The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations

Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory at King's College, London. He is author or co-author of more than 40 scholarly books addressing international relations, comparative politics, political theory, political psychology, history, classics, and philosophy of science. Among his recent books are The Rise and Fall of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Reason and Cause: Social Science in a Social World (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

• Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. What is knowledge?; 3. Positivism and interpretivism; 4. Positivism: Correlational research; 5. Positivism: Experiments; 6. Positivism: Rationalism; 7. Interpretivism: Causal narratives; 8. Interpretivism: Practice turn; 9. Counterfactuals; 10. Verification vs. Falsification; 11. Causal and non-causal narratives; 12. Reason; 13. Cause; 14. The causal paradox; 15. Mechanisms; 16. International relations as an ethical practice.

'Lebow offers an impressively grand tour of important debates and distinctions in IR, seasoned with his own eyewitness accounts as a participant in many of the discussions he surveys. He also doubles down on the the project of defining and pulling together a relatively coherent 'interpretivist' approach to juxtapose to a 'positivist' canon. Does the campaign succeed? Read the book and judge for yourself!' Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, American University