ABSTRACT How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy asks and answers two central questions: What is rationality in international politics? Are states rational? We begin with a summary of our arguments in the book and explain why we find the existing literature on the rational actor assumption wanting. Next we respond to our critics, who challenge our position on both conceptual and empirical grounds. We conclude with a discussion of the relationship between rationality and realism.

ABSTRACT John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato’s How States Think is an engagingly written book that tackles big questions central to International Relations: what does it mean to be rational, and how prevalent is rationality in international politics? However, the book mischaracterizes how political psychologists think about rationality in international politics, mistaking revisions of specific modeling assumptions for rejections of rationality more generally. As a result, many of the book’s critiques are unpersuasive, and its attempts to root rationality in a specific understanding of “credible theories” run into conceptual challenges. Moreover, Mearsheimer and Rosato’s tendency to stake out bold claims rather than measured ones – the same punchiness that also makes the book so provocative – also leads it to exceed its evidentiary limits, resulting in inferences that it is incapable of substantiating.

ABSTRACT Both James C. Scott and Friedrich Hayek articulate critiques of centralised state planning that are fundamentally epistemological in character. In particular, both emphasize the loss of knowledge resulting from attempts to achieve synoptic legibility of complex social practices. Yet while Hayek’s critique of central planning leads to an emphasis on the indispensability of the price system, Scott argues that capitalist markets are also mechanisms of perverse simplification. This paper explores the roots of this disagreement and seeks to articulate the insights that emerge from reading Hayek and Scott together on questions of markets, knowledge, and the state.

ABSTRACT A growing body of research suggests that political polarization in the United States is at a forty-year high, and that it is rooted less in disagreements over policy than in hostile attitudes toward political opponents. Such attitudes explain the manifest increase of intolerant behavior in American culture and politics in recent years. But what explains the attitudes themselves? One significant contributor may have been the rise of scientism in the early twentieth century, which undermined the metaphysical, epistemic, and institutional foundations of the type of morality required to transcend our instinctual tribalism.

ABSTRACT The longing for total revolution described in Bernard Yack’s seminal book, which he analyzes as an effort to find a place for human freedom and morality in a world governed by natural necessity, can be traced to Reformation debates between predestinarian Calvinists and free-will theologians. These debates were reflected in Kant’s efforts to establish the very possibility of freedom and in those of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Considered in this light, the longing for total revolution is a yearning not merely to overcome dehumanization but to become something more than human, which must always come up short in the face of human finitude and mortality.

ABSTRACT The historical context of early post-Kantian debates on politics reveals the emergence of a new type of perfectionist ethics no longer based on the state-sponsored promotion of happiness, as the dominant German tendency in the eighteenth century had been, but on individual freedom. Post-Kantian perfectionism focused on maintaining and enhancing the conditions for rightful interaction among self-defining individuals. Rather than isolating and alienating, Kantian negative freedom enabled a new conception of social interaction based on the idea of right and the progressive extension of rightful relations. Humboldt, Schiller, Fichte, and Marx exemplified this new approach, despite their differences.

The analysis of armed opposition groups is heavily tainted by gross categorizations and labeling. Using vague terms that reduce the objectives of such groups to a uniform binary of secessionist or reformist defies their ideational complexity, undermining the effort to gain a nuanced and in-depth understanding of their actual motives. A closer look into the Ogaden National Liberation Front in Ethiopia reveals the type of complexity we might expect to find in armed opposition groups’ objectives, and thus the problem with superficially labeling them to make for easy comparative analyses.

ABSTRACT In response to widespread voter ignorance, Jason Brennan argues for a voting ethics that can be summarized as one negative duty: do not vote badly. The implication that abstaining is always permissible entails no incentive for citizens to become competent voters or to vote once competent. Following the Condorcet Jury Theorem, this can lead to suboptimal outcomes, suggesting that voter turnout should concern instrumentalist epistemic accounts of democratic legitimacy. This could be addressed by adding two positive voting duties: to make an effort to become a competent voter; and, once competent, to vote.

ABSTRACT Berlin and Strauss shared surprisingly compatible views about four matters of great importance. The first is the need for political philosophy, which Berlin traced to value pluralism and Strauss to the inherent incompleteness and contestability of our knowledge of politics, due to its comprehensive nature. Second, Berlin and Strauss each opposed social-scientific positivism: Berlin, because it contradicts human freedom and responsibility; Strauss, because it depends on an untenable and nihilistic distinction between facts and values. Third, both philosophers wished to place, in the ground currently occupied by positivist political science, the study of statecraft, embodied in such figures as Churchill and FDR. Finally, Berlin and Strauss agreed on what characterizes such statesmen: an intuitive, pretheoretical practical judgment of political particulars.