Context and Connection
Bull – Substantive
Why were you so boring? Yeah, I know that you don’t believe that you can prove your point with quantitative analysis but did you have to write like you were coding your whole book in math? Well I do admit that the end was much more interesting than the beginning. Despite the immense rhetorical sentiment that drenches the pages of this book I did find some parts extremely interesting.
I remember we discussed Bull’s methodology last week and how many have boasted that The Anarchical Society is out-dated. Yes, I do admit to skipping around a little when Bull reiterates the power struggle between the US and the USSR but I do not side with the critics of this work. I believe that book remains an important piece of literature on the subject of international relations as do the authors that we have become intimate with throughout the course of this semester. If we were to date a masterwork on the concept of being out-dated then why not throw the whole lot of our books on that pile? The Peloponnesian War doesn’t have any more relevance than does the Cold War in modern IR.
At the end of Chapter 12, Mr. Bull reflects upon a story of a man who was lost and asked for directions and the farmer answering the man’s question replied: “Oh sir, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here!” Bull concludes this chapter and this paragraph by exclaiming “The fact is that the form of universal political organization which actually prevails in the world is that of the state system, and it is within this system that the search for consensus has to begin (285). This caught my attention because my reflective post by Weber was of a similar nature. Both authors recognize that you cannot hypothesize about changes if you do not acknowledge the current “here and now” sentiment of life. You can’t talk about the practice of politics if you don’t recognize what politics at this point in time consists of and you can’t change the international system or offer up methods of peace if you do not recognize the starting point, the state system.
Why were you so boring? Yeah, I know that you don’t believe that you can prove your point with quantitative analysis but did you have to write like you were coding your whole book in math? Well I do admit that the end was much more interesting than the beginning. Despite the immense rhetorical sentiment that drenches the pages of this book I did find some parts extremely interesting.
I remember we discussed Bull’s methodology last week and how many have boasted that The Anarchical Society is out-dated. Yes, I do admit to skipping around a little when Bull reiterates the power struggle between the US and the USSR but I do not side with the critics of this work. I believe that book remains an important piece of literature on the subject of international relations as do the authors that we have become intimate with throughout the course of this semester. If we were to date a masterwork on the concept of being out-dated then why not throw the whole lot of our books on that pile? The Peloponnesian War doesn’t have any more relevance than does the Cold War in modern IR.
At the end of Chapter 12, Mr. Bull reflects upon a story of a man who was lost and asked for directions and the farmer answering the man’s question replied: “Oh sir, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here!” Bull concludes this chapter and this paragraph by exclaiming “The fact is that the form of universal political organization which actually prevails in the world is that of the state system, and it is within this system that the search for consensus has to begin (285). This caught my attention because my reflective post by Weber was of a similar nature. Both authors recognize that you cannot hypothesize about changes if you do not acknowledge the current “here and now” sentiment of life. You can’t talk about the practice of politics if you don’t recognize what politics at this point in time consists of and you can’t change the international system or offer up methods of peace if you do not recognize the starting point, the state system.
posted by Holly at 2:37 PM
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