beyond belief: ideas and symbolic technologies in the study of international relations

Beyond Belief: Ideas and SymbolicTechnologies in the Study of International

Relations

MARK LAFFEY and JUTTA WELDESUniversity of Minnesota and Kent State University

As presently constituted, the analysis of ‘ideas’ is deficient in two keyrespects. First, despite presenting itself as an alternative to thedominant rationalist perspective on international relations and foreignpolicy, the turn to ‘ideas’ represents only a minor modification of thattradition, rather than a serious challenge to it. Second, the retention ofthe rationalist framework has had problematical implications for how‘ideas’ are conceptualized. Although explicitly defined as shared beliefs,we argue that the metaphors structuring rationalist analyses lead themto conceptualize ‘ideas’ as objects. As an alternative, we offer aconstructivist account of ideas as ‘symbolic technologies’ that enablethe production of representations. This different metaphor enables usto address directly the difficulties for analysis stemming from aconception of ideas as objects. It also opens up for examination a rangeof empirical phenomena overlooked by rationalist analysts.

Recently, ‘ideas’ have once again1 moved to the forefront of the researchagenda in International Relations. The desire to account for unexplainedvariance in rationalist models has motivated a number of scholars to examinethe effect of ‘ideas’ on foreign policy,2 specifically through an effort toconnect ideas causally with the policies that they seem to justify and, in turn,to discover the degree of impact that ideas have on foreign policy and thuson state action (Jacobsen, 1995; Yee, 1996. On state action, see Milliken,1995). Arguing that the explanation of political action in terms of rationalactors maximizing a utility function rooted in material interests cannotadequately account for observed behaviors by state actors, these scholarshave suggested that ideas have an independent causal effect on policy ‘even

European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 1997SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

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when human beings behave rationally to achieve their ends’ (Goldstein andKeohane, 1993: 5). In short, ideas as well as interests are claimed to beimportant for the explanation of foreign policy. In this respect, the ‘ideas’literature comes as a welcome addition to the still growing body of workcritical of the explanatory claims of Waltzian structural theory and, inparticular, of its efforts to account for state action solely on the basis of theascription to states of structurally-derived interests (e.g. Waltz, 1979). It isalso a welcome effort to address the explanatory problems which flow fromthe indeterminacy inherent in rational choice models which display multiplepotential equilibria (Keohane, 1988). Goldstein (1993: 6) explicitly framesthe turn to ‘ideas’ in these terms.

As presently constituted, the analysis of ideas in foreign policy isnonetheless deficient in two key respects. First, despite presenting itself as analternative to the dominant ‘rationalist’ (Keohane, 1988) perspective oninternational relations and foreign policy, this literature reprises several ofthe key features of the model it sets out to criticize. The turn to ‘ideas’ thusrepresents only a minor modification of the rationalist tradition, rather thana serious challenge to it. Second, and more important, the retention of therationalist framework has had significant and problematical consequences forhow ‘ideas’ are conceptualized. These problems derive from the conceptionimplicit in this literature of ‘ideas’ as objects. This conception and itsconsequences for understanding what ‘ideas’ are is evident in (at least) threecharacteristic features of rationalist analyses — first, even the most sophisti-cated exponents of this genre persistently and symptomatically separate ideasfrom interests and treat them as rival explanatory variables; second, ideas areassumed to have causal effects in the conventional, ‘neo-positivist’ orHumean sense; and third, ideas have been defined, at least explicitly, asindividual possessions, and usually as ‘beliefs’ or ‘shared beliefs’. We discusseach of these features of rationalist analyses, and the problems they generatefor analysis, in more detail below. Underpinning these characteristics andserving to make sense of them are a set of metaphors which, despite anexplicit definition of ‘ideas’ as beliefs, indicate that in this literature ‘ideas’are conceptualized implicitly as discrete objects, a notion expressed mostclearly in the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor. In important ways, then, aswe argue below, it is the metaphors structuring their analyses that leadrationalists to conceptualize ‘ideas’ in this way and undermine theirusefulness for analyzing foreign policy and state action.

As an alternative to this rationalist-inspired understanding, we offer aconstructivist account of ideas. In particular, we argue that at least some ofthe phenomena referred to as ‘ideas’ in this literature are more usefullyconceptualized as ‘symbolic technologies’ (Greenblatt, 1991: 12) thatenable the production of representations. In contrast to the rationalist

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metaphor of ideas as objects, an alternative set of metaphors and analogies— ideas as technologies — leads to a conception of ideas as social rather thanindividual phenomena, implies that they should be understood as elementsof constitutive practices and relations rather than as ‘neo-positivist’ causalvariables, and that, as such, they are inextricably involved in the productionof interests. In short, deploying an alternative metaphor enables us toaddress directly and productively the problems we identify in the ideasliterature. In addition, as we demonstrate below, it also opens up forexamination a range of empirical phenomena more or less invisible in thework of ‘ideas’ analysts.

In order to defend these claims, the article proceeds as follows. We firstoutline the form in which the return to ‘ideas’ has taken place. In particular,we examine the conception of ‘ideas’ which this literature employs. We thenprovide an extended critique of this conception, focusing on the distinctionbetween ideas and interests, the ‘neo-positivist’ causal analysis of ideas andthe definition of ideas either as shared individual ‘beliefs’ or as ‘commod-ities’. In the third section, we begin to sketch out an alternative,constructivist conceptualization of ‘ideas’ in terms of symbolic technologies.In conclusion, we discuss briefly the politics of model construction andchoice.

Rationalism and ‘Ideas’

The basic issue in this literature is ‘the role of ideas’ — the empiricalexamination of the ‘impact’ of ideas on policy through the application of‘the tools of social science’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 6; Odell, 1982:13, 58, 66, passim; Sikkink, 1991: 26, 242–3). The question is designed, atleast in part, explicitly to challenge both ‘reflective’ or constructivist and‘rationalist’ perspectives on International Relations.3 The challenge to theconstructivists, Goldstein and Keohane argue, is addressed to their alleged‘antiempiricist’ bias; that is, it targets constructivism’s ostensible failure togenerate or test hypotheses, or to conduct empirical analyses.4 The challengeto rationalism, on the other hand, stems both from the indeterminacy ofrationalist models and from the empirical anomalies they generate (e.g.Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 4–5; Odell, 1982: 58, passim; Sikkink, 1991:7–10, 15–19). Rationality, in this approach, is treated as a heuristic device orpreliminary hypothesis about human behavior whereby the analyst beginswith the assumption that individual human action is instrumentally rational.To the extent that the explanation of political action in terms of rationalactors maximizing a utility function rooted in material interests is insufficient— that is, to the extent that this theory is indeterminate or produces

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empirical anomalies — a more complex social theory is required (Craib,1992: Chapter 4).

In the abstract, a more complex theory might be generated in at least twoways — either by identifying additional variables which account for thevariance left unexplained by rationalism, or by modifying the conception ofwhat it is to be rational upon which that perspective is based. The bulk ofcontemporary International Relations research adopts some variant of theformer course of action, most typically by making reference to a now-extensive range of supplementary variables, including norms (e.g. Katzen-stein, 1993, 1996), culture (e.g. Johnston, 1995) and ideas. This strategicchoice is not surprising. Rationalism assumes a specific model of reasoning aspart of the ‘hard core’ of its research program (Lakatos, 1970). That modelis ‘substantive’ rationality, defined as ‘behavior that can be adjudgedobjectively to be optimally adapted to the situation’ (Simon, 1985: 294;quoted in Keohane, 1988: 381).5 Because substantive rationality is assumed,the empirical examination of the mode of reasoning which the actors actuallyemploy is effectively ‘black-boxed’.6 Rationalist approaches, at least in theirtypical form, are therefore precluded from positing alternative modes ofreasoning.7 Goldstein notes explicitly that her ideas approach is ‘not aimedat its [rationalism’s] ‘‘Lakatosian’’ core, but rather at the inability of suchanalyses to explain particular political outcomes’ (1993: 250). Instead, itbegins with this same model of rationality and introduces additionalvariables in order to account for deviations from expected outcomes,specifically by identifying the ‘ideas’ on the basis of which the actors engagein substantively rational action. This has prompted some critics to describethe ‘ideas’ literature not as a challenge to the rationalist approach but ratheras its completion (e.g. Wendt et al., 1992). Moreover, because rationalismtypically takes the individual as its basic unit of analysis and focuses onindividual rationality,8 these ideas are conceptualized in individual terms, ascharacteristics or possessions of individuals. ‘Ideas’, in short, function asinputs for a substantive and individualist model of rationality. As Goldsteinand Keohane acknowledge, the ideas literature ‘does not challenge thepremise that people behave in self-interested and broadly rational ways’(1993: 5). The rationality assumption itself, part of the hard core of therationalist research program, is taken for granted, with the result that thisliterature, instead of challenging that research program, has developedlargely within it. This places a number of significant limitations on the waysin which ‘ideas’ can be defined and studied, and on the forms of explanationin which they can be deployed.

Goldstein and Keohane’s (1993) programmatic statement concerning theanalysis of ‘ideas’ is consistent with this fundamental rationalist commit-ment. They suggest that the ‘null hypothesis’ being tested in the empirical


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studies in their recent collection on ‘ideas’ is that ‘variation in policy acrosscountries, or over time, is entirely accounted for by changes in factors otherthan ideas’ or, more specifically, that ‘the actions described can beunderstood on the basis of egoistic interests in the context of power realities:that variations of interests are not accounted for by variations in thecharacter of the ideas that people have’ (1993: 6, 26–7; emphasis in theoriginal). In other words, they propose that, even when rationality has beentaken into account, ‘ideas’ account for some of the left-over variation inpolicy over time or across countries.9 The central question in this literature,then, is ‘Do ideas have an impact on political outcomes, and if so, underwhat conditions?’ (1993: 11).

But what exactly are ideas? In much of the literature this is not clear.Odell’s path-breaking study of US international monetary policy provides agood example of the conceptual confusion surrounding this genre’s centralconcept. He seems to equate ideas with theory, ideologies, perceptions, andthe like, and only rarely defines any of these terms. For instance, he arguesthat ‘a new economic theory . . . might be explicitly cited as the source of apolicy experiment. Similarly, a cognitive perspective might lead to the findingthat one or another ideology . . . has been directly applied in a given case’(1982: 63, emphasis added). He also claims that ‘ideas refer to innovation ineconomic and political science, the spread of ideologies, the circulation ofschools of thought through government by means of personnel turnover, andchanges in the perceptions of specific situations and the salience of particularvariables’ and that an ideas ‘perspective’ includes ‘the intellectual idiosyn-cracies of individual leaders’ (1982: 363, emphasis added). What exactly anidea is is obscure, but for Odell, at least, ‘ideas’ seem to include anythingvaguely ‘ideational’, from the ‘intellectual idiosyncracies’ of individuals totheories and ideologies. And Odell is not alone in this confusion. InSikkink’s analysis of ‘developmentalism’, ideas, ideologies, beliefs, theoriesand models are also used more or less interchangeably. At the outset of herbook, for example, she explains that

The particular type of idea that interests me here is that concerned witheconomic development on the periphery, what Albert Hirschman called‘ideologies of economic development’, sets of ‘distinctive beliefs, principles, andattitudes.’ I prefer to speak of ideas about development, or models of economicpolicy making. Sets of ideas connected by a theory or group of theories form amodel of economic development. (1991: 1, emphasis added)

While Sikkink seems to be equating ideas, ideologies and numerous otheridea-like entities, she also argues that ideologies can act as constraints on theadoption of ideas (1991: 2–3). As in Odell’s work, the relationships amongall of these concepts remain unclear.10


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In an effort to bring order to this conceptual and theoretical confusionand to encourage further empirical research on the ‘impact of ideas’,Goldstein and Keohane have sought to define more precisely both what‘ideas’ are and what the nature of the relationship among various idea-likeentities is. To do so, they begin by defining ‘ideas’ most generally as ‘beliefsheld by individuals’ (1993: 3), which means that ‘ideas’ are equated with,and hence reducible to, ‘mental events’ (Yee, 1996: 69). In addition, incontrast to much of the older analyses of belief systems, this new literatureassumes that beliefs are shared.11 As Sikkink has argued, ‘it is necessary tograpple with the influence of ideas on the policy-making process, not onlythe ideas of individual policy makers, but also those . . . shared by largegroups in society’ (1991: 19; see also Odell, 1982: 66; Goldstein, 1993: 11;Jacobsen, 1995: 287; Yee, 1996: 69). Ideas, then, refer to ‘particular beliefs— shared by large numbers of people’ which ‘have implications for humanaction’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 7).

Building on this definition, Goldstein and Keohane provide a three-tiertypology of different ‘ideas’ or beliefs.12 The broadest, most general type iswhat they call ‘world-views’ or ‘conceptions of possibility’. These are sharedbeliefs which ‘define the universe of possibilities for action’. Examples theyoffer include ‘the world’s major religions’, and ‘conceptions of sovereignty’,as well as a vaguely defined ‘modern Western world view’ that encompasses‘individualistic and secular scientific premises’ (1993: 8–9). At the inter-mediate level are located ‘principled beliefs’ or ‘normative ideas’. Thesebeliefs ‘specify criteria for distinguishing right from wrong and just fromunjust’. ‘Slavery is wrong’, ‘abortion is murder’ and the belief that humanbeings have the ‘right of free speech’ are the examples they provide. Theseprincipled beliefs ‘mediate between world views and particular policyconclusions’ by translating ‘fundamental doctrines into guidance for con-temporary human action’ (1993: 9). Finally, ‘causal beliefs’ or ‘shared causalbeliefs’ (Goldstein, 1993: 11) occupy the most concrete level of thetypology. These are ‘beliefs about cause–effect relationships which deriveauthority from the shared consensus of recognized elites, whether they bevillage elders or scientists at elite institutions’.13 Examples include ‘scientificknowledge’ claims that explain, for instance, ‘how to eliminate smallpox’and ‘how to slow down the greenhouse effect in the earth’s atmosphere’(Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 10). It is this third category, the moreconcrete ‘causal beliefs’, which are the most important in the current ideasliterature, not only in terms of doing most of the explanatory work, but alsoas the focus of the bulk of the empirical research carried out to date.

‘Shared causal beliefs’ are assumed to be causally efficacious and thereforeto play an important role in explaining foreign policy decisions or stateactions. The explanatory model which these scholars employ concentrates


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on the causal analysis of the impact of ‘ideas’ or shared beliefs —conceptualized as independent or intervening variables (1993: 12–13) — onforeign policy. For instance, ‘Ideas intervene between material power-relatedfactors on the one hand and state interests and preferences on the other’(Risse-Kappen, 1994: 186). This ‘neo-positivist’14 approach implies that theinvestigation of the role of beliefs should focus on ‘the extent to whichvariation in beliefs, or the manner in which ideas are institutionalized insocieties, affect political action under circumstances that are otherwisesimilar’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 26, emphasis in the original).15 Thetask for students of ‘ideas’ is therefore, first, to ‘establish covariation betweenideas and outcomes’ and, second, to ‘identify a [causal] path leading fromideas to policy’ (1993: 29).

Critique: Beyond BeliefDespite the positive contribution which the ‘ideas’ literature makes inhighlighting both the poverty of pure rationalist models and the sharedcharacter of ‘ideas’ or beliefs, it suffers from a number of significantproblems. Persistent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, this focus onbeliefs does not succeed in challenging the dominant rationalist or interest-based approach to foreign policy and state action. Instead, much of theapparatus of the rationalist perspective has been reintroduced, if through theback door, in the practical retention of the distinction between ‘ideas’ orbeliefs and interests, in the ‘neo-positivist’ causal focus of the analysis andmethodology, and in the conception of ‘ideas’ on which this literature rests.These closely interrelated characteristics either stem from or serve toreinforce the conception of ‘ideas’ as objects which, we will argue, lies at thecore of rationalist analyses. Taken together, these characteristic features of‘ideas’ analysis indicate that the turn to ‘beliefs’ signals a retreat by thisliterature from its most useful insights and its reversion instead to anargument which is little more than a minor modification of the rationalistposition it sets out to challenge. In this section, then, we argue that theconception of ‘ideas’ as objects creates problems which undermine theusefulness of this literature for ‘bringing ideas back in’ to the study ofinternational relations and foreign policy.

Ideas versus Interests

The first problem with this literature is that, in practice, most of theseanalyses treat interests as distinct from, rather than as significantly shaped orconstituted by, ‘ideas’.16 This is true even of Sikkink, who, more than otherrepresentatives of this genre, emphasizes the interconnection of interests and‘ideas’. She claims, on the one hand, that:


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. . . the separation of ideas and interests is fundamentally flawed. Political andideological factors [i.e. ideas] influence the very meaning and interpretation ofeconomic ideas and recommendations [i.e. material interests]. Except in itscrudest form, the comprehension and formulation of facts and interests impliesthe existence of a conceptual apparatus. To conceive of ideas as intellectualjustifications of actions that people wanted to take anyway is to obscure therole of ideas in helping people grasp, formulate, and communicate socialrealities. (1991: 5; see also Jackson, 1993: 129; Katzenstein, 1993: 267;Sikkink, 1993: 140)17

On the other hand, she then immediately argues that ‘for analytical purposesit may be useful to attempt to separate ideas and interests initially and discusswhether politics can be understood primarily on the basis of plausiblyinferred interests of key actors, or whether it is necessary to know about theexistence and content of ideas to understand policy outcomes’ (1991: 6).Treating interests and ideas as distinct and competing hypotheses is, ofcourse, consistent with treating the rationalist model, as most of thisliterature does, as the null hypothesis against which the causal significance of‘ideas’ is tested. The conceptual distinction between interests and ‘ideas’ thatis central to rationalism is thus retained, with two significant and inter-connected consequences.

First, by maintaining this distinction, the investigation of the socialconstruction of interests is in practice disavowed because it is assumed,despite theoretical pronouncements to the contrary, that interests are givenand can be determined in isolation from ‘ideas’. In reply to the question‘where do interests come from’, these analyses continue implicitly to answerthat they are determined, at least initially, independently of, and prior to, theapplication of ideas, beliefs and suchlike. Even if this distinction is retainedonly as a matter of analytical or methodological convenience, as in Sikkink’sanalysis, it reinforces the notion that interests are given and can be treated asnon-ideational. Serious consideration of where interests come from isthereby avoided, despite the existence of a growing body of literatureaddressed, for example, to the way in which structure, interest and identityare internally related, and are produced and reproduced through practicalactivity (e.g. Wendt, 1992; Weldes, 1996). While paying lip-service to theclaim that ‘ideas’ and interests are necessarily interconnected, then, thisapproach both in practice and as a methodological principle treats them asdiscrete and competing forms of explanation.

Second, and related, retaining the distinction between interests and ‘ideas’creates a tendency to understand ‘ideas’ merely as tools which are used bypolicy-makers to manipulate various audiences, such as international elites,domestic publics or bureaucracies. If decision-makers’ interests are definedas analytically distinct from ideas, then ‘ideas’ are easily dismissed as ‘mere


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justification’, as post-hoc rationalizations of policies made on the grounds ofalready given material interests. The retention of this distinction reinforcesrather than challenges a model of the actor as a rational, calculating decision-maker, wielding ‘ideas’ as weapons in the battle to procure given materialinterests. So, despite her theoretical claims about the constitutive relationbetween ideas and interests, Sikkink argues that ‘ideas’ are ‘means’ used bydecision-makers ‘for mobilizing support’, that they are used by ‘politicalentrepreneurs’ as ‘the basis for pulling together disparate political coalitions’(1991: 17, 244). This does capture an important aspect of the phenomenathat ‘ideas’ analysts investigate, namely, that ‘ideas’ (in some senses) can bemanipulated to persuade. But it does not provide a useful analytical tool forexamining the ways in which interests are produced and reproduced in thecourse of engaging in social action because in practice it rejects theconception of interests as constituted by ‘ideas’ (Weldes, 1993).

Ideas as Causes

The second problem with rationalist analyses of ‘ideas’ concerns the ‘neo-positivist’ conception of causality which informs this literature. This hassignificant implications for how ‘ideas’ are understood. In this literature it isassumed that while the broadest type of ‘ideas’ or beliefs provide ‘concep-tions of possibility’, this type of ‘idea’ is less important causally than the‘principled’ and ‘causal’ beliefs. Goldstein and Keohane argue that analystsof shared beliefs must recognize that ‘the delineation of the existence ofparticular beliefs is no substitute for the establishment of their effects onpolicy’ (1993: 11). In other words, the important questions concern not thebroad conditions of possibility, which are conceptualized in such a way thatthey do not seem directly to affect or ‘cause’ policy, but concern instead theimpact of the narrower ‘causal’ beliefs, which do. (The ‘causal’ beliefs arethus defined as ‘causal’ in two senses — first, their content is causal in thatthey specify cause–effect relationships and, second, their function is causal inthat they can be cited in ‘causal’ explanations of behavior.) Odell, forexample, tacitly excludes the broader understanding of beliefs from hisanalysis when he argues that beliefs are not involved, that ‘a cognitiveperspective is not called for’, when ‘market conditions or other situationalfeatures are extreme’ (1982: 364). The implication, of course, is that‘market conditions’ are part of an external reality which can be apprehendedand experienced without the mediation of ideas. Otherwise the analysiswould require as well the investigation of those ideas which made it possibleto understand the situational features as particular market conditionsrequiring a particular sort of foreign policy response. The efficacy of broader


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beliefs or world-views in explaining foreign policy and state action is thusimplicitly denied.

As these analysts acknowledge, the liberal ‘world-view’, for instance, setsthe limits of debate about such economic policy issues as trade liberalization,agricultural subsidies or gold convertibility. But it does much more than thisas well. First of all, it renders all of these other ‘ideas’ intelligible; it makesmeaningful arguments about ‘flexible foreign exchange markets’, ‘import-substituting industrialization’ and ‘liberalization’. Second, it confers norma-tive and moral authority on to certain policies, such as liberalization, andsimultaneously makes others, such as state intervention and the adoption ofsubsidies, a problem or deviation to be explained. Third, it defines both theproblems which these new ‘ideas’ are called upon to solve and the range ofacceptable responses to these problems. For example, it is within a liberal‘world-view’ that flexible foreign exchange markets can become the solutionto particular kinds of problems. Further, the putatively external andobjective effects of ‘market conditions’ are themselves only recognized assuch through the lenses of a ‘world-view’ — they cannot be apprehended orcomprehended as ‘market conditions’ without the prior idea of the marketand the prior belief that the international economic system is in factorganized as a market. Part of what is at issue here is the concept-dependentnature of social reality — social phenomena such as ‘markets’ are in partconstituted by the social ‘idea’ of the market (Sayer, 1992: 29–43). As wewill argue below, the meaningful constitution of social reality is notinconsistent with causal explanation; indeed, it is central to it. Thus, whilenarrower questions revolving around ‘shared causal beliefs’ and particularpolicies are interesting and worthwhile, they are not the only legitimate anduseful causal questions that can be asked about ‘ideas’. The prior questionsthat Goldstein and Keohane, for example, reject as having no direct causaleffect on policy — questions concerning the possibility conditions forparticular courses of action — are in fact extremely significant. Constructinga theoretical framework which renders such questions seemingly unim-portant is a reversion to the understanding of social and political realitycommon to the rationalist perspective these authors all claim to reject; ittakes as given the same putatively objective, external conditions, constraintsand interests.

This literature does, however, claim that the broader ‘world-views’ areconsequential for the explanation of foreign policy in that they place limitson the range of narrower ‘causal’ beliefs which can be adopted. That is, thebroadest sets of ‘ideas’ are assumed to set the conditions of possibility for thenarrower. One of the central questions in this literature, therefore, is ‘howand when are new ideas adopted?’ The adoption of ‘ideas’ tends to beexplained in terms of the ‘fit’ of new ideas with ‘existing ideas and ideologies


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of important groups’ (Sikkink, 1991: 21)18 and such claims about ‘fit’ areexpected to carry quite a bit of explanatory weight. Nonetheless, whilevarious of these authors place the term ‘fit’ in quotation marks (e.g.Goldstein, 1993: 12, 255; Sikkink, 1991: 21, 26, 255), indicating that theyare aware of the metaphorical character of their use of the term, or at leastof its imprecision, none seems concerned to explain just what this means.This is particularly interesting as there exists a well-developed theoreticalframework addressed to the ‘articulation’ or joining together of discursiveelements into a more-or-less coherent ideology (Laclau, 1979; S. Hall,1985; Grossberg, 1992; Weldes, 1996). What this notion of articulationhighlights, among other things, is that ‘fit’ does not just happen; rather, it ismade.19 That is, the ‘fit’ between new and existing ideas is activelyconstructed rather than simply ‘there’ in the ideas themselves. Neglectingthe theorization of ‘fit’ means that this literature is incapable of specifyingthe degree to which existing ‘ideas’ or beliefs actually place limits on theadoption of new ‘ideas’. This is a significant shortcoming, for it means thatthere is no way to determine the relative impact of narrow ‘causal beliefs’and broader ‘world-views’ on foreign policy outcomes, despite the claim thatit is the former and not the latter which do the serious explanatory work.

In order to establish that some set of ‘ideas’ have in fact caused aparticular policy, explanations generated by the rationalist ‘null hypothesis’are compared with the observed policy. Ideas, as we noted above, areunderstood as an additional variable with which to explain unaccounted forvariance. The conception of causality which informs this search foradditional variables has been explicated by King et al. (1994; cf. Goldsteinand Keohane, 1993: 28, n. 42). Causality, on this view, is a ‘theoreticalconcept’ which refers to ‘the difference between the systematic componentof observations made when the explanatory variable takes one value and thesystematic component of comparable observations when the explanatoryvariable takes on another value’ (King et al., 1994: 76, 81–2). So, forexample, to demonstrate that ideas are causally important:

. . . the observed dependent variable (policies) and explanatory variable (ideasheld by individuals) must be compared with a precisely defined counterfactualsituation in which the explanatory variable takes on a different value: therelevant individuals had different ideas. (1994: 191; see also Goldstein andKeohane, 1993: 28)

Causation can be inferred, in other words, only if there is an observablechange in the dependent variable (policy), that change is not explicable byreference to models generated by the ‘null hypothesis’, and it can plausiblybe traced to a co-variation between the policy change and the ‘ideas’ of thepolicy-makers.


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By defining causation as a theoretical concept and linking it explicitly toobserved changes in behavior, ‘ideas’ scholars such as Goldstein andKeohane take sides in the debate over competing conceptions of causality(e.g. Carlsnaes, 1992, 1994; Hollis and Smith, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994;Patomaki, 1996; Wendt, 1987, 1991, 1992; Yee, 1996). The conception ofcausal relations underpinning the ‘ideas’ literature is clearly Humean — itassumes that a causal relation ‘may obtain only between discrete things orevents which are both contingent and contiguous’ (Ball, 1978: 101; see alsoSalmon, 1989). Policy and ‘ideas’ (or, more precisely, the ideas ‘held’ by aspecific set of individuals) are construed as individuated entities. In order toclaim that a causal relation exists between such entities, it is necessary toshow that the two variables have co-varied, that is, when the independentvariable (ideas) takes on a new value, the dependent variable (policy) alsochanges. To take the most prominent competing model as a useful contrast,for scientific realists causality refers not to a theoretical concept but to anaturally necessary relation between underlying cause and observable effect.‘On the realist view, causality concerns not a relationship between discreteevents (‘‘Cause and Effect’’), but the ‘‘causal powers’’ or ‘‘liabilities’’of objects or relations, or more generally their ways-of-acting or ‘‘mech-anisms’’ ’ (Sayer, 1992: 104–5; emphasis in the original. Cf. Patomaki,1996: 117–18). Causality is conceived of generatively and relationally, assomething that exists in the world rather than only logically or in theory.Causal claims refer to the ‘causal powers’ of social agents, which areconferred on to those agents by the social structures and relations thatconstitute them (Weldes, 1989). The meaningful constitution of the social,in the form of internal relations between agents and powers for instance, isfor a realist integral to causal analysis. Such powers are only contingentlyrealized and so it also follows that there is no necessary relationship betweenthe attribution of causal powers to an object or a relation and theobservation of particular empirical patterns of events.

Contrasting the account of causal explanation that informs the ‘ideas’literature with the different account proposed by scientific realists servesusefully to highlight several distinctive features of the recent return to‘ideas’. First, scientific realists are interested in ‘how possible’ questions, andequate causal analysis with the search for the generative structures thatproduce particular effects. ‘Ideas’ analysts, adopting a ‘neo-positivist’ modelof causality, are not interested in ‘how possible’ questions save as an adjunctto ‘why questions’, defined in terms of co-variation between discretevariables (King et al., 1994: 85–7; 225). This occludes the analysis of ‘howpossible’ questions in the generative sense emphasized by realists. Second,establishing the existence of and in turn analyzing causal mechanisms isequated (erroneously) with ‘process-tracing’ by King et al. (1994: 86). In


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fact, what is involved is the development of sets of concepts that operate atdifferent levels of abstraction and ontological depth (Sayer, 1992: Chapter3). Meaning enters into the two forms of analysis in very different ways. For‘ideas’ analysts, who adopt an essentially liberal conception of the social,meaning is ultimately reducible to a property of individuals, understood asthe basic elements of social reality in part because they have bodies (Ball,1978: 102). Realists operate with a richer social ontology which allows forthe idiosyncracies of individuals but which sees those individuals as socialentities. Meaning enters into the analysis as a social or intersubjective quality,constitutive of entities and relations rather than external to them. Third, thebasic elements or entities presupposed by these different conceptions ofcausality are also different. Deploying a ‘neo-positivist’ conception ofcausality means that ‘ideas’, for instance, must be conceptualized as discreteentities (variables). Indeed, it turns out that only some ‘ideas’ are sounderstood, specifically the ‘causal beliefs’. Scientific realists, on the otherhand, are interested in establishing the relations through which objects areconstituted as such. The basic elements of social reality are therefore thoserelations (cf. Lloyd, 1993). As a result, the broader ‘world-views’ thatconstitute the ‘causal beliefs’ are equally integral to a causal analysis.

In this context, it is worth recalling, as Yee (1996) has noted, that theemerging orthodoxy within both the philosophy of science and of socialscience is to seek to render causal explanations in terms of the mechanismsthat produced or enabled a particular event or effect. One seldom-noted butsignificant consequence of this shift is to transform ‘why’ questions into‘how’ questions. The sharp contrast drawn between ‘how’ and ‘why’questions by Doty (1993), for example, while useful as a heuristic device forclarifying the nature of questions, is misleading. Asking how it was possible‘that a particular decision or course of action could happen’ in the first place,and examining ‘how meanings are produced and attached to various socialsubjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions whichcreate certain possibilities and preclude others’ (Doty, 1993: 298; see alsoWendt, 1987; Weldes and Saco, 1996), is integral to causal analysis ratherthan in competition with it. As a result of adopting a ‘neo-positivist’conception of causality, however, such constitutive questions tend to falloutside rationalist analyses or are rendered of marginal significance forexplanation.

Ideas as Beliefs or Ideas as Commodities?

Although in this literature ‘ideas’ are often explicitly defined as ‘beliefs’, theequation is clearly strained. In fact, the term ‘ideas’ appears to have at leasttwo distinct meanings — first, as shared beliefs (i.e. as mental states or


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mental events), and second, as tools or implements. It is not clear how thesecond meaning can be reconciled with the first. For example, if the term‘ideas’ is used instead of its definition (‘shared beliefs’), it may seemcommonsensical — in Spanish and English language games, at least — to saythat ‘ideas’ are tools. The implication of the term ‘ideas’ is that these aresomehow public (e.g. the ‘market-place of ideas’ metaphor implies pub-licity), external to and separable from the individual, and so can be wieldedas weapons. But what does it mean to say that one can ‘wield a belief’ or‘wield a shared belief’ in an instrumental fashion? The implication is muchless plausible for ‘beliefs’, which are more straightforwardly and com-monsensibly understood to be ‘internal’ to the individual. Claiming that‘ideas’ can be wielded as weapons in policy debates, in other words, makessome intuitive sense, since various forms of symbols and languages certainlycan be, and often are, used in this way, but it is less clear how these can beunderstood as beliefs.

In fact, in their discussion of the causal pathways through which beliefs‘can matter’, Goldstein and Keohane seem implicitly to recognize that‘beliefs’ and ‘ideas’ are actually quite different things. They assert at onepoint, for example, that ‘ideas can have an impact even when no one genuinelybelieves in them as principled or causal statements’ (1993: 20, emphasisadded).20 For this to be true, ‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’ must be distinct. Moreover,despite the definition of ‘ideas’ as ‘beliefs’, many of these authors continueto use both terms and to deploy the locution ‘ideas and beliefs’ (e.g. Yee,1996: 69). But this locution is redundant if they really mean to define ideasas beliefs.21 These terminological ambiguities, we suggest, are symptomaticof the difficulties in treating social phenomena in individualist terms. Theystem from the failure adequately to distinguish between ‘beliefs’ defined asmental states or events made possible by socially produced and definedcategories and meanings (Sayer, 1992: 30–2) and ‘ideas’ defined as elementsof discourse — of language-in-use. For example, while Yee explicitlydiscusses symbolic languages, intersubjective meanings and discursive prac-tices, he seems to equate these with ‘systems of beliefs’ (1996: 94). Preciselyhow this translation is effected is left obscure. In short, it seems that thedefinition of ‘ideas’ as ‘beliefs’ is quite problematical, and potentiallyincoherent. Perhaps, then, the underlying conception of ideas on whichthese analyses are based is in fact a different one.

The nature of that conception, we want to argue, is evident in thepersistent use of the ‘idea as commodity’ metaphor.22 This rather strikingmetaphor, which helps to account for a number of the conceptual problemsthat we have outlined above, treats ‘ideas’ as like commodities. New ‘ideas’are referred to as ‘innovations’ (Odell, 1982: 363) which are ‘introduced’(P. Hall, 1989: 367), ‘diffused’ (Goldstein, 1993: 241) and ‘gain currency’


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(P. Hall, 1989: 365). In order to be causally effective, ‘ideas’ require‘political entrepreneurs’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 13; Goldstein,1993: 3; Sikkink, 1993: 142)23 whose role is to ‘select’ and then to ‘market’(Goldstein, 1993: 18-19), ‘sell’ or ‘peddle’ them (Checkel, 1993: 279,289). The creation of ‘ideas’ is not arbitrary or haphazard; instead, they are‘supplied’ in response to the ‘demands’ of politicians (Ikenberry, 1993: 86).As Goldstein put it, the ‘demand for change must be met by a supply ofideas’. Once generated, ideas ‘must be packaged’ in order ‘to be sold to bothelites and the mass public’ (Goldstein, 1993: 255). Once ‘packaged’, they‘circulate’ (Odell, 1982: 12) in society, they ‘enter the political marketplace’(Goldstein, 1989: 32, emphasis added), where they are ‘consumed’ (1989:15). Ideas — although explicitly defined as shared beliefs — are thusimplicitly conceptualized as commodities that are ‘supplied’ by ‘politicalentrepreneurs’ on a ‘market-place’ in response to ‘demands’, and then‘circulate’ through that market-place to be ‘peddled’ and ‘consumed’.

The metaphor of the ‘idea as commodity’ is not merely a benign rhetoricalflourish; it is an indication of the understanding, implicit within thisliterature, of what an ‘idea’ is. That understanding has significant andproblematical consequences for the way in which the role of ‘ideas’ inforeign policy is currently being conceptualized. Specifically, it reinforces theproblems discussed thus far — it makes sense of the ‘neo-positivist’ causalanalysis of ‘ideas’; it reinforces the notion that ‘ideas’ are distinct frominterests and that their role, in practice, is limited to manipulation; and itobscures the constitutive function of ‘ideas’.

The metaphor has these consequences because, by treating ‘ideas’ ascommodities, and more generally as concrete objects, it permits theirmethodological equation with what are typically thought of as causalvariables. It thus creates, first of all, an image of ‘ideas’ as discrete objects(rather than as ‘beliefs’ or mental events) which can causally influence otherobjects, in this case policies. By creating an image of ‘ideas’ as discreteobjects, this metaphor makes sense of the otherwise peculiar claim that‘ideas’ or beliefs can be ‘carried’ (Goldstein, 1993: 14; Ikenberry, 1993: 60;Sikkink, 1991: 242) and then ‘inserted’ (Sikkink, 1991: 252) or ‘injected’(Jackson, 1993: 138) into politics.24 It evokes the standard billiard ballexplanatory model of positivism with its discrete causes and effects, andclearly separable and identifiable independent and dependent variables(Salmon, 1989). It creates an association between ‘ideas’ and the discreteobjects of more traditional sciences by conjuring up stereotyped images ofeconomic explanations and, by conventional extension, of the causalexplanations of the natural sciences. The metaphor ‘ideas as commodities’therefore implicitly legitimizes, and indeed makes both intelligible and


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apparently unproblematic, the application of ‘neo-positivist’ methods to thecausal analysis of ‘ideas’.25

Second, treating ‘ideas’ as commodities and hence as discrete objectsmakes sense of the claim that ‘ideas’ can be wielded to manipulate audiencesor create coalitions. While it is difficult to understand ‘ideas as beliefs’ asthings to be wielded as tools, ‘ideas as commodities’ are more readilyunderstood in this way. If they are discrete objects, they can easily be seen asdistinct from interests and as used, as Ikenberry put it, to provide‘opportunities for elites to pursue their [given] interests in more effectiveways’ (1993: 84). This metaphor thus renders plausible the practice ofoffering interest-based explanations as the null hypothesis against whichdistinct idea-based explanations are tested.

Third, the metaphor has the effect, simultaneously, of obscuring alter-native understandings of ‘ideas’ and thus alternative methods for investigat-ing their role. In particular, it turns attention away from the constitutive roleof ‘ideas’ in generating or constructing interests, in defining the problems towhich policies are the response, and in general in making possible theapprehension of the world (Weldes and Saco, 1996; Weldes, 1996).Understood as ‘commodities’, ‘ideas’ are more readily seen as additionalvariables that account for deviations from substantive rationality rather thanas being capable of generating interests. If ‘ideas’ are separate, discrete‘variables’, they do not constitute or define; instead, in tried-and-true ‘neo-positivist’ fashion, they ‘cause’.

In some ways, the equation in this literature of ‘ideas’ with discrete objectsis unsurprising. There is a considerable degree of overlap between the ‘ideasas commodities’ metaphor and what Reddy (1993) has called the ‘conduit’metaphor. The plausibility of the rationalist understanding of ‘ideas’ asobjects is derived, we would argue, in part from the more pervasive set ofunderstandings and analogies entailed by the ‘conduit’ metaphor, which isperhaps the dominant metaphor in Anglo-American cultures for under-standing communication.26 According to Lakoff, the model of communica-tion expressed in the ‘conduit’ metaphor envisions ‘ideas’ as ‘objects thatyou can put into words, so that language is a container for ideas, and yousend ideas in words over a conduit, a channel of communication to someoneelse who then extracts the ideas from the words’ (1995: 116).27 Twofeatures of this metaphor bear directly on our discussion of the ‘ideas ascommodities’ metaphor — that ‘ideas’ are constructed as objects; and that‘ideas’ can exist apart from people.28 Both of these are consistent with andserve to underpin the plausibility of the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor.For example, if we accept the ‘conduit’ metaphor, this not only makes senseof the claim that ‘ideas’ are objects, but also renders sensible the claims thatthey are in people’s heads (‘mental events’) and yet can be manipulated. The


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peculiar ambiguity of the meaning of ‘ideas’ in rationalist analyses, as well asthe plausibility of the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor, appears to derive (atleast in part) from an unspoken commitment to the ‘conduit’ metaphor asthe basis for conceptualizing what ‘ideas’ are.

At a fundamental level, the understanding of ‘ideas’ in rationalist analysesis structured by this overlapping set of metaphors. We are not criticizing theuse of metaphors per se, which is unavoidable in any case. As Lakoff andJohnson have observed, ‘any human conceptual system is mostly met-aphorical in nature’ (1980: 185). Rather, we are interested in the effectswhich the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor in particular has had on the‘ideas’ perspective and in turn on what it tells us about how ‘ideas’ have beenunderstood. We have argued that this metaphor is both indicative of, and hasserved to reinforce, a number of conceptual problems. In the next sectionwe therefore set aside this rationalist conception of ‘ideas’ in favor of analternative set of metaphors and analogies. As we will show, the redefinitionof ‘ideas’ expressed in and entailed by such a move enables us to address allthree of the criticisms we have lodged against the rationalist understandingof ‘ideas as commodities’. We return to the topic of metaphors in ourconclusion.

From ‘Ideas’ to Symbolic Technologies

In the remainder of this article, we propose and discuss an alternativeconceptualization of ‘ideas’ and associated phenomena as ‘symbolic technol-ogies’.29 Symbolic technologies are, most simply, intersubjective systems ofrepresentations and representation-producing practices. An understandingof ‘ideas’ as symbolic and representational, because it rests on a conceptionof ideational phenomena as fundamentally social and intersubjective ratherthan as collective or shared,30 alerts us to their implication in practices and totheir constitutive nature. Seeing ‘ideas’ as part of a broader set of linguisticand symbolic practices allows us to rethink ‘ideas’ as intersubjectivelyconstituted forms of social action. The notion of ‘symbolic technologies’,then, highlights the systems of representation — metaphorically, symbolicmachineries or apparatuses or implements — that have developed in specificspatio-temporal and cultural circumstances and that make possible thearticulation and circulation of more or less coherent sets of meanings abouta particular subject matter (Fiske, 1987: 14).31 These systems of representa-tion need not — and seldom do — constitute a ‘single, perfectly integratedmimetic practice’ (Greenblatt, 1991: 22). Rather, the degree of integrationis likely to vary from one system of representation to another. Thus, while


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the early modern European discourse of discovery, for example, was ‘alumbering, jerry-built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery’(Greenblatt, 1991: 23), the United Nations System of National Accounts,which we discuss below, was more deliberately constructed and internallycoherent.32

Conceptualizing ‘ideas’ as symbolic technologies moves us away from theproblems associated with defining them as equivalent either to physicalobjects (whether ‘commodities’ or otherwise) or to collections of individualbeliefs. On the contrary, it enables us to see that they are shared forms ofpractice, sets of capacities with which people can construct meaning aboutthemselves, their world and their activities.33 Symbolic technologies arecapacities the existence of which can be retroduced on the basis of actualrealizations. As capacities, symbolic technologies enable; they make certainkinds of action, and ways of being in the world,34 possible insofar as they are‘mechanisms’ by which meaning is produced (O Tuathail and Agnew,1992). At the same time, because making some kinds of meaning and actionpossible may preclude other types of meaning and action, they alsoconstrain. And, understood as capacities for making meaning, technologiesare likely to be more apt for some purposes than for others. Understandingideational phenomena as symbolic technologies thus allows us to ask the‘how possible’ questions occluded by the conception of ideas as neo-positivist causal variables.

The metaphor of ‘symbolic technologies’ also highlights the implicationof ‘ideas’ in social relations of power. Symbolic technologies are inextricablyembedded in material practices and other social relations, not least becausepower relations are entailed in all representational practices (S. Hall, 1985).As a result, it is not sufficient to note either that ‘ideas’ can be ‘carried’ and‘used’ by the powerful or that they are often adopted for their usefulness topowerful vested interests. Instead, symbolic technologies are themselvesforms of power through their capacities to produce representations. In turn,depending on the circumstances of their deployment, representationalpractices will often have diverse and even seemingly contradictory ideologi-cal effects (Purvis and Hunt, 1993).

If the ‘idea’ of ‘development’ (Escobar, 1995; see also Doty, 1996), forinstance, is understood as a symbolic technology, the ideological effects ofthe representations it enables can be examined. Among these ideologicaleffects are the creation of relations of opposition between ‘advanced’ and‘backward’ societies, the debasement of the culture of the ‘backward’societies, and the legitimation of practices of aid and intervention into‘backward’ societies by the more ‘advanced’. Relations of ‘opposition’, of‘debasement’ and of ‘legitimation’ are some of the ideological effects made


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possible by the symbolic technology of ‘development’.35 The essentializationof identity is also a common ideological effect of certain representationalpractices. Depending on the circumstances in which such representations aredeployed, however, the essentializing moment in representation can contrib-ute to processes of either liberation or domination. Consider, for example,the ambiguous effects of essentialized identity claims in struggles forindigenous self-rule (e.g. Enloe, 1990: 54–64). Representations of ‘thenation’ deployed in the context of the struggle against colonialism typicallyhave served to reinforce the gendered hierarchy within the independencemovement and the post-independence social formation. Further complicat-ing any analysis of representational forms and their effects is the fact that‘individuals and cultures tend to have fantastically powerful assimilativemechanisms . . . that work like enzymes to change the ideological composi-tion of foreign bodies’ (Greenblatt, 1991: 4). It is for this reason that theideological content or effect of particular representations is not fixed butrather depends on the circumstances of their articulation. For instance,representations of Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand in terms of anessentialized and pre-colonial spirituality, tribalism and authenticity havebeen rearticulated in such a way as to have played an important positive rolein contemporary and ongoing campaigns against ‘desecration of tribal land,against development or for compensation, and for better services andfunding for Maori development and education programmes . . .’ (Thomas,1994: 186). As this example suggests, relations of adaptation and hybridityas well as relations of domination and subordination may potentially emergeout of the contested articulation of particular representational practices withother social relations. For these reasons, it follows that a symbolictechnology and its effects are not fully determined and hence explicable byreference to the conditions of that technology’s production alone, even ifthey are indelibly marked by it. Likewise, the ideological effects ofrepresentations are not internal to the representations themselves but areclosely bound up with the contexts in which they are deployed.

In elaborating on our claim that ‘ideas’ can usefully be reconceived as‘symbolic technologies’, we demonstrate how and where such a focus allowsus to address directly all three of the criticisms we have brought to bear onthe ‘ideas’ literature. Specifically, we show how our metaphor ‘reveals’ thesocial character of ‘ideas’ by moving beyond the ‘ideas as beliefs’ model to afocus on practices, how this implies that ‘ideas’ cannot be conceptualized asdiscrete objects, and how ‘ideas’ on such a view are not separate from but areinstead constitutive and productive of interests. We begin, however, byclarifying the relationship between a rationalist understanding of ‘ideas’ andour own.


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Ideas as Capital

The rationalist understanding of ‘ideas’, we have argued, is evident in thewidespread use of the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor. In order to clarifywhere and how our understanding of ‘ideas’ differs from that of rationalists,we adopt a different metaphor of ‘ideas as capital’. The ‘ideas as capital’metaphor stands in relation to Marx’s analysis of the commodity as the ‘ideasas commodities’ metaphor stands to that of liberal economics.36 As Marxobserved, ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivialthing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing . . .’ (1977[1867]: 163). Whereas liberal analyses of the market remain at the level ofappearances, understanding the circulation of commodities as a function ofthe freely entered into and apolitical contracting of individual consumers andproducers, Marxist analyses emphasize the social relations that produce andenable apparently autonomous consumers and producers and endow themwith powers and capabilities. The ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor drawsattention to exchange relations, the central concern of neoclassical econom-ics and the heart of liberal theories of capitalism. Our capital metaphor alsodraws attention to the realm of exchange, but points us towards the motionof capital through a social formation in various circuits, including, impor-tantly, the circuit of production. Such a metaphor reconstructs ‘ideas’(‘symbolic technologies’) as ‘mimetic capital’, which Greenblatt defines asthe ‘stock of images, along with the means of producing those images andcirculating them . . .’ (1991: 6). Drawing on a Marxian37 problematic incontrast to the liberal problematic presupposed by the metaphor of ‘ideas ascommodities’, we proceed to demonstrate how the ‘capital’ metaphordirects attention to several significant implications of our redefinition of‘ideas’ as symbolic technologies. Thus, our aim in this section is to workthrough some of the implications of an alternative set of metaphors andanalogies for understanding ‘ideas’, not to claim that ‘ideas’ really are likecapital.

For purposes of comparison with rationalist approaches to ‘ideas’, webriefly rehearse part of Marx’s account of the social production ofcommodities.38 Marx began his analysis with a set of claims about thecentrality of human labor in producing and reproducing social life. Thisprocess of social self-creation entailed the objectification of the products ofhuman labor. This ‘typically human practice’ of objectification was trans-formative not only of the social and natural circumstances of the species butof human nature itself. However, to the extent that ‘human beings envisiontheir products as taking on a life of their own, humans surrender their ownsocial powers of objectification and are increasingly ‘‘subjected to theviolence of things’’ ’ (Rupert, 1995: 17–18; quoting Marx). Marx referred


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to this process — which was internal to capitalism as a mode of production— as ‘the fetishism of commodities’ (e.g. 1977 [1867]: 163). Productivelabor was alienated from the worker (who was in turn alienated from herown species being) as a result of the separation between production andownership of the commodity. The products of social labor became objecti-fied such that human life under capitalism seemed to be governed by ‘things’rather than by people or the social relations into which they had entered.Thus for Marx, the commodity — the object into which alienated humanlabor was displaced — was ‘a mysterious thing, simply because in it the socialcharacter of men’s [sic] labor appears to them as an objective characterstamped upon the product of that labor’ (quoted in Ollman, 1976: 196).

In contrast to the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor, which implies that‘ideas’ are objects, the ‘ideas as capital’ metaphor invites us to think ‘ideas’rather differently. For example, it implies that ‘ideas’ are not objects at allbut are in fact objectified human labor. The ‘thing-like’ quality of ‘ideas’taken for granted by the rationalist metaphor is, on this view, only anappearance or a fetish, a reification of what is in fact a social product. Againstthe liberal metaphor of ‘ideas’ as ‘commodities’, the Marxian capitalmetaphor challenges the tendency to reify ‘ideas’ as things by inviting us tosee them as processes, as relations among people39 or, more precisely, classesrather than as external objects. In contrast to the ‘conduit’ metaphor,human labor is made central to our understanding of ‘ideas’ with respectboth to their production and to their reproduction. The capital metaphoralso undermines the equation of ‘ideas’ with some aggregation of individualbeliefs. Like social relations of production, ‘ideas’, it might be said, cannotexist apart from human labor, nor can they be reduced to sets of individualattributes. They are social, not collective, phenomena.

The capital metaphor raises a set of questions overlooked by the rationalistliterature. Specifically, how is it that a set of social relations and processescome to be understood as reified objects — ‘ideas’ — in the first place? Howare those objects, and the categorizations upon which their appearance asdiscrete things depends, produced and reproduced? Indeed, what preciselyare these social products? What is being produced? Volosinov (1986 [1929])argued that the word or, more generally, the sign itself was the elementaryform of those phenomena reified as ‘ideas’. In a manner similar to theseemingly simple reality of the commodity, the sign was the ‘specific materialreality’ that had to be interrogated by a Marxian philosophy of language, thescience of which meaning was the object (Volosinov, 1986 [1929]: xiv; cf.Marx, 1977 [1867]: 138). An understanding of ‘commodities’ as nothingbut discrete sensuous objects, however, was for a materialist like Marx orVolosinov a form of vulgar empiricism. What had to be grasped was thesocial character of the commodity, which was expressed in its use- and


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exchange-values. These were not things either but rather derived from socialrelations, from human species being and the capitalist organization ofproduction, respectively. The capital metaphor, then, might be taken toimply that we should examine the sign’s ‘accent’, what Volosinov referred toas the refraction of social existence in the sign itself (1986 [1929]: 22–3). Ifthe commodity depends for its existence upon that set of relations throughwhich it is constituted rather than bearing either its value or meaning asintrinsic qualities, the capital metaphor implies that we think of ‘ideas’ in thesame way. The metaphor here points us towards a set of questions about theways in which particular signs are articulated one with another, and in turnhow they are articulated with hierarchically organized sets of social relations(S. Hall, 1988). For example, Volosinov (1986 [1929]: 23) attributedthe multiaccentuality of the sign to the class struggle in language. It is in thecontext of such articulations that we might begin to talk about theideological content or effects — the ‘value’, as it were — of particular sets ofsigns.

The capital metaphor serves usefully to illustrate how pursuing analternative to the ‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor — by resituating theliberal understanding of commodities within a Marxian problematic —opens up new ways of thinking about what ‘ideas’ are — or might be. Itillustrates how powerful can be the effects of alternative metaphors onreceived forms of theory. Redefining ‘ideas’ as ‘symbolic technologies’, webelieve, also enables us to address directly the three central criticisms that wehave advanced against the ‘ideas’ literature. We have already suggested, indrawing out the capital metaphor, some of the ways in which ‘ideas’ definedas ‘symbolic technologies’ are not discrete objects. In the next section, wedevelop an analytic stance alternative to that of the ‘ideas as beliefs’approach, one appropriate to our focus on representational practices. Thediscussion is framed around a set of methodological questions.

Locating ‘Ideas’

‘A key problem is that students of the role of ideas must interpret what is inpeople’s heads . . .’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 27). How then does an‘ideas’ analyst know that a specific ‘idea’ is present in a particular set ofheads? A variety of different kinds of evidence could be adduced. Docu-ments and reports can be read, policy-makers interviewed, speeches andpersonal letters examined, and so forth.40 In all of these cases, beliefs areinferred from ‘a set of observable and [occasionally] quantifiable behaviors’(Weldes and Saco, 1996: 370). On the basis of this evidence, the analystinfers that a particular set of ‘ideas’ (or ‘beliefs’ or ‘mental events’) exists inthe heads of a specified group of individuals. These ‘mental events’ are then


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taken to be decisive for the explanation of individual and, by extension,group action. The interpretation depends on a model (usually unspecified)of human beings as the kind of entities that have internal mental states anda set of assumptions about the relationship between those states and variouskinds of performance. For example, it must be assumed that answering thequestion ‘do you believe X?’ in the affirmative, writing certain kinds ofsentences in documents, and otherwise acting in particular ways are evidencethat a certain ‘belief’ is ‘held’ by the individual in question. The translationfrom such evidence to justified claims about both the existence of mentalstates and their content is no easy matter; indeed, Quine (1976) amongothers has argued that such are the complexities, we would be better offdoing away with mental entities altogether!41 What is relevant for ourargument here is that the move from evidence to inference is complex andpresupposes a particular model of the kind of entities human beings are, aswell as the assumptions that mental entities (‘beliefs’) exist and that they playa central role in explaining why individuals engage in certain perfor-mances.

We have stressed the theory-dependence of this inferential process inorder to clarify an analytic point. The assumed existence of mental states(‘beliefs’) is a commonplace of our everyday experience. Indeed, thecategories built into our language (English) presuppose and reproduce suchcommonplaces. As we have argued above, the set of ontological claimsembedded in everyday language — people have ‘their own’ ‘ideas’ and‘beliefs’; these are to be found ‘inside’ people’s heads; they explain people’sbehavior; and so forth — structures the ‘ideas’ literature. Yee adopts such aposition explicitly, arguing that ‘ideas and beliefs [sic] [are] defined asmental events that entail thought’ (1996: 69), while most others in the ideasliterature do so implicitly. However, such an assumption is a contingentrather than a necessary starting point for the analysis of social action. Theexistence and use of mentalistic categories in everyday language, and thereference to mental states, does not imply that people really have beliefsinside their heads or, more importantly, that we must posit such correspond-ing mental entities in our theories.42 Such categories are perhaps better seenas the legacies of what Coulter (1992: 249) has called ‘Cartesian misconcep-tions of ‘‘the mind’’ ’, that is, a set of holdovers from a quite specific (andwidely contested) set of theories and claims about the nature of humanperception and its relation to the world (e.g. Rorty, 1979). The categoriesembedded in language might serve as evidence in and for specific theoriesabout what people are like and their relation to the world. However, thesignificance of such evidence depends on the theory within which it isarticulated and/or constructed, not on whether or not such categories existor on the number of people who claim to have beliefs inside their heads.


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The ascription to individuals of ‘internal’ states that explain ‘external’behavior also produces considerable technical difficulties for analysis inas-much as it becomes necessary to construct accounts of how ‘external’phenomena are translated into, produced by or interact with ‘internal’phenomena and vice versa. A more useful posture, we believe, for theanalysis of social action proceeds by situating ‘the predicates attributed bythe Cartesians to the mind’ in relation to ‘the person as a social being’(Coulter, 1992: 249; emphasis in the original; cf. Mandelbaum, 1973). Wethus assume, as the capital metaphor already implied, that ‘idea’ predicatesrefer to social rather than to mental phenomena.

This analytic move enables us to adopt an agnostic attitude towards theexistence of mental entities, and licenses a different methodological stancefrom that found in the ‘ideas’ literature. In contrast to ‘ideas’ analysts, whobegin with a rationalist-inspired model of individuals as choosers, we beginwith a model of people as depictors — ‘people make representations’(Hacking, 1983: 132). This model derives from our metaphor of ‘ideas’ as‘symbolic technologies’. Our alternative starting point brackets the inferenceto beliefs and instead asks — how are representations produced and what arethe rules by which verbal speech, written statements, and other representa-tions — including Cartesian representations of people as individuals withbeliefs ‘inside’ their heads — are made meaningful?43 We proceed byanalyzing more closely the representations themselves, their internal logicsand conditions of possibility and their effects.44 Such a move has immediateand significant consequences for empirical analysis. For example, it impliesthat ‘ideas’ are not located inside people’s heads. As Geertz argued a numberof years ago,

Ideas are not, and have not been for some time, unobservable mental stuff.They are envehicled meanings, the vehicles being symbols (or in some usages,signs), a symbol being anything that denotes, describes, represents, exem-plifies, labels, indicates, evokes, depicts, expresses — anything that somehow orother signifies. And anything that somehow or other signifies is intersubjective,thus public, thus accessible to overt and corrigible plein air explication. (1980:135)

A focus on representations and their production also alerts the analyst to aset of empirical phenomena typically ignored by the ‘ideas’ literature. Ithighlights the making of representations through such practices as thedrafting of memos and cables in foreign policy bureaucracies, for example,the reproduction of deterrence theory among defense intellectuals (e.g.Cohn, 1987), and the deployment of accounting practices such as thoseembedded in the everyday functioning of the world economy (e.g. Sinclair,


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1994). It is to such practices, among others, that redefining ‘ideas’ as‘symbolic technologies’ draws our attention.

In order to clarify and illustrate what might otherwise seem a ratherabstract set of claims and arguments, we turn briefly to an analysis by Barnett(forthcoming) in which he reflects critically on his experience of becoming a‘Rwanda expert’ while working for the US Mission to the United Nations.Ethnographic accounts of foreign policy bureaucracies are rare. Even lesscommon are accounts written by professional social scientists reflectingcritically on their experiences within such organizations. Barnett’s ethno-graphic account of ‘becoming a Rwanda expert’ addresses directly our largerpoint about the social character of ‘beliefs’ and the utility of redefiningindividuals as social beings who produce representations through suchpractices as cable-drafting, for example. As such, it also begins to suggestsome of the ways in which ‘ideas’, defined as social and symbolicphenomena, can be analyzed without reference to ‘beliefs’.

As Barnett makes clear, the practice of being a foreign policy bureaucratpreceded his acquisition of the requisite set of ‘beliefs’:

Slowly I acquired more than the skills of a political officer — I developed thementality and mindset. After several months I became more comfortable withmy position, better able to understand and share in the symbols, gestures, andutterances of my colleagues, and generally better able to fit in. Said otherwise,not only had I entered the bureaucratic world, but the bureaucratic world hadentered me. My long days of intense interaction with my colleagues was slowlytransforming how I understood, identified, and presented myself. (1997: 11;emphasis added)

Barnett describes how he was literally transformed through his positioningwithin a set of practices which can be understood as ‘modes of socialrelation, of mutual action’ (Taylor, 1987: 56–7). At no point in thistransformation was it necessary for Barnett actually to believe in the policiesthat he helped promote in the name of the US. On the contrary, as hisaccount of performing as a ‘Rwanda expert’ suggests, more significant wasbeing able to engage in the practices appropriate to the place, the situationand his position — by drafting appropriate cables, calling the right contacts,relaying the right sort of information and answering questions in particularways (Barnett, 1997: 3).45 What Barnett describes, from the point of view ofthe individual social actor, are specific kinds of performances made possibleby pre-existing symbolic technologies and social relations. It was through hismastery of the everyday practices, and in particular representational prac-tices, associated with the position that Barnett was able to become aneffective desk officer. In short, he knew how to go on. Belief — whether hisor anyone else’s — is strictly speaking unnecessary to his account of how a


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University of Wisconsin political scientist became a ‘Rwanda expert’,although a fuller treatment would require that one address also theconditions that make ‘a Wisconsin political scientist’ both a suitable and awilling subject for such transformations.

Once we recognize the contestable nature of the ‘Cartesian misconcep-tion of the mind’ that structures the ‘ideas’ literature, alternative approachesbecome conceivable. In addition, as Geertz pointed out, the empiricalanalysis of ‘ideas’ becomes in some respects more straightforward. Seeing‘ideas’ as practices rather than as objects, we have suggested, is a valid anduseful alternative to the analytic posture evident in the rationalist approachto ideational phenomena. In the next section, we build on this discussionand seek specifically to demonstrate how redefining ‘ideas’ as symbolictechnologies enables us to open up for empirical investigation the constitu-tion and production of the ‘objective’ world against which particular coursesof action are adjudged by rationalists to be rational or not. We approach thistopic through brief treatments of categorization and constitution, andillustrate our argument with reference to Waring’s (1988) feminist analysisof the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA).46

Categorization, Constitution and Substantive Rationality

The process of categorization is a crucial element of the meaningfulconstitution and practical production of social worlds (Onuf, 1989; see alsoMilliken, 1995). Social categories (which by definition are not individualand idiosyncratic) are human constructs that provide the basic meansthrough which, among other things, distinctions are made, objects arepicked out and then grouped in various ways. Such constructs are necessaryin a world that has only continua, where, as Waltz said, ‘everything is relatedto everything else’ (1979: 8; cf. Connolly, 1991). Much of what isconventionally understood to be ‘policy-making’ is addressed to thisproblem — ‘Policy is centrally about classification and differentiation, abouthow we do and should categorize in a world where categories are not given’(Stone, 1988: 309). Social categories thus enable — they are a necessaryprecondition for policy.

One of the defining characteristics of ‘ideas’ understood as symbolictechnologies is their role in making available sets of categories that enablepractices of classification and differentiation. A particularly clear example ofthis role can be found in the UNSNA, which provides the means throughwhich are produced the national systems of accounts used in calculating suchcentral economic indicators as GNP and GDP. Measuring ‘economicgrowth’, which is the central purpose of the UNSNA, relies upon acategorization of some activities as ‘economic’ and others as not, as well as


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a complex set of accounting practices. In turn, those practices rely onparticular sets of social categories, including, among others, ‘production’,‘consumption’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Waring, 1988: Chapters 2 and 3). TheUNSNA is not simply a passive categorical instrument, however. In a veryreal sense, the UNSNA is a set of interwoven practices through which theworld is represented, constituted and reproduced on a daily basis. Symbolictechnologies, which provide sets of social categories that define phenomena,are constitutive (Majeski and Sylvan, 1991) and at least potentiallyproductive of social reality to the extent that they inform and structure socialpractice. In common with other symbolic technologies that, through beingdeployed, have achieved practical integration into social reality, the UNSNAsits embedded within a wider set of practices — including census-taking, tax-collecting, government budgeting, defense and welfare spending, and thelike — which serve to put its categories into motion (Waring, 1988: Chapter4). Moreover, not only are UNSNA categories deployed by governmentsand their statisticians in order to ‘measure’ economic activity, but those samecategories are also drawn on by social subjects to order and organize theirown activities. In this way, official categories become ‘sewn into the fabric ofthe economy, society, and the state’ (Starr, 1992: 264).47 The UNSNA isthus not easily separable from the reality it allegedly ‘measures’ because ofthe constitutive role played by its categories in organizing and producingthat reality.

As Waring makes clear, the UNSNA quite literally makes possible theproduction of representations that are highly consequential for the kinds ofeconomic (and other) policies pursued by governments. Waring is veryattentive to what she calls ‘the boundary of conception’ — that is, theimplications of the categories deployed for who is included and who isexcluded — through which the UNSNA divides up the social world. Ofcentral concern for her are the ways in which the activities of women arethereby rendered invisible. The relationship between ‘economic growth’ andostensibly ‘non-economic’ activities carried out predominantly by women isobscured, for example. Given the construction of women’s householdactivities as primarily non-economic, those representations entail a range ofideological effects, including but not limited to exclusion — women aregenerally represented as not engaged in productive activity unless they enterinto the cash economy. Such effects have direct consequences for a range ofpublic policies, both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’. For example, it is prima faciedifficult to justify childcare for mothers who, at least according to theUNSNA, are ‘unoccupied’ (Waring, 1988: 81–8). Similarly, by effecting ahierarchy between production for subsistence and production for marketexchange, the categories built into the UNSNA help to establish andreproduce a bias in favor of foreign aid for commercial rather than


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subsistence farming. Repeated famines in the midst of bumper exportharvests, as well as shifts in gender relations as males usurp traditional femaleroles and become ‘bread-winners’, are only two of the consequences of thepolicies made commonsensical and hence more likely by the deployment ofUNSNA categories.

If we focus on the person as a social being, two additional consequencesof the representations enabled by the UNSNA become apparent. First, tothe extent that these categories and representations inform social practice, sothey come to participate in the constitution and production of the world asit must be negotiated by people. It is in part for this reason that socialcategories, and especially those deployed by governments, ‘promote particu-lar forms of attachment’ among populations (Starr, 1992: 278). As Waringdemonstrates, such categories tell us who we are, what we do, and assignvalue (or not) to those identities and activities. These categories are notsimply free-floating sets of symbols but are built into the fabric of everydaylife, insofar as they are deployed and reproduced across a range of sites andpractices. Whatever a particular person may think of the categories madeavailable by the UNSNA, they can neither be wished away nor simplyrefused; they are part of the way the world is.

Second, the reflexive nature of human beings means that social categories— and the forms of reasoning built into symbolic technologies such as theUNSNA — are ever likely to be taken up and deployed by the very subjectswhom they allegedly are about. In this way, symbolic technologies such asthe UNSNA may participate in the constitution of the ‘characteristics of thechoosing organism’ (Simon, 1985: 294) itself — albeit an organismunderstood as a social being endowed with social powers and capacitiesrather than as a rational individual endowed with beliefs. For example,symbolic technologies secrete particular forms of rationality, understood ascharacteristic modes of reasoning that make sense of and within the contextof specific socially constructed realities. The social powers and capacities withwhich symbolic technologies potentially endow subjects thus include thecapacity to reason in particular ways; rationality is a social characteristic, notan individual one (Hindess, 1991: 221). This process of constitution extendsto the production of interests as well. To the extent that it can be shown thatinterests presuppose a particular identity (Wendt, 1992; Weldes, 1996), itthen follows that ‘ideas’ such as the UNSNA are potentially constitutive ofinterests not only insofar as they enable the apprehension, constitution andproduction of worlds but also to the extent that they enable particular formsof identity.

Once we begin to think through the multiple ways in which a symbolictechnology such as the UNSNA is implicated in the constitution andproduction of the world it purports ‘objectively’ to measure, an exclusive


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focus on substantive definitions of rationality becomes suspect. In this case atleast, it appears that the technology in question actually participates in theproduction of the conditions of substantive rationality. The UNSNA —ostensibly a mere accounting device — is in fact highly consequential for theproduction of the objective reality to which it allegedly responds. Moreover,as the example of the UNSNA makes apparent, the modes of reasoningsecreted by symbolic technologies — to the extent that they enter into theproduction of the worlds which people must endeavor to negotiate — ‘have’those ‘actors’ rather than vice versa (e.g. Pocock, 1985; cf. Ashley, 1986:294). This process of constitution, and in particular the role of ‘ideas’ withinit, is explicitly ignored in a model of substantive rationality. Focusing onrationality defined only substantively — that is, as ‘behavior that can beadjudged objectively to be optimally adapted to the situation’ — thenobscures a crucial fact that social analysis presumably ought to uncover,namely, the implication of the ideational in the production of the veryconditions taken for granted by substantive conceptions of rationality.

Conclusion

In abstract terms, this argument has addressed itself to a critical analysis oftwo possible models for thinking through the ‘impact’ of ‘ideas’ and relatedphenomena on foreign policy and state action. Specifically, we havehighlighted a set of issues that are predominantly theoretical and conceptualin nature — ambiguities in the use of theoretical language (should it be‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’ or ‘ideas’ as ‘beliefs’?), the suitability of certain notionsof causality to specific kinds of phenomena (‘neo-positivist’ causation orconstitutive relations?) and in particular the implications of alternativemetaphors for analysis (‘ideas’ as commodities or ‘ideas’ as capital?). As wehave demonstrated, conceptions of what ‘ideas’ are, the explanatory modelswithin which they are situated and the empirical investigation of ‘ideas’ (inparticular, assumptions about where they are located) are all powerfullyshaped by the metaphors that structure our analyses. By way of conclusion,we briefly discuss the implications of our argument for the politics of modeldesign and selection.

The categories that make knowledge of the social world possible are the‘stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical andpractical struggle for power to preserve or transform the social worldby preserving or transforming the categories by which it is perceived’(Bourdieu, 1985: 729). It is a partial recognition of this fact, we wouldargue, that drives the ‘ideas’ literature. However, rationalists have failed topay sufficient attention either to the ‘ideas’ that structure their own work or,more significantly, to the implications of those ‘ideas’ (see, Goldstein and


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Keohane, 1993: 12, n. 21 and 30). Models of social phenomena mayparticipate in the constitution and production of the very worlds they seekto address in a variety of ways. For example, if a model proceeds from the‘prevailing discursive practices that embody the authority and responsibilityrelationships dominant in the collectivity under investigation’, so that modelwill tend to reproduce and to reinforce those relationships (Shapiro, 1981:197). A case in point is the emphasis on elites in the ‘ideas’ literature.Implied by the model is a view of the world that sees foreign policy as thebusiness of elites. Among other things, this tends to absolve non-elites ofresponsibility for foreign policy. To the extent that the model is persuasiveand comes to be a more-or-less taken-for-granted element in the com-monsense of some population — always a possibility when dealing withreflexive creatures like human beings — so the model enters directly into thereproduction of existing relations of authority. Foreign policy then just iselite business.

A notable feature of the two models we have been discussing — ‘ideas’ as‘beliefs’ versus ‘ideas’ as ‘symbolic technologies’ — is their dependence upondifferent structuring metaphors. The rationalist model of ‘ideas’ achieves itsplausibility in part precisely by drawing on a set of commonsense assump-tions about what ‘ideas’ are like. Those assumptions, expressed most clearlyin the ‘ideas as commodities’ and ‘conduit’ metaphors, provide the deepstructure of rationalist analyses. In order to begin to make those assumptionsand their effects visible, we presented a different set of metaphors andanalogies, drawing on Marxian accounts of the commodity. As we havesought to demonstrate, while those metaphors and analogies (‘ideas’ asrelations?) run directly counter to the received commonsense that structuresthe ‘ideas’ literature, they enabled us to address directly all three of thecriticisms we had raised with respect to rationalist models. In addition, theyalso directed our attention to a range of empirical phenomena more or lessinvisible in the ‘ideas’ literature. In these respects, we sought to demonstratethe relative utility for analyzing state action of a redefinition of ‘ideas’ assymbolic technologies.

The significance of these ‘duelling metaphors’ runs deeper than this,however. It is possible further to demonstrate the usefulness of rethinking‘ideas’ as symbolic technologies by seeing the rationalist literature as itselfmade possible by a specific set of technologies. Seen from this point of view,the ideological effects of conceiving ‘ideas’ as individual possessions(whether ‘beliefs’ or ‘commodities’) become apparent. The conception ofthe individual and his relationship to his ‘ideas’ built into the ‘ideas’literature mimics fairly directly the possessive individual so beloved ofapologists for capitalist social relations (Macpherson, 1962). He has personalproperty in his ‘ideas’ which he can both alienate with relative ease — he is


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a very flexible subject in this respect — and also generate — he is capable ofprimitive production and accumulation as well. At a time when the projectof globalizing capitalist social relations, their associated political forms(liberal democracy) and modes of subjectivity (bourgeois individualism)continues apace, the ‘ideas’ literature participates, if unintentionally andindirectly, in that project.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meetings of theInternational Studies Association, San Diego, 16–20 April 1996, and the Inter-national Studies Association, Midwest, Chicago, 29–30 October 1993, and to theInternational Relations Colloquium, Department of Political Science, University ofMinnesota. Thanks to Sanjoy Banerjee, Tarak Barkawi, Michael Barnett, WalterCarlsnaes, Nicholas Onuf, Michael Shapiro, David Sylvan, Alexander Wendt, theanonymous reviewers of the European Journal of International Relations, andespecially Diana Saco for comments on these papers.

1. The qualification is necessary inasmuch as the recent ‘return of ideas’ — likeearlier rediscoveries of the state, domestic politics, and the like — was onlynecessary because the field of International Relations had endeavored system-atically to ‘read out’ these concepts. Earlier work in the field, particularly that ofthe classical realists, was attentive to all of these issues. For a sophisticated earlyexample, see Carr (1964 [1946]). For an interesting reading of Carr and theEnglish School as constructivists, see Dunne (1995).

2. Much of this literature focuses on the role of ideas in the making of foreigneconomic policy. Examples from which we draw include Goldstein (1988, 1989,1993), Goldstein and Keohane (1993), P. Hall (1989), Odell (1982), Sikkink(1991) and Woods (1995). Exceptions to the usual focus on economic policy areCheckel’s (1993) analysis of the role of ideas in the ‘Gorbachev foreign policyrevolution’ and Shafer’s (1988) analysis of the importance of ideas to theexplanation of the failure of US counterinsurgency policy.

3. The terms ‘rationalist’ and ‘reflectivist’ are Keohane’s (1988). We prefer theterm ‘constructivist’ (e.g. Onuf, 1989; Wendt, 1992) rather than ‘reflectivist’because we think it is both more accurate and less pejorative.

4. Neither of these charges is sustainable, of course. Such a criticism might perhapsbe accurate if one began with a very narrow understanding of constructivism andlevied the charge only against such metatheoretical accounts of (one version of)constructivism as are offered by Onuf (1989) or Wendt (1987, 1992). But sucha definition of constructivism is overly narrow; many diverse traditions of analysis— including marxisms, feminisms, post-structuralisms, postmodernisms andrealisms (Dunne, 1995) — are in different ways constructivist and each providesa significant body of empirical analysis. For a detailed response to such attacks onconstructivism understood in this broader sense, see Walker (1989).

5. This notion of rationality is also called ‘instrumental’ rationality or, in Weberianterms, Zweckrationalitat (Weber, 1947: 115). For Weber, Zweckrationalitat —


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instrumentally rational actions ‘defined in relation to a system of discreteindividual ends and the rational estimation of means available for theirattainment’ — was opposed not to procedural or bounded rationality (as inSimon, 1985: 294) but to Wertrationalitat, defined as social action ‘involving aconscious belief in an absolute value and its implementation independent of theprospects for its successful realization’ (Hindess, 1991: 217).

6. For a critique of the view that rationality assumptions can ignore an empiricalexamination of the forms of reasoning actually employed by social actors, seeHindess (1988, 1991).

7. In this respect, the recent ‘ideas’ literature adopts the same theoretical strategy asthose scholars who employ the concept of ‘bounded rationality’ (see Simon,1986). For both kinds of theory, substantive rationality remains the norm ormodal form of individual reasoning against which deviations are identified, aswell as the regulative ideal of reasoning. In neither approach is reasoning as asocial institution problematized. See Hindess’s (1991) discussion and critique ofthe model underlying Simon’s position.

8. While there is a tendency in rationalist analyses to adopt some variant of eitherontological or methodological individualism, these commitments are contingentrather than necessary corollaries of a rationalist approach. See Wendt (1996,Chapters 1 and 4); and Ruggie (1983).

9. The explanatory model which underpins much of this literature, and Goldsteinand Keohane’s version in particular, is that of regression models in statisticalanalysis. (See also Goldstein, 1993: 251.) Material interests generate the nullhypothesis against which ‘ideas’ are tested as an additional variable with which toexplain otherwise inexplicable variance from interest-generated predictions. Forexplicit statements to this effect, see Garrett and Weingast (1993: 203). For acritique of such models, see Yee (1996: 71–6).

10. A similar confusion runs through Checkel’s (1993) analysis. He seems to equate‘ideas’ with ‘expert knowledge’, the ‘concepts and intellectual frameworks ofSoviet academic specialists’ (272), ‘new ideologies’ (273), ‘sets of beliefs andattitudes’ (276), ‘intellectual outlooks’ (277), ‘mindsets’ (278), ‘policy’, ‘world-views’ (281) and ‘images’ (295), and never defines these concepts or specifiesthe relations among them. However, Checkel does seem to want, in tried-and-true Cold War fashion, to oppose all of these, which are somehow thought toreflect ‘serious, scholarly research’, to ‘Marxist-Leninist dogma’ (284) and to‘official Soviet dogma’ (285).

11. See Little and Smith (1988) on belief systems. An exception was Leites’s (1951,1953) analyses of the shared ‘operational code’ of the Bolsheviks.

12. Jacobsen offers a similar, but more streamlined, two-tier typology — ‘consensualshared beliefs’ provide the ends to be pursued while ‘economic ideas’ specify themeans (1995: 287).

13. Why elites is unclear and left unexplained. After all, some influential ideas, suchas ‘old wives’ tales’, seem to derive their authority from their status as commonsense rather than from their association with elites. How one might distinguishbetween ‘expert’ ideas and other ideas, whether such a distinction is meaningful


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and what the politics of such a distinction are, are questions never addressed inthis literature. We are inclined to agree with Jacobsen’s charge that, ‘it is time toabandon the conceit that a tree has not really fallen in the forest unless a memberof the Council on Foreign Relations hears it or it falls on her’ (1995: 310). Anexception to the almost exclusive focus in this literature on elites is Jackson(1993).

14. This was the terminology used in an earlier version of Goldstein and Keohane’schapter (1990: 7). While they have dropped the term ‘neo-positivist’ in thepublished version, the argument remains much the same — the primary concernremains ‘causality’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 11) in the positivist, Humeansense. For a critique of this view of causality, see Sayer (1992: Chapter 3) and thediscussion in Yee (1996: 76–85).

15. An exception is Shafer who uses ideas to explain ‘continuity despite changes inthe international distribution of power, presidential administrations, bureau-cratic coalitions and capabilities, the locale of conflict and the nature of theinsurgencies, and the governments they threaten’ (1988: 3–4, emphasisadded).

16. This critique is lodged by Jacobsen as well (1995: 309). It is fascinating to notethat none of this literature seems to recognize that the practice of positinginterest-based explanations as the null hypothesis is itself based on an idea, anda modern idea at that — namely, that interests can and should be referred to inexplanations of human behavior. (See Hirschman (1977) on the development ofthe idea of interests; for a related argument, see also Hindess on ‘the idea of theperson as rational actor’ (1991: 216).) That the centrality of interests is itself anidea that is culturally variable can be gleaned from Katzenstein’s (1993) analysisof anti-terrorism policy in Germany and Japan. He argues that while Germanpolicy-makers operate with a view of the international system as a community(281) governed by international norms (294), their Japanese counterparts viewthe international system as held together by interests (294). The centrality ofinterests is thus revealed to be a culturally specific idea.

17. Goldstein and Keohane make a similar, but much weaker claim, arguing that‘[I]deas may even lead — even if not immediately — to a significant change inthe constitution of interests’ (1993: 16). Ikenberry also argues that ‘policy ideas’can influence ‘governments’ conceptions of their interests’ (1993: 58), but hedoes not investigate this claim. Instead, he treats the two as distinct, althoughpotentially complementary, explanations and argues that ‘policy ideas matterbecause they provide opportunities for elites to pursue their [given?] interests inmore effective ways’ (84).

18. Although the term ‘fit’ seems to be the most popular (e.g. Sikkink, 1991: 21;Goldstein, 1989: 32, 69), various other formulations appear as well, includingthe ‘articulation’ of different ‘ideas’ with existing ideologies and the ‘resonating’of beliefs with existing ideas (Sikkink, 1991: 26–7; Ikenberry, 1993: 71) or with‘the larger political environment’ (Ikenberry, 1992: 292).

19. P. Hall provides some discussion of the ‘fit’ of new Keynesian ideas with existingideas, arguing that the ‘nature of prevailing political discourse can work to the


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advantage or disadvantage of new policy proposals. In terms of prevailingdiscourse, some new proposals will be immediately plausible, and others will bebarely comprehensible’ (1989: 383). While this is a useful insight, he neglectsthe fact that the ‘fit’ between various ideas and the plausibility, or not, of newideas are actively constructed rather than simply ‘there’ in the ideas themselves,which seems to be the assumption in much of this literature. The need for ‘ideas’actively to be created is recognized by Garrett and Weingast, who argue thatshared belief systems ‘do not always emerge without conscious efforts on thepart of interested actors. Rather, they must often be constructed’ (1993: 176).We differ with these authors in that we maintain that ideas, and their ‘fit’ withexisting ideas, must always be constructed, whether consciously or not.

20. See also Halpern (1993: 90). Goldstein makes a similar, peculiar claim that‘beliefs are simply strategies that can be abandoned if they fail to deliver the goalssought by political leaders’ (1993: 251). This claim runs counter to a centralfinding of cognitive research, including the belief systems literature in the studyof foreign policy, which has argued persuasively that beliefs are in fact quiterobust and that contradictory information is filtered out to avoid cognitivedissonance (e.g. Jervis, 1976).

21. In contrast to most of this literature, Woods differentiates ‘ideas’ from ‘beliefs’on the grounds that the former are subject to ‘thinking, verification, and logic’whereas the latter are ‘ideas no longer thought about’ (1995: 162). However,the fact that any ‘belief’ currently having the form of a prejudice (Woods’simplicit model) can potentially be made the subject of ‘thinking, verification,and logic’ implies that her model does not distinguish between ‘ideas’ and‘beliefs’ but only between statements of the form ‘I do (or do not) currentlybelieve X’.

22. Although the wielders of this metaphor do not comment on it explicitly, theysometimes seem to be at least partially or tacitly aware of it. The various termsof the metaphor are sometimes placed in quotation marks, for example, perhapsto indicate their metaphorical status (e.g. Goldstein, 1989: 33). However, thechoice of metaphor is never explained, nor do these authors seem aware of theeffects which this metaphor has on the substance of their analyses. Thismetaphor is more striking and elaborate in the work of Goldstein (1988, 1989,1993). Other authors tend to use the metaphor more sparingly, invoking, forinstance, the ‘circulation’ of ideas (Odell, 1982) or the role of ‘politicalentrepreneurs’ (Sikkink, 1991). This conception of ideas as commodities is alsoto be found in the literature on epistemic communities. (See the examples anddiscussion in Laffey and Muppidi, 1992.)

23. In addition to the metaphor of ‘political entrepreneurs’, Sikkink uses the notionsof ‘sponsors’ and of ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’ as well (1991: 2, 18, 244, 253).Checkel uses the similar phrase ‘policy entrepreneur’ to refer to ‘purveyors ofnew ideas’ (1993: 298).

24. This is another example of the semantic peculiarities that emerge when oneattempts to substitute ‘shared beliefs’ for ‘ideas’. While it may make intuitive


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common sense to claim that ‘ideas’ are ‘carried’ and then ‘inserted’ into politics,what does it mean to say that ‘beliefs’ are ‘carried’ and ‘inserted’?

25. A related issue concerns the question of whether or not reasons can be causes. Asthe literature on interpretive social theory demonstrates, although beliefs canfunction as reasons for actions, it is at least debateable as to whether or not theyenter explanations of social action in a manner directly analogous to the ‘causes’of the natural sciences. It is for this reason that Fay (1975), for example, refersto beliefs and reasons as ‘quasi-causal’; but cf. Patomaki (1996). With theexception of Sikkink (1991) and Ferejohn (1993), the literature on ‘ideas’basically ignores the distinction between positivist and interpretive socialtheory.

26. We could go further than this and suggest that the very plausibility of the ‘ideasas commodities’ metaphor derives from a particular image of and the practicesthat characterize capitalist societies. Presumably such metaphors would haveconsiderably less plausibility in social formations not dominated by thecommodity form.

27. The ‘conduit’ metaphor also seems to underpin a possible objection to ourargument. Specifically, it might be charged that, while rationalist analysts aresomewhat confused about what ‘ideas’ are, they are correct to see thesignificance of ‘ideas’ as lying with their propositional content rather than theirform. We are sceptical of this argument insofar as it seems to imply that ‘ideas’are either separable from or prior to language. For counter-arguments, seeLakoff (1995) and Bowles and Gintis (1987: 156ff).

28. For example, if ‘ideas can be put into words, and words are in books, then theideas can be in books and the books can be in libraries’, where people then goto ‘extract’ the ‘ideas’ and put them into their heads (Lakoff, 1995: 117–18).Obscured here is the necessity of interpretive human labor which is required inorder to take a set of symbols and then to manipulate them in order for thosesymbols to have meaning.

29. We adopt, and significantly rework, Greenblatt’s (1991) language of ‘symbolictechnologies’.

30. By collective or shared, we mean phenomena which can be decomposed withoutloss of content into aggregations of more fundamental units of analysis. On thisview, ‘ideas’ or beliefs are collective in the sense that a large number ofindividuals have the same ‘ideas’ or beliefs in their heads. Social phenomena, onthe other hand, are those which are intersubjective (Taylor, 1987; Neufeld,1993) or, in a certain sense, holistic (Hollis and Smith, 1990). They aretherefore not decomposable into individual beliefs and are not individual-levelphenomena. For critiques of the rationalist program along these lines, see,among others, Kratochwil (1988); Alker (1990); Walker (1993: especiallyChapters 4 and 5); and Neufeld (1993).

31. In this sense, symbolic technologies are in certain respects analogous todiscourses. We prefer the metaphor of ‘symbolic technologies’ because ithighlights what is of most interest to us here, namely the making of meaningitself, the mechanisms whereby meaning is made, and the implication of these in


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processes of constitution. Moreover, unlike ‘discourse’ which tends (mistakenly)to occlude questions of agency, the language of ‘technologies’ implies moredirectly the necessity for people to engage in practices of production andreproduction. Finally, Greenblatt links ‘symbolic technologies’ directly to a set ofphenomena associated with ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson, 1991). As we indicatebelow, our interests overlap with his in this respect. For useful discussions ofdiscourse, see O Tuathail and Agnew (1992), Fiske (1987) and Purvis and Hunt(1993).

32. There is no necessary connection between scale, degree of integration and theidentification of a set of representational practices as a ‘symbolic technology’.The delineation of any particular set of practices and their identification as a‘symbolic technology’ is an empirical and theoretical question, shaped by theinterests of the analyst. Compare, for example, Edward Said’s (1977) analysis ofOrientalism with Thomas (1994) and Ahmad (1994 [1992]).

33. Ideas, then, are less like objects and more like a language. Indeed, a move awayfrom seeing ideas as individual possessions towards accounts which stress theshared conventions within which certain kinds of moves are possible has beenincreasingly the trend, for example, in the study of intellectual history (e.g.Pocock (1985: especially Chapter 1) and Tully (1988a, b)).

34. The language of ‘technologies’ should not be understood to imply that therelationship between people and these implements is either strictly instrumentalor external. Engagement with technologies — symbolic or otherwise — is alwayspotentially transformative of both the subject and the object of engagement. Itis in part on the basis of such engagement that the ‘ ‘‘natural’’ reality of [humanbeings] as materially situated biological beings’ is transformed into the socialreality of people in society (Onuf, 1989: 40). In the Middle Ages, for example,people took on the names of their occupations (e.g. ‘weaver’, ‘carter’, ‘mason’,‘miller’ and so on). Less prosaic is the effect of technology on the human body— think of Michelangelo’s stonemason models, with their huge hands, theruined eye-sight of watch-makers, or the madness of hatters. Taken together, thecumulative effect of engaging in such practices is the production of particularsubjectivities.

35. Other examples of such ideological effects include unification, rationalization,universalization, separation, naturalization, reification, eroticization, insub-stantialization, affirmation, negation, classification, aestheticization and appro-priation. This list, by no means exhaustive, is derived from Eagleton (1991:Chapter 2) and Spurr (1993).

36. See in particular Chapter 1 (‘The Commodity’) and Appendix (‘I. Commoditiesas the Product of Capital’) in Marx (1977 [1867]).

37. Of course, Marxism ‘is not a singular category at all; as a category ‘‘Marxism’’ is,in fact, no better than a gnomic vulgarity’ (Castree, 1995: 1163). Our readingof Marx draws on the Gramscian-inspired writings of S. Hall (1985, 1988),Rupert (1995) and Cox (1986), among others; see also Ollman (1976).

38. The following, extremely abbreviated, summary leans heavily on Rupert (1995:Chapter 2).


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39. As Greenblatt puts it, ‘any given representation is not only the reflection orproduct of social relations but . . . is itself a social relation, linked to the groupunderstandings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts that exist in otherspheres of the culture in which it circulates’ (1991: 6). Seeing representations associal relations also implies that they are themselves forms of power, through thecapacity to produce representations. That is, ‘representations are not onlyproducts but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces thatbrought them into being’ (Greenblatt, 1991). This is in direct contrast to the‘ideas as commodities’ metaphor which sees ‘ideas’ (‘beliefs’) as deriving most ifnot all of their power from outside themselves, specifically from the ‘political’and ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’ and ‘sponsors’ who ‘purvey’ them.

40. Typically, the body of evidential material drawn on is more restricted than this.For such an argument, applied to the security literature on South Asia, seeAbraham (1995).

41. The complexity of the relationship between performances such as these, theinference to particular mental states and the production of individual, let alonesocial, action is barely referenced in the ‘ideas’ literature. For a (very small) rangeof works that give some indication of how complex that relationship is and thedifficulty of examining it, see for example, Austin (1963), Crespi (1992), Grice(1989), Kratochwil (1988, 1989), Sayer (1992), Searle (1969), Somers andGibson (1994) and Taylor (1964).

42. The recent exchange between Coulter and Bilmes in Journal for the Theory ofSocial Behaviour (1992) is a good introduction to the literature and the issuesinvolved. For useful introductions to the current state of psychology, see Harreet al. (1985) and Greenwood (1991), both of which stress the social character ofmind.

43. For explicit discussion of this alternative analytic move in relation to theories ofstate action, see Weldes and Saco (1996), Milliken (1995) and O Tuathail andAgnew (1992). For a sophisticated discussion of rules in relation to socialtheory, see Onuf (1989).

44. Yee (1996) also recommends greater attention to the internal structure of‘ideational forms’ but does not make explicit the distinction between representa-tions and ‘beliefs’ nor the necessary implication of representations in practicesthat we have sought to highlight here. Indeed, Yee’s otherwise impressiveanalysis is undermined by his continued commitment to a Cartesian model ofthe subject. Compare Coulter (1989, 1991).

45. Barnett’s account is corroborated in this respect by Mark Laffey’s experienceswhile working as an assistant advisory officer in the New Zealand Department ofTrade and Industry in 1987.

46. It should be noted at the outset that the UNSNA is a highly formalized symbolictechnology. We have chosen to discuss the UNSNA both because it is absentfrom the discourse of International Relations as a field, and because it illustratesour larger argument particularly well. For discussion and analysis of moreinformal examples, see Carmichael (1993) on ‘the Cold War’, Drinnon (1990


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[1980]) on ‘indian-hating and empire-building’, Escobar (1995) on ‘develop-ment’, Herman and O’Sullivan (1989) on ‘terrorism’, Schram (1995) on‘poverty’, Spurr (1993) on the ‘rhetoric of empire’, or Weldes and Saco (1996)on ‘the Cuban problem’.

47. Greenblatt makes a similar point. Recalling the capital metaphor we discussedabove, he says that ‘the images that matter, that merit the term capital, are thosethat achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves’ asthey are deployed and become integrated into everyday life (1991: 6).

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MARK LAFFEY is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of PoliticalScience at the University of Minnesota. He is completing a dissertationexamining the internationalization of the state and the redefinition of socialpurpose in a world economy.

JUTTA WELDES is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent StateUniversity. Her work has previously appeared in the European Journal ofInternational Relations, Millennium, and Theory and Society.

beyond belief: ideas and symbolic technologies in the study of international relations

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