Science and common sense in the study of international politics

The history of recent efforts to establish a science of international politics may be usefully viewed as elaborate glosses on David Hume's powerful philo sophical programme for resolving, reconciling or dissolving a variety of perspicuous dualities: the external and the internal, mind and body, reason and experience. Philosophers and historians of ideas still dispute the extent to which Hume succeeded but if one is to judge by the two leading 'scientific' research programmes1 for international politics?inductivism and na?ve falsifi cationism?these dualities are as unresolved as ever, with fatal consequences for the thesis of the unity of the sciences. For the failure to reconcile or other wise dissolve such divisions shows that, on the Humean view, there is at least one difference between the physical (or natural) sciences and the moral (or social) sciences: namely, that while the latter bear on the internal and external, the former are concerned primarily with the external. How much this difference matters and how the issue is avoided by the proponents of induc tivism and na?ve falsification is the subject matter of this paper. This paper will execute a three-step strategy. At step one, I shall examine the epistemological bases of inductivism and methodological falsificationism, finding them grossly inadequate and simplistic. At step two, I move to a discussion of these self-same methodologies but this time with a view to uncovering their metaphysical features. I shall find these inadequate, entailing excessive commitments to programmatic conceptions of the nature of the world. At step three, I shall recommend a commitment to rationality as a form of common sense and claim that political realism embodies such a commit ment. I shall argue that this commitment constitutes a kind of foundation for international relations which has certain attractive features notably absent from inductivism and na?ve falsification. And the conclusion will be not the red herring that the study of international politics is forever condemned to an inferior, unscientific status, but rather that, in being more felicitously construed as common sense rationality, international politics need no longer be terrorized by any self-imposed invidious distinction between it and, say, theoretical physics.