Nicholas G Onuf
Biographic Data
| ID | 698487 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas G Onuf |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas G |
| FAMILY NAME | Onuf |
| SIGNATURE | ONUF N G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida International University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7212-8917 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Exchange on Nick Onuf’s ‘Metaphoricizing Modernity,’ Part III–Reconfiguration of Modernity and/as Metaphor(s)
In this Dossier, four scholars reflect on Nicholas Onuf’s leading article, ‘Metaphoricizing modernity’, (re)engaging with – and celebrating – more broadly Onuf’s groundbreaking work from different places, perspectives, and angles. Part III (re)engages with (his) reconfigurations of Modernity and/as metaphor(s), including an extensive, and much careful response from Onuf to those four scholars and their (re)readings published in this Dossier: Cele…
Bewitching the world
Kratochwil's magnificent The Status of Law in World Society 's first meditation, a philosophical discursus masquerading as a meditation about meditation, addresses how International Law and International Relations deal so differently with their common concerns. Kratochwil treats these concerns with his usual cogency. Yet, critical links are missing. How do we get from speaking as a normative practice to the status of law in today's world? How doe…
Response to Bentley B. Allan’s review of The Mightie Frame
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Epochal Destruction
Often we hear that modernism is all about speed. Better to say that modernism marked the age of acceleration, an explosion in rates of change. Today we routinely link capitalism and the metaphor of explosive growth. Capitalism threatens to consume everything in its path, producing great destruction along the way. This is conspicuously so with the advent of modern war epochally transformed by the modernist acceleration of technical innovation. App…
Transitional Figures
Discussion of modernism tends to be confined to specific modes of expression—architecture, art, literature, music, photography. Generalizing nonetheless, modernism works by breaking the surface and working through layers. There is no empty space; there are only ensembles of relations, stable or shifting, linked by purpose. Form follows function; complexity induces functional differentiation. A distinctively modernist philosophy must dig beneath, …
What Can We Know?
To cast the story of modernity and its epochs as a story about conditions of thought in relation to conditions of rule, this book offers a philosophical memoir in place of a theoretical framework, and begins with Foucault’s question: “But what is it impossible to think . . .?” Drawing on Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Martin Heidegger leads to an idealist, or antirealist, stance. Heidegger would have us thrown into the world, whic…
Paradise Lost?
Whether there has been a transition to something new in what it is possible to think remains to be seen. In the absence of such a transition, we are unlikely to see significant changes in the conditions of rule. If indeed capitalism is a spent force, then economic decline will accelerate and material inequality will increase. Short of a complete collapse, established conditions of rule will be reinforced—the mighty frame ever mightier, the intern…
Epilogue
The last three chapters of the book have a constructivist flavor. One might wonder if constructivism could point to new conditions of thought and rule within the modern world’s mighty frame. If so, Bruno Latour’s extensive, ever more influential body of work bears attention. He has directly, energetically attacked “the dominion of modernism” and sketched a “political ecology” for the future; he made an ancillary project of “saving constructivism”…
Prologue
IN THIS BOOK, I tell a story—a long story consisting of a tightly linked sequence of discrete parts. Each part, or chapter, is more or less sufficient in itself, yet each finds me constantly picking up and playing out distinct variations on a few overarching themes. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it tells a story about modernity and its epochs. Readers will quickly notice that this story is studded with a number of terms, such as frame, epoch, …
Modernity’s Mighty Frame
Although conventional periodization informs The Order of Things , Foucault’s focus was the way we think and when that changes. His “ruptures” are best grasped by considering the efforts of transitional figures to make sense of what is happening around them. If there is a crucial moment in Foucault’s story, it is the transition from the classical age to the modern age. At that time the “quasi-transcendental domains” of life, labor, and language tu…
The Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations
The Mightie Frame
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things , this book tells a story about epochal change in the modern world. While both books are concerned with how we moderns think about ourselves and our world, this book emphasizes the conceptual links in the ways we think, talk, get things done, conduct ourselves, and run societies. Both tell the story as a succession of epochs or ages separated by great ruptures. First is the Renaissance as the age …
The Bigger Story
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Many Worlds, Many Theories, Many Rules
There are many ways to speak about the modern world, and many theories setting it apart. I focus on a world facing economic decline and a return to the status-ordering of traditional societies. With republican theory as a backdrop, I show that an updated virtue ethics constitutes an ethical system uniquely suiting any society that is significantly status-ordered
Constructivism at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods
In this paper, I ask why constructivism in IR has slowed down as a theoretical project. One answer is that slowing down is normal (as in normal science); there is no problem. I propose a second answer, to the effect that constructivism has reached a crossroads. As the way ahead gets slower and slower, the temptation to turn off the road can only strengthen. The slowdown and the crossroads point to a central feature of constructivist thinking. As …
The ethics of identity
Making Sense, Making Worlds
Nicholas Onuf is a leading scholar in international relations and introduced constructivism to international relations, coining the term constructivism in his book World of Our Making (1989). He was featured as one of twelve scholars featured in Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (1996); and featured in Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon, Fifty Key Thinkers in Int…
Position, distribution, restoration
This is a reply to:Weber, Martin. 2014. “As if ‘relations’ mattered: how to subvert positional bias in social science with a lot of help from ‘others’....” Global Discourse. 4 (1): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.805513
Recognition and the constitution of epochal change
For two decades, political theorists have granted recognition a great deal of attention. However, theorists of international relations have not, despite a common interest in identity politics. Instead, the latter take recognition for granted as a long-standing practice enabling states to engage in relations, as equals, under law. I hold that recognition is an unexplored way of addressing the constitution of epochal change in the modern world. I d…
Of Paradigms and Preferences
Brian Rathbun wonders if “the political beliefs of those who study international relations affect their beliefs about international relations and the way they are studied.” In his search for an answer, he turns to a body of literature in social psychology called social dominance theory (SDT) and a psychometric construct called social dominance orientation (SDO). SDT is “a general theory of societal group-based inequality” (Pratto, Sidanius, and L…
Ips Forum Contribution (Issue 3, Vol. 4)
Journal Article IPS FORUM CONTRIBUTION (ISSUE 3, VOL. 4): Old Mistakes: Bourdieu, Derrida, and the “Force of Law” Get access Nicholas Onuf Nicholas Onuf Florida International University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages 315–318, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2010.00107_5.x Published: 06 September 2010
"Escavando a "comunidade internacional
Neste artigo, argumento que metáfora e conceito são nomes para o mesmo tipo de coisa. E, se isso é assim, metáfora é uma metáfora para conceito; conceito é uma metáfora para metáfora. Se assim o é, então o conhecimento é, em geral, metafórico. Uma arqueologia do conhecimento metafórico é uma expressão metafórica para um conjunto de reivindicações e procedimentos concebidos para expor os pressupostos e as associações enterrados, constituindo (e, p…
Rules in Moral Development
Kohlberg’s position on moral development in children underestimates the importance of rules in Piaget’s work on the subject. Yet Piaget’s constructivism, taken over by Kohlberg, depends on the rule element, which can be strengthened by considering the properties of different types of rules and their relation to the developmental sequence. Rules are socially constructed through the performative use of language. Distinctive categories of rules depe…
Friendship and Hospitality
The series friends, rivals, enemies is a seemingly ‘natural’ classification for the relations of states, while the parallel series kin, neighbors, strangers functions as an informal classification system for social relations in general. That we may owe foreigners the hospitality due to strangers has become a matter of discussion among normative theorists, thanks to Kant's Perpetual Peace. Thus the conjunction of friendship and hospitality calls f…
The Ambiguous Modernism of Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for the origin, properties, condition and destiny of the modern world in work running from Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), to Situating the Self (1992), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996), and Another Cosmopolitanism (2006). I hope to show that Benhabib's view of modernity is ambiguous, and that inconsistencies in her position reach back, through Habermas and Weber, to Kant. …
Anarchy, Authority, Rule
International Relations and Political Science are constituted as disciplines on the Hobbesian opposition of anarchy and authority. We reject this opposition and the paradigms of anarchy and authority it has come to authorize. We propose instead a single paradigm of rule to account for the pervasive asymmetries of international relations. We show that in German social thought from Hegel to Weber political society consists in relations of super- an…
Sovereignty
The Constitution of International Society
Journal Article The Constitution of International Society Get access Nicholas Onuf Nicholas Onuf * The American University School of International Service, Washington D.C Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the International Jurisprudence Colloquium, New York University (April 1992), the Dartmouth College-United Nations University Conference on National Sovereignty and International Intervention (May 1992), and the Research Seminar o…
Civitas Maxima
For more than two decades, historians of the United States have energetically debated the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. Was the late eighteenth century a time of progress, and events culminating in the ratification of the Constitution a triumph for individual rights and liberal society, as convention held? Or was it a time of decay, and the events of the founding a renewal of citizen virtue in defense…
Levels
The term `level' is an integral feature of contemporary international relations discourse. Singer introduced levels of analysis as a methodological problem in 1961. Since then levels schemes have proliferated and talk of levels is pervasive. As formulated, the level of analysis problem is which level should we choose? With the proliferation of schemes, the problem is which scheme should we choose? This question raises others. Which scheme best re…
International Legitimacy and World Society
International Legitimacy and World Society. By Ian Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 248p. $55.00. Ian Clark has written two books about international legitimacy. Linked by Clark's conviction that legitimacy is a normatively freighted practice, related to but not to be confused with moral, legal, and constitutional practices, the two books are complementary in design. The first (Legitimacy in International Society, 2005) forthrightly …
Everyday Ethics in International Relations
International Legal Order as an Idea
International law, its masters tell us, is “the vanishing point of jurisprudence.” So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any ar…
Friendship and Hospitality
The series friends, rivals, enemies is a seemingly ‘natural’ classification for the relations of states, while the parallel series kin, neighbors, strangers functions as an informal classification system for social relations in general. That we may owe foreigners the hospitality due to strangers has become a matter of discussion among normative theorists, thanks to Kant's Perpetual Peace. Thus the conjunction of friendship and hospitality calls f…
Global Order
Bewitching the world
Kratochwil's magnificent The Status of Law in World Society 's first meditation, a philosophical discursus masquerading as a meditation about meditation, addresses how International Law and International Relations deal so differently with their common concerns. Kratochwil treats these concerns with his usual cogency. Yet, critical links are missing. How do we get from speaking as a normative practice to the status of law in today's world? How doe…
Institutions, intentions and international relations
Renewed interest in international institutions makes clear the need for a better theory of institutional possibilities. Friedrich Hayek held that institutions are either designed, though badly, or emerge spontaneously, and providently, as an unintended consequence of agents' self-interested choices. Hayek's historical sketch misses a third set of possibilities reflecting the claim that agents make institutions in keeping with nature's design or, …
Federal Union, Modern World
Imagined Republics
The Principle of Nonintervention, the United Nations, and the International System
In the last decade a number of scholars concerned with patterns of change in the international system have turned to international law for indications of systemic trends. They have assumed that key rules and principles of international law reflect broad characteristics of the system while controversies over and changes in their content and status reflect the rate, extent, and direction of change in the system. For example, Stanley Hoffmann in an …
Recognition and the constitution of epochal change
For two decades, political theorists have granted recognition a great deal of attention. However, theorists of international relations have not, despite a common interest in identity politics. Instead, the latter take recognition for granted as a long-standing practice enabling states to engage in relations, as equals, under law. I hold that recognition is an unexplored way of addressing the constitution of epochal change in the modern world. I d…
Prometheus prostrate
From Empire to Community
From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95. Amitai Etzioni is a seasoned political sociologist and leading voice in the communitarian program to offset the narcissistic and alienating individualism of liberal modernity. Communitarians emphasize the affective bonds that make community an indispensable feature of the human condition and, thus, the local co…
World of Our Making
Reports to the Club of Rome
The Club of Rome was formed to publicize the contemporary human predicament—an unprecedented social pathology which, according to founder Aurelio Peccei, “is aggravated by the interrelatedness ... of everything in the human system.” The Club has commissioned and accepted nine reports, the first and most famous of which isLimits to Growth(1972). This report's “Malthusian” viewpoint and popular format identified the Club with a controversial issue …
Professor Falk on the Quasi-Legislative Competence of the General Assembly
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Many Worlds, Many Theories, Many Rules
There are many ways to speak about the modern world, and many theories setting it apart. I focus on a world facing economic decline and a return to the status-ordering of traditional societies. With republican theory as a backdrop, I show that an updated virtue ethics constitutes an ethical system uniquely suiting any society that is significantly status-ordered
Constructivism at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods
In this paper, I ask why constructivism in IR has slowed down as a theoretical project. One answer is that slowing down is normal (as in normal science); there is no problem. I propose a second answer, to the effect that constructivism has reached a crossroads. As the way ahead gets slower and slower, the temptation to turn off the road can only strengthen. The slowdown and the crossroads point to a central feature of constructivist thinking. As …
Of Paradigms and Preferences
Brian Rathbun wonders if “the political beliefs of those who study international relations affect their beliefs about international relations and the way they are studied.” In his search for an answer, he turns to a body of literature in social psychology called social dominance theory (SDT) and a psychometric construct called social dominance orientation (SDO). SDT is “a general theory of societal group-based inequality” (Pratto, Sidanius, and L…
"Escavando a "comunidade internacional
Neste artigo, argumento que metáfora e conceito são nomes para o mesmo tipo de coisa. E, se isso é assim, metáfora é uma metáfora para conceito; conceito é uma metáfora para metáfora. Se assim o é, então o conhecimento é, em geral, metafórico. Uma arqueologia do conhecimento metafórico é uma expressão metafórica para um conjunto de reivindicações e procedimentos concebidos para expor os pressupostos e as associações enterrados, constituindo (e, p…
Do Books of Readings Contribute to Scholarship
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International Law-in-Action and the Numbers Game
Journal Article International Law-in-Action and the Numbers Game: A Comment Get access N. G. Onuf N. G. Onuf American University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Quarterly, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 1970, Pages 325–333, https://doi.org/10.2307/3013587 Published: 01 September 1970
Professor Falk on the Quasi-Legislative Competence of the General Assembly
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Principle of Nonintervention, the United Nations, and the International System
In the last decade a number of scholars concerned with patterns of change in the international system have turned to international law for indications of systemic trends. They have assumed that key rules and principles of international law reflect broad characteristics of the system while controversies over and changes in their content and status reflect the rate, extent, and direction of change in the system. For example, Stanley Hoffmann in an …
Peace Research Parochialism
Law and lawyers in international crises
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
International Legal Order as an Idea
International law, its masters tell us, is “the vanishing point of jurisprudence.” So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any ar…
Books in review
Reports to the Club of Rome
The Club of Rome was formed to publicize the contemporary human predicament—an unprecedented social pathology which, according to founder Aurelio Peccei, “is aggravated by the interrelatedness ... of everything in the human system.” The Club has commissioned and accepted nine reports, the first and most famous of which isLimits to Growth(1972). This report's “Malthusian” viewpoint and popular format identified the Club with a controversial issue …
Prometheus prostrate
Anarchy, Authority, Rule
International Relations and Political Science are constituted as disciplines on the Hobbesian opposition of anarchy and authority. We reject this opposition and the paradigms of anarchy and authority it has come to authorize. We propose instead a single paradigm of rule to account for the pervasive asymmetries of international relations. We show that in German social thought from Hegel to Weber political society consists in relations of super- an…
Global Order
Sovereignty
World of Our Making
Bringing Law to Bear on International Relations Theory Courses
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The Constitution of International Society
Journal Article The Constitution of International Society Get access Nicholas Onuf Nicholas Onuf * The American University School of International Service, Washington D.C Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the International Jurisprudence Colloquium, New York University (April 1992), the Dartmouth College-United Nations University Conference on National Sovereignty and International Intervention (May 1992), and the Research Seminar o…
Imagined Republics
Civitas Maxima
For more than two decades, historians of the United States have energetically debated the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. Was the late eighteenth century a time of progress, and events culminating in the ratification of the Constitution a triumph for individual rights and liberal society, as convention held? Or was it a time of decay, and the events of the founding a renewal of citizen virtue in defense…
Peace in the Liberal World
Federal Union, Modern World
Levels
The term `level' is an integral feature of contemporary international relations discourse. Singer introduced levels of analysis as a methodological problem in 1961. Since then levels schemes have proliferated and talk of levels is pervasive. As formulated, the level of analysis problem is which level should we choose? With the proliferation of schemes, the problem is which scheme should we choose? This question raises others. Which scheme best re…
Federal Union, Modern World
Federal Union, Modern World
The Changing Political Economy of the Third World
Part 1 Regional Perspectives: Debt, Democracy and Neoliberalism in Latin America, M. Foley The Changing Political Economy of the Caribbean, M. Demar Centralisation and Delayed Capitalism in Subsaharan Africa, A.T.K. Gadzey State, Petroleum and Democratisation in the Middle East and North Africa, M. Dorraj The Political Economy of Growth in Southeast and Northeast Asia, R.F. Donner and G. Hawes The Changing Political Economy of China, R. Gamer. Pa…
Everyday Ethics in International Relations
Political science (44 works) · Law (37 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Law (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Politics (25 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · History (14 works) · Economics (12 works)