Articles

• Reus-Smit, Christian

Abstract

This article contends that the move to recast liberal international relations theory in positivist terms has undermined its status as a political theory, and that attempts to use such a theory as the basis of a liberal international legal theory undermine its proponents' capacity to reason normatively about international change, a crucial quality of a mature international legal theory. Politics, it will be argued, lies at the intersection of instrumental and ethical deliberation and action, an intersection that actors are drawn towards by the imperatives of practical, collective action. The ‘New Liberalism’ in international relations abandons the political in two ways: it expels normative reflection and argument from the realm of legitimate social scientific enquiry; and it embraces a rationalist conception of agency that reduces all political action to strategic interaction. This ‘positive’ theory lacks the philosophical resources to inform the articulation of a mature liberal international legal theory, a theory that coherently mediates between the pragmatics of social and political circumstance, the practice of rule interpretation, and the prescription of new norms.