Beyond National Liberalism

This chapter discusses the intertwined constitutions of social sciences and Pax Americana with ethnographic notes on emerging unintended consequences of all this entanglement, and the need they demonstrate for a clearer critique of the specific institutional forms the Americans and their sciences have given to liberalism: a world of self-determination, free and privileged enterprise, separated and only formally equal rights, and very limited liabilities. He argues that deliberately radical critiques, such as the denunciations of American empire, do less than can an unfettered, simply liberal, re-examination of these realities.

The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

We now know that the ‘birth of the discipline’ of international relations in the United States is a story about empire. The foundations of early international relations theory are set in not just international law and historical sociology but evolutionary biology and racial anthropology. The problem is the way in which scholars today deal with the place of race in the thought of John Hobson, Paul Reinsch, and virtually all other social scientists of the era. The strand of thought that still resonates in our own time about empire, states, and the like is raised up and depicted as the scientific or theoretical core in the scholars’ work, while the strand that involves now archaic racial constructs is downgraded and treated instead as mere ‘language’, ‘metaphors’, and ‘prejudices’ of the era. To undo this error and recover in full the ideas of early international relations theorists it is necessary to bring the work of historians of conservative and reform Darwinism to bear on the first specialists and foundational texts in international relations.

Power after Nuclear Weapons

This chapter draws out the implications of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of power for thinking about the nuclear revolution. Drawing on Arendt’s distinction between violence and power, it posits that nuclear weapons are powerful not simply because they are destructive, but because the fact of their destructiveness induces statesmen to behave in practice as if power and violence were in fact opposites. This Arendtian approach providing a conceptual foundation for a particular strand of American thinking about nuclear disarmament. Rather than a push from the past, nuclear weapons reveal power to be more like a pull from the future. Their power is not reducible to the rituals of deterrence, but rather from the fact that thermonuclear annihilation has fundamentally altered the human relationship to the planet.

The Misuse of Numbers

Mass democracies such as the United States, that have embraced meritocratic criteria for elite selection and mass opportunity, are tempted develop impersonal, objective, mechanical, measures of quality. Why? The seductiveness of such measures is that they all turn measures of quality into measures of quantity, thereby allowing comparison across cases with an apparently single metric. This chapter attempts to sketch that logic and argue that it is irremediably and fatally flawed.

American Power and the New Mandarins Redux

Noam Chomsky's landmark essay collection American Power and the New Mandarins was published about five decades ago, just after the Tet Offensive marked a turnaround in the Vietnam War. His superb debunking expedition, along with other early volumes At War In Asia and For Reasons of State, remains disturbingly relevant in its dissection of professional conceits, institutional deceits and booster attitudes in sectors of academe where everyone, says ‘we’ when referring to US foreign policy.

Counterfeit COIN and the State of Nature Effect

This chapter documents the processes by which the American intervention in Iraq transformed a plural nation into a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). In the civil strife of ancient Greek cities that was the model for Hobbes' state of nature, the intervention of the larger forces of Athens and Sparta, proclaiming unconditional causes to die for, transformed local social differences into lethal factional enmities. Death then raged from many quarters. The same effect of anarchic violence has followed from imperial conquer-and-divide policies in modern colonial and post-colonial societies. Historically, the state of nature appears as the effect of the subversion of the social contract rather than its precondition.

The Golden Bough at Bretton Woods

This chapter reconsiders the now muted and distanced relationship between anthropologists and the U.S. state since the Bretton Woods Conference. Frazier's Golden Bough helps to understand the ambitious stances of post-war and post-Cold-War American foreign policymakers. The British (and other enfeebled European) empire(s) was no less on the American hit list than were outright communist entities. Social scientists up the Vietnam era at least, were often willing fellow travellers in this home-grown capitalist internationale. Clearly there is a noteworthy difference that needs to be worked out between anthropologists working in the area of Cultural Resources Management for the Department of Interior and those that signed up with Human Terrain Systems teams hunting opponents abroad. The chapter urges that the relationship between government and discipline be institutionally defined through anthropologists' professional bodies, so as to protect both subjects and practitioners from ethical conflicts with the government agencies they interact with. However, the unintended consequences of engaging with American power risks destruction of the discipline’s objective values as a science.

Translating Social Science for China

A firing squad executed Qu Qiubai in 1935 as he sat in the lotus position in Zhongshan Park, Changtian City, Fujian Province. Qu was thirty six years old. In over fifteen years of staggering labour, Ou established Chinese sociology as a Marxist discipline, translating and drawing from sociology of the USSR and elsewhere. He embraced social science in a hope to locate truth and amass accurate knowledge, with his cohorts even receiving graduate education in the United States, engaged in an unrelenting translation into Chinese written languages of the experience and literatures of other peoples in search for accuracy. Qu’s focus on translations, truth, language, and the role of social science in societal change helps us see the kinds of social science that developed in counter-pose to the sociology of Pax Americana.

The Imperialism of Categories

The American ‘impulse to impose Locke everywhere’ on a world presumed to be eagerly waiting to receive it has by no means expired. It becomes more articulate as America moves gropingly, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes by design, toward becoming an empire. The question is, will America’s encounter with the other in the Middle East and elsewhere give Americans that ‘sense of relativity’, that ‘spark of philosophy’, which will enable them to recognize and negotiate with the unfamiliar and the strange it finds in other peoples and polities? Or will it merely intensify, as it often has, a liberal absolutism indifferent to difference?

Conclusion

The purpose of this volume has been to reconsider the American 'fiery hunt,' examine its effects upon social sciences (political science, anthropology, sociology, and economics) and, in turn, assess their effects on the Pax Americana from Truman up to the Trumpian era. Starbuck was immobilized by a clash between his better judgement and his duty to obey. Ishmael, ready to go wherever truths take him, hauls the mutinous lesson of the Pequod home to enlighten the rest of us. Starbuck's dilemma is not his or ours, not any longer. To situate and critique the powers of Social Science, its accompaniments on 'voyages out' and frequent complicity in 'fiery hunts,' has been our intention. The presupposition is that the information, and the lessons therein, matter. These candid accounts, we reckon, provide leverage to actors who thereby can change the context in which policy is made.