The ‘Isms’ Are Evil. All Hail the ‘Isms’! A Reflection on IR Theory

there can be both orthodox or heterodox Marxism or liberal feminism and Marxist feminism, and so forth. In short, in political science the isms generally denote ideologies and their refinements.

Realism was not an ideology, but increasingly came to be seen as a simple set of universal truths about politics.

Liberalism, and neoliberalism, were re-described as modes of (self)governance rather than explanations of how the world worked. Once we accept assumptions about rationality we become the self-interested person the theory was only supposed to describe. Ideologies produce political subjects. In this way, ideologies came to be seen as inherently regulative and dominating; they were not descriptions of the world, but ways of making us act in it.

Theories posit the relat- ionship between variables and generate testable hypotheses, while traditions are messier, unsystematic confluences of ideas that people need to straighten out in order to pull out those hypotheses.

both realism and liberalism share core concepts like anarchy, the state, material power and so on. But the relative importance of each can only really be understood once we see how ‘peripheral’ and other ‘core’ concepts are deployed in relation to one another, like cooperation or capitalism, institutions or hegemony.