| Chapter 1: | The Domestic Analogy |
|
|
same way. To be sure, statements of this sort are often very general; nevertheless, the need for precision in their case is quite the same as when grand theories are being operationalized in the natural sciences. The point is intersubjectivity. It does not adopt the relativism and subjectivism characteristic of the radical version of constructivism. Rather, it involves acknowledging the centrality of empirical evidence for the conduct of research in the social sciences. It bears stressing, however, that such a recognition is in no way equivalent to a posture of impartiality; indeed, a situation in which all claims proved equally correct would be simply a random peculiarity. Political scientists’ critique of ideas has thus functioned as a kind of referee between competing ideologies.18
Brian Barry and John Rawls have both inspired me in this enterprise, in the conviction that a scientific stance is fully possible on questions of value. Barry began his foremost work with the magnificent sentence “This is a study of the relation between principles and institutions.” The political recommendations that follow from adherence to a certain principle can in fact be ascertained by analysis and investigation, along the same lines as when the truth-value of claims in the pure sciences is being evaluated. The task of political scientists, as Barry put it, “consists in providing reasons for thinking that some policy is desirable or undesirable.”19 In Rawls’s view, the aim of normative political theory is to make considered judgments on a variety of matters—justice, equality, or (why not?) global democracy—through a mental process comparable to the development of a grammar. The task is to formulate a syntax that makes it possible for anyone to devise sentences as coherent as those produced by a native speaker. This work of systematization reaches far beyond arbitrary improvisation and ad hoc assumptions.20
It has been common in the field of international relations, from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Morgenthau and Waltz, to deny the possibility of a moral standard to which nation-states are subject. Charles Beitz is one who has taken issue with this realist skepticism. Commenting on