International Theory and Historical Explanation

theoretical laws in order to complete his explanation. Though the imaginary economic case, for instance, was in all strictness an instance of Gresham's Law, and though Gresham's Law is certainly a general proposition, it is not required to be used as such, or indeed at all, within the explanation that instantiates it. At first sight deductive in form, that explanation changes its shape under further examination. My first conclusion, therefore, is that in these non-deterministic studies, the relation between theoretical laws and historical explanations is not necessarily that prescribed by positivist methodology or by such logicians as Popper and Hempel. Now there is an obvious objection to the conclusion just drawn. It is that laws and theories in the natural and the social sciences are concerned with large numbers, and that nobody bothers with invoking laws in cases of the nearly-unique or the nearly-singular, such as those have been instancing. E.g., one can say that Gresham's Law is concerned with the effects throughout a whole nation or economy of autonomous variations in the metallic value of specie against some second type of currency i.e., that Gresham's Law has its application in situations where there are so many operators that no historian could tell just who exported or melted down or hoarded how much of the undervalued specie. Instead, the historian, literally Gresham's Law would have to work upon a relation between the degree of undervaluation, the amount of indebtness to foreign creditors, and the nature of the market for bullion on the one hand, and on the other hand the speed and completeness with which the bad currency drove out the good. And if he were to follow that line the objection might continue the historian would be applying economic theory in a direct and obvious fashion. Now think that objection is valid for the most part; but before enter into qualifications, should point out that economics is almost the only field of non-determinist social theory in which the operators are as numerous and anonymous as the objection requires them to be (psephology, demography, and some of the study of party politics may also have this numerosity). Students of international affairs in particular rarely have to deal simultaneously with the relations of more than a dozen or so nations. Morton A. Kaplan has invented the convenient phrases and to make this distinction.10 A sub-system-dominant relation or policy would be one in which the behaviour of one of the sub-systems (that is, one of the nations or one of the firms in an economic case) is able to change significantly the behaviour of the system as a whole (e.g., to change the structure of the balance of power, or the rate of production in an industry). A system-dominant relation 10 Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York, 1957), Chap. 1 passim. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.189 on Thu, 04 Aug 2016 05:13:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms INTERNATIONAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL EXPLANATION 65 or policy is one in which the agents are very numerous and all more or less of a size; and in which, therefore, an alteration of behaviour by one of them makes no significant difference to the behaviour of the whole system. With sub-systemdominance, the nation or firm responds to each of its competitors specifically. With system-dominance, it responds to the system the market or the industry as a whole. One might add as a corollary, that if an operator in a systemdominant situation is to respond with sensitivity to the whole system's behaviour, there must be some public quantitative medium, such as money or votes or seats in the House, through which the behaviour of the system is reflected. In international affairs apart from the dubious and ambiguous comparison of military budgets, there is characteristically no quantitative medium. shall now consider a fourth form of historical explanation call it compositive from the adjective used by von Hayek1 to characterize the method of building up economic theory. Let us illustrate with another case of Gresham's Law. Suppose that the explicandum consists in the disappearance from circulation, throughout a nation, of a coinage in a precious metal. It should be noticed that since this is something the historian wishes to explain, it is something the historian wishes to explain, it is something that he knows actually occurred. The form of explicans as have designed it'2 is made up of bits from the and constitutive forms, but with several important differences. The first in the explicans would state the historical fact (for which the historian had conclusive evidence) that at some reasonably brief interval before the specie disappeared from circulation, it had become public knowledge that it was under-valued by a certain amount in terms of the rest of the currency. (This is of course equivalent to the minor premise of the type.) The second would say that for many people in this nation, the information about such undervaluing could afford a motive and an opportunity to hoard or melt down or export the undervalued currency.13 The item in parentheses (a third premise?) says that if many operators hoarded or melted down or exported the under-valued specie, this would amount to its disappearance from circulation. I F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (London, 1949), 73 ff. is (i) At time (t-interval i), the information cl was divulged in system S. (ii) For an indefinite number of agents, Explicans: al .. . am, c could have afforded opportunity for actions dl or d2. . . or dn. ?(iii)? (d1 . .. or dn) =el at t. (iv) Sequence (cl el), during i in 5, is conclusive evidence for (dl. . . or dn). Explicandum: Event el occurred at time t in S. 12 In the conditional mood, these first two premises carry us through the practical syllogism which have spelt out in my formalizing of the motivational type of explanation. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.189 on Thu, 04 Aug 2016 05:13:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Epistemology · Global Financial Crisis and Policies · History · Philosophy

• Prospects for a General Theory of International Relations

  Open Access•Arthur Lee Burns•World Politics•1961

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