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Max Stirner, for example, rejects any kind of limitation on the action of the individual, including social structures that may evolve spontaneously – for example, parental authority, money, legal institutions (for example, common law), and property rights; Proudhon, on the other hand, argues for a society of small enterprising co-operatives. The co-operative movement often attracts those with collectivist leanings but who seek to move away from the potentially authoritarian model of typical socialism. In contrast, libertarian thinkers who support the free market have proposed anarchic solutions to economic and political problems: they stress the voluntaristic nature of the market system as a moral as well as an efficient means of distributing resources and accordingly condemn state failure to provide adequate resources (health care and education but also police and defense services); the so-called public goods and services, they assert, ought to be provided privately through the free market. Regardless of the political direction that the anarchist leans towards (collectivism or individualism), how the anarchic community is to be secured presents philosophical problems that demand a close regard to possible inconsistencies.
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Historicist anarchists believe that anarchy is the ultimate state that humanity is (inevitably) ascending towards – they agree with Marx's general theory of history that history (and the future) divides into convenient eras which are characterized by a movement towards less authority in life (that is, the gradual displacement of authoritarian or socially divisive structures), and that this movement is inexorable. Radical anarchists claim that the future can only be fought for, and any imposition of authority on an individual's actions is to be defended against – their calls extend to anarchists actively undermining, disrupting and dismantling the apparatus of the coercive state; those on the libertarian wing stress that only government coerces whereas those more sympathetic to socialism's moral critique of capitalism emphasize the oppressive nature of multinational companies and of global capitalism. While some anarchists are pacifistic in their rejection of authority (drawing on Gandhi's conduct against British rule in India), others condone the use of violence to secure their freedom from external coercion. In common with modern liberal and with some socialists and conservatives, some branches of anarchism reject the material world and economic progress as being innately valuable. Anarchists who rail against economic progress (or "global capitalism") as somehow limiting their choices seek alternative ends to their political utopia, one which has much in common with the final political theory examined: environmentalism.
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Environmentalism : Beyond the traditional ethical disputes concerning the good life for human beings and what political situation would best suit our development, others take up an alternative conception of humanity and its relationship with the living world. Broadly termed "environmentalist," this political philosophy does not concern itself with the rights of people or of society, but of the rights of the planet and other species. The political philosophies of liberalism, socialism, conservativism and anarchism – and all of their variants – agree that the good life sought by political philosophy ought to be the good life for human beings. Their respective criticism of political practice and mores stem from a competing standard of what ought to constitute the good life for us. Feminists, for example, within the four man pro-human political theories argue for more (or different) rights and duties towards women; resident interventionists in the liberal and conservative clubs claim that political control over some means of production may enhance the opportunities for some hitherto underrepresented or disempowered folk; similarly, welfarists propose universal standards of living for all, to be secured by the their respective beliefs in collective or voluntaristic associations. However, environmentalism starts on a different premise: human beings are not the center of our politics – nature is.
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At the beginning, it was noted that for argument's sake that theologically based political philosophies must come to terms or propose standards by which to judge a person's life on earth. Hence they enter the traditional debates of how people (Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, Hindu, and so forth) ought to relate to his fellow human being and through what kind of institutions. Environmentalism, however, considers our place on earth to be of secondary importance to that of the natural world. In its weaker forms, environmentalism claims that human beings are custodians of nature, to whom we must show respect and perhaps even certain ethical and political obligations (obligations akin to those some theological positions hold of people to their God) to the natural world. This implies that people are accorded an equal ethical status as that of other living species – he is seen as a primus inter pares. In its stronger form, however, environmentalism condemns the very existence of humanity as a blot on the landscape – as the perennial destroyer of all that is good, for all that is good cannot, according to this position, be a product of human beings; people are the source of unending evils committed against the world. In terms of the grand vista of intellectual history, environmentalism stems from several anti-human or anti-secular traditions that reach back three millennia. Eastern religions developed theories of innate human wickedness (or nature's innate goodness) that filtered through to the West via Pythagorean mysticism and later Christian asceticism and Franciscan variations on a pro-nature theme. Applied issues that provoke its ire include pollution, vivisection, hunting, the domestication of animals, the eating of meat, and the desecration of the landscape.
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Generally, environmentalists distinguish themselves from conservationists who, from various positions along the spectrum of political theory, argue that landscapes or animals ought to be protected from extinction only if they are beneficial or pleasing to humanity in some form or other. Environmentalists reject such human-centered utilitarianism in favor of a broad ethical intrinsicism – the theory that all species possess an innate value independent of any other entity's relationship to them. Criticisms leveled against this argument begin with asking what the moral relationship between a predator and its victim is or ought to be – does the mouse have a right not to be caught by the cat and is the cat a murderer for killing the mouse? And if this cannot be justified or even ethically explained does it not follow that when people stand in an analogous relationship to the animals we hunt and domesticate then we too should not be judged as a murderer for eating meat and wearing fur? The central issue for environmentalists and their animal rights supporting brethren is to explain the moral relationship between human and beast and the resulting asymmetrical justifications and judgments leveled against humanity: that is, according to the environmentalists' general ethical position, it is morally appropriate, so to speak, for the lion to hunt the gazelle or the ant to milk the caterpillar, but not for people to hunt the fox or milk the cow – and likewise, it can be asked whether it is morally appropriate for the wild-cat or bear to attack people but not for people to defend themselves?
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The political philosophy of environmentalism then turns on creating the proper structures for human social life in this context. The weaker form demands, for example, that he stops pillaging the earth's resources by either prohibiting further exploitation or at least slowing the rate at which he is presently doing so: sustainable resource management is at the center of such environmentalism, although it is a political-economic theory that is also picked up by the other pro-human philosophies. Environmentalists theoretically can differ on what political-economic system can best fit their demands, but one advocate (Stewart Brand writing in The Whole Earth Catalogue) argues that people should return to a "Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion." However, the demographic and economic implications are apparently missed by such advocates: to return to a Neolithic state, humanity would have to divest itself of the complex division of labor it has produced with the expansion of its population and education. Effectively, this would imply a reduction in the human population to Neolithic numbers of a million or so for the entire planet. The fact that this would require the demise of five billion people should be addressed: what would justify the return to the supposed Eden and what methods would be appropriate? Brand begins his argument thus: "We have wished…for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age…" Genocidal campaigns are justifiable according to those who assert that their population (culture, nation, race, religion) ought to be the sole residing group on the planet – an assertion hotly contended by other groups of course and those who expound the rights of individuals to pursue a life free of coercion, which leaves environmentalism to explain why people must suffer and even die for its ends. The proffered justifications often stem from a rejection of any rights for human beings.
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Environmentalism extends rights to – or duties towards – other species which range extended beyond those animals closest to natural and cultural human sympathies. Rats, insects, and snails have been championed by various lobbies seeking to protect animals from human incursions. Utilitarians of the traditional political schools may agree with such proposals as being useful for humanity (say for future generations), but environmentalists prefer to remove 'human beings' from the equation and deposit inalienable rights on such non-human entities regardless of their relationship to humanity. Since animals are not ethical beings, environmentalists have a difficult task explaining why a snail darter possesses a greater right to live on the planet over a human. A solution is that our ethical and political capacities in fact negate our moral status: the fact that we can reason and hence comprehend the import of our actions implies that we are not to be trusted for we can willingly commit evil. An animal is a-moral in that regard: it kills, eats other entities, adapts to and changes its environment, breeds and pollutes, but it possesses no conception of what it does. For the environmentalist this accords non-human species a higher moral status. Animals act and react and there is no evil in this, but people think and therein lies the source of our immorality. From this premise, all human creations can be universally condemned as unethical.
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2-International Relations
nternational relations, the study of the relations of states with each other and with international organizations and certain subnational entities (e.g., bureaucracies, political parties, and interest groups). It is related to a number of other academic disciplines, including political science, geography, history, economics, law, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Historical development : The field of international relations emerged at the beginning of the 20th century largely in the West and in particular in the United States as that country grew in power and influence. Whereas the study of international relations in the newly founded Soviet Union and later in communist China was stultified by officially imposed Marxist ideology, in the West the field flourished as the result of a number of factors: a growing demand to find less-dangerous and more-effective means of conducting relations between peoples, societies, governments, and economies; a surge of writing and research inspired by the belief that systematic observation and inquiry could dispel ignorance and serve human betterment; and the popularization of political affairs, including foreign affairs. The traditional view that foreign and military matters should remain the exclusive preserve of rulers and other elites yielded to the belief that such matters constituted an important concern and responsibility of all citizens. This increasing popularization of international relations reinforced the idea that general education should include instruction in foreign affairs and that knowledge should be advanced in the interests of greater public control and oversight of foreign and military policy.
This new perspective was articulated by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21) in his program for relations between the Great Powers following a settlement of World War I. The first of his Fourteen Points, as his program came to be known, was a call for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at" in place of the secret treaties that were believed to have contributed to the outbreak of the war. The extreme devastation caused by the war strengthened the conviction among political leaders that not enough was known about international relations and that universities should promote research and teaching on issues related to international cooperation and war and peace.
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International relations scholarship prior to World War I was conducted primarily in two loosely organized branches of learning: diplomatic history and international law. Involving meticulous archival and other primary-source research, diplomatic history emphasized the uniqueness of international events and the methods of diplomacy as it was actually conducted. International law—especially the law of war—had a long history in international relations and was viewed as the source of fundamental normative standards of international conduct. The emergence of international relations was to broaden the scope of international law beyond this traditional focal point. Between the two world wars : During the 1920s new centres, institutes, schools, and university departments devoted to teaching and research in international relations were created in Europe and North America. In addition, private organizations promoting the study of international relations were formed, and substantial philanthropic grants were made to support scholarly journals, to sponsor training institutes, conferences, and seminars, and to stimulate university research. Three subject areas initially commanded the most attention, each having its roots in World War I. During the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war, major portions of the government archives of imperial Russia and imperial Germany were opened, making possible some impressive scholarly work in diplomatic history that pieced together the unknown history of prewar alliances, secret diplomacy, and military planning. These materials were integrated to provide detailed explanations of the origins of World War I. Among such works several are particularly noteworthy, including Sidney Bradshaw Fay's meticulous The Origins of the World War (1928), which explored prewar diplomacy and alliance systems; Bernadotte E. Schmitt's The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930) and Triple Alliance and Triple Entente (1934); Pierre Renouvin's The Immediate Origins of the War (1928); Winston Churchill's The World Crisis (1923–29); and Arnold J. Toynbee's The World After the Peace Conference (1925). There also were extensive memoirs and volumes of published documents that provided much material for diplomatic historians and other international relations scholars. The newly created League of Nations, which ushered in the hope and expectation that a new and peaceful world order was at hand, was a second subject that captured significant attention. Some of the international relations schools that were founded in the interwar period were explicitly created to prepare civil servants for what was expected to be the dawning age of international government. Accordingly, intensive study was devoted to the genesis and organization of the league, the history of earlier plans for international federations, and the analysis of the problems and procedures of international organization and international law.
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The third focal point of international relations scholarship during the early part of the interwar period was an offshoot of the peace movement and was concerned primarily with understanding the causes and costs of war, as well as its political, sociological, economic, and psychological dimensions. Interest in the question "Why war?" also brought a host of social scientists, including economists, sociologists, psychologists, and even mathematicians—all of whom were pioneers in the intellectual movement known as behaviourism—into active participation in international studies for the first time. In the 1930s the breakdown of the League of Nations, the rise of aggressive dictatorships in Italy, Germany, and Japan, and the onset of World War II produced a strong reaction against international government and against peace-inspired topics in the study of international relations. The moral idealism inherent in these topics was criticized as unrealistic and impractical, and the academic study of international relations came to be regarded as the handiwork of starry-eyed peace visionaries who ignored the hard facts of international politics. In particular, scholars of international relations were criticized for suggesting standards of international conduct that bore little resemblance to the real behaviour of nations up to that time. As the desired world of peaceful conflict resolution and adherence to international law grew more distant from the existing world of aggressive dictatorships, a new approach to the study of international relations, known as realism, increasingly dominated the field. Nevertheless, the scholarly work on world affairs of the early interwar period, despite the decline in its reputation and influence, was extensive and sound, encompassing the collection and organization of large amounts of important data and the development of some fundamental concepts.
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Some topics of study in international relations that are still considered novel or of recent origin were already being vigorously explored in the interwar period. Indeed, a brief review of these topics tends to undermine the image of the interwar period as one dominated by moralistic ideas. The topics include the causes of wars; the relationship between international affairs and the problems of racial and ethnic minorities; the effects of population change on foreign policies; the effects of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism; the strategic aspects of international relations, including the importance of geographic location and spatial relationships (geopolitics) for military power and the influence on governments of what later was called the "military-industrial complex"; the implications of economic inequalities between countries; and the role of public opinion, national differences, and cultural orientation in world affairs. Although these earlier studies tended to be somewhat short on theory and long on description, most of the topics examined remain relevant in the 21st century. The scholarly contributions of some individuals in the 1930s were particularly noteworthy because they foreshadowed the development of international relations studies after World War II. Harold D. Lasswell, for example, explored the relationships between world politics and the psychological realm of symbols, perceptions, and images; Abram Kardiner and his associates laid the groundwork for an approach, based on a branch of anthropology known as culture-and-personality studies, that later became a popular but short-lived theory of international relations; Frederick L. Schuman, setting a style that is still followed by interpreters of foreign policy and by journalists, synthesized analytic commentary with accounts of current international events; Quincy Wright investigated numerous aspects of international behaviour and war as head of one of the first team research projects in international relations; and E.H. Carr, Brooks Emeny, Carl J. Friedrich, Schuman, Harold Sprout, Nicholas Spykman, and others developed the main lines of what became the "power-politics" explanation of international relations, also known as realism. In 1937 the Spanish poet, historian, philosopher, and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, founder of the College of Europe, relied upon his experience in working with the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva to describe the gap between what was being said or written about international relations and what was actually happening.
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The broadened definition and scope of the study of international relations were among the fundamental contributions of scholars of the interwar period. Many of these innovators were enlisted by governments during World War II for work in intelligence and propaganda, as well as other aspects of wartime planning. In this respect the war stimulated systematic social-scientific investigations of international phenomena. It also led to important technological advances—notably the computer—that would later have a major impact on the study of international relations.
In other ways World War II was a divide for academic international relations. The war itself brought about a drastic change in the agenda of world politics, and the postwar intellectual climate was characterized by a marked shift away from many earlier interests, emphases, and problems. In the early postwar years there was a quest for analyses that would cut through the details of studies of myriad international topics to produce a general understanding of common elements and a clear view of the fundamental nature of international politics. There was also a growing interest in developing theories that could help to explain the major issues of the changing international scene. New security issues emerged, including the issue of nuclear weapons, which led to extensive writings on deterrence as a basis of strategic stability. Bernard Brodie's treatise on nuclear deterrence was highly influential, as was the work of Herman Kahn, Glenn Snyder, Thomas C. Schelling, Henry A. Kissinger, and Albert Wohlstetter. Other issues that were addressed in the vast literature of international relations include international, and especially European, integration; alliances and alignment, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); ideologies; foreign-policy decision making; theories about conflict and war; the study of low-intensity conflict; crisis management; international organizations; and the foreign policies of the increasing number of states that became part of the international system in the mid- to late 20th century.
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The postwar ascendancy of realism: Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (1948) helped to meet the need for a general theoretical framework. Not only did it become one of the most extensively used textbooks in the United States and Britain—it continued to be republished over the next half century—it also was an essential exposition of the realist theory of international relations. Numerous other contributors to realist theory emerged in the decade or so after World War II, including Arnold Wolfers, George F. Kennan, Robert Strausz-Hupé, Kissinger, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Although there are many variations of realism, all of them make use of the core concepts of national interest and the struggle for power. According to realism, states exist within an anarchic international system in which they are ultimately dependent on their own capabilities, or power, to further their national interests. The most important national interest is the survival of the state, including its people, political system, and territorial integrity. Other major interests for realists include preservation of the culture and the economy. Realists contend that, as long as the world is divided into nation-states in an anarchic setting, national interest will remain the essence of international politics. The struggle for power is part of human nature and takes essentially two forms: collaboration and competition. Collaboration occurs when parties find that their interests coincide (e.g., when they form alliances or coalitions designed to maximize their collective power, usually against an adversary). Rivalry, competition, and conflict result from the clash of national interests that is characteristic of the anarchic system. Accommodation between states is possible through skillful political leadership, which includes the prioritizing of national goals in order to limit conflicts with other states. In an international system composed of sovereign states, the survival of both the states and the system depends on the intelligent pursuit of national interests and the accurate calculation of national power. Realists caution that messianic religious and ideological crusades can obscure core national interests and threaten the survival of individual states and the international system itself. Such crusades included, for Morgenthau, the pursuit of global communism or global democracy, each of which would inevitably clash with the other or with other competing ideologies. The attempt to reform countries toward the ideal of universal trust and cooperation, according to realists, runs counter to human nature, which is inclined toward competition, conflict, and war.
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Realist theory emerged in the decade after World War II as a response to idealism, which generally held that policy makers should refrain from immoral or illegal actions in world affairs. As no impressive new formulation of political idealism appeared on the international scene to reply to realist theory, the debate between realism and idealism gradually faded, only to be revived in a somewhat different form in the final decades of the 20th century in the disagreement between neoliberal institutionalists and neorealist structuralists. Many international relations scholars neither rejected nor embraced realism but instead were engrossed in other aspects of the broadening agenda of international relations studies. Beginning in the 1950s, as the United States became more fully engaged in world affairs, the U.S. government made large sums of money available for the development of area studies, especially studies of regions that were important in the intensifying Cold War with the Soviet Union. In order to understand the major forces and trends shaping countries such as the Soviet Union and China or the regions extending from Africa to Northeast Asia, the United States needed to recruit greater numbers of specialists in the histories, politics, cultures, economies, languages, and literature of such areas; the Soviet Union did likewise. Theoretical concerns generally played a marginal role in the growth of area specialization in the West. Although many scholars agreed with Morgenthau's statement that theory and research should have a "concern with human nature as it actually is, and with the historic processes as they actually take place," they did not uniformly believe that realism was capable of providing an adequate explanation of international behaviour.
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The behavioral approach and the task of integration : In the 1950s an important development in the social sciences, including the study of international relations, was the arrival of new concepts and methodologies that were loosely identified in ensemble as behavioral theory. This general approach, which emphasized narrowly focused quantitative studies designed to obtain precise results, created a wide-ranging controversy between theorists who believed that the social sciences should emulate as much as possible the methodologies of the physical sciences and those who held that such an approach is fundamentally unsound. In addition, the great number of new topics investigated at the time—including cognition, conflict resolution, decision making, deterrence, development, the environment, game theory, economic and political integration, and systems analysis—provoked some anxiety that the discipline would collapse into complete conceptual and methodological chaos. Accordingly, much of the intellectual effort of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s—the so-called "behavioral decade"—went into the task of comparing, interpreting, and integrating various concepts from new areas of study, and the scholarly goal of the period was to link theories, or to connect so-called "islands of theory," into a greater, more comprehensive theory of international relations. This task proved to be a difficult one. Indeed, some scholars began to question the necessity—or even the possibility—of arriving at a single theory that would explain all the varied, diverse, and complex facets of international relations. Instead, these researchers suggested that a number of separate theories would be needed.