The first time I was directly exposed to a consequential theoretical debate in the academic context of a social science discipline, came last year when the Keynes/Hayek debate was highlighted in an international political economy course I was taking. Economics is largely thought of as one of the most scientific of social sciences, a fact that was even mentioned in one of Dr. Crawford’s lectures when comparing economic theories to those of IR and elaborating how economic theories tend to, at least, present and test certain laws while claims purporting the existence of such straightforward rules of behavior remain largely absent and/or unattainable in IR-related settings. Even though economics has enjoyed a scientifically privileged status compared to other social sciences and given that the Keynes/Hayek debate virtually took place within a single economic paradigm i.e. liberalism, it, nonetheless, revealed very crucial points of divergence between the two theorists regarding how they thought about and envisioned their field of inquiry which were never fully resolved and remain as relevant today as the time of their inception. These issues were perhaps most fittingly embodied in Hayek’s Nobel prize lecture in 1974 where he presented the concept of an exiting “pretense of knowledge” among most influential economic theorists of his time and more broadly the contemporary academic field as a whole. He tried to elaborate on a theme similar to what was underscored in the introduction segment of our course i.e. the assumption of naturalism which has informed and shaped theoretical formulations in many academic fields of social science i.e. the attempt to emulate or replicate the success story, e.g. in a Newtonian sense, of natural sciences in other not so related academic fields which deal with individual human beings and societies, i.e. not solely rational entities, as their main subject of study and inquiry. To recall from one of our course lectures an endeavor which virtually amounts to an elusive quest for securing “the functional equivalent of a geology of IR”.
In any case, my intention in the last paragraph was to explain why I was drawn to this course on international relations theories and how I was first exposed to and discovered such an interest in theoretical foundations of social sciences. I have to admit, to my delight the course so far has proven to be broadly concerned with tackling critical questions which I was preoccupied with myself i.e. not just the theoretical claims of each school of thought falling within the field of IR but their epistemological roots and underpinnings and how underlying presuppositions might have a bearing on corresponding theories or more broadly the fields of inquiry which encompass them.