Exclusive ideological focus trades off with essential material and policy realities.

In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.

Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent ‘re-discovery of the material’ associated with various self-styled ‘new materialists’ is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.

A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt’s main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader’s surprise, the material, in the form of ‘common fate’ produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.

My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These ‘unlikes’ are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.

But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call ‘practical naturalism’—human social agency is understood to be occurring ‘between two natures’: on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of ‘natural needs,’ most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various ‘historical materialist’ propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of ‘what is to be done’ given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on ‘deconstructing’ various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a ‘constructive constructivism’. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated.