Psychology, historical science and inefficient causation
In a chapter contribution to a four volume project entitled Richard Ned Lebow: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, History, Philosophy and Psychology, ed. By Hans Günther Brauch (Heidelberg: Springer; New York: Dordrecht, 2016), Stefano Guzzini was asked to reflect on Ned Lebow’s methodology and philosophy of science. Rather than imposing an external grid on Lebow’s work, the chapter develops Lebow’s position out of his research.
The guiding inspiration for the chapter is Lebow’s impatience with any argument which says that “things had to come” as they did (when wars break out), or “this cannot happen” (such as the peaceful end of the Cold War). Instead, Lebow would look for the incongruities in personal decisions, the unintended effects of human interactions, and the unexpected twists that history can take.
This basic stance produces a central tension that defines his approach to science. On the one hand, such an emphasis on the contingent and the non-deterministic would make him skeptical of attempts to reduce the human world to behaviorist explanations; instead, the specifically ‘human’ and ‘social’ pushes his interest towards historical explanations and the philosophical underpinnings of such indeterminacy. On the other hand, there is no doubt that he wishes to stay within a “social science”, albeit more “humanistically” conceived, if by this we refer to both the ethical ideal of humanism and the analytical ideal which looks for a more holistic understanding of knowledge. To put it briefly: Lebow is unwilling to give up the search for some form of regularity only because many have pushed it beyond what the ontology of the social world can bear.
The first section of the chapter follows Lebow in his attempts to open up theoretical black boxes which, according to him, allow for the pernicious analytical shortcuts that construct such inevitability in the first place. This will also inform his theoretical predisposition to combine the study of cognitive processes, the role of motives and motivational explanations, and intersubjective identity processes. A second section will then show how these ontological and theoretical dispositions translate into a philosophy of science that eschews both determinism and pure contingency at the same time. His social science is historical and interpretivist, but also endorses a form of (singular) causation.
