¹ Mill, John Stuart, Auguste Comte and Positivism (EPub: Project Gutenberg, 2005)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16833} accessed May 2014.

² See Weber, Martin, ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”: IR constructivism, critical theory, and the challenge of political philosophy’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:2 (2014), pp. 516–543 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Bhaskar, Roy, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar; see on this Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 50–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics.

⁵ Examples of this kind of argument can be found, for instance in Hopf, Ted, ‘The promise of constructivism in International Relations theory’, International Security, 23:1 (1998), pp. 171–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Price, Richard and Reus-Smit, Christian, ‘Dangerous liaisons? Critical international theory and constructivism’, European Journal of International Relations, 4:3 (1999), pp. 259–294 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finnemore, Martha and Sikkink, Kathryn, ‘Taking stock: the constructivist research program in International Relations and comparative politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), pp. 391–416 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Prominently, for instance, Collins, Randall, Four Sociological Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁷ Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation – The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)Google Scholar; see also Lacher, Hannes, ‘The politics of the marker: Re-reading Polanyi’, Global Society, 13:3 (1999), pp. 313–326 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Penguin Books, 2005)Google Scholar. For a more recent, wide-ranging reconstruction, see Castel, Robert, From Manual Labor to Wage Laborers: Transformations of the Social Question (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003)Google Scholar; and in IR, Owens, Patricia, ‘Human security and the rise of the social’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), pp. 547–567 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, Patricia, ‘From Bismarck to Petraeus: the question of the social and the social question in counterinsurgency’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:1 (2013), pp. 135–157 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, Patricia, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, Patricia, ‘Method or madness? Sociolatry in international thought’, Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this Forum.

⁹ I use the term ‘trans-political’ here in order to imply that different polities across Europe and in the colonies had to deal with the effects of this transformation, leading not least to ‘different’ nation states, once that specific institutional form eventually becomes dominant.

¹⁰ There is no possibility to explicate this last point in the necessary detail. Suffice it to point here to the basic reflectivist problem it indexes: The need to provide an account of the conditions of possibility behind the analysts ability to stand apart from the ‘social order’ in order to both, describe it comprehensively, and to assign ‘politics’ its place therein. Below, I return briefly to this issue.

¹¹ In pursuing this argumentative strategy, I am of course aware of the many different and continuing attempts to read the ‘conflict theoretic’ heritage, too, as aligned with naturalist precepts. In IR theorising, this has had exposure in particular through works indebted (if to different degrees) to ‘critical realism’ (or scientific realism) more generally, and the work of Roy Bhaskar in particular (see, indicatively, Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations). On why this naturalism is problematic, see Weber, Martin, ‘Ontologies, depth, and otherwise: Critical notes on Wight’s meta-theoretical proposal for a scientific realist IR’, Review of International Studies, 38 (2012), pp. 223–234 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Relevant for this argument, in particular here Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce – Civilization and Capitalism 15 ^th –19 ^th Century, Volume 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

¹³ Rosenberg, Justin, The Empire of Civil Society – A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See Cutler, Claire, ‘Globalization, the rule of law, and the modern law merchant’, Constellations – An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 8:4 (2001), pp. 480–502 Google Scholar; Hegel, G. F. W, Elements of a Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. See on this also specifically Honneth, Axel, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 92–130 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See, for example, the trenchant reconstructions in Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe – Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; in IR, see Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ On linkages between various forms of the use of force and coercion during the formative periods of ‘classical political economy’, but especially the crucial role played by practices of enslavement, see Shilliam, Robbie, ‘Forget English freedom, remember Atlantic Slavery: Common law, commercial law and the significance of slavery for classical political economy’, New Political Economy, 17:5 (2012), pp. 591–609 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Donnelly, Michael, ‘From political arithmetic to social statistics: How some 19^th century roots of the social sciences were implanted’, in Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Bjorn Wittrock (eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 225–240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Donnelly, ‘From political arithmetic’; see also Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things – An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar; and Rose, Nikolas, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Cutler, ‘Globalization’; see also MacPherson, C. B, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism- From Hobbes to Locke, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar

²⁰ Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1965)Google Scholar.

²¹ James, C. L. R, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

²² See Grovogui, Siba, ‘To the orphaned, dispossessed, and illegitimate children: Human rights beyond liberal and republican traditions’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 18:1 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Wokler, Robert, ‘The enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity’, in Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock (eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, pp. 35–76 Google Scholar.

²⁴ On this, see Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Arendt, On Revolution.

²⁶ See Read, Donald, Peterloo: The Massacre and its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Wagner, Peter, A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not all that is Solid Melts into Air (London: Sage, 2001)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Wokler, , ‘The enlightenment’, p. 52 Google Scholar (my excision (in brackets)). This signals neatly the different possibilities for democratic politics, as well as the route eventually taken. It also signals the institutionalised differentiation of ‘political’ society from the realm of ‘the social’, the populace, or ‘the masses’.

²⁹ There is, of course, a deep-seated register of reasons, rules, and imaginaries underpinning both, these contingencies on the one hand, and the eventual establishment (via renewed absolutism) of the ‘representative’ script. For more on such backgrounds, see, for example, Grovogui, Siba N., Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns and Africans – Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minnesota Archive Editions, 1996)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Wagner, Peter, ‘Certainty and order, liberty and contingency: the birth of the social sciences as empirical political philosophy’, in Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock (eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, pp. 241–263 Google Scholar.

³¹ Penny, H. Glenn, ‘Reflection: German polycentrism and the writing of history’, German History, 30:2 (2012), pp. 265–282 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society.

³³ Shilliam, ‘Forget English freedom’.

³⁴ See, for example, Wendt, Alexander, ‘The state as a person in International Relations theory’, Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), pp. 289–316 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Indicatively, Adler, Emmanuel, ‘Cognitive evolution: a dynamic approach for the study of International Relations and their progress’, in Emmanuel Adler and Neta B. Crawford (eds), Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 43–88 Google Scholar. Despite Adler’s attempts to dissociate his account of ‘cognitive evolution’ from the trappings of teleological conceptions associated with Darwinism, his scheme remains tied to an account of ‘selection’ between and among different ‘learning communities’. It fails to unravel the implicative logics of change driven by contestations over power, authority and legitimacy.

³⁶ Emblematic for this, Keck, Margret E. and Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Albert, Mathias and Buzan, Barry, ‘International Relations theory and the “social whole”: Encounters and gaps between IR and Sociology’, International Political Sociology, 7:2 (2013), pp. 117–135 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Castel, From Manual Labor to Wage Laborers

³⁹ See, for example, Quinault, Roland E. and Stevenson, John, Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History, 1790–1920 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ For a brief, but incisive summary of this in the context of a reconstructive approach to normative changes in social and political integration, see Honneth, Axel, Das Recht der Freiheit – Grundriss einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), pp. 360 Google Scholar, ff.

⁴¹ See, for example, Read, Peterloo.

⁴² See also Castel, From Manual Labor to Wage Laborers. Castel’s book uses the concept of ‘metamorphosis’ to trace through a much wider range of shifts and changes to the ‘Social Question’ than is possible to render in this attempt to reconstruct the intellectual cleavages affecting the integration of social theoretic inventories into IR.

⁴³ Mamdani, Mahmood, Define and Rule: The Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the colonial construction of civil society and inclusion/exclusion, see Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject – Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Consider, for example the various instantiations of racists ‘integration’ policies in the Australian context, focused on skin-color, and involving inter alia practices of state-sanctioned forced adoption schemes.

⁴⁵ Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ On the disclosive potential of approaches couched in the cogent conceptual pair of ‘left’ and ‘right’, see Noel, Alain and Therien, Jean-Philippe, Left and Right in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ For those readers not suspecting Comte to have been invested in this methodological outlook, see Halfpenny, Peter, Positivism and Sociology – Explaining Social Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See Comte, Auguste, Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Comte, Auguste, System of Positive Polity – Volume 1 (London: Longmans Green, 1875), pp. 1 Google Scholar, ff

⁵⁰ Exemplary in recent IR theorising, for instance Albert and Buzan, ‘International Relations’, and their reconstructions of elements the integration of social theorising into IR, as well as of the gaps and omissions discernible from their perspective in this context.

⁵¹ See Perez-Ramos, Antonio, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, and the Maker’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁵² See Wendt, Alexander, ‘Why a world state is inevitable’, European Journal of International Relations, 9:4 (2003), pp. 491–542 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wendt’s article takes social self-organisation theory as a framework for arguing that a three-stage teleological trend is likely, which will see the ‘evolution’ of the international system to international society, and finally world society, with the emergence of a ‘world state’ as the inevitable corollary.

⁵³ On the paucity of action-theoretic approaches, see Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Beyond the justice cascade: How agentic constructivism could help explain change in world politics’, available at: {http://www.princeton.edu/politics/about/file-repository/public/Agentic-Constructivism-paper-sent-to-the-Princeton-IR-Colloquium.pdf}.

⁵⁴ This is, of course, consistent with practices that confine the remit of Political Science to psephology and/or narrow conceptions of change in the ‘political system’.

⁵⁵ See also Owens, ‘Method or madness’; Owens, ‘From Bismarck to Petraeus’; Wagner, ‘Certainty and order’.

⁵⁶ Cox, Robert W., ‘Towards a posthegemonic conceptualisation of world order; reflections on the relevancy of Ibn Khaldun’, in James Rosenau and Ernst O. Czempiel (eds), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ See Mamdani, Mahmood, ‘Reading Ibn Khaldun in Kampala’ (2013)Google Scholar, available at: {http://criticalencounters.net/2013/07/05/reading-ibn-khaldun-in-kampala-mahmood-mamdani/}.

⁵⁸ Weber, ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”’; Weber, Martin, ‘Come in, make yourself uncomfortable: Some thoughts on putting Critical Theory in its place’, in Shannon Brincat, Laura Lima, and Joao Nunes (eds), Critical Theory In International Relations and Security Studies – Interviews and Reflections (London: Routlegde, 2012)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Theunissen, Michael, Sein und Schein: Die Kritische Funktion der Hegelschen Logik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Marx, Karl, Early Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), pp. 57 Google Scholar, ff.

⁶¹ Theunissen, , Sein und Schein, pp. 231–237 Google Scholar.

⁶² Maus, Ingeborg, Ueber Volkssouveraenitaet- Elemente einer Demokratietheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011)Google Scholar

⁶³ Collins, Four Sociological Traditions.

⁶⁴ See Weber, ‘Come in’; Weber, ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”’.

⁶⁵ See Weber, Heloise, ‘A political analysis of the formal comparative method: Historicizing the globalization and development ebate’, Globalizations, 4:4 (2007), pp. 559–572 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁷ See Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference. See also Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit. Hegel was exceptionally clear that the system of ‘needs and freedoms’ that constituted the ‘state of civil society’ created more needs and desires than could be satisfied within national boundaries, and would hence produce both, poverty, and the expansionist-appropriative practices of colonisation. This aspect of his analysis is simply irreconcilable with both, his explorations in the Logic, and his rendition of the ‘state’ as the ‘universaliser’ within boundaries in the Philosophy of Right.

⁶⁸ See Dalby, Simon, ‘Ecology, security, and change in the anthropocene’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, 13:2 (2007), pp. 155–164 Google Scholar. See also Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The climate history: Four theses’, Critical Inquiry, 4 (2009), pp. 197–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Bartelson, Jens, ‘Towards a genealogy of “society” in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this Forum.

⁷⁰ Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Durkheim, Émile, The Rules of the Sociological Method (Free Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² See Smith, Anthony D., The Concept of Social Change: Critique of the Functionalist Theory of Social Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁷³ Goddard, Stacey and Nexon, Daniel, ‘Paradigms lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics ’, European Journal of International Relations, 11:1 (2005), pp. 9–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁵ Waltz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics (Boston Mass: McGraw-Hill, 1979)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ See Albert and Buzan, ‘International Relations’.

⁷⁸ See Weber, Martin, ‘The concept of solidarity in the study of world politics – towards a critical theoretic understanding’, Review of International Studies, 33:4 (2007), pp. 693–713 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Weber, ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”’.

⁷⁹ Owens, ‘Method or madness?’; Owens, Economy of Force. To be clear, this ‘absenting’ of political questions in the analytical schemes described here should not be confused with an absence of political discourse and/or practices in the context of actual relations.

⁸⁰ See, for example, Tully, James, Strange Multiplicity – Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘Taking stock’.

⁸² See, indicatively, Price, Richard, ‘Moral limit and possibility in world politics’, International Organization, 62:2 (2008), pp. 191–220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In response, see Weber, ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”’.

⁸³ Indicatively, again, Hopf, ‘The promise of constructivism’.

⁸⁴ Sikkink, ‘Beyond the justice cascade’.

⁸⁵ For a notable exception, see Bleiker, Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Onuf, Nicholas, A World of Our Making (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.

⁸⁸ See Weber , ‘Between “isses” and “oughts”’; see also Owens, ‘Human security’; Owens, Economy of Force.

⁸⁹ Weber, ‘A political analysis’.

⁹⁰ See, indicatively, for different takes in this general frame, Wendt, Alexander, ‘Social theory as Cartesian Science: an auto-critique from a quantum perspective’, in Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander (eds), Constructivism and International Relations: Alexander Wendt and His Critics (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Patomäki, Heikki, ‘Cosmological sources of critical cosmopolitanism’, Review of International Studies, 6 (2010), pp. 181–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁹⁴ See Dillon, Mick and Reid, Julian, The Liberal Way of War (London: Routledge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁵ More on this in Weber, ‘Ontologies, depth’.

⁹⁶ Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

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⁹⁹ See Rojas, Cristina, ‘The place of the social at the World Bank (1949–81): Mingling race, nation, and knowledge’, Global Social Policy, 15:1 (2015), pp. 23–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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