Reject narrow and paradigm-driven approaches to international relations – you should prefer the perm as an epistemically humble theorizing of social science.

As noted, the six arguments for pluralism reviewed in the first part of section one are not simply to be dismissed. Narrow readings of scientific knowledge do, as Jackson and Nexon argue, exclude the world’s full diversity from theoretical characterization and impoverish scholarly debate. Analytical eclecticists and bridging-the-gap pluralists, for their part, are not wrong in observing that paradigm and methods-driven work can lead to insularity and scholasticism. Meanwhile, the deeply technical nature of late-industrial modernity does necessitate an uneasily negotiated balance among phronesis, techne, and episteme—which, in turn, sometimes necessitates the kind of vigorous argument to which Socratic-belief pluralists hold. Finally, reflexivists are correct to underscore the ways in which power dynamics work inside the academy no less than outside of it. Yet these arguments on behalf of pluralism are disparate pieces of a larger story. They can be woven together, we suggest, by taking the line that pluralism necessarily entails skepticism in epistemological terms. From this perspective, what has been missing thus far has been proper attention to what pluralism works against: the idea that truths about politics can somehow transcend politics, and that the “right” theory or conceptual schema can lead us to them. Rather than a response to institutional or structural narrowness—to be solved by greater plurality—the call to pluralism responds to a tendency to forget that social-scientific concepts extrapolate from a world they can never fully capture, and then to conflate the former with the latter. This tendency to forget—known as reification—inheres in the very nature of thinking itself. As such, it demands explicit attention and remediation. On this account, pluralism matters because—when properly understood—it combats this reifying tendency: it “rearranges our thinking.” The scientific desire to make sense of things must be balanced against an acceptance of the fact that we live in a world that overflows neat conceptual definitions and categorical divisions; in which “everything is related to everything else.” 66 Yet, at the same time, we must still act in and on that world. In order to answer the practical question what do we do, we must compare situations facing us with others that are similar but not identical. We must be willing to toy with ideas, identify patterns, change perspectives, reason by analogy, and think from case to case, even as we recall the inherently provisional nature of such work. The remaining challenge is threefold. First, we must lay out the broader political and historical context that gave rise to the systematic study of world politics. The tools and ideals of IR—the idea of using theoretical knowledge to produce leverage over events in world politics—did not emerge from nowhere. They were born from a belief that the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century were indicative of a general condition of crisis in late modern politics, one that had become universal in scale and open-ended in time. Scientific intervention in world politics was born not out of idle Humean curiosity, but out of fear: a response to “the crater,” as Karl Mannheim put it, “which is yawning beneath our western society.” 67 Second, we must show that the wish to use theory to transcend or control politics nevertheless cannot succeed; that it actually perpetuates the crisis it was meant to resolve. This second point has less to do with what individual scholars intend, and more to do with delineating what thinking does: the way theories work in the mind, the peculiar combination of reified knowing and forgetting they suborn. Third, we must show how pluralism—understood as entailing epistemological skepticism—can be mobilized to combat such knowing and forgetting. Each of these points will be taken in turn.