Description
It is widely recognised that IR suffers from both an ongoing identity crisis and an inferiority complex in relation to the other social sciences. This paper proposes that the deepest reason for this debilitating condition is that IR has not understood the meaning of its own central object: the international. It further proposes that the cause of this deficit is the failure of IR to think the relation between the political and the international. Rather, even as it separated itself from Political Science, IR has always simply assumed the normative primacy of the bounded space of the ‘inside’. On this assumption, the international can then only appear as secondary and residual – the formless ‘outside’ space that is classically understood by Realism as anarchic, conflict-ridden and resistant to progress. The paper critiques this foundational assumption at a metaphysical level. Drawing on Hegel, it first correlates the inside/outside division of IR with the inside/outside structure of consciousness. It then shows how, at the culmination of the dialectic, the oppositional structure of the inside/outside division is transcended altogether into what, at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel terms ‘Absolute Knowing’. The paper concludes that it is this condition of achieved totality that is the properly metaphysical meaning of the international.
