Illogics of Social Action: Pathological Behavior in International Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a theoretical and empirical account of what occurs when states, driven by radical domestically transformational and internationally expansionist agendas, fail to make rational means-ends calculations. We term such behavior pathological. In such cases, states fail adhere to none of the social logics - of consequences, appropriateness, communicative action, or practice - identified by IR theory. While such cases are rare, they are often transformative of their international environments, and thus call for explanation in their own right. Actions deviating irreducibly from logical behavior constitute an inverted ‘illogic’ of social action, a means-ends disjunction in which means undermine ends. Pursued persistently, this pathology often destroys the actor itself. We provide a theoretical account framing domestic and international conditions for pathology, and consider possible causal accounts of pathological behavior. We then examine two historical cases: Nazi Germany and Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".