Books by Nicolas Guilhot
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In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to... more In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic political theory, as part of the broader mobilization of social science during the Cold War. The Decisionist Imagination explores how “decisionism” emerged from its origins in prewar political science to become an object of intense scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscape of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates the connection between early twentieth-century conservative political theory and techno-scientific aspects of modern governance—helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today.
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After the Enlightenment is the first attempt at understanding modern political realism as a histo... more After the Enlightenment is the first attempt at understanding modern political realism as a historical phenomenon. Realism is not an eternal wisdom inherited from Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes, but a twentieth-century phenomenon rooted in the interwar years, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the transfer of ideas between Continental Europe and the United States. The book provides the first intellectual history of the rise of realism in America, as it informed policy and academic circles after 1945. It breaks through the narrow confines of the discipline of international relations and resituates realism within the crisis of American liberalism. Realism provided a new framework for foreign policy thinking and transformed the nature of American democracy. This book sheds light on the emergence of 'rational choice' as a new paradigm for political decision-making and speaks to the current revival in realism in international affairs.
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The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of s... more The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of scholars and practitioners debating the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, all of whom have struggled with this legacy, Nicolas Guilhot revisits a seminal event and its odd rejection of scientific rationalism.
Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.
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Has the international movement for democracy and human rights gone from being a weapon against po... more Has the international movement for democracy and human rights gone from being a weapon against power to part of the arsenal of power itself? The book explores this question and looks at how in the 1990s the U.S. government, the World Bank, political scientists, NGOs, think tanks, and various international organizations have appropriated the movement for democracy and human rights to export neoliberal policies throughout the world. It charts the various symbolic, ideological, and political meanings that have developed around human rights and democracy movements. It suggests that these shifting meanings reflect the transformation of a progressive, emancipatory movement into an industry, dominated by "experts," ensconced in positions of power.
The story begins in the 1950s when U.S. foreign policy experts promoted human rights and democracy as part of a "democratic international" to fight the spread of communism. Later, the unlikely convergence of anti-Stalinist leftists and the nascent neoconservative movement found a place in the Reagan administration. These "State Department Socialists," as they were known, created policies and organizations that provided financial and technical expertise to democratic movements, but also supported authoritarian, anti-communist regimes, particularly in Latin America.
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Papers by Nicolas Guilhot
Social Research: An International Quarterly
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After the Enlightenment
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After the Enlightenment
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Revue Francaise De Science Politique, Sep 1, 2000
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Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2015
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Review of International Studies, 2015
Beyond the initial infatuation with his work, Kuhn’sStructure of Scientific Revolutionshas had a ... more Beyond the initial infatuation with his work, Kuhn’sStructure of Scientific Revolutionshas had a lasting impact on the field of International Relations. The article analyses the reception of Kuhn in IR and suggests that it contributed to overcoming the ‘second debate’ by making science and realism fully compatible. More importantly, Kuhn offered a vision of science in which scientific communities operated on the basis of realist principles. This not only consolidated the academic hold of neorealism, but transformed realism into a theory of knowledge, which its critics have failed to acknowledge. This lasting transformation is analysed by looking at Kuhn’s influence on the classic studies of strategic decision-making by Graham Allison and Robert Jervis.
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Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2004
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Critique internationale, 2008
Between Legalism and Constructivism: Human Rights in American Foreign Policy The sociology of int... more Between Legalism and Constructivism: Human Rights in American Foreign Policy The sociology of international norms has often focused on human rights in order to illustrate the 'power of ideas' to inform policies: as the story goes, the successful institutionalization of human rights principles under the Carter administration forced the Reagan administration to adjust its policies to principles it could not uproot or use for purely legitimating purposes. The paper argues that these approaches ignore the disputed nature of political-legal concepts and the fact that their very definition is at stake in struggles between contending groups of actors seeking to use these concepts in order to legitimate different policy courses. Mapping out the field of producers of the human rights discourse in the late 1970s-early 1980s, both in their civil and governmental components, the paper shows that the concept of human rights can be construed in two different ways, each corresponding to specific social groups and policy interests: one that anchors human rights in the field of international law, promoted essentially by lawyers or activists connected with international organizations; the other turning it into an anti-juridical concept primarily concerned with political regimes and "democracy promotion," and elaborated by neoconservative policy makers.
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Mouvements, 2001
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Revista Política, 2011
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Agone, 2005
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Books by Nicolas Guilhot
Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.
The story begins in the 1950s when U.S. foreign policy experts promoted human rights and democracy as part of a "democratic international" to fight the spread of communism. Later, the unlikely convergence of anti-Stalinist leftists and the nascent neoconservative movement found a place in the Reagan administration. These "State Department Socialists," as they were known, created policies and organizations that provided financial and technical expertise to democratic movements, but also supported authoritarian, anti-communist regimes, particularly in Latin America.
Papers by Nicolas Guilhot
Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.
The story begins in the 1950s when U.S. foreign policy experts promoted human rights and democracy as part of a "democratic international" to fight the spread of communism. Later, the unlikely convergence of anti-Stalinist leftists and the nascent neoconservative movement found a place in the Reagan administration. These "State Department Socialists," as they were known, created policies and organizations that provided financial and technical expertise to democratic movements, but also supported authoritarian, anti-communist regimes, particularly in Latin America.