The Great Powers and the International System: Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective

Bear F. Braumoeller The Great Powers and the International System: Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyThe pedigree of the modern social sciences is more than a century old with origins in the work of people such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber and with ancestors going back at least to Hobbes, and ultimately to Aristotle. Though no one fashion dominates the current array of approaches in academic disciplines such as anthropology, economics, political science, sociology and any number of related areas of scholarship (e.g., geography and history) and sub-disciplines (e.g., public administration, postcolonial studies), important segments of the current enterprise have sought to mimic the natural sciences, provide operational definitions, identify dependent and independent variables, test null hypotheses, deploy ever more sophisticated statistical techniques, generate explanatory theories and, in the process, appropriate some of the status and research funds previously won by their kin in astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics. The venture hasn't always worked out well.One of the several problems with running human studies as a scientific project is the nature of the human beast. Inanimate objects respond to physical forces, people react to perceived differences. Billiard balls, for example, are normally altered in their position by the exchange of kinetic energy. billiards player strikes one ball with another and, if sufficient information is gathered about the mass of the balls, the velocity and angle of impact, the condition of the felt table top and other pertinent physical variables, then it's possible to predict with some precision where the impacted ball will come to rest. People are different.We are information-processing food tubes which do react to physical impacts when, for instance, we are punched in the nose; but, we also respond to more complex stimuli. Sometimes, we even respond to the absence of stimuli, as when we are not invited to a party or when someone doesn't send us a birthday greeting. Moreover, the complicated processes of personality, perception and memory make it all but impossible to anticipate what any particular human being will do in any specific circumstance on any given day.The scientific approach to human studies, of course, is assisted if researchers can point to something to count. Economists have an advantage here, for it is possible to identify uncontested objects to quantify-tons of codfish or pig iron, numbers of people employed in specific industries and import-export ratios expressed in amounts of money. Psychology, especially insofar as it has been associated with the science of medicine, also obtains a certain scientific cache. Moreover, both psychologists and behavioral economists have managed to concoct actual laboratory-like experiments in which subjects can be induced to act badly or, in the alternative, to display empathy. Stanley Milgram (1974) was especially good at the former. Nonetheless, most of our efforts to generate instruments that reliably predict human behaviour fall short of the confidence which laboratory technicians have when they mix chemical A with chemical B. Absent divine intervention, performing the same experiment under the same conditions yields the same results time after time. People are more complicated.Accordingly, some social sciences have lagged behind in the push for scientific standing. Anthropology, except for the subdiscipline of physical anthropology which encourages the measurement of skulls, the assessment of bipedalism and so on, is largely engaged in the job of description and classification. Like geology, paleontology and early stages of biology, it is rather difficult to set up an experiment in evolutionary processes that have long since been completed (though genetics is helping out dramatically in some fields where steps can be taken backward toward, for example, the Mitochondrial Eve. …

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