Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
One of the defining texts of International Relations (IR) theory is Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations. He posits, “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.” We may feel impressed by this aphorism. We may not know what it means, exactly, but we are sure—it’s Morgenthau, and his Politics Among Nations, after all—that this is the sort of statement worth talking about.
But what picture of reality does this statement present? This strikes us as a meaningful proposition, but it is unclear what the world would look like if it were true or, more importantly, false.
Perhaps, this is not intended to paint a picture but is merely a definitional remark (like, all bachelors are unmarried), in which case we might shrug and say: ‘well sure, if you’d like to define international politics like that’. Except, Morgenthau clarifies, “Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.” Semantics doesn’t seem to be the intention. Rather, he seems to be—or intends to be—drawing a substantive picture, which we could plausibly debate over. That is, he is making a descriptive claim, not a definitional one. To rephrase: ‘It is always the case that, regardless of what their long-term goals are, political actors seek short-term power.’ Given the universal ‘always’, a seemingly straightforward—and strikingly precarious—criterion for falsifying the statement is simply to find one instance in which one’s immediate goal is not power.
This sounds easy enough. That is, until we ask what is meant by ‘power’, and what sort of observation we could make to determine whether it is someone’s immediate goal or not. Morgenthau offers more clarification: “Political power is a psychological relation … It gives [one] control over certain actions of [another] through the influence which the former exert over the latter’s minds.”
The picture again becomes fuzzy. Empirical analysis aside, could we even imagine a case in which a political actor would not be pursuing power, as described here? To get to any ‘ultimate aim’ on the world stage, it seems that one would necessarily have to engage with others and enter into a ‘psychological relation’ in which one influences the thought of another, insofar as they are engaging in political interactions (like, diplomacy) with other agents. Perhaps Morgenthau is referring to a special type of influence—one that wouldn’t be baked into the definition of international politics—that would save the statement from semantic triviality. But we can stop the interpretation here. The issue is already clear—it is not even a question of whether the statement is false, but whether it’s even the type of statement that can be false. And, if a statement can’t even be false, then it’s either a matter of semantics (I’m defining power, relations, ultimate aims, etc. as such and such) or, if not semantics, something much worse—nonsense. He is referring to nothing at all, but an imagined, amorphous quality—‘power’—that we can’t make predictions about but is nonetheless supposed to have bearing.
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) made the distinction between statements that are sensical, senseless, and nonsense. Sensical statements are truth apt—they can be, in principle, true or false pictures of reality. Statements like these presuppose a certain criterion for how you would determine its truth-value. From the assertion that all swans are white, we would expect that every observation of a swan would be of a white swan, and if there was a single (accurate) observation otherwise, then the statement would securely be rendered false. In other words, statements can be sensical yet obviously false—but it’s their sensicality that allows us to quickly dispose of them and prevent pulling hair.
Senseless statements include those of logic and mathematics, which may be true or false by virtue of certain rules, but don’t purport to paint a picture (they give the structure of the picture). And then there are the worst offenders—nonsense statements which variably sound like they are saying something meaningful but are simply ill-formed propositions. Consider Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, as a prototypical example of (intentional) nonsense:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
‘’Twas brillig’ sounds like an English sentence with recognizable syntax—there is a something, x, and x was ‘brillig’—but one would obviously be confused if they tried to determine how to prove or falsify that statement.
Although not nearly as severe and immediate as the Jabberwocky example, a concerning amount of material in the International Relations literature suffers too from nonsense—especially that which we sometimes mysteriously refer to as ‘theory’. It is unclear whether some statements within the literature—say, about the structure of the international arena, fundamental motivations of political agents, etc.—are about anything at all. They do not paint a clear enough picture such that we would know, in principle, how to determine whether the picture matches reality.
The consequence is impasse. High-school debaters and academics alike can discuss liberalism, realism, constructivism, Marxism, etc. ad infinitum, but without much progress because it is unclear what picture, exactly, is being debated. This talking-past-each-other might excite our intellect, but with little import to real-world decision-making to show for it. Given the near impossibility of subjecting international relations to experimental study, it is understandable why there is relatively less concrete, methodologically rigorous analysis about international relations. But plugging the hole with abstractions, which do not paint a picture one way or another, fail to compensate.
Consider the following example from Nicholas Ross Smith and Grant Dawson’s article Mearsheimer, Realism, and the Ukraine War, in which the author critiques Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s picture of civilizations:
Civilizations are continually evolving in different directions. So, while in the West the concept most adequately denotes a loose ‘political community’, in places like China and Russia, the notion of civilization has evolved to be “coterminous with a state” (Coker 2019, 92). These emerging ‘civilizational states’ force the reconsideration of Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s (2007, 47) argument that civilizations are not actors because there is “no front office or central bureaucracy”.
The first proposition—“Civilizations are continually evolving in different directions”—borders on nonsense. It is not immediate what any of the terms in the sentence are referring to—civilization, evolving, directions—and, consequently, there is no clear path to verifying or falsifying this claim.
Fortunately, the rest of the paragraph helps clarify that this first statement is not claiming that a set of entities called ‘civilizations’ are themselves doing anything (‘evolving’) but that the application of the concept ‘civilization’ is evolving. That is, for instance, people in the West now apply the term ‘civilization’—which might typically be reserved for something like Ancient Greece—to a collection of modern states, which we might call ‘Western civilization’. In contrast, people in China or Russia now apply ‘civilization’ to a singular state—e.g., the ‘Chinese state’ is synonymous with ‘Chinese civilization’. So, as it turns out, the path to verifying or falsifying the claim is to simply go out and see if people really do, in fact, use the term ‘civilization’ as described, not to speculate about the behaviors of civilizations. We may feel as though we have robbed the statement of its intrigue, but at least we have retrieved it from nonsense.
The issue, however, is that the resulting proposition—the term ‘civilization’ is now used in such and such ways—no longer seems to actually engage with Jackson’s claim that civilizations aren’t actors because they lack a ‘front office’. Smith and Dawson argue that ‘civilizational states’, like Russia or China, pose as counter-examples to Jackson’s claim, since they—as states with governments—clearly have ‘front offices’. But, as we recall, Smith and Dawson didn’t actually claim anything about whether Russia or China qualify as civilizations, or about the behaviors or attributes of such civilizations (as a set of entities). Instead, they made a claim simply about how the term ‘civilization’ is used. Jackson can perfectly well agree that the concept of ‘civilization’ is indeed now applied by people in places like Russia and China to their states, but that has no bearing on whether those states really are civilizations.
Of course, the fault for this argumentative whiff also lies in Jackson’s original claim. Is he simply saying as a matter of his definition that there are entities called civilizations that don’t have front offices? In this case, there would be no point in engaging this claim—since he could rule out any counter-examples of civilizations with front offices as definitionally excluded—although we might debate about the appropriateness of this definition. Or, is he making a substantive remark that there are entities called civilizations, who happen to all exhibit the lack of a front office? In this case, then the sentence borders on nonsense until we know what he’s referring to when speaking of civilizations. In either case, between Smith and Dawson on one hand and Jackson on the other, we have two independently puzzling statements with an equally puzzling relation to each other.
Let us look at a final example from a well-cited chapter on conflict resolution. The author Raimo Väyrynen contends, “Terrorism is political action divorced from verbal politics which has been found ineffective as a means of political influence.” Again, it is not obvious what picture this statement paints. An immediate roadblock is the grammatical ambiguity about whether “which has been found ineffective …” is modifying ‘terrorism’ or ‘verbal politics’. Let us assume the latter, which yields the embedded claim that verbal politics has been found ineffective (by terrorists). Although few would feel inclined, one could, in principle, survey terrorists and find out whether they have, in fact, found verbal politics to be ineffective. In this way, the embedded claim has sense.
But what about the claim that “terrorism is political action divorced from verbal politics”? Assuming this is a descriptive claim about terrorism, we might ask: is all terrorism really divorced from verbal politics? This doesn’t seem to be the case at all—terrorist groups are often quite vocal about their motives (take, for instance, Osama bin Laden’s 2004 speech to America, or the Unabomber’s Manifesto). Assuming that such an obviously false suggestion was not the intention, perhaps the statement is merely a definition. Terrorism is just defined as political action divorced from verbal politics. In that case, we may feel as though this is an excessively strange definition that bears little resemblance to what we typically mean by ‘terrorism’. Given that both interpretations may strike us as non-options, we may think instead that Väyrynen intends to refer to something less immediate when he says ‘political action’, ‘divorced’, and ‘verbal politics’, and we are missing the point entirely. Perhaps some explanation is in order, but until then—and the onus should not be on us—the statement does not supply a possible means toward verification or falsification and so borders on nonsense.
Of course, the functions of language go beyond simply describing, truly or falsely, the affairs of the world (or, in this case, the international arena). Some language is just an expression of one’s attitude or feeling, like ‘ouch!’, which is not intended to accurately describe. But when we are using descriptive language, as is often the case in International Relations literature, it is important to be clear and honest. Too much gets away with the illusion of meaning without saying anything at all—that is, too much gets away with nonsense. And if nothing is being said, as Wittgenstein insists, we must pass over in silence.
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