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Transforming the International System: Small Increments Along a Vast Periphery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

James N. Rosenau
James N. Rosenau
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

Many students of world politics take their subject so seriously that they often mistake their conception of reality for reality itself. There may be an objective truth about any given event or trend in world affairs, but the observer must use some method to comprehend it and, in so doing, he inevitably renders the truth subjective. The “established facts” of world politics are, in effect, no more than widespread agreement—what I shall call an intersubjective consensus—among actors and experts as to the existence and relevance of particular phenomena. Total comprehension of the realities of world politics can thus only be approximated. The greater the intersubjective consensus, the greater the comprehension and the more “real” the reality.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , April 1966 , pp. 525 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1966

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References

1 Still other types are of course played by journalists, politicians, citizens, preachers, and the many other actors who have occasion to discern and evaluate the international scene. Here we are concerned only with scholarly games, which are assumed to be distinguished from all other types by their goal of understanding why the course of events unfolds as it does. As will be seen, scholarly games can vary considerably in their rules and subordinate goals, but they do share an aspiration toward comprehension.

2 Recently some thought and work on the issue-area concept have been reported and appear to hold considerable promise. See, for example, Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics, XVI (July 1964), 677–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Extended research into national-international linkages, however, has yet to be launched. For a discussion of both the issue-area and linkage concepts, see my “Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy,” in Farrell, R. Barry, ed., Approaches to Comparative and International Politics (Evanston 1966), 27–92.Google Scholar

3 Eighty-three countries clustered into sixteen types and represented by three groups of actors operative in four issue-areas and eleven subareas.

4 Two of the largest of these totals were not provided by the author but had to be calculated by the reviewer from data in separate tables and passages.

5 Haas readily concedes this criticism by noting that the annual publication of the list of Members failing to submit the instruments to competent authorities “often … results in improved conduct the following year,” albeit “in many cases the appeals fall on very deaf ears” (p. 263). A quantitative measure of the success of this prodding through publicity is provided by comparing the table reproduced here with one included in the book's footnotes (p. 558) which, using the smae format, gives the annual figures for submissions “within the prescribed time limits.” Such a comparison reveals that, indeed, a large number of the submissions do occur subsequent to the date they are due: The percentages for 1948 through 1960 in the table reproduced here are higher by, respectively, 50.0, 44.2, 35.5, 32.8, 30.2, 30.3, 23.2, 36.2, 23.7, 22.0, 22.8, 19.0, 11.2, and 0.0 percentage points than the equivalent figures for submission within the prescribed time limits.