Kaplan’s System and Process

In this note Wight critically analyses Morton Kaplan’s System and Process in International Politics. While ‘positivist theorists’ aspiring to scientific rigour have belittled philosophical works on topics such as the just war or natural law as ‘tautologous or platitudinous’, these theorists have themselves constructed ‘new edifices of tautology and platitude’. Kaplan, for example, restates ‘simple and obvious truths, in the impressive special language of his theory’. Wight lists other shortcomings. Kaplan’s ‘historical limitedness’ reflects his ‘small range of historical reference’. Kaplan’s reliance on the abstractions of game theory leads to ‘the unintentional effect’ of ‘trivialization’ of ‘the awful issues of peace and war’. Furthermore, Kaplan’s ‘analytical jargon atomises and disintegrates reality’, and this results in ‘dehumanization’ and ‘hypostatization’ of the abstractions. Finally, ‘Objectivity becomes moral neutrality’, with ‘moral content … drained off, and then added again to the stew in pinches of recognition as “parameters” or “values”’.