The Primacy of Procedural Advocacy and the Danger of Ontological Drift.

Modern international relations develops out of the liberal and enlightenment traditions of political thought and practice. The legacy of these traditions is often unproblematically assumed. In this paper I probe the ontological presuppositions of contemporary realist and liberal IR to explain how in the conceptual framing of world politics IR theory effects an exceedingly narrow model of normative advocacy. Examining the ontological presuppositions among several IR traditions properly historicizes their philosophical lineages and opens them up to a number of important problematizations about the specific nature of the entities they purport to analyze. Historicizing these concepts in late modernity is especially important given greater awareness of the essentially contested nature of much that has been taken for granted by the major theoretical traditions of IR. Specifically, historicization allows a critique not only of the entities whose existence is presupposed by IR’s metaphysical propositions, but also the normative ideals the predominant theoretical traditions advance, consciously or not. I argue that confusion about what ontological commitments are in late modern times (and what they must be made to reflect given IR’s rigid epistemological protocols) produces considerable ambiguity about the world political relations IR theories claim to explain, and how some of the most prescient challenges of our time ? namely, maldistributions of world income ? can be more effectively addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]