WHAT IS CONSTRUCTIVISM FOR?

by Martijn Konings1 on February 18, 2015.

In an important sense we are all constructivists now. The vast majority of International

Political Economy (IPE) scholars would readily agree that interests are not natural or

pregiven but constructed and bound up with identities; that ideas have a certain degree of

independent causal efficacy; that values are not elements in a transcendent normative

order but contingent social principles; that instrumental rationality is a historically

specific institution; that the ways in which humans reflect on their own practices has a

constitutive effect on those very practices; and that a social science worth its name should

not approach its object as a collection of brute data but require a minimal degree of

hermeneutic sensibility. Disagreement with such propositions is increasingly considered

reflective of an oddly doctrinaire mindset, be it of a structuralist, rationalist or positivist

persuasion. The major contribution of constructivism is to have brought this philosophical

theme of the constructed nature of institutional facts (their observer-dependent character)

into the mainstream of IPE.

And yet, it is not always clear what substantive difference constructivism has made: all

too often, it is hard to avoid the impression that much has remained materially the same

in the wake of the constructivist intervention. If we take Robert Gilpin’s categorisation

of IPE theories in The Political Economy of International Relations (Realist, Liberal

Institutionalist, Marxist) as a key point of reference we might say that the differences

between each of these approaches can be expressed in a limited number of specific

propositions about the relationship between states and the global economic system. Each

of them suggests a particular angle from which we should look at reality. But it is hard to

say the same thing about constructivism: somehow, the notion that human institutions are

“made” does not automatically generate a distinctive lens through which to view the

world: it does not give us a set of guidelines that tell us what kinds of actors or institutions

we should foreground when we try to make sense of historical processes. That is, of

course, not to preclude the possibility that such an angle might still emerge, but for the

1 Martijn Konings works in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (Cambridge University Press, 2011) as well as The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Stanford University Press, 2015). He is currently working on changing patterns of financial governance with specific reference to the role of the Federal Reserve.

time being it is striking that those who adopt a broadly constructivist methodology have

tended to generate substantive analyses that are remarkably in tune with the core tenets

of liberal institutionalism (illustrated by the intense concern among leading

constructivists with the role of international organisations).

This problem is illustrated by the responses that the constructivist challenge has tended

to generate: those who are committed to the substantive claims of realism or marxism

often find it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Sure, social facts are constructed – so

what? One response to such concerns about the lack of distinctiveness of the constructivist

approach would be to say that it provides a welcome opportunity to get away from

seemingly unresolvable debates and that the value of constructivist methods consists in

their ability to provide a firm methodological grounding for socially relevant empirical

research. This is certainly the direction that the constructivist project seems to have taken

in recent years: constructivist IPE is increasingly a combination of somewhat

inconsequential meta-theory, on one hand, and empirical research conducted in a

positivist frame, on the other hand, treating as brute facts the very phenomena that it

claims are discursively and socially constructed, performative and observer-dependent.

This is an awkward direction for a project that takes itself to be deeply concerned with

the constitutive powers of human reflexivity. It perhaps explains the somewhat defensive

attitude that increasingly accompanies the constructivist project in IPE. Many

constructivist articles and books still start with a list of all the naïve assumptions that they

reject. In a review of the edited volume Constructing the International Economy, John

Boli expresses concern in the journal Contemporary Sociology with the fact that most of

the contributions:

are overly concerned with justifying the ‘sense and sensibility’ of the

constructivist approach in the abstract. Norms matter; discourse has

effects; material interests are socially constructed, not given in the

nature of things; interests are less stable than rationalists assume. This

form of argumentation, particularly when repeated (albeit in different

terms and from different angles), becomes rather tiresome.

It would be hard to argue that this defensiveness stems from a general hostility towards

the constructivist project: the more common attitude from those who are not on board is

indifference or puzzlement, and in the meantime constructivists have been remarkably

successful in terms of institution-building and paradigm-making. This suggests that the

defensiveness has intellectual rather than sociological origins.

Perhaps we can shed some light on the problem by noting that there exists a certain odd

self-limitation at the heart of the kind of IPE constructivism: mainstream constructivist

scholars have remained highly reluctant to embrace the idea that everything is socially

and discursively constructed. We may take some guidance here from scholars who are

generally sympathetic to the constructivist approach but have suggested ways in which it

can be enriched and moved forward. Wesley Widmaier’s article in Millennium: Journal

of International Studies on the social construction of crises suggests that constructivism

has so far focused too strongly on the role of ideas and cognitive frameworks and needs

to do more to concern itself with emotions (such as the anxieties and resentments

generated by economic problems and the way these are exacerbated by crises). Charlotte

Epstein in the European Journal of International Relations has argued that constructivism

has worked with problematic notions of identity and that a shift is required to the reflexive

and interactive dynamics of identification and the way this revolves around an element

that always eludes the constructive effects of norms, values and discourse (the Lacanian

real). On one hand, these scholars hint at a constructivism that goes deeper (if perhaps not

all the way down). On the other hand, they suggest that this would have to operate with a

more complex understanding of the dynamics of construction. In other words, they

express a concern with the artificial “neatness” of the constructivist perspective and its

eagerness to re-bifurcate the world into objects and subjects just after we discovered

intersubjectivity and constructedness.

To my mind, these are convincing arguments. But of course they chip away at the promise

of formal and quantitative rigour, and in this respect they very much go against the general

direction of the constructivist project in IPE. Key here is of course the concern that

allowing for the possibility that construction is involved at all levels of reality-making

would land us in the muddy methodological waters and pointless sophistry of

postmodernism. And this in turn reflects the conviction that in the end constructed entities

are less real or objective than natural or material facts. But this raises an important

question: if “construction” only results in weak coherence and low levels of facticity, why

should it be central to our theorising in the first place?

I would like to focus therefore on what exactly the constructivist claim is. The

constructivist communicates to others (both scholars and social actors) that they are in

the grip of a certain essentialism, that the phenomena that they think are natural, pregiven,

objective are in fact constructed, made by human hands or minds. The constructivist

points to a phenomenon in the world and says to others, “You think this is a simple, self-

sufficient, objective fact, but you’re wrong: it’s socially constructed, composed of

different heterogeneous elements; it’s not unitary but consists of ideas, interests and a

whole range of other elements that you have lost track of”. To employ the language of

actor-network theory, the constructivist says, “This is a complex assemblage that you

have come to treat as a black box”. In other words, the central claim of constructivism is

that the way in which other scholars and human actors relate to the world involves some

kind of idolatry: we are seen to have forgotten our own role in the making of the object

and now attribute to it intrinsic powers and capacities. The constructivist reminds us that

we are the ones who bestowed those powers on the object in the first place through the

way we were involved in its assembly.

So the force of the constructivist argument is dependent on us having forgotten that the

facts of social life are conventions, contingent, cobbled together from heterogeneous

materials. But it not clear that this is really how we relate to institutional facts. In fact, we

generally have very little difficulty acknowledging that the kinds of phenomena that IPE

studies—regulatory institutions, states, banks, corporations, contracts, markets—are far

from natural, pre-given or monolithic but precisely constructed, internally complex and

dependent on our ongoing ability and willingness to follow institutional rules and perform

functional roles. This is why Realists and Marxists have so far failed to be suitably

impressed by the argument that states and markets are social constructions: they never

really denied that they were. In that sense, it’s not just that we’re all constructivists, but

that there never was a time when we weren’t constructivists.

But if we are in this sense all constructivists, the point is that, like the Realist and the

Marxist, we do not really view this as diminishing the facticity of these phenomena. This

is key to our relationship to the modern fact: we are capable of seeing it as both a self-

contained, autonomous phenomenon with a coherent and self-evident identity, and as

something that has been built over time, is complexly layered and would crumble

tomorrow if we collectively decided to no longer believe in it; both as a thing in itself and

a contingent configuration of connections. We can view something as either a complex

network or as a coherent actor. We ‘bracket’, in Anthony Giddens’ terms in Central

Problems in Social Theory, or treat a complex historical process as a unitary identity. We

treat phenomena as black boxes even though we are perfectly aware that that is what we

are doing: it is not that we do not know there are things inside the black box that have

historically shaped its characteristics; it’s just that we feel that knowing what exactly

those things are would not make any difference to how we relate to the black box. A

Realist does not deny that national states have complex histories, merely that uncovering

these would add nothing consequentially new to what we presently understand to be the

national interest.

This is not naïveté, but a substantive hypothesis about what the relevant units of social

life are, the appropriate starting-points. It involves a productive move and is the stuff of

conceptual progress: if we were always forced to return things to their most elementary,

atomic level, we would never be able to learn anything about anything. As Bruno Latour

has argued in We Have Never Been Modern, moderns are forever engaged in the twin

projects of, on one hand, creating complex new networks and assemblages and, on the

other hand, purifying them; constructing new configurations and finding ways to treat

them as Latour1entities in themselves. While this process involves elements of disavowal

and “forgetting”, it is important to understand it in the first instance as a productive

moment that builds new capacities. Purification plays an important role in facilitating the

construction of complex heterogeneous entities: things would quickly become unwieldy

if our networking practices did not somehow ‘cluster’, produce new coherent facts with

specific identities. This involves some kind of forgetting, but what we forget is not really

the constructed nature of our own creations. What we lose sight of is not so much the fact

of constructedness but its precise modalities and configurations, i.e. the how of

constructedness. Certain aspects of public authority come to be consolidated in such a

stable social construction that we can refer to it as “the government”, but it doesn’t take

all that much for us to realise that it is shorthand for a complex constellation of

institutions, norms and practices. It’s just that this realisation by itself does little to

improve our understanding of how the government works.

Constructivism’s theoretical contributions have focused heavily on emphasising the fact

of constructedness. Clearly there is a worthwhile political impulse here: a key concern of

constructivist IPE has been to assert the contingency of what in the wake of neoliberalism

and the collapse of communism had come to appear as the hard facts of capitalist life, and

so to identify opportunities for politics and agency in a world increasingly governed by

the dismal logic of markets. Constructivists tend to stress the constructed nature of things

precisely when they want to emphasise their contingent and changeable nature. The

constructedness of something is seen to reduce its degree of reality, to make it less than a

natural or material fact. The constructed nature of a phenomenon is taken to mean that it

could have been otherwise. The problem is that this has given constructivism a strongly

“counterfactual” bent: it has tended to be concerned more with the difference that agency

might make than the difference that it has made. And as long as the claim that reality is

socially constructed is taken as emphasising its changeability, we will have little choice

other than to impose strict limits on the phenomena that we can consider to be “socially

constructed” and return to positing the existence of hard, pre-discursive facts.

This is not to deny that constructivist authors have investigated the actual processes

whereby social facts are constructed. But it is striking how abortive this project has been,

which explains the sense that there is nothing new on offer. Constructivist research tends

to take one step back and disaggregate a particular institutional actor in terms of the ideas,

interests and identities that have gone into its making; but these factors have quickly

ended up being treated as givens (data) without a history of construction. In this way, the

constructivist project has taken on a distinctly positivist flavour, except that there is now

a sense that somehow agency, politics and morality still matter. Thus, on one hand, we

have things that could have been otherwise, and on the other hand things that are just the

way they are. The facts of social life are polarised into idols (things that we believe in and

so acquire an ultimately contingent and changeable existence) and brute facts (things that

exist and that is why we believe in them).

For Latour, in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, the idea that idols / fetishes and

facts are essentially different things is the ultimate modern conceit, an inability to

recognise that networking and purification have always gone hand in hand. All we have

are “factishes,” phenomena that have been constructed and in the process have attained a

certain degree of reality or coherence that is not evident from their constituent parts. These

constructions go beyond the purposes and intentions of their makers and so are generative

of real effects and novelty. The idea that some things are just “made” through sheer

intentionality is as much a fantasy of the modern mind as the idea that other things are

just out there, waiting to be discovered. The signal discovery of constructivism should

have been the discovery of factishes, not a return to a world that is cleanly divided

between objects and subjects, between objective facts and subjective interpretation. In

this sense, constructivism in IPE offers an unreflexive manifestation of the duality of the

modern fact rather than an incisive analysis of it.

This, to my mind, is what the arguments of Widmaier and Epstein hint at, and it is

something that a constructivism that goes “all the way down” could potentially come to

terms with. But of course the actual direction of constructivist theory in IPE is in the

diametrically opposite direction, namely to uphold the commitment to a distinction

between material facts and idols. Although I have relied on the ideas of Latour here (also

see the interview with him on ‘Modernity is Politically a Dangerous Goal’), I certainly

don’t mean to imply that constructivism should turn itself into a branch of actor-network

theory. Perhaps the real irony in the constructivist IPE project is that it has so little sense

of its own intellectual lineages that it systematically neglects highly pertinent

contributions—famous works that come to mind here include Peter Berger and Thomas

Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and Richard Bernstein’s Between

Objectivism and Relativism—that would make the tendency to quickly relapse into

subject-object dichotomies seem deeply problematic. In that sense, constructivism in IPE

is rapidly becoming notable above all for its demonstration of the effectiveness with

which neoliberal academia can take a critical impulse and turn it into the next

paradigmatic fad.