Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology

Forsideomslag
Cambridge University Press, 12. okt. 2006
The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.

Fra bogen

Indhold

Afsnit 1
15
Afsnit 2
23
Afsnit 3
50
Afsnit 4
51
Afsnit 5
62
Afsnit 6
64
Afsnit 7
86
Afsnit 8
90
Afsnit 17
131
Afsnit 18
137
Afsnit 19
140
Afsnit 20
155
Afsnit 21
174
Afsnit 22
177
Afsnit 23
180
Afsnit 24
215

Afsnit 9
91
Afsnit 10
99
Afsnit 11
102
Afsnit 12
107
Afsnit 13
112
Afsnit 14
121
Afsnit 15
123
Afsnit 16
129
Afsnit 25
226
Afsnit 26
231
Afsnit 27
243
Afsnit 28
253
Afsnit 29
255
Afsnit 30
257
Afsnit 31
290

Andre udgaver - Se alle

Almindelige termer og sætninger

Populære passager

Side 65 - When reference is made in a sociological context to a 'state,' a 'nation,' a 'corporation,' a 'family,' or an 'army corps,' or to similar collectivities, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons.
Side 133 - Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Side 98 - Whenever certain elements combine and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination, new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in the original elements but in the totality formed by their union.
Side 134 - The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure - one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure - but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure.
Side 69 - According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize.
Side 66 - Consequently, every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false.
Side 134 - Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure - or rather the structurality of structure - although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.
Side 53 - ... conceptions of what they are doing in their activity ; (3) social structures, unlike natural structures, may be only relatively enduring (so that the tendencies they ground may not be universal in the sense of space-time...
Side 238 - For there is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history — or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all.

Om forfatteren (2006)

Colin Wight is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield.

Bibliografiske oplysninger