theories of international relations

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Theories of international relations

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1 Introduction

A structural query in the social sciences and associated areas as we know it today has deep roots in the history of Western thought . To find out the fundamental , constitutive , structures into which the sensory data of human observation and experience fall : this was a fundamental objective of the ancient Greeks , to go back no far in time (S Sambursky , 1956 . The Greek root of word "idea " refers to pattern relationship , or

constitution . When we speak of Plato 's doctrine of Ideas , we might better speak of his principle of Forms , for this is specifically what they were . Granted that these were ideal , even heavenly units in Plato 's philosophy , it relics true , as Cornford has stressed , that Plato was also a cosmologist , keenly interested in the nature of the actual , experiential world , social as well as physical In Plato 's cosmology there is a thoughtful sense of reality as comprised by not discrete data but shapes and forms mathematical in character (F M . Cornford , 1952

Nor where Plato 's student and absconder Aristotle has any less interested in structures . As all interpreters of Aristotle have stressed , it is the living being , and with it growth , that dominates Aristotle 's mind as the basic model of structure . Organismic structure is , indeed , one of the oldest and most determined models to be found in Western philosophy and science . From Aristotle 's day to our own , with barely any lapses , the philosophy of an organism has been a significant one : sometimes with stress on the more static aspects , as in anatomy but other times on the dynamic elements which are found to be constitutive , as in physiological processes , with growth

Structuralism can be inert in character , or it can be hereditary and dynamic

Contending purely organism model of structure have been as a minimum two others : the mathematical and the mechanical . Most likely the first is at least as old as the organismic . The earliest , pre-Socratic Pythagorean School of philosophy sought to reveal that reality is mathematical - that is , formed by irreducible geometrical patterns . As , the Pythagorean philosophy exercised great influence upon Plato , and much of his own cosmology contains efforts to refine the Pythagorean view of the geometric structures which form the real . The notion that reality is eventually mathematical in character is of course a very powerful one at the present time . A basic notion is interest in the relationships , the connections , within which we discover primitive elements of matter and energy

The perfunctory conception of structure , though also very old , enjoyed a renascence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , the consequence in substantial degree of the influence on all thought of such physical philosophers as Kepler , Galileo , and Newton . It was nearly expected given the great repute of these and other minds engaged in the search for laws , systems , and structures in the physical world , that the type of systems and structures they...