Authors
Anatoly Reshetnikov
Publication date
2019/10
Journal
New Perspectives
Volume
27
Issue
3
Pages
159-166
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
The discipline of International Relations (IR), according to Justin Rosenberg, is “a thriving intellectual hub where ideas and approaches are imported from right across the social sciences and humanities, and where they meet each other in a rich and enriching cacophony of debate and innovation”(2016: 128).“What else to desire?”, an aspiring IR scholar could ask. For Rosenberg, however, this situation is deeply problematic. IR’s mongrel character is, to a large extent, a result of its prolonged incarceration in the prison of Political Science. Allegedly, this imprisonment compelled IR scholars to produce knowledge based on a borrowed ontology, which deprived the discipline of the possibility to formulate an ontology of its own. The borrowed ontology was rooted in the irreducible difference between individuals’ interests and desires, or, in other words, in the political nature of the social. Yet, Rosenberg is also optimistic …
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