Read the summary and the most important questions on The Problem of Community in International Relations | Linklater

• 1 The Problem of Community in the Modern States System

• What was the aim of states  who set out to emply the notion of a wider society of states for the explicit purpose of maintaining internaitonal order?

  Its aim was to enjoy the benefits of preserving an international society without incurring the risk that individual citizens would challenge the state's legitimacy by proclaiming their allegiance to a higher cosmopolitan ethic

• Which types of questions have been central to the Western theory and practice of international relations since the emergence of the states system?

  The philosophical, the practical, and the sociological. 

• What have the recurrent philosophical questions in modern international relations theory have been concerned with?

  The grounds for conferring primacy upon any one of three competing visions of community - the nation-state, the society of states, or a community of humankind. 

• What kind of questions have merged in conjucture with the questions (from the previous question) of morality and obligation?

  Practical foreign policy questions

• What does the sociological type of questions have dealt with?

  With the question whether or not the state's capacity to attract human loyalty and structure political identity seems likely to change in a significant respect. 

• What can the development of a critical theory of international relations accomplish?  

  It can connect normative, empirical, and practical analyses of moral inclusion and exclusion, so it can restore coherence to the study of international relations by assembling the most powerful strands of argument within competing approaches to the discipline into a more systematic comprehensive whole. 

• 2 Kant and Marx

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• To who can the earlier discussed three-layered project be linked?

  To Kant and his approach to international relations, which contained a universal ethic (the defense of the categorical imperative), a sociology of logics of development (the analysis of the transformative effect s of the rise of republicanism and the evolution of international commercial relations), and the prolegomenion to a new international political practice (the conceptualization of the maxims of an ethical foreign policy that would extend international commnuity). 

• What does the form of the research framework mirror?

  The project of historical materialism, with its normative vision of a universal society of free and equal producers; its explanatory framework, which maintained that the internationalization of capitalist social relations of production and exchange would destroy the constraints upon the emergence of a cosmopolitan community; and its belief that, at the level of praxis, proletarian internationalism (assisted by the political efforts of progressive national movements) would realize the higher possiblity immanent within capitalist civilization. 

   

• Why can't Kant provide more than a illustration or inspiration in the present context?

  Because Kantian ethics are vulnerable to the charge of ahiistoricism. Kant's rudimentary sociology of logics of development in world society reflects the concerns of another era, as does his discussion of the prerequisite of an ethical foreign policy. 

   

• Why can't Marx or Marxism provide more than an illustration or inspiration in the present context?

  Because the contention that historical materialism provides the starting point for an emancipatory politics - nothing more and nothing less - pinpoints some of the problems that have yet to be solved by a critical theory of internaitonal relations. The most imoprtant of these if how to construct a post-Marxist critical theory that takes into account the unyielding (onverzettelijke) qualities of the international system of states.