International Relations as a Neo-Kantian Project

Introduction
Why does the discipline of International Relations have so much difficulty ‘seeing’ and attaching importance to the practice of international relations? The field has always favoured top down, abstract, holistic conceptualizations over pluralism, complexity and change. As an undergraduate in IR one of the first books I was exposed to was Waltz’s, Man, the State and War and it just seemed that doing IR properly required systemic theory, even if the details of that theory changed. In this post I want to suggest that this style of thinking should be seen not as consequence of the nature of international relations but of the fields unacknowledged debts to the roots of a great deal of modern social theory in Neo-Kantian philosophy. From around 1880 to 1930 Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in German academia and its influence permeated debates on the nature of the natural and the human sciences (itself a Neo-Kantian formulation) and the training of multiple generations of scholars. The suggestion that I want to make here is that understanding the legacy of Neo-Kantianism casts light on IR’s style of thought, in fact IR has many Neo-Kantian habits without even having heard of the movement.

Let’s start with a description of the movement and its concerns, then I’ll take up what I take to be their characteristic philosophical approach and before turning to the multiple channels of influence on International Relations and its consequences.

The Movement
In sociological terms Neo-Kantianism carved out a position for philosophy within the scientific university by rejecting Hegelian speculative metaphysics and going ‘back to Kant’ or at least to a version of Kant that treated him a scientific philosopher of knowledge. It’s sometimes argued that the centrality of epistemology to modern philosophy is a consequence of the movement. The term itself is sometimes used specifically to refer two two schools centred on Marburg (Herman Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer) and Baden (sometimes referred to as South-Western Neo-Kantianism) (Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert) but this obscures the extent to which the Neo-Kantian problem space was shared by thinkers who distanced themselves from the two schools, for example Wilhelm Dilthey. What we would think of as Twentieth century philosophical movements for example, phenomenology, logical empiricism and critical theory were shaped as reactions to the perceived limitations of Neo-Kantianism by thinkers who were steeped in Neo-Kantianism. The main members of the schools wrote extensively on human and cultural sciences. Key social theorists – Weber, Durkheim, Simmel were all trained as Neo-Kantians. International legal thought bore a strong imprint. Distinctions like explanation vs understanding, facts and values, nomothetic and idiographic, natural science vs human science emerge in the context of Neo-Kantianism.

So what was the content of Neo-Kantianism? It’s easier to make sense of it if we start with a cartoon version of Kant’s problem. He wanted to reconcile the rationalist (we can figure things out by thinking) philosophy of Leibniz and his successors and the empiricism (it’s all down to sensory experience) that Hume adapted from Locke. Kant’s solution that are elements of human experience that are not just subjective but reflect a universal experience and give us certain (apodictic) knowledge about the world. Starting from space and time he argued that there were universal elements in human cognition and these provide categories through which we interpret the world. In my (simplistic) terms there is a cycle by which subjective experience contains universal elements that provide the categories through which we make sense of the world in the Critique of Pure Reason he tried to work out what those categories were. Kant emphasized that we are always dealing with ‘appearances’ and not ‘the thing in itself’. At the same time he assumed a fit between an orderly ‘Newtonian’ external world, ordered on the basis of a limited number of principles and human cognition. After he published the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 critics argued that ‘the thing in itself’ didn’t actually do anything for human knowledge of the world. Indeed, even after he attempted to rebut these criticisms in the second edition some philosophers continued to argue for the superiority of the first version – effectively knowledge is a matter of our concepts.

As a self-consciously scientific movement the Neo-Kantians discounted ‘the thing in itself’ as metaphysics that is the external world was reduced to our concepts and methods. They extended Kantian epistemological methods by trying to uncover the universal elements underpinning the academic disciplines in the new scientific universities. Extracting the underpinning universal from particular cases (the transcendental method) provided a basis for interpreting the world and other cases. Indeed, other cases can be evaluated by reference to the extent to which they conform to the universal concept. Hence, a key concern for the Neo-Kantians was establishing the ‘validity’ of applications of the ‘transcendental method’ to derive the universal. The results should not be understood as an abstraction from a specific set of cases and subject to scope conditions but a claim to a truth with a validity that goes beyond the empirical. Compared with Kant the Neo-Kantians had to give some ground on issues of change but compared with historicists their bias was towards the structural. It is the context of Neo-Kantianism that ‘relativism’ emerges as a concern. Neo-Kantianism also marked out variation across time and space as a matter of variation in concepts and / or values.
As a mode of thinking about the world Neo-Kantianism places enormous weight on concepts. Indeed an issue reaching back to Kant himself is the question of pre-conceptual experience – a possibility that Neo-Kantian philosophy tended to reject. Concepts shape how we experience the world at both an epistemological level and an evaluative one. The point to underline again is that concepts exist in both empirical and transcendental versions. A final point is that there is a difference between Neo-Kantianism as philosophy or methodology and its impact in use within the disciplines themselves. To take a very obvious example the movement from Weber’s methodological writings on ideal types, what he did with them and the use that others have made of them marks the loss of cautions and qualifications and awareness of what an ideal type was supposed to be.

Neo-Kantian Influences on International Relations
Once you recognize Neo-Kantianism as a movement constituted by a specific thinkers and networks of relationships a complex web of connections with International Relations comes into view. The starting point is with the German theories of the state and international law that, in their American version, produced Realism. Once Realism is understood as a Neo-Kantian project its simultaneous claim to transhistorical validity regardless of whether history conforms to the theory, or the claim that Realism has normative force even if countries keep acting in ways that aren’t consistent with it makes much more sense. The claims of Realism are transcendental rather than empirical. The Americanization of emigre scholars obscured these connections and excavating their debts to Rickerts or Windelband is less interesting to later scholarship than possible connections to Nietzsche or Carl Schmitt, the Neo-Kantian style just becomes an unidentifiable background influence.

If Realism is the most obvious vector for Neo-Kantianism the irony is that efforts to render Realism more scientific and to provide alternatives effectively turned to different strands of Neo-Kantian thought. All of the versions of systems thinking, from whether Uexküll’s environmentalism, Bertalanffy’s general systemology, Wiener’s cybernetics or Parsons’s structural-functionalism have connections to Neo-Kantianism whether explicit, via teachers and supervisors or through later influences in particular the work of Ernst Cassirer. These all efforts to work out the conditions of knowledge and action in the abstract. Constructivism whether in sociological or phenomenological versions has its own debts. Durkheim’s social holism should be seen as a Neo-Kantian construct. Husserl wanted to produce a version of Kant that was more systematic than than of the Neo-Kantians and who alienated his more empirically minded students with a turn to the transcendental. The characteristics of Frankfurt School critical theory come from the effort to update Hegel and Marx in an intellectual context strongly influenced by Neo-Kantianism and where the key members of the School were themselves taught by Neo-Kantians. Even after the revolution Neo-Kantianism survived in the Soviet Union and via Bakhtin exerted an influence on post-structuralism.

Neo-Kantianism dropped the elements of Kant – the thing in itself, intuition – that balanced out the tendency to reduce the world to a set of concepts. A century later these Neo-Kantian influences have contributed to an IR that struggles to see outside its concepts and generally appears to have no idea what the status of its concepts are. When you begin to pay attention to how concepts are employed in IR you quickly become aware of how many of the statements in the field replace actual events with their complexity and uniqueness with concepts of uncertain provenance or relevance. Abstract concepts of ‘state’, ‘sovereignty’, international system float in from the past without their status being interrogated. These legacy concepts were formulated in the context of a claim of universal validity that we might be less willing to accept today. We are more sceptical of such universalizing claims and/or because we can come up with better ways of conceptualizing the thing we are interested in. Implicit Neo-Kantianism undermines the distinction between scientific concepts and those that exist ‘out there’. The universality of concepts also fits with the assumption that the social world is defined and explained by meanings. In the best Neo-Kantian tradition the concept can also serve a normative function as well as descriptive or explanatory leading to endless IR arguments about why the world doesn’t conform to the concept. And at this point we are back in the realm of Plato’s forms where the everyday world of international relations is an less real imitation of the ideal. The conceptualism encourages IR to see the world in terms of an abstract holism: practice, history and the empirical become deviations from the reality of the concept. This isn’t necessarily a problem provided that you know that you’re doing it.

This leads to a final point. The radical response to IR’s Neo-Kantian problem is a reconsideration of the status of the concept in IR. Where do our concepts come from, how do we use them, when are we talking about concrete cases and when are we actually replacing them with statements about concepts. The attempts at a radical reconstructions of IR frequently end up replacing one abstract whole with another, here we can point to the way that the ‘relational turn’ simply means replacing ‘substantialist’ concepts with ‘relational’ ones, concepts like ‘racism’ or ‘coloniality’ function in the same way as ‘system’, ‘sovereignty’ or ‘national interest’

I will come back to what a post-Neo-Kantian approach to IR should look like in future posts.

Reading
I have zero intention of writing anything systematic about Neo-Kantianism and International Relations so this is a list of items that this post draws on.

Helpful places to start are the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on Neo-Kantianism

https://iep.utm.edu/neo-kant/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neo-kantianism/ pages.

Neo-Kantianism in the Development of Philosophy

de Warren, N., & Staiti, A. (2015). Introduction: Towards a reconsideration of Neo-Kantianism. In New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism (pp. 1–15). Cambridge University Press.

Friedman, M. (2002). Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger: The Davos Disputation and Twentieth Century Philosophy. European Journal of Philosophy, 10(3), 263–274.

Harrelson, K. J. (2015). The Priority of Epistemology in Early Neo-Kantianism. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 32(1), 57–77.

Hohendahl, P. U. (2010). The Crisis of Neo-Kantianism and the Reassessment of Kant after World War 1. The Philosophical Forum, 41(1–2), 17–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9191.2009.00346.x

Luft, S. (2018). Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology. In D. Zahavi (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology (pp. 45–67). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198755340.013.5

Naraniecki, A. (2010). Neo-Positivist or Neo-Kantian? Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle. Philosophy, 85(4), 511–530. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819110000458

Richardson, A. W. (2003). Conceiving, Experiencing, and Conceiving Experiencing: Neo-Kantianism and the History of the Concept of Experience. Topoi, 22(1), 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022132704044

Themes and Issues in Neo-Kantianism

Beiser, F. (2008). Historicism and neo-Kantianism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 39(4), 554–564. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.09.002

Beiser, F. C. (2009). Normativity in Neo‐Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17(1), 9–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672550802610941

Kinzel, K. (2019). Relativism in German idealism, historicism and neo-Kantianism. In M. Kusch (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism (pp. 69–78). Routledge.

Kinzel, K. (2021). Historical thought in German neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 29(4), 579–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1932411

Kinzel, K. (2023). Neo-Kantian conceptualism: Between scientific experience and everyday perception. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2023.2237070

Social Thought

Brandist, C. (2000). Neo-Kantianism in cultural theory: Bakhtin, Derrida and Foucault. Radical Philosophy, 102. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/neo-kantianism-in-cultural-theory

Eliaeson, S. (1990). Max Weber and His Critics: Critical Theory’s Reception of Neo-Kantian Methodology. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 3(4), 513–537.

Feest, U. (Ed.). (2010). Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen (Vol. 21). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3540-0

Herzog, M. (1995). William James and the development of phenomenological psychology in Europe. History of the Human Sciences, 8(1), 29–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519500800103

Paulson, S. L. (1992). The Neo-Kantian Dimension of Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 12(3), 311–332. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/12.3.311

Redding, P. (2005). Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory. Critical Horizons, 6(1), 183–204.

Turner, S. (2017). Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian Philosopher. In W. W. Gephart (Ed.), The Sacred and the Law: The Durkheimian Legacy (pp. 49–70). Klostermann. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783465142942-49

Vandenberghe, F. (2001). From Structuralism to Culturalism: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. European Journal of Social Theory, 4(4), 479–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310122225271

Systems Theories

Brentani, C. (2009). Konrad Lorenz’s epistemological criticism towards Jakob von Uexküll. Sign Systems Studies, 37(3/4), 637–660. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2009.37.3-4.13

Nemenyi, D. (2019). What is an Internet? Norbert Wiener and the Society of Control [PhD Philosophy, Kingston University]. https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/44219/1/Nemenyi-D-44219.pdf

Pouvreau, D., & Drack, M. (2007). On the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”, and on its relationship to cybernetics: Part I: elements on the origins and genesis of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”. International Journal of General Systems, 36(3), 281–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/03081070601127961