ideologies motivate actors to champion particular institutions and values against rival ones. To the extent they overlap, they form political in-groups. To the extent they diverge, they define political out-groups. Ideologies, in other words, encapsulate the shared or conflicting ideas around which domestic and transnational political parties and movements coalesce or collide. Group leaders draw on these ideas as they mobilize supporters and advance their ideology against rival ideological groups. Politics is about ideas and morality (right and wrong), not just about power, processes, and accommodation. Worldviews, as we understand them, are always contested – sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. They do not suffuse individuals in relationalist processes that limit individual choice. They involve individual and human agency. Actors are free to imagine new or escape old group relationships.Footnote ⁶ Above all, individuals are always responsible for the effect their ideologies have on the freedom of choice of other human beings.

Actors’ ideological beliefs have profound effects on foreign policy behavior. Most importantly, the degree of similarity and difference among ideological beliefs – “ideological distance,” as noted earlier – has major effects on threat perceptions, which in turn critically shape foreign policies. As Haas argues, “There exists a strong relationship between the ideological distance dividing states’ leaders and their understandings of the level of [international] threat … The greater the ideological differences dividing decision-makers across states, the higher the perceived level of threat; the greater the ideological similarities uniting leaders, the lower the perceived threat.” Nau addresses the same issue through the concept of national identity – that is, a country’s self-image which motivates the use of force: “If [national] identities … diverge, hostile nations create a dangerous balance of power. On the other hand, if identities converge, communities of nations may moderate the balance of power.” Alastair Iain Johnston also deploys the variable of “identity”:

Johnson’s last point is very important, and it is one that we develop later in Section 2.2 on foreign policy orientations. The effects of ideological distributions are independent of the effects of other variables such as power disparities emphasized by realist arguments, institutional constraints emphasized by liberal arguments, and holistic ideas emphasized by social constructivist perspectives. Ideologies shape the real world of power, institutions, and social identities. They are separate, sequential causes of events not simply rationalizations of power (realism), mutually constituted variables (constructivism), or bundled entanglements (relationalism).

Ideological distances shape actors’ threat perceptions and consequent international security policies by three main pathways – conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications.Footnote ⁸

2.2 Foreign Policy Worldviews

As we have argued, ideological worldviews influence international events through the three causal pathways of conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications. But how important are these ideological factors compared to other variables? In each pathway, ideological variables, or what we call type identities, confront and compete with other causal variables such as power, institutions, and role or social identities. In other worldviews, power interests (realist worldviews), institutional factors (liberal worldviews), and role or social identity factors (constructivist worldviews) may dominate. Relationalist worldviews would argue that none of these factors has any distinct influence on outcomes because all of them are bundled together in the quantum world. They exist only as probabilities, until an investigator asks a question, and then pose a fundamental dilemma for an analysis like this one because they cannot be tested against an objective world. So, let’s assume that the specific questions we are asking as investigators trigger the relationist quantum world to yield the Weberian world and specific variables which can be tested against an objective universe. That assumption is not inconsistent with the new relationalism and allows this Weberian analysis to proceed. After all, if Newtonian science is good enough for understanding tennis balls, but not quanta and galaxies (black holes), it may be good enough for the study of politics since the latter operates on the level of tennis balls not quanta or galaxies.

Historically, actors in international affairs have taken four distinct approaches to thinking about the interaction of “type” ideas with other variables. They reflect the four main foreign policy traditions or worldviews of any country: nationalist, realist, institutionalist, and ideological. Each tradition implies a different causal relationship between type identities on the one hand and power, institutions, and role or social identities on the other.Footnote ³¹

The nationalist orientation comes closest to a pure Weberian worldview. Nations, like individuals, are separate and distinct. They have a unique type identity and act, rationally for the most part, to preserve that identity. This imperative to survive shapes in turn the realities of power, relationships/institutions, and social identities. Nations mostly take care of themselves. Independence and unilateralism prevail, not interdependence and multilateralism. Institutions such as alliances are unnecessary, except in extremis. Power balances emerge autonomically. Social or shared identities are thin; type identities matter most.Footnote ³² The materialist universe consists of an equilibrium of multiple and roughly equal powers.

The realist worldview is mostly Weberian but adds some interdependent or institutional aspects. Not all type identities matter the same. Great power identities matter more because great powers have more agency (capability) and responsibility to balance power and preserve world order. The balance of power (power) then shapes military capabilities (e.g., arms races), institutional relationships (e.g., the United Nations), and social identities (e.g., great power solidarity). Great powers cooperate and compete regardless of type identity, and cooperation does not narrow ideological differences.Footnote ³³ Social identities remain thin.

The institutionalist worldview operates between the Weberian and quantum worlds. Interdependent, rather than independent, relationships shape power (e.g., collective security, trade), institutions (e.g., multilateralism), and role or social identities (e.g., common rules, regulations, practices).Footnote ³⁴ Actors strive to resolve their geopolitical (realist) and identity differences by negotiations and common rules. They build up international institutions and develop the habit of cooperation, which helps them narrow geopolitical and type identity differences. Over time, role and shared identities take on greater importance, and a world community or “community of nations” emerges.Footnote ³⁵

The social constructivist worldview tacks toward the quantum end of the worldview spectrum. The world is no longer made up of separate Weberian entities or interdependent relationships between separate entities. It is now a holistic world of entanglement in which individual and separate identities disappear into discourses and language games. Communicative practices shape identities, and role or social identities matter more.Footnote ³⁶ Social constructivists “bracket the corporate [i.e., domestic] sources of state identity and interests, and concentrate entirely on the constitutive role of international social interaction, exploring how structural contexts, systemic processes, and strategic practice produce and reproduce state identities.”Footnote ³⁷ Over time, relationships replace identities, as actors merge at higher and higher levels of analysis. The world becomes a whole; actors are diffused rather than distinct.

Let’s look at several empirical examples of how “type” ideological variables interact with and at times override materialist, institutionalist, and social constructivist worldviews

2.3 Conclusions

The point of this chapter is not to argue that worldviews understood as political ideologies and type identities override in all cases other influences on outcomes. There are times when materialist forces exert preeminent influence – for example, when nuclear weapons compel security interdependence;Footnote ⁷⁰ or when institutional forces overcome historical geopolitical rivalries, as in the case of the European Union.Footnote ⁷¹ Even social and relationalist identities matter increasingly in such issue areas as global warming. It is simply to suggest that our Weberian agency-oriented approach has important advantages that are eviscerated in more relationalist and holistic approaches. In our approach, perspectives are identified with specific actors and objectives. These actors perceive the world differently and contest their differences against an external world which they cannot completely know but which pushes back to tell them if their worldview is not false.Footnote ⁷² They wrestle with moral dilemmas. As Michael Barnett points out (Chapter 5, this volume), Israeli Jews deliberate and decide between nationalist and cosmopolitan worldviews. Whatever they decide, whether they fail or succeed, they are responsible. In debates about the causes of the end of the Cold War, the reader can test different foreign policy worldviews against the evidence and decide which one makes more sense. In holistic worlds, there is no contestation of political or religious perspectives. There is no good and evil. Nothing can be questioned because boundaries are uncertain and everything is in the process of becoming. There are no certainties, no firm truths. Seen critically, the holistic vision is an appeal to disarm intellectually, to abandon the pivot of individual inquiry and insight, to blur any distinction between points of view, and to lose the element of choice which is the very essence of freedom.

The challenges presented today by climate change and ecological collapses, including the ongoing sixth mass extinction,Footnote ¹ are unprecedented in scale and politically complex. They are also challenging for how International Relations (IR) scholarship and other social sciences have oriented themselves to the world, human and nonhuman. As Audra Mitchell reminds us, in the face of these challenges IR scholars are only just starting to think through how we might orient to questions of survival “as such” rather than simply the survival of individual states or communities.Footnote ² And, as Rafi Youatt suggests, in a rush to “manage” the oncoming crisis, we have failed to consider how interspecies and not just “human” politics is deeply embedded in our responses.Footnote ³

In a way, in the face of the different scale, nature, and temporality of uncertainty implicated in ecological and climate changes, IR, alongside many political and social sciences, has struggled to break free from the conceptual bounds within which we have imagined the world: primarily Newtonian, substantialist, and also often anthropocentric in Katzenstein’s terms (see Introduction), and as such also rather narrow in terms of the political imaginations available to think through how we might negotiate the challenges ahead.

So how might we address climate change and ecological collapse differently? How are productive political conversations enabled when human and nonhuman communities adjust to changing ecological and climate conditions on the planet? And how are such questions implicated with the “relational revolution” – the rise of new forms of relational thinking and practice – in the natural and social sciences?

In this chapter I seek to tackle such questions by introducing a set of reflections arising out of “relational cosmology,” a reorientation to thought and practice around IR that I have been exploring in recent years.Footnote ⁴ This perspective is aligned closely to the Post-Newtonian, relational, and hyperhumanist ends of the spectra that Katzenstein sets out in the introduction to this work. As a result, as we will see, the perspective here interrogates puzzles around “worldviews,” both in scholarly practices and in the “world” at large, in quite a distinct manner vis-à-vis classical paradigms of IR.

The relational perspective explored here suggests that the sciences – natural and social – are undergoing a “relational revolution,” moving from Cartesian, Newtonian, and empiricist ways of knowing toward more relational ontologies and epistemologies in line with not only quantum science and relativity theory but also with ecological thought and decolonization of the sciences. Relational cosmology, and Post-Newtonian perspectives more widely, argue that we can and should explore new or different ways of thinking and practicing science, politics, and also questions around agency. These perspectives encourage us to rethink the conceptual parameters and “affective” commitments that structure IR’s ways of putting the world together to manage its challenges.

The challenge of the relational perspectives, which are many, is that they do not come with easy answers or straightforward paradigmatic commitments, and they do not often even address the same questions of concern to classical paradigms of liberalism, socialism, or realism: they do not search for a rational individual to ground politics, there is no abstract ethics to justify actions on universal grounds, and there are no clear cut answers to the socialists’ favorite question: “What is to be done?”

As such, relational thinking may seem strange, frustrating, and even dangerous perhaps, to some scholars in the field (see, e.g., Nau, Chapter 6, this volume). For example, from this perspective, agents – human and nonhuman – are seen as porous, hybrid, and “distributed,” much to the displeasure of many classically Newtonian and humanist emancipatory ideologies, whether liberal or socialist. Relational perspectives – and partially related perspectives such as quantum perspectivesFootnote ⁵ – challenge many core conceptions of classical western humanism, its (Newtonian and secular) orientations to science, its habit of separating nature and society, and the tendency to seek to “manage” people and things. However, in answer, the relational perspectives as explored here also do not put forward a single, totalistic “worldview” or an “agent of salvation” (leader, class, rational individual, species), but rather provoke us to find new ways of thinking and feeling the world(s) around us and, through this, also representing the varied agents at stake in IR scholarship of a Post-Newtonian kind.

Relational perspectives, then, encourage a lot of new “theoretical” thinking on agency, politics, international relations, science and religion, and affect. Yet, it is important to note that they are not “theoretical” or “abstract” exercises even as it is tempting to treat them as such. They seek to be intensely practical and put forward new ways of practicing engagement, representation, and, thus, (planetary) politics (see also Duara, Chapter 7, this volume). Indeed, the most significant aspect of the relational perspectives is not (at least in my view) how they “theorize” the world as such, but rather the ways in which they ask us to view, experience, be, and “become” differently in our immediate experiences as well as through our “planetary entanglements.”

What this all means for IR scholarship or for climate change is not straightforward to work out – the implications for politics or action are contested (as rebuttals of relational work in this book show; see, for example, Nau, Chapter 6). Yet, the challenge is that, instead of turning back to political ideologies that we have turned to for centuries, political ideologies implicated in the creation of the problems we are faced with in our relationship with the “natural world”Footnote ⁶ as well as in cross-cultural dialogue,Footnote ⁷ we can and should explore the difficult questions emerging from the relational revolution – in the natural and social sciences – in order to develop ways of engaging the “trouble” in the current order and with our conceptions of it.

This relational “end of the spectrum” has in the context of this project been described as “the jungle,” and, as such, has been contrasted to the “gardens” or “parks” of more traditional ways of thinking and doing International Relations (Katzenstein, Chapter 10, this volume). There is something seemingly unruly, wild, and “unmanaged” about relational thinking and political practice. And, for others, this perspective appears “cuddly” and “naïve” in somehow assuming that we should love all others around us. Both conclusions, I hope to show, are too easy a response to the difficult questions raised by relational thinking. The relational perspectives are many and do not seek a uniform, singular truth. And they have multiple different challenges and questions to navigate themselves. They offer no panacea.

Yet, my belief, in line with Katzenstein’s intuition, is that these kinds of perspectives should be explored and debated more in our field precisely because the alternative – to turn back to realism, liberalism, or socialism unreconstructed – also comes with problems in the condition we inhabit. Our ways of conceiving the international and what the focus of IR should be are implicated in a particular ecological and cosmological ordering of the world.Footnote ⁸ The relational perspectives then call on us instead to reimagine how we have historically come to constitute our conception of the world and to shift these imaginations to forms of politics which may seem “new,” “radical,” and “strange” to some western scholars. Yet, arguably relational qualities, practices, and thoughts, while more present in non-Western traditions, pervade the lives of “western” “individuals” too. As Grove puts it in Chapter 4, if we are all relationally processing in the world, relational thinking and negotiation is of relevance to all. Relational traditions pry open seemingly well-sealed liberal individuals or national communities, and reveal the “other aspects of ourselves,” the porosity and comaking, the overlaps, the complex constitution of individuals and communities and species.Footnote ⁹

In this chapter, I start by reviewing the ways in which authors in and around IR often frame climate and ecological challenges, including the increasing number of critics of IR’s way of framing coexistence challenges on the planet. I then explicate what the so-called relational cosmology brings to the table, how it reorients our thinking and being, and, crucially, what introducing it does (in my view) to our orientation to the world (and, indeed, the idea of worldviews as an analytical category). In other words, I seek to explicate what operations of mind (and body!) are required to link relational cosmology to worldviews analysis. This (as Byrnes [Chapter 9] and Allan [Chapter 8] might also lead us to expect) includes reflection on big questions around secularism and religion, the nature of science, and the nature–society dichotomy, as well as the nature of politics and political community. Finally, I seek to show that moving to the conceptual register of relational cosmology entails a shift in how we do politics. While the political implications of relational thinking are not necessarily akin to the usual “policy implications” sought in the study of international politics, they are nevertheless of some import to how political praxis can be reoriented in and around IR and in relation to questions of climate and environment.

3.1 Climate Change, Ecological Destruction, and the Problem of International Relations

In the last twenty years, environmental challenges have arisen from the sidelines of the social and natural sciences to present some of the central challenges for theoretical and practical sciences today. This has been precipitated by the materialization of a changing climate and environmental patterns, the communication of a new scientific consensus around challenges presented for human and nonhuman life within the next decades and centuries, and also certain shifts in power relations between human communities and also arguably between key human and nonhuman communities (e.g. farmers and bees). What Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” – climatic regimes, planetary circulations, ecosystems (“massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”)Footnote ¹⁰ – are appearing on our horizons, but we do not know what to “do with them”: while somehow implicated in our ability to act, and indeed our past actions, they are also not subject to human control but exceed them. They seem to challenge our very conceptions of how to “understand” and “control” the planet and processes on it. As Morton nicely reminds us, they are “hyper [in the sense of ‘over’, ‘beyond’, in excess] relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans.”Footnote ¹¹

In this section I explore IR ways of attending to these challenges, first within traditional paradigms, and second amongst a series of critical scholars.

3.2 Relations in a Relational Universe

Instead of trying to reflect the full scope of relational thought in a short chapter, I focus on the implications of relational cosmology, a perspective which I have been working with for some five years now and which (to my mind) expresses relational principles and what is at stake in them rather clearly and also converses with other relational perspectives in interesting way.Footnote ³⁸ My focus here is to bring out the core assumptions of relational cosmology and to relate them to the discussion of worldviews and IR theory.

3.3 Politically Practical, But in a “Strange Way”

First encounters in IR circles with the kind of relational perspectives explored herein often generate responses such as: What does this contribute to real resolution of interstate conflict around climate change contributions (requiring, ultimately, state cooperation internationally and human action domestically)? In ignoring basic building blocks of “how we do politics” (between individuals, in states, and on the international stage), does it not in fact undermine our ability to address climate catastrophe? How can we have practice “policy response” in a relational mesh?

The relational perspective examined here, and relational perspectives more widely,Footnote ⁵⁷ do not come to IR or practical politics with disinterest. They come to it with a sense of deep disappointment and a certain level of anger and frustration about how our ways of doing and knowing international politics reproduce ways of “allowing” us to forget about how we must and could shift ways of doing politics. Relational perspectives, then, do not come to IR with a hope for an “invitation” into the IR parlor-game, but with a call for different kinds of dances altogether.

These new dances are not uninterested in the world, nor are they “theoretical,” “utopian,” or “impractical”; yet, they pull on our sensibilities, ways of being, and lifeways in some strange and uncomfortable ways. If you like, they pull us into the world differently; and encourage us to “commit” to world(s) around us differently. Crucially, within this (set of) worldview(s) who the communities are that matter are shifted, quite fundamentally, and, as a result, so are negotiating sites and modalities of politics. Instead of doing global governance of the humans and for the humans, engagement with politics might also entail immersion into marine communities or thinking with trees. And engagement with “humans” here too becomes less about modeling negotiations between abstract, autonomous humans and more about exploring various ways in which “humans” are made and cut the world around them, and not only as (abstract, universal) humans but also as “more-than-humans” (porously processing in mesh).

A couple of points, then, could be noted about “politics” in such a context.

• There is, for sure, interest in politics beyond states, the international, and the global, but for somewhat different reasons from classical liberal scholars, say. In this frame, all states, individuals, and communities are porous and worldviews are porous too. Because every “thing” is made in relational processes, they are to be understood as part of relational processes shaped far and wide. Crucially, then, to do “politics” in such a context is not to represent “oneself” or one’s “state” – these constructs are just one way to cut the world politically. Rather, the aim is to “loosen” actors (at the boundaries) to understand cobeing, entanglement, and conegotiation across “beings,” actors, and species. In terms of climate and environment politics this means, for example, that state politics and global responses are not the be-all and end-all of “political” negotiation. Rather, attempts to understand and conduct diplomacy with more-than-human humans and, crucially, plants, animals, and ecosystems becomes a central aspect of politics. Politics is not “only-human.” One way of describing this is as a form of planetary politics: a process of making kin and doing diplomacy in more-than-human worlds. Or we can understand it as Youatt calls it: as interspecies politics.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this frame we recognize that we must and do negotiate with, on a daily basis, bacteria, fish, and trees as well as humans. They “think” and they “act”; and we represent them even at present, but often badly: we can learn to represent them and ourselves and our symbiotic relations better. As Dutch activists engaged in the Embassy of the North Sea point out, it is difficult but not impossible to learn to represent algae, water, and fish communities.

• Yet, this planetary or interspecies politics – also of interest in different ways for Duara and Grove (Chapters 7 and 4, this volume) – is not “one” and is engaged from different traditions of thought, culturally and in terms of experiences of natural world. Such politics, then, comes with critical sensibility about “crisis environmentalism”Footnote ⁵⁹ or the “planet talking” for us – the environment “dictating” mattersFootnote ⁶⁰. This is in part because the politics of how the “environment” is created, and how the “human” (only) also emerges from this, are key to work through and become animated about in this view. There is an intense interest in the politics of the human and the nonhuman. How some migrant populations are made as “less than human,” and how mass slaughter of animals is facilitated by constructions of “lifted” humanity, are intense focal points of negotiation politically. These constructions work at the international level, but they are also at play in our daily negotiations.

• As such, there is also a wariness of “politics” of control, panic, and management. Relational perspectives point out that much of western political imaginations – including climate change politics – is tied up with forms of control and, simultaneously, many apocalyptic visions of “threats” to humanity (or some humans) and their preferred notions of autonomy and agency. From this perspective, the need to control and manage “the earth” as part of climate change politics is seen as part of the problem, rather than a solution. This does not mean we should not take political action on climate change, but it does mean that this action cannot be taken simply to reproduce, in a panic, the same politics of control which are in part to blame for where we have ended up (a deeply hierarchical order of [some humans’] control). These perspectives agree with decolonial and critical perspectives in recognizing that “modern politics” and “international politics” have been not just about representation or coordination only but also, deeply, about discipline, control, and order for some over others. We must therefore watch out for what forms of politics we encourage – politics of negotiation or politics of control – and pay attention to when the one starts to bleed into the other. Implicated in these questions are also questions of colonialism, racism, and species-solipsism.

These kinds of reorientations to politics, and there may be others, may mean different things to different communities in different relational perspectives. For me, “personally” they have provoked important changes in concrete political practice. For example, I have ceased to look to the international order for the “solutions” and have redirected my political action to alternative forms of local and global attempts to understand and represent humans and nonhumans. My academic politics too today revolves around teaching how we might think, “feel,” and act differently, thinking carefully with toads, spiders, and plants. Yes, we read “plant theory” in my MA class on the future of IR! And I am pleased my students going into the practice of “classical” politics have written their essays on political leadership of matriarch elephants or how to re-relate to nonhuman life through music. I think their engagement with the world, experientially and politically, has shifted, as has mine, through exposure to relational ways of “loosening” ourselves into the world – even if these political negotiations do not at once overturn the international order and all the cosmological baggage (of classical humanism) it comes with.

Will such politics “save us”? Perhaps not. Indeed, these kinds of perspectives also throw up many difficult questions on which much more reflection is needed. Thus, is relationalism necessarily a good thing, or does relationality mean that “machines,” “structures,” and “ecologies” can structure our fate to such an extent as to destroy any hope for emancipatory politics?Footnote ⁶¹ Is there an ethics of relational thinking, and what does it consist of?Footnote ⁶² And how do we assess political action if it is situated and context specific? What happens to structural or collective responses? Are we driven to some sort of weird individualism? What is it to represent beyond the human voice? Who are communities if there are no “I”s or “we”s?

These and many other important questions remain unanswered, or different responses to them are being developed. But they are being asked, seriously, and being explored, seriously. This, if nothing else, is evidence of the significant kind of shift in worldviews that is ongoing in the field of IR, along with many others in the context of the relational revolution.

3.4 Conclusion: Of Jungles, Parks, and Cities?

Those who exist in a Newtonian world of things and their patterns and look for order – in the gardens of IR – may not see this kind of intervention as productive. And yet, within the “ruins” of ecological and human chaos we are facing, it is probably best not to pretend that IR or global power management has succeeded in managing these issues. Perhaps we should, as Grove argues, call out the “old white men [who] still strut around the halls of America’s best institutions as if they saved us from the Cold War, even as the planet crumbles under the weight of their failed imperial dreams.”Footnote ⁶³ In the real world there is trouble, much trouble, and we need to stay with the trouble, as Haraway would have it.Footnote ⁶⁴ In a relational universe, perhaps more productive than anything that reproduces the failing orderly IR, with its American hegemony, its colonial impulses, its stubborn state-centrism, its inherent liberal individualism, its alliance with capitalism, is to learn to let go of the special discipline, of the failed paradigms for politics, of the insistent humanism of the social sciences and IR. And we should let go of the measures of success and relevance of those working to a providential plan for human redemption, eventually.

I’m persuaded by the call that we need to get more real. And getting real means also getting real about which kinds of worldviews, or orientations to being in the world, we work with. Relational revolution is here, global ecological collapse is here; “humanity” (as an imagined whole) was never saved and has not saved the world. How do we reckon with this?

The aim of relational thinking is to try to process in and coexist with the world and its rich, real participants, and figure out less brutal ways of living, for more actors. It does not aim to be policy relevant for the “killing machines”Footnote ⁶⁵ of lifeways, cosmologies, and politics that many of our states, democracies, and economic orders are. What we need to “get with” in a relational perspective, then, is a sense of “letting go” of these orientation points. This letting go is not to give up on politics or community or diplomacy, but it is to give up on imagining political or social orders as a park, carefully managed, ordered, and eradicating of ecologies of relationalities.

The spatial metaphor Smolin prefers for a relational form of life in the universe is a “city.”Footnote ⁶⁶ For him, a city is a perfect example of a relational unfolding of multiplicities of relations. It is not one “thing”; we don’t know where its “borders” are; it is smeared across humans, nonhumans, and technology and has roots in the rural and the global all at the same time. States are also smeared, and so are we. To think like this is to let go of ontological categories that are fixed – a notion of relations with definitions, but it is to gain a way of knowing and being in the world which is interesting and embedded in the world. In this world, you are made and you are cutting across others as we speak. And you explore, curiously, the relations which make you, but which you can never fully capture. Political being and intra-action is not between defined beings with interests, but “collaboration across difference”Footnote ⁶⁷ in relations.

It follows that climate change is so many other things than a climate change problem to be solved by humans in the international politics of the humans. In a relational worldview it is a process of negotiation of many actors and relations. It is of the “mesh,” and not to be easily tamed or tackled in a “park” or a “garden.” It is a mess of diverse beings cohabiting, battling for space, transforming and taking over, never uniform, never singular, never nondynamic or nonlinear. Thus is also world politics. Relational IR then too is “doutblessly messy,” as Kavalski would have it.Footnote ⁶⁸ That’s not a “problem” if the world is also a mess.

What is required in this mess/mesh is constant wariness of the habits of thought that simplify too much: simplify what it is to think and act politically, simplify what it is to think and act globally, simplify what it is to think and act scientifically. And from this perspective what is needed is fewer new total single global visions – a worldview; rather, what is needed is “multiplying viewpoints so as to complicate all “provincial” or “closed” views with new variants.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Thinking carefully on worldviews, then, surely is key in this process. But we also perhaps need to think on limitations of how we perceive worldviews. Whose views? Whose worlds? How do worldviews collaborate, conflict, and cohabit? In a relational universe, the key challenge of the social sciences, and of IR, is to adjust to this inherent and constant difficulty and also to the limitations of our thought and practice. Engaging in politics in a relational universe does, then, involve a different way of engaging uncertainty, as Katzenstein proposes in the introduction. Paraphrasing Morton, engaging politics in a relational universe is “like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The occasion of this collection is the problem of worldviews for the field of international relations (IR). I want to invoke this problem in more than one sense. First, I am interested in how the kinds of worldviews we inhabit change the way we study international relations. In my case, I will try to present the reasoning behind my methodological decision to adopt a relational world view as opposed to a mechanistic world view made up of discrete objects with specific and stable essences. Second, I want to show the way that worldviews function in our relational world – that is, in practice.

In an attempt to create a conversation across the different chapters, I offer an account of what I think relationalism is and its origins within the tradition of international relations. As is often the case of adherents to a particular position, I want to show that we are all relationalists, just some better and more explicit than others. I also want to dispel a few presumptions about what I think relationalism can and cannot do, and give a sketch of what a relational approach could look like in addressing a seemingly straightforward legal or technical question about nuclear authority.

4.1 What is Relationalism, for Me?

First and foremost, relationalism is an is, not a should. I mean it as a claim to how I believe the world actually works. For me, it comes primarily from the radical empiricist tradition of William James, C.S. Pierce, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and Gabriel Tarde. Second, the goal of a relational approach is to figure out how things – including people, states, and technological systems – actually work, rather than to make claims about how things should work or predictive claims about how things will continue to work. Therefore, it is in the philosophical sense a realist position not primarily interested in questions of representation or interpretation, but also not indifferent to them. Relationalism sees problems of human access to the world (representation) and problems of meaning-making and communication (hermeneutics) as being horizontal with other relations, such as those we think of as biological or technological. This has been described by Manuel Delanda as a “flat ontology.”Footnote ¹ Human observation and interpretation is on the ground floor with everything else, rather than above it, apart from it, or looking down at the world.

Although it certainly has a strong claim to ontology – how things are – relationalism is an ontology of becoming. Process is privileged over structure or fixity in the traditional sense. Highly dynamic and transversal ecosystems are privileged over equilibrium systems such as those imagined by Talcott Parsons or other Hegelian inheritors who see the world as turgid and therefore only open to gradual and often purposive change.

The correlate to an emphasis on becoming or the dynamic evolutionary character of change within systems and of systems directs us to investigate processes – stories about distributed formations and deformations – rather than agents or variables which could be said to be the “effect” of a process. In part, the so-called “flat ontology” of relational worldviews renders distinctions between independent and dependent variables, and agents and structures, somewhat arbitrary. As an aside, arbitrary here does not mean meaningless. It simply means not essential – that is, not bearing an essence. What is causally significant, what is an agent, what is a system instead is most often an effect of investigation. At what scale one asks the question, and the scale of the investigator, radically alters what appears as a part and what appears as a whole. For instance, from this perspective, the methodological individualism of social theory and many other theories is not a natural unit of analysis. Instead, the focus on the individual as a causal principle comes from the unity we “feel” as an “I.”

We rarely experience ourselves as disaggregated (although drug-induced effects, bouts of madness, dreaming, etc., are exceptions most people experience over the course of their lives). However, we are disaggregated. From William James’ Principles of Psychology, in which we are a “bundle of affects and perceptions,”Footnote ² through to contemporary neuroscience investigations of mood-altering gut bacteria, preconscious decision-making, and increasingly compelling philosophical accounts of a subjectless human by Galen Strawson and others, we have strong reason to believe that even this most basic unit quickly begins to come apart at the seams as we zoom in for closer investigation.Footnote ³

As we zoom out, the litany of parts reveals more and more wholes. Consider group behavior in the form of riots and crowds, which exhibit flocking behavior even in humans. Extending the view just a little further, communities and then societies appear in which the lack of central planning (and even contrary to central planning) there is repetitive behavior, cooperation, and transactions of all kinds. An aerial view of a major highway system exhibits behavioral phenomena vastly beyond the conscious coordinating capability of individual humans or the technology they are interfacing with. Despite the high number of auto fatalities, that there are not more is astounding. The average daily commute is more than an hour a day of barely conscious muscle memory playing out amongst thousands of actors with little to no communication beyond turn signals and the occasional horn. And what about zooming out much further? If we occupy the space between the earthrise and Carl Sagan’s little blue dot, the entire planet becomes something like James Lovelock’s Gaia. The earth from this perspective is a kind of super-organism of feedback mechanisms, from the carbon cycle to the birth, death, and reabsorption of all of the necessary chemical and mineral components, as well as the creative drive to incorporate them into newly innovative forms of life. Scale as a spacetime, how close and for how long, drives the units of analysis and not the “natural” or “essential” unity of those units. Instead, there are relations at every scale crossing into every other scale. Which relations are most important, most operative, and most determinative of change or stability depends upon the region investigated.

Finally, we have the very strange and exotic wholes which make up much of international relations. So far, the descriptions of parts have been in some sense mechanical, or could be interpreted as such (i.e. brains or weapons, etc.). However, what about Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities? Collectivities can feel history and connection with those they have never met, and will show up to fight a war for the injury of those anonymous brethren. Even the strange magic of memory and consciousness scales very differently when considered at different scales. However, we should not separate consciousness or memory from the networks of neurons, perceptions, gut bacteria, print media, and social network platforms that make it possible for consciousness to travel, imitate, innovate, and reaffirm conceptual habits.

At all scales, relationalism describes a multitude of relay and feedbacks constitutive of the processes that give form to what we experience as part–whole relationships in time. Many endure at different scales (plate tectonics for eons, species differences for shorter durations, fashion trends or diplomatic crisis for durations of hours or days) but they only exist, in some sense, solely in their process. When the relations change, the process is over or altered, and the only thing that remains is the impression left on the new arrangement by the arrangements that preceded it. This is true, according to relationalism, from the intimacy of identity all the way to the formation of stars.

While I follow a relational and primarily historical and interpretive approach, I do depart from many other adherents of relationalism in two significant ways.Footnote ⁴ The first involves the assumption of an ethical or normative content to what Milja Kurki calls the “relational cosmology” of the “relational revolution” (Chapter 3, this volume). Kurki believes an ethical impulse is “baked into” a relational worldview. There are a number of examples of this in contemporary theory inside and outside of IR. Two variants are those following Judith Butler and her debt to Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, who account for violence as an abrogation of relations and a possibility of nonviolence in relations themselves. Here, violence is in some sense the ignoring of a fundamental relationality among human beings that would, if recognized, create an understanding mutuality opposed to violence. From these accounts, consciousness-raising about the fact of relationality is a solution to global violence just as “realizing” and “experiencing” relationality makes us open or indebted to “the other,” to use Levinas’ terms. The second variant focuses more on the natural environment and violence against nonhuman others. From this perspective on relationality, environmental destruction and extreme cruelty toward nonhuman animals is, like the Levinasian/Arendtian account, the result of a loss of relationality often attributed to modernist accounts of mind/body and nature/culture dualisms, or, more generally, of anthropocentrism. Like normative relationalism, the environmental strand believes that an awareness of this fact, or a cultivation of an ethos of interdependence beyond the human species, will reduce violence and possibly may make planetary life more sustainable. It is not unusual to take as evidence of this position the confluence of environmental protections by indigenous peoples with relational cosmologies.

Both variants conflate the methodological insights of relationalism with a relational worldview. One is empirical while the other is aspirational. The risk, I believe, in this conflation is a confusion of expectations and a false sense that one has solved more philosophical questions than are possible to solve. It is enough to have an account of the world that integrates ideational and material forces into a single substance and ontology. We ought not expect that this, in addition, restores the world to some perfect order, or that striving for a more universal notion of the good escapes somehow the deep problems of competing interests, relativism, or incommensurable worldviews. Too often the appeal to relationalism’s debt to science or fundamental, ancient ontologies is used to depoliticize its normative commitments. However, the ambivalent relationship between relationalism’s cosmological and scientific origin stories ought to demand the inverse. Rather than seeing relationality as an ethical exit from particularity and the divisions in politics, it ought to insist upon both as the beginning of inquiry.

While an ethics can be built within a relational ontology, it does not necessarily follow from the ontological insights. After all, seals and great white sharks are deeply relational and aware of each other, and yet could not easily arrive at a common sense of the good. If any interspecies consensus could be reached between predator and prey, it would be minimal (maybe a consensus value on saving the ocean, for instance) and not as a mere result of their relationality, which is mostly characterized by teeth and blood. Could such a relationship be at least free of violence? Even that seems far-fetched given the findings of animal behaviorists that predators enjoy their hunt; killing for fun has been observed in orcas, dolphins, and cats.

In fact, rather than say that relationality and violence are opposed, I believe that the opposite claim can and should be made. If everything is relational – from our cells to our consciousness – then certainly violence is relational too. To go a step further, violence – a thoroughly human concept – only distinguishes itself from force or change because of the particular relationships of attention and intimacy which make cruelty possible. What makes an earthquake tragic – that is, unavoidable and indebted to no misanthropy or purposive end – is precisely what makes an act of war violent. Malice, sadism, cruelty, cultivated indifference – all of these extra characteristics are what change the ecological and political relations of actions such that they are violent as opposed to something else.

The second error of many relational approaches is to treat relations as a metaphor, or an independent substance. This is a common error of network theories and assemblage theories. In both cases relations are abstracted from the environment, resulting in an image of “nodes” which fall back into the original trap of agents – that is, unified, essential entities, independent of relations and surrounded by a “web” of connectors. This image is often borrowed from the internet existence we all live amidst. The vast series of “tubes” connecting things are either thought of as an independent substance, like the wires and fiberoptic cables of the network society, or as a kind of metaphor for communication across the ether between nodes.

Either way, treating relations as a “thing” misses the entire point of the ecological approach. We are not constituted by relations. We are relations. Or, more accurately, everything is an unfolding and refolding process of relations. There are no solid inputs or outputs. All of life is origami. The differences are in the folds, not the substance. A relational approach does not study relations instead of actors or instead of parts. A relational approach studies the folds and processes that make differences, hence the ability to differentiate the therapeutic cut of a scalpel to remove a gangrenous hand, the punitive surgical removal of a hand because someone has been convicted of theft, and the horror of having your hand blown off by an adversary trying to kill you. Mechanistically they are all similar at one level, in that they all involve pain, a missing hand, or another actor creating the condition of losing a hand, a weapon, or a tool. At another level – that of the psycho-social economy, the chances of survival, the character of the trauma, and the feelings of gratitude or revenge – it is the variability of the relations of the process which will be the basis for creating these differences. This is what I mean by an ecological approach. There are not entities with relations; it is relations all the way down.

For me, relationalism is an entry point into the complexities of global violence rather than an exit from or prophylactic against it. Similarly, the highly complex and dispersed systems which make violence possible, from breathable air to enmity to the technological systems of enacting violence on larger and larger scales, to the rich histories of national belonging as well as forms-of-life which form the basis of legible differences, suggest to me that a relational approach is incredibly productive for studying such the variable and unstable arrangement of the things that constitute global orders. In what follows, I will present one example of how a relational approach would alter our discussion and research. The example focuses on nuclear weapons, particularly the relationship between constitutional authority and command, and control capability, which are often treated as completely separate questions. My discussion of nuclear weapons command and control is not meant to offer comprehensive accounts of the vast literatures on this question. Instead, I want to show what kinds of questions or research might become visible with a shift to a relational ontology and an ecological research agenda.

4.2 A Relational Approach to Nuclear Authority, or the Insufficiency of Decisionism and Constitutionalism

Broadly speaking, there exist two very different literatures about nuclear weapons. Legal scholars and philosophers spend their time considering whether the American president has the right to use nuclear weapons either constitutionally or morally. A more technical literature on nuclear strategy and capability focuses on policy formulation and implementation. Little if any overlap exists between these two literatures and traditions of inquiry. I want to see what happens when we combine these questions, see how each is shaped by the other, rather than seeing either as primary. Furthermore, what comes of debates over sovereignty and decisionism when we take a more relational or ecological approach?

It is important to keep in mind that an ecological account of security is not simply about connecting technological change with legal and political development internally, but observing the change in the security environment’s material conditions – that is, all of the relations. For instance, it is difficult to imagine the present state of nuclear weapons development that tended so heavily toward a sovereign model of command and control without taking account, at the most basic level, of the geographic specificity of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even a distant competitor such as Japan would have altered the technological development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). A basic feature of the environment like the relatively small size of the Japanese nation-state would probably not have driven the development of MIRV-ed delivery vehicle or even megaton yields entering into the double-digits.Footnote ⁵ The simple fact that Japanese soldiers could not have threatened Western Europe, thus requiring a nonconventional arsenal to even the odds, would have altered the course of nuclear weapons development. But size, geography, competitor – these are contingencies of history, contexts for which either the legal/moral or strategic approach could easily account for and does not change how we understand the actors or institutions at work. For an ecological account to be significant (and worth the effort), the nature of change and the actors of the situation ought to appear different (alien, even) to the conceptual tools of methodological individualism presumed by moral legal theory and leadership debates in strategic thought. Otherwise, contingencies such as place, infrastructure, and communication networks are merely details. What is at stake in this section is to consider that these things are constitutive, internal actants – that is, details that make a difference in what is and is not possible and what is and is not thinkable. The sovereign is not exterior to the nuclear assemblage nor its command head. Rather, what we understand to be nuclear sovereignty – the final right and capability of nuclear launch of which there is no higher power – is the assemblage itself, by which any particular president is incorporated, habituated, and therefore plugged into. This perspective is in sharp contrast to the individual accountability that is a central value of the humanist Newtonianism that Haas and Nau (Chapter 2) and Nau (Chapter 6) defend so vigorously. As Nau puts it, the discussion of IR and the events we study “would not be possible without individuals.”

There exists a fundamental problem in Nau’s analysis. His claim of the individual as a basic unit rests on Weber’s rich understanding of individual behavior that distinguishes between instrumental rationality, value rationality, emotions, and habits. Nau focuses exclusively on the first two and skips over emotions and habits when he writes “the individual remains primary over structure.” Nau thinks that this assertion allows him to move forward with a reading of Weber in which “choice is free, not determined by science or higher norms.” What little lip service Nau pays to Weber’s rich understanding of structure is subsumed by a deep and abiding faith in a unified and autonomous individual. However, dismissing “structure” does not get us back to a unified individual for one simple reason. The individual is a structure constituted by the deep relationality between the four distinctive Weberian categories on which Nau relies. They are categorically relational even if one were to believe that instrumental rationality is a kind of governing executive function freed from its origins and the processes of perpetual recreation. Values, habits, and feelings (and, I would argue, also instrumental rationality) come from relations that predate the individual even if we want to be humanists. These categories are contingent on early childhood development and learning that are both radically intersubjective before the “I” emerges (as Erikson, Lacan, Piaget, and many childhood developmental psychologists have shown) and radically inter-objective (as the formation of what we recognize as the self comes from the ability to separate from the mother and connect to other people and objects in the formation of independence, as Klein argues).Footnote ⁶ Even if we argue that humans “congeal” at some point late in their teenage years (which is implausible for any teacher of university students and for anyone who thinks that experience induces learning), the four Weberian categories of individual action have to be coordinated by some means other than instrumental rationality, otherwise the others would no longer be categories for behavioral analysis; they would just be a bargain bin for rationality to sift through and choose self-consciously amongst. Of course, this is absurd. Instead, there is a plastic and oscillating intensity of relations between emotional, habitual, rational, and ideational formations of consciousness and sense. This is where structure, affect, intersubjectivity, pedagogy, aesthetics, metabolism, architecture, nonhuman animals, temporality, etc., all come back into play with a vengeance. Nau ignores all of this and moves forward with the rest of his critique of relationism and his defense of human freedom because he black boxes all of these relations in the emergence of consciousness. Put simply, Nau’s individualism is Cartesian not Weberian. He thus fundamentally violates the foundational relational assumptions that are embedded in the Weberian model he deploys.

Consider Weber’s attention to charisma in Economy and Society, applied here to the complex nuclear issue. Weber distinguishes between the power of bureaucracy and the charismatic leadership both in terms of their economy of power and the “rules” of legitimation (or lack thereof) that govern them. Economically, bureaucracy is dependent on a “continuous income” for its functioning.Footnote ⁷ In contrast, Weber writes of charisma that it “lives in, not off this world.” Adding a further religious and almost magical tone, he continues: “Because of this mode of legitimation genuine charismatic domination knows no abstract laws and regulations and no formal adjudication.”Footnote ⁸ Beyond laws and norms, Weber argues for charisma as a distinctive source of power that differs from the rationalized power of bureaucracy and the less-refined brute force that possess the capability to exercise domination and “transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms.”Footnote ⁹ Weber’s explanation of charisma deconstructs both the individualist explanation and the casual frame it might suggest – namely, that someone “possesses” charisma and uses it in some instrumental or individualistic way. For Weber, charisma cannot be something that is simply possessed by an individual, for it must move the people it inspires in unprecedented ways, often against their own interests. That is, charisma works by neither rational nor habitual means. It breaks rules and creates new values rather than relying on norms or laws. So how does one acquire such a power?

For Weber, for charisma to exist in the first place, charismatic leadership is relationally dependent upon those moved by its power. The self-determination of charisma is not that of the charismatic leader conceived of as a self-possessed individual. Instead, the self-determination of charisma is a co-emergent and semi-autonomous formation resulting from the relation between the leader and the people. In Weber’s language: “Charisma is self-determined and sets its own limits. Its bearer seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his missions. If those to whom he feels sent do not recognize him, his claim collapses; if they recognize it he is their master as long as he ‘proves’ himself.”Footnote ¹⁰ There is no means by which either the “bearer” of charisma or the will of the followers can be a sufficient cause for charisma. Instead, there exists a deep and variable relationality at the heart of the production of subjects, whom Nau calls individuals. Intersubjectivity creates the condition of possibility for charisma and the catalytic transformation it can deliver. Weber does not offer an individualist account of charisma. And Weber insists that no rational account is on offer as charisma “disrupts all rational rule.”Footnote ¹¹ It would be fine to ignore just how malleable and coconstitutive humans are if charisma were a rare force in political and geopolitical change. But I concur with Weber that in a “purely empirical and value-free sense charisma is the specifically creative revolutionary force of history.”Footnote ¹² The vision we are given by Weber is one in which all of the agents of change are swept up in a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, much less any particular individualistic part.Footnote ¹³ For me, Weber’s explanation is much closer to what I am trying to develop here in terms of a nuclear sovereign assemblage than is Nau’s defense of a substantive or methodological individualism.

What I argue is the precise opposite of Nau. It is only once circulating in the assemblage that the American president can become a significant relay-exchange in the functioning or nonfunctioning of the assemblage, but is never the final relay-exchange. While we would likely blame or credit the president in the case of a nuclear launch, much as we did blame or credit George W. Bush with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, such an anthropomorphic image would be a mistake. The command as much as the compliance with the command is not possible without the collaboration of millions of people and countless numbers of things. Nau’s image of individual responsibility may satisfy his moral appetite, but it does nothing to reveal how a decision takes place as an event which can unfold across systems and people seemingly as if their dispositions were already decided. How many decisions, infrastructures, years of training, or national identities had to come into formation for a presidential command to make sense, much less be effective in unleashing nuclear war. To put it another way: the decision comes after the potentiality of nuclear war, not before it.Footnote ¹⁴

Such a claim, if demonstrated, changes how we understand constitutional constraints of nuclear war. The legal right is less significant, even potentially irrelevant, to the capability to set nuclear war in motion without, for instance, congressional approval. Similarly, in the context of strategic studies, the anthropomorphism that conflates the state and its nuclear arsenal into a single entity, a president, with a structured, individualized rationality driven by victory and survival, becomes self-evident. That is, the sovereign is shown to be a mere stand-in for something vastly more complex than a real, ontological entity. The president, in the most radical reading of this claim, is more like a mascot than a quarterback. In the informatic networks of early warning systems, targeting coordinates, satellite communication, silo commanders, rocket fuel, hangovers, weather balloons, and global ideological competitions, the American president doesn’t call the play, the play calls them.Footnote ¹⁵

In what follows I will quickly identify the characteristics of the nuclear arsenal that lends itself to a relational or ecological analysis. As I argued in the introduction, relations are the real fabric of existence. They are ontologically real and not a metaphor. Does everything then lend itself to a relational approach? Not necessarily. Not all forms of reductionism – that is. the reliance on unitary actors or instrumental accounts of tools – are useless. Like the case of Newtonian physics, reductions and simplifications can be very powerful despite being in some sense simply inaccurate. However, there are scales of complexity and complexities of causality in which simplifications occlude more than they reveal. I want to argue that there are specific features of the nuclear arsenal that demonstrate the limits of legal-moral and strategic anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. Furthermore, to understand how war as an event, and nuclear war specifically, requires a relational account to describe the capacity to make wholes out of such disparate parts also goes a long way to discount Nau’s belief that relationalism somehow smuggles utopia and peace into its conceptual worldview. Quite the opposite: a relational approach is essential to understanding collective catastrophe as much as it is to any other form of change. What we lose in the shelter of provincial humanist thought is the degree to which global politics depends precisely on the nonindividualistic capacities of human beings. Ought we let political realism off the hook if a president did not “mean” to cause a nuclear war or end civilization, or would the habituation of strategic thinking, nuclear development and deployment, and thousands of hours of drilling officers sitting in bunkers somehow find its way back to the logics of deterrence and escalation dominance that were simultaneously inspired by the vast networks of nuclear capability and that enlivened the circulation and modernization of those nuclear networks? The nuclear world we live in goes well beyond the four-part Weberian schema of social action described by Nau in Chapter 6. Likewise, unfortunately the inhuman and often indifferently autogenocidal character of the nuclear sovereign assemblage calls into question whether becoming part of the connected nature of things leads anywhere in particular, much less to what Kurki calls a “not only human… planetary politics.”Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, relationalism merely is. The fact of the relational world may be as necessary for the possibility of a more humane planetary ethos as it is for the techno-human death cult of the nuclear balance of terror. However, the insight that we live in such a world is not sufficient to explain the inevitability of either outcome.

4.3 Conclusion

In the case of nuclear command and its ambivalent relationship to sovereignty as imagined in our habitual descriptions of presidential authority, I have tried to show how a relational approach to nuclear sovereignty as opposed to either a materialist or ideational approach is necessary to understand how embedded and at times perpetual the infrastructure of nuclear violence has become. What is presented here is not sufficient to make that case indisputably or lay out what new mode of political action would be equivalent to the complexity of each problem. That is beyond what can be done in one chapter. However, I hope that the slightly different account of the problem that more fully accounts for the relational complexity and inhuman character of nuclear command as ecological problems can open up practical questions about how purely individualist approaches or purely discursive approaches blunt our understanding of how these problems work. To craft from that a way forward would need to center in some sense on the very practical and material condition by which territories, spaces, and habits of each encounter are built and repeated, often below the radar of anything we would call a decision.

However, the deadlock of arms-reduction treaties and even contemporary efforts at threat reductions, are, from a relational point of view, much easier to understand. When the more concrete assemblage of nuclear power becomes part of the discussion the interests of the strategic actors seemingly wielding the weapons, as well as tired narratives about the failure of “political will” or “leadership,” can be displaced in favor of the nuclear infrastructures which are in some sense more durable than our political systems. The nuclear sovereign assemblage has a momentum and a trajectory well beyond the intentions or agency of those who thought themselves its maker. In a sense, then, Nau may be right that “individual freedom is at stake,” but not because relationalism somehow “dissolved it” – although wouldn’t it be a neat trick if the ontological framework of the universe could be altered by a compelling argument? Instead, individual freedom, in the way conceived by Nau’s reading of Weber, may be at risk precisely because it never existed in the first place, and that is precisely why the predicaments we find ourselves in, from a nuclear armed world to an imploding ecosystem, come to pass in the first place.

Why study worldviews? What does the concept add that is not covered by kindred concepts such as civilization, paradigm, ideology, and discourse? Each incorporates the values, knowledge, practices, and identities that bind the members of a community and organize social relations; shape meanings; craft narratives of the past, present, and future; define and justify ethical action; and establish the background conditions that form habit and the subconscious. You say civilization, I say worldview. Following the observations of Stephen Kalberg and others, my view is that worldviews do something these others do not: blend the worldly and the heavenly.Footnote ¹ They are tantamount to an “ethical universe” that links the here-and-now to the transcendent, and the practical and metaphysical.Footnote ² In line with Katzenstein’s discussion in Chapter 1, they consider how a community addresses the “ultimate” questions of meaning, purpose, suffering, and injustice.Footnote ³ What is the place of the community in the cosmos and the relationship to the universal? What is the relationship to outsiders? What duties and obligations does it have to them? How do they cope with suffering and evil? How is suffering related to salvation and redemption? To the extent that worldviews address these fundamental questions that often can strike terror and panic in the hearts and minds of humans, they help create order out of the chaos.Footnote ⁴ The world is a jungle, but worldviews provide a transcendental canopy.

This chapter considers the multiple and changing worldviews of western Jewry in search of ontological and physical security in a post-Enlightenment world of nation-states. Because the volume provides multiple worldviews on worldviews, and Chapter 1 situates worldviews in relationship to forms of relationalism and humanism, I should begin by briefly explaining why I occupy the cell of humanist relationalism. I adopt a sociological relationalism that does not venture into quantum-style relationalism or hyper-humanism. Although I have been informed by others in the project that quantum-style relationalism subsumes sociological relationalism because it is the mother of all relationalisms, which it might be, but I have not been persuaded that the former’s high level of abstraction is either necessary or can be sufficiently grounded to capture the changing meanings and practices of worldviews. Moreover, although there are communities, religious and otherwise, whose worldviews incorporate relationality with nonhuman forms, at best this is a minor feature of Judaism and the Jewish people.Footnote ⁵

My sociological position also distances my argument from substantialism in ways that follow from constructivist international relations. Actors, whether they are individuals or groups, are social constructions. Said otherwise, they are not natural but rather are social kinds. This sociological position can and does incorporate the possibility that groups can be more than aggregates of individuals and can have a collective identity, and that these collectives can have enduring features, including identities, beliefs, interests, and practices. But this differs from substantialism’s tendency toward essentialism and reification. Instead, worldviews “do not have a life of their own, apart from their human carriers.”Footnote ⁶ As Katzenstein writes in his discussion of Weber and Dilthey in Chapter 1, the interpretive tradition works at the individual and group levels of analysis to access the cultural meanings and significance that individuals and groups give to the world; however, these worldviews are not the byproduct of psychology, but rather of a culture with an integrity. Worldviews, in this way, provide a “causal impulse” akin to the conditions of possibility discussed by constructivists.Footnote ⁷ As social constructions, worldviews can be settled or unsettled, and they can be unsettled by internal developments and contradictions or by external shocks and disturbances.

These dimensions of humanist relationalism inform my narrative of the changing worldviews of western Jewry in response to the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state. All groups are social kinds and thus are constructed. Most groups that make an impression have a history, and in the case of the Jews it is 5,782 years and counting. And, similar to all social kinds, Jews have debated what defines them as a people, what is their purpose, how to make sense of suffering, what are their core tenets, how to interpret and give meaning to their central texts, who is and can be a member, and what are the boundaries between themselves and others and what should be their relationship to them. Jews have managed to maintain a collective identity despite having lived most of their history in exile and, in the modern period, in pockets of isolated communities strewn across the Christian and Muslim worlds. Yet there is diversity within unity, which is always the case for any community or cultural grouping, and especially so for a people that are diasporic, dispersed, and, historically speaking, have lived in relative isolation from each other. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews share a unity, but also a diversity. So, too, do many western Jewish communities. As the punchline to several Jewish jokes goes: two Jews, three synagogues.

Jews are both a certain and an uncertain people. They are a certain people to the extent that they have a strong collective and transnational identity with mutual obligations. They are an uncertain people with regard to their survival. As a barely tolerated and often hated minority, Jews have experienced all kinds of oppression, violence, forced migration, and genocide. Jewish history and important religious events are often narrated by moments of considerable suffering. Indeed, suffering is so central to the Jewish historical narrative that, according to the eminent historian of Jewish history Salo Baron, they possess a “lachrymose” view of their history.Footnote ⁸ And, according to various other scholars, this reading of history shapes their worldviews and anxiety about their physical and ontological survival.Footnote ⁹ The consequence is that suffering and survival enter worldviews in two ways. Suffering must be explained, and in a way that provides meaning. And the threat of destruction is part of their worldview.

The historical period I examine – a post-Enlightenment world of nation-states – posed threats to and presented opportunities for western Jews that, in turn, led to a change in worldviews. Although worldviews have various dimensions, I focus on what is called the “Jewish Question.” The theologically stylized formulation is: are the Jews are a people apart, or are they a light unto nations? Should they emphasize and preserve those laws, customs, traditions, and rituals that make them distinctive, or should they accentuate and cultivate what they share with humanity? How should they balance and navigate the relationship between particularism and universalism?Footnote ¹⁰

These theological questions began to have practical importance with the rise of the Enlightenment and the nation-state in Europe in the eighteenth century. The urgent question became: how can the Jews, a diasporic, transnational community, find a secure place in a world with universalizing tendencies and that is carved up into different territories that are expected to circumscribe identities and loyalties?Footnote ¹¹ The Enlightenment and nationalism compelled Jews to reconsider how they classify themselves as a people, their place and purpose in the world, and their relationship to non-Jews. The universal threatened to remove the boundaries that distinguish Jews as a separate people, and inclusive forms of nationalism expected the Jews to transfer their loyalties from their fellow brethren to their fellow citizens.Footnote ¹² Under such conditions, the Jews might possibly cease to exist as a people, cut off from other Jews and their history. But if they refused the invitation, they would potentially signal that they were a separate and possibly threatening people. At least they had a choice. Other countries, shaped by counter-Enlightenment and chauvinistic nationalism, treated Jews as the quintessential “other,” an outsider worthy of exclusion, persecution, and violence. Different worldviews began to emerge in relationship to these different circumstances. There is a larger history lesson here: if you want to understand how different Jewish communities have answered the Jewish Question, start by looking at the gentiles. This piece of advice is attributed to Heinrich Heine, the great nineteenth-century poet and writer who was born a Jew and then converted to Christianity. A Yiddish proverb offers a similar, though more fatalistic, conclusion: Vy es kristit zikh, azoy yidlt zikh – “As the Christians go, so go the Jews.”Footnote ¹³

The responses by Jewish communities to these challenges and opportunities provided by the Enlightenment also were mediated by political theology. Whether Jews are primarily a religious, national, or ethnic community is a post-Enlightenment debate that underscores how Judaism has become less important to Jewish identity for many western Jews. But even when it appears to have receded, it still figures prominently. An ongoing challenge for any religious community is the translation of theological concepts rooted in text into political choices shaped by context.Footnote ¹⁴ In short, political theology is the process and result of connecting the transcendental to the imminent. The search for a “usable past” is central to this exercise. There is no one, true, original meaning or interpretation. Religious texts do not speak for themselves; there is an active human process of interpretation that occurs at the individual and collective levels. Consequently, all religious communities debate the meaning of texts and which elements are most urgent and salient. History and politics channel this search for a usable past, and mold this past into the ingredients that shape a worldview. The recognition that religion shaped how Jews understood the meanings, and responded to the challenges, of the Enlightenment and nationalism underscores that worldviews are never hermetically sealed but are constantly rubbing shoulders with, absorbing, and reacting to other worldviews, a point raised by other chapters in this volume.

These unsettled times underscored how worldviews are simultaneously background and foreground. Whereas Chapter 1 focuses on the background, I shift the angle to the foreground. Western Jews are engaged in backward- and forward-looking debates about how to respond to current circumstances and challenges in ways that connect the past to a possible future that addresses their ontological and physical security. There is no single answer to these debates. However, if a proposed solution is to find an audience, it must satisfy the need for both physical and ontological security. And while there have been multiple answers, they are Jewish responses. But the fact that responses are in the multiple, and that different responses can become hegemonic in different national and transnational contexts, highlights how a single community can have multiple worldviews and how any community’s worldview, just like its culture, has both unity and diversity.Footnote ¹⁵

The rest of the chapter is divided into two sections organized around two periods, from the 1800s through 1948, and from 1948 to the present. Global structures and world-turning events provided the stimulus for the transformation of Jewish worldviews. The first section describes how variations in the Enlightenment and nationalism, and the perceived necessity of Jewish sovereignty and statehood for survival, led to the emergence of four Jewish worldviews: a diaspora nationalism, which mixed nonterritorialism and particularism; a rooted cosmopolitanism, which combined nonterritorialism and universalism; an ethnonational Zionism, which blended territorialism and particularism; and a prophetic Zionism that contained territorialism and universalism. The second section examines how the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel led the two largest Jewish communities in the world, the American and the Israeli, to develop two distinct worldviews: American Jews continued to orbit around a rooted cosmopolitanism; and Israeli Jews migrated from a prophetic Zionism to ethnonationalist Zionism. The conclusion draws out the lessons of this story for humanist relationalism.

5.1 Jewish Worldviews: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Except for the brief slice of history when they had political power in ancient Israel, Jews have been a minority people in exile that operated with a nearly singular worldview that pivoted around isolation in and exclusion from the world. Jewish life and religious practice varied regionally and historically, but this was diversity within unity. However, after centuries of relative isolation, two yoked transformations forced Jews to reconsider their worldview.

The first major transformation was the Enlightenment. By privileging reason over superstition, change over tradition, science over religion, and, most importantly, humanity over discrimination, Enlightenment thought held that people should be judged as individuals and on their achievements, not their religion or other discriminatory factors. Because the Enlightenment made it less defensible to treat some people as inherently inferior and undeserving of equal treatment and respect, it represented the beginning of the emancipation of the Jews and other minorities and the possibility of having rights and citizenship.Footnote ¹⁶ This was a revolutionary moment in the history of the Jews. As Salo Baron, pronounced more than ninety years ago, “The history of the Jews in the last century and a half has turned on one central fact: that of Emancipation.”Footnote ¹⁷ Two decades ago, David Vital similarly concluded that: “The principal engine of change in the modern history of the Jews of Europe was the revolutionary idea that it might be after all right and proper for them to enjoy full and equal civil and political rights with all other subjects of the several realms they inhabited.”Footnote ¹⁸ In his monumental history of Jewish emancipation, David Sorkin reviews how the variable of the emancipation nearly determined differences in the conditions of European Jews since the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ In any event, with the possibility of their emancipation, the debate about their relationship to the particular and the universal spilled out of the yeshivot and into politics. Yet not all states and polities embraced Enlightenment; indeed, most European Jews lived in places where counter-Enlightenment flourished and Jews were defined as less than human.Footnote ²⁰

Similar issues emerged because of the second major transformation: the rise of nationalism. A nation, generically speaking, is a political community that is bound by a common history, language, religion, spirit, or sense of fate. What gives the nation something of a special status in modern politics is the project of nationalism and its goal of statehood. In short, nationalism consists of a nation with a collective identity and interests, and with the belief that its interests and self-determination are advanced by gaining or maintaining sovereignty or authority over a homeland. In many instances, the nation replaced God as the sacred.Footnote ²¹

As self-defined nations went about their business of nation- and state-building, some had open clubs while others were restricted. The classic distinction is that between civic and ethnic nationalism, which, not coincidentally, was coined by a Zionist and Jewish scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn.Footnote ²² In ethnic nationalism, membership is determined by blood, lineage, kinship, and tribe. As Michael Ignatieff famously described, in this brand of nationalism “an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen.”Footnote ²³ States that subscribe to this form of nationalism favor one group over another. In those countries where ethnic nationalism took root, Jews did not have to consider which features of their Jewishness they were prepared to surrender to become part of the nation because they were, for all intents and purposes, automatically disqualified from membership. An alternative form of nationalism is based not on blood or heritage, but on a shared civic character. “This nationalism,” Ignatieff argues, “is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.”Footnote ²⁴ In the early days of nation- and state-building, this meant transforming regional, religious, and ethnic identities into a unifying national identity.

The rise of nationalism alongside the first wave of globalization helped to create the rise of cosmopolitanism. There are many kinds of cosmopolitanism, but most modern forms trace their origin to the Enlightenment and include several core tenants. There is a belief that each person is of equal worth an a subject of moral concerns. Relatedly, individuals and communities have duties and obligations to all other humans near and far and that transcend existing territorial, political, cultural, gender, racial, and religious boundaries. And, humans should strive to transcend “particularism in order to achieve a more complete understanding of that experience.”Footnote ²⁵ These modern forms, moreover, became more desirable with the simultaneous rise of the nation-state and the internationalization of the world; whereas the former demanded that individuals circumscribe their identities and duties, the better encouraged individuals to transcend borders.

There has been a spirited philosophical and political debate regarding the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism ever since they emerged as projects and aspirations around the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ As should be apparent by comparing how Duara in Chapter 7 and I approach the topic of cosmopolitanism, the relationship between it and nationalism is hard to pin down because neither has a fixed meaning, and the boundaries between them have evolved in relationship to each other and in response to the historical times. And, to further complicate matters, the boundaries between them are not only historically fluid but also community dependent. Different communities in historical and spatial proximity can have very different views of the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To go deeper down the rabbit’s hole, as I will soon do, the same community can have contending views about this relationship. That said, the debate tends to orbit around whether nationalism and cosmopolitanism are competing or complementary.

The zero-sum view is that they are rivals and that when one is up the other down, a view that derives from the belief that national and cosmopolitan identities, like oil and water, cannot mix. During the era of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalism was in and cosmopolitanism was out. This was an era of state-building, in which society was expected to not only defer to the state but also to identify with it and no others. Movements that imagined an alternative political project that directly challenged the authority and purpose of the state, such as socialism, and those peoples who were viewed as incapable of shifting their loyalties, such as the Jews, were viewed as enemies of the nation. This nineteenth-century perspective appears to be making a comeback, as current trends exhibit a retreat from forms of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and the return of a self-centered nationalism.

Alternatively, cosmopolitanism and nationalism might have a positive-sum and symbiotic relationship. Nations have common interests that can only be individually and collectively advanced with the presence of a cosmopolitan spirit. In this regard, forms of cosmopolitanism can stabilize, not undermine, a world organized around the nation-state. Many nations and nationalisms present themselves as serving not just the nation-state but also the international community, and such presentations and their associated practices can help legitimate the nation-state. Cosmopolitan beliefs and practices can deepen while maintaining the legitimacy of the state. For instance, Immanuel Kant imagined a historical unfolding whereby states developed a pacific relationship while maintaining their sovereignty.Footnote ²⁷ There have been historical periods when such sentiments developed into dominant trends and practices in the world order. For instance, World Wars I and II discredited egoistic nationalism and created a space for the development of internationalism with islands of cosmopolitanism. Lions and lambs could not only coexist, but also enjoy a platonic consummation.

The rise of nationalism and the Enlightenment profoundly impacted how Jewish communities answered the Jewish Question and pursued their ontological and physical survival in an era of the rise of nation-states. After centuries of having little choice but to be a people apart, the emergence of nationalism and the nation-state meant that Jews were judged according to whether they were perceived to be capable of shifting their loyalties from each other to the state. Whether nationalism was, on balance, more positive than negative depended on which form prevailed. In the emerging folk nationalisms of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Jews were defined as outsiders because of their heritage, dress, religion, and Yiddish tongue. Under such circumstances Jews had very limited choices, including immigrate to the West, join movements such as socialism that aspired to remove all differences between peoples, or become Zionists.

In situations of civic nationalism Jews were welcome – on the condition that they shed any transnational identity in favor of their new state-bounded identity. For instance, in 1789, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared: “To the Jews as a nation – nothing; to the Jews as human beings, everything.”Footnote ²⁸ If the Jews wanted to be a nation, then they could not be French, and if they wanted to be French then they had to forget any thoughts of being a nation. Jews decided to become French. A similar process occurred in other liberal-oriented nations, as Jews became Germans, Dutch, British, and Americans. But if the Jews were not a nation, then what were they? Either a religious community or an ethnic group, or some combination thereof, but in any case this was a private and not a public concern. Complicating their claims, though, were the eastern Jews, who had been excluded from membership and were now increasingly claiming that the Jews were a nation that deserved their own homeland or state. If the eastern Jews were right about the Jews being a nation, then western Jews were trying to con their Christian neighbors.

The Enlightenment and civic nationalism also placed new demands on Jewish communities. Jews had the opportunity to be granted equal rights and accepted as citizens of the nation-state – but only if they abandoned those features that gentiles found offensive and believed sustained their clannish tendencies. It was not enough to pledge loyalty to the nation – they had to fit in. Accordingly, Jews began to reconsider their way of life, traditions, and religious laws and customs, attempting to reform or remove those that Christians found contemptible and that Jews believed would hinder their bounded integration into a modern, civilized society.Footnote ²⁹ They removed any claims to be a “chosen people” or that they were in exile, each of which communicated the view that Jews were both superior and just passing through. But how much of a makeover was too much? At what point did altering their practices to win acceptance turn into an assimilation that was a euphemism for cultural suicide? The Haskalah movement in the nineteenth century was one of the first important attempts to provide an answer.Footnote ³⁰ Centered in Germany, it advanced the simultaneous solidarity of the Jews and their integration into Christian societies. In the United States, a Judaism that once had no need for adjectives now began to acquire them – reform, conservative, and Orthodox. Reform Judaism became the primary vehicle for allowing Jews to remain Jews while also fitting into a modernizing and liberalizing society. It was this prophetic theology that helped to nurture a cosmopolitanism and universalism among western, and especially reforming, Jews.Footnote ³¹

Reform Judaism drew much of its inspiration from prophetic Judaism.Footnote ³² Prophetic Judaism refers to the sayings of the prophets who lived between the seventh and eighth century BCE, a period in which the Jewish tribes were having difficulty sustaining themselves, religiously and politically. They had formed a monarchy, an unusual move for a people that believed that only God was a true king. The monarchy became corrupt and arguably blasphemous as it used faith to mask its many indiscretions. In response to these transgressions, dozens of prophets, including Amos, several Isaiahs, Hosea, and Micah, professed that God had spoken directly to them, commanding them to exhort the Jews to return to a path of righteousness, to reaffirm that there was only one, invisible, God, to choose good over evil, and to work for justice. God’s message was clear: to be righteous requires more than unthinkingly following commandments, reflexively holding ceremonies, and performing rituals to be righteous – it also demands an ethical life, treating others kindly, and working for justice. A house of worship that becomes a “den of thieves” is not pious. Reform Judaism drew from the prophetic tradition as it emphasized the importance of ethics and justice – themes that did not require Jews to spend hours in prayer and that made them appear more acceptable to non-Jews.

The combination of the kinds of emancipation and nationalism split the Jewish community into four stylized worldviews distinguished by the intersection of nonterritorial/territorial and particular/universal. Particularity regards whether Jews are a people apart and universality whether they are part of a common humanity. Deterritoriality captures whether Jews can (and should) exist without a home or state of their own. Judaism and the Jewish people are attached to the ancient land of Israel, reflected in and reinforced by religious texts, songs, prayers, and expressions. But this attachment does not necessarily demand either immigration to their ancient homeland or the belief that Jews require an exclusive homeland or state in order to survive and thrive.Footnote ³³

Territoriality concerns whether Jews need a homeland or state of their own that allows them to control and defend their lives. Zionism is the chief example of territoriality.Footnote ³⁴ It originated in the nineteenth century in Europe and as a response to Jewish ontological and physical insecurity; if Jews became part of other nations they might assimilate to the point of disappearance, and Jews needed a state of their own for self-determination and self-defense. In this respect it tracks with many other nationalisms at the time, but as a latecomer it drew from the various existing nationalisms. But in almost all versions Zionism was intended to do more than provide protection and self-determination; it was also intended to provide a break from and a return to history. Centuries of living in exile had led the Jews to acquire many unsavory characteristics: obsequious, weak, compliant, cowardly, passive, and willing to obey even the most suicidal of commands.Footnote ³⁵ According to mainstream Zionist thought, diaspora Jews do not get respect from gentiles because they do not deserve it. By returning to Palestine and working the land, by building a state and defending it with courage, muscle, and power, Jews will recover their dignity and Christians will treat them with the respect they have earned. Zionism was a twelve-step program that would help Jews become “normal” and make an awe-inspiring return to history.

Figure 5.1 Worldviews of Western Jews

Three caveats before describing each worldview. Because subcommunities can have their distinct worldviews, there could be as many worldviews as there are subunits. I am including those Jewish worldviews that want to maintain the physical and ontological survival of Jewish people. There were Jews who were quite tired of the “disaster” of being Jewish, as Howard Kallen undiplomatically put it, wanting to shed any sign of their Jewishness, and who felt no love for or obligation to the Jewish people.Footnote ³⁶ Some assimilated into society either by rejecting Judaism and/or converting to Christianity. Many Jews also joined socialist and communist movements, which held that anti-Semitism would end with the arrival of a socialism that would choke off the supply of opium that turned the masses into religious dopes.Footnote ³⁷ Second, I am examining those Jewish worldviews that are political to the extent that they are attempting to address the social organization of the Jewish people in a world carved into nation-states. There are religiously oriented sects that, for all intents and purposes, have withdrawn from the secular world. Third, these stylized views are ideal-types.Footnote ³⁸ In other words, their purpose is not to reflect a granular reality, but rather to help identify different kinds of, and measure change in, worldviews. There might be three synagogues for every two Jews, but it also might be theoretically and empirically advantageous to compare all three to two different ideal-types. In this regard, they are sociological categories because they identify distinctive attributes that distinguish between types, and historical categories because they can help trace change in and across Jewish communities.

Prophetic Zionism emerges from the interplay of territorialism and universalism. It is territorial because it demands a homeland or state for the Jews in the land of ancient Israel where they can enjoy self-determination and marshall their own defense. This form of Zionism also had a universal or cosmopolitan character, both in terms of how it imagined organizing state–society relations and the state’s place in the world. There were two major branches of prophetic Zionism. A liberal Zionism imagined the creation of a liberal state, in which all inhabitants would enjoy liberty and equality. It would become a light unto nations. This was the Zionism of Herzl, many leaders of the Zionist movement such as Chaim Weizmann, and the prevailing form in western countries such as the United States. There also was a Labor or Socialist Zionism. This Zionism emerged as a critique of capitalism and bourgeois nationalism, aspiring to create a socialist state that would provide the foundation for genuine equality and justice and become a role model for the world until a global socialism emerged that would remove the need for a world divided by sovereignty. This was the Zionism of Moses Hess, Ber Borochov, David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish leadership in Palestine, and the Mapai government that ruled Israel for three decades. Both liberal and labor Zionism, though, confronted the limits of egalitarianism when having to create a Jewish state with a significant Arab minority in a hostile environment: as a Jewish state, would Jews enjoy special privileges, and would the state provide room for non-Jews in its national identity? And as a Jewish state, how would it respond to the potential threat posed by the Palestinians and Arabs? Importantly, liberal Zionists tended to be highly secular and labor Zionists quite hostile to religious authority.

Ethnonational Zionism ascribes to the idea that a state for the Jews should be by and for the Jews. There are two major branches. One follows from revisionist Zionism.Footnote ³⁹ Spearheaded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, it began less as a rejection of Zionism than as a critique of the Zionist leadership in Palestine and abroad. Although he never rejected liberal values, his nationalism had a strong ethnic and racial component. He also admired those European nationalisms that wanted to flex their muscle and militarize, even going so far as mimicking some of Italian nationalism’s fascist elements. Unlike the labor and liberal Zionists. who exhibited some flexibility in their territorial demands, he imagined a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River. He passed away in exile in 1940, and his legacy continued with Menachem Begin and others, often venturing from a minimalist to a more maximalist revisionism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Alongside revisionist Zionism is religious Zionism, which blends nationalism and Orthodox Judaism. Of the many important intellectual figures, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was among the most influential, interpreting the Jewish return in messianic terms and advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state that followed religious law on all of ancient Israel.Footnote ⁴¹

Diaspora nationalism refers to a Jewish people dispersed across different lands that see themselves as a nation with a shared identity, history, and common fate.Footnote ⁴² As responses to the emerging European nationalism, diaspora nationalism developed alongside, and in ways as a counterpoint to, Zionism.Footnote ⁴³ The primary point of differentiation between it and forms of Zionism is the necessity and possible function of a Jewish state. The Jewish people would benefit from common, transnational institutions, and even be members of multilateral institutions and international organizations, but these features of political life could be accomplished without a sovereign state. Perhaps most critical in this regard was cultural, religious, and physical survival. Many diaspora nationalists advocated a two-front campaign – develop forms of autonomy at home and global norms and institutions to protect them from their domestic enemies. Also, while diaspora nationalists tended to reject the idea of a state, they nevertheless favored a Jewish homeland to provide a fertile ground for a Jewish renaissance and to anchor Jews in a universalizing world. Not only did they believe that a Jewish state was impractical, but many also thought that living in the diaspora was ethically superior to political sovereignty. Whereas Zionists saw exile as producing abnormalities and deformities in the Jewish character, some diaspora nationalists believed that it nurtured a cosmopolitanism and more easily merged the particular and the universal, developed a multiperspectival view, and integrated the best of different cultures. For some non-Jews, this diasporic character became a major explanation for the purported genius of the Jews. Living on the margins enabled Jews to create something world-turning from loose and disparate ends; Marx, Einstein, and Freud became the paradigmatic examples.Footnote ⁴⁴

Rooted cosmopolitan sits at the intersection of nonterritoriality and universality.Footnote ⁴⁵ It overlaps with diaspora nationalism in terms of its rejection of the necessity of Jewish sovereignty for a meaningful and secure Jewish life. But whereas diaspora nationalism often imagined forms of geographic, legal, and political autonomy in order to maintain the Jewish cultural identity, rooted cosmopolitans tended to root themselves in the individualism of liberal, democratic societies. Relatedly, while diaspora nationalism tended to hope for various forms of national and international protections to secure their cultural and physical existence, rooted cosmopolitans tended to rely on a strategy of acceptance and a liberalism of equality. Consequently, diaspora nationalism flourished in eastern Europe, and rooted cosmopolitanism in Western liberalizing democracies. Rooted cosmopolitanism’s liberal, democratic roots also account for its suspicion of Zionism because of its exclusionary nationalist character. Consequently, while Zionism might be necessary for securing the physical and cultural existence of some Jews, they are fine where they are.

Rooted cosmopolitanism’s universalism stems from a political theology and humanism that accentuates the liberal and pluralist character of modern (international) society. In this way, its domestic political culture shapes its international and cosmopolitan orientation. Accordingly, rooted cosmopolitans tend to have the sort of orientation associated with liberal internationalism, and for two major reasons. One is that their universalism crosses borders. Their values of liberalism, democracy, equality, and liberty are not tied to the nation-state but rather are part of global justice. As Jews they could play a role in bringing these values to the rest of the world, and many of them did, as evidenced by their role in the creation of international human rights. The other reason owed to Jewish survival and security. The same humanistic values that brought security and acceptance to them in Western liberal democracies could also help bring security to Jews in non-Western lands. As such, advocated internationalism and civilizing missions.Footnote ⁴⁶ And, it just so happened that those western countries where Jews were becoming accepted and enjoying access to political power were also the West’s major powers, creating, at times, a relationship between Jewish interests and imperialism.

5.2 Profiles in Changing Worldviews

These four primary worldviews that crystallized in the early twentieth century had different answers to the Jewish Question and Jewish ontological and physical security in the context of changing kinds of Enlightenment processes and nationalism. As I argued in the opening pages, worldviews can change because of internal and external developments. In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish worldviews were shaken by a series of violent ruptures that culminated in the Holocaust. In the second half of the twentieth century the worldviews of the two largest Jewish communities, the American and the Israeli, followed their environments: among American Jews it remained part of rooted cosmopolitanism, with shades of particularism; in Israel, a prophetic Zionism became replaced by an ethnonational Zionism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Once again, for the sake of simplicity and because of space constraints, nuance is an unaffordable luxury.

5.3 Conclusion

I want to conclude with two observations regarding the relationship between Jewish worldviews and relationalism. The first is the recognition that while worldviews presume a permanence, they also are susceptible to change. To distinguish between change in a worldview and change of a worldview requires some measure of distinction. In other words, what aspect of a worldview is being isolated and used to mark a transformation? There is no gold standard, in part because there are various elements of worldviews. My account of Jewish worldviews, though, has focused on the relationship between the community and their relationship to outsiders and their place in the world, otherwise known as the Jewish Question. But, as many of the major European intellectuals, who also happened to be Jewish, observed, you don’t have to be Jewish to experience the Jewish Question. The relationship between the particular and the universal, as Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Levi-Strauss, Berlin, and Arendt, and other eminent Jewish scholars noted, is a central feature and experience of modernity. And for a Jewish community defined by religion and ethnicity, the universalizing properties of the Enlightenment and modernity threatened extinction.

Accordingly, the central question for many Jewish communities became how to retain some semblance of their Jewish identity while integrating in an increasingly humanistic world. There were many factors that shaped how different Jewish communities answered this dilemma, including what their non-Jewish neighbors might think of them. And if their non-Jewish neighbors were not pleased, there was the chance that their toleration might wear thin. As such, this was a debate that was shaped by historical context and the search for security mediated by the desire to retain features of a religious and secularized Jewish identity. And the very fact that there was not one answer but multiple answers, all formed under the rubric of the Jewish Question, highlights how a single community can have distinguishable worldviews.

The second point is more directed at hyper-humanism. As I stated at the outset, my sociological relationalism incorporates not just a humanism but also a recognition that while all groups are socially constructed, they also can have enduring properties and see themselves as having a history and memory that links them from the past to the present to the future. When Jews began debating the Jewish Question in the late eighteenth century, they did so with a belief that they shared a common history and set of religious texts that provided the wellspring of memory and belonging. Being and becoming were part of a dialectic process, and neither could exist without the other. There must be a there there – a desire to maintain some semblance of belonging even as they choose different paths for becoming. Jews might not have agreed on the basis of their belonging, but they agreed on the necessity of keeping belonging alive. The particular required a permanence, even if at the level of metaphysics, with the danger that humanism might turn into a version of hyper-humanism. What would be the consequence? Jews, and all communities would become ever-changing things (or things that are not things) that have little basis of existence. Their sense of self would have no basis in history, culture, or belief. Individuals would experience alienation and anomie. They would cease to have hopes or ways of coping with disappointment and suffering. Do humans long for this deracinated existence? Communities are often criticized for the burdens and obligations they impose on their members, but a world defined by highly mutable and constantly disappearing things sounds like another form of imprisonment.

The questions posed in this volume are reminiscent of Martin Buber’s struggle to find a comfortable relationship between humanism and relationalism. Born in Vienna in 1878, he moved to Germany as a young man, rose to considerable prestige, and then fled Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1938 at the age of 60, where he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In a recent biography, Paul Mendes-Flohr underscores how Buber eventually committed to a relationalism to try and align the particular and the universal. As Mendes-Flohr tells it, there were three stages to Buber’s intellectual development.Footnote ⁶³ In Stage One he worried that the Enlightenment would lead to the erasure of the supernatural Jew, who is deeply connected to thousands of years of tradition, history, and practice, and rooted in Torah and rabbinic tradition, and to the rise of the “natural” Jew, who aspires to become part of humanity. This shift owes partly to the attraction of Enlightenment thought and to the desire to mute anti-Semitism by doing everything to avoid offending Christians. But at what cost? Humanism, Bubor warned, would lead to the disappearance of the Jewish people and offer nothing but emptiness.

In his effort to recover the supernatural Jew, Buber turned to Hasidism, which he believed represented a sort of “pure” Judaism. However, Buber hoped not for a return, but rather a rebirth – a Jewish renaissance. In Stage Two Buber entered into Jewish politics, embraced Zionism, and worked for Herzl. What attracted Buber to Zionism, though, was not the idea of imitating European politics or establishing a Jewish state, but rather the possibility of promoting a Jewish cultural renewal in which Jewish rebirth and humanity were in dialectical relationship. Indeed, he feared that a Jewish nation that became a sovereign state would cease to have the ability to enjoy a real Jewish renewal; European nationalisms were hardly attractive role models. Buber championed binationalism, broke from organized Zionism, and concluded that renewal did not require living in Palestine but rather could occur in the diaspora.

Stage Three begins when he moves to Berlin, continuing his Judaic learning, and becomes mentored by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. He now adopts a relationalism that is steeped in both the imminent and the transcendent and the particular and the universal. Such commitments provide the metaphysical foundations for a fluidity between being and becoming and his magisterial I and Thou. He retains an abiding belief that the Jews are rooted in a primordial covenant whose life in faith is mediated through religious texts. But there is always the danger that a people might become cloistered and unable to engage in genuine dialogues with those outside the community. He wanted a Jewish people that were able to realize their “commitment to a larger family of humankind” and worried that Jewish nationalism in Palestine might develop in a way that disregarded the genuine needs and aspirations of non-Jews.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such a nationalism would not only harm Palestinians, but would also lead to a damaged Jewish people in Israel. Jews, like all peoples, need to be able to establish relations that recognize others and allow the possibility of being changed through dialogue. Buber’s worldview was both Jewish and humanistic. In this regard, he wanted to avoid the dangers of substantialism and hyper-humanism and locate an ethical humanism and a form of politics that recognized the intrinsic relationship between being and becoming.