Absent a practice of sustainable critique, emancipatory criticism of international relations oversimplifies the world and falls to unchecked reification.

The concept of reification, central to this project, requires some additional elucidation before the path to sustainable critique can be cleared. Social sciences describe human-constructed realities through analogies, whose artificiality is progressively naturalized—lost to intellectual understanding and theoretical consideration—until they come finally to appear “as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will.” 50 Different moments in theorizing, as chapters 3 through 5 show, set out to undo or criticize an existing theoretical or political common sense, combining long-standing fact-value traditions (captured in IR by the traditions of realism, liberalism, and the like but drawn from normative political-theory traditions of much older vintage) with particular methodological approaches to produce paradigmatic research programs. Each does so by positing its own particular reifications in distinction to others; over time, these, too, are lost to intellectual understanding and theoretical consideration. Assumptions that emerged in dynamic interaction with and in response to a changing political and scholarly reality take on the qualities of received wisdom. They thus come to be conflated with the world they were meant to describe—“merge[d] with the world of nature,” as Berger and Luckmann put it, equated with things-in-themselves that cannot disclose themselves otherwise. 51 Th e term reifi cation itself has a complicated heritage. Its usage here derives from Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism and from the subsequent work of Hungarian Marxist theorist Georg Luk á cs. 52 Yet as Gillian Rose has observed, the term has “no canonical source, and has become prominent and debased as much by insinuation as by scrupulous examination.” 53 Certainly, contemporary social-scientifi c and social-theoretic usages vary widely. Deployed loosely, it oft en appears as a synonym for a class of logical confl ations akin to Alfred North Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” 54 Yet that looseness, Timothy Bewes has recently noted, has an ironic eff ect: it renders the term “susceptible to the problem it denotes”; reifi cation takes on precisely the sort of pseudoscientifi c agency that its promulgators ostensibly meant to critique. 55 Here, reification is construed as a highly particular kind of forgetting: of the distinction between theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer. 56 All theory—including this one—relies to some degree on such forgetting, as it inheres in the particular ways in which the former can, and cannot, adequately describe the latter. Yet that forgetting has a distinctive chain of potential analytical and normative effects. The sanctity of sentient life is frequently an unintended casualty of it; left to its own devices, reification “thingifies” sentient beings, blurring the moral separations traditionally made between them and inanimate objects. Th e same intellectual process that transforms a stand of trees into lumber or a hilltop into coal—that is, transforms them into fungible commodities or factors in economic production—can transform human beings as well: men and women become labor in economic terms or force assets in military-strategic ones. Th e “instruments or means of thought,” initially meant to pave the road to human betterment, thereby “become independent of the purpose of thought.” 57 This process of forgetting has distinctive consequences for IR, given the vocation earlier described for it. Theory’s reliance on reification suggests that theorists are not merely describing the world when they fit complex events into paradigmatic research traditions. Rather, they are redacting it. As King, Keohane, and Verba observe: Even the most comprehensive description done by the best cultural interpreters with the most detailed contextual understanding will drastically simplify, reify, and reduce the reality that has been observed. . . . No description, no matter how thick . . . comes close to capturing the full “blooming and buzzing” reality of the world. 58 Given the proximity of IR’s policy analyses to the use of extreme and deadly force, this reliance upon “drastic simplification and reduction” presents a dilemma. 59 Without it, there would be no hope of creating practical knowledge, no hope of intelligently stewarding a world that presents real and abiding challenges. 60 Yet with it, one risks naturalizing the ontological assumptions of particular fact-value traditions and their derived scholarly research programs, such that these take on an “objective” imprimatur. Theory, it would seem, can live neither with reifi cation nor without it. Some mode of managing or checking its effects must therefore be found, if IR’s historic vocation is to be made good upon.