The International Political Economy of Risk: Rationalism, Calculation, and Power

By Robert Deuchars

The discipline of international political economy faces a number of critical challenges at present, as it seeks to incorporate a number of relatively new issues, one of these being "risk". This captivating and enlightening study redresses the neglect of "risk" in this field by focusing on objectivist rationalism. Highlighting some of the calculative practices rationalism makes possible, it demonstrates the deeply political nature of supposedly value-neutral technical pursuits such as accounting, auditing, the practice of statistics, sampling, and credit rating. All these practices are implicated in modernist forms of power and governance.

The volume draws on work from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political economy, and philosophy, to explain the apparent unravelling of the rationalist quest for more reliable forms of knowledge. It is highly suitable for courses on international relations/international political economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society for Philosophy & Culture
• Release date: Feb 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301462759

Book preview

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to those who have assisted me in completing this work. Professor Ralph Pettman gave me invaluable advice and was always available to discuss problems I had with the book, despite his own heavy workload. I am deeply indebted to Trevor Bradley for providing me with a wealth of material and for always being a constructive critic. I also thank Dr Kate Macmillan, Dr Kosuke Shimizu and Simon Liddell for their useful and constructive comments on early drafts of this book.

Part of this work was incorporated into an Honours paper and I am also grateful to my students for helping me to clarify much of my thinking. I am especially thankful to John Pennington, Alan Cockerill, Seth Bateman, Kinglsey Edney, Fergus Coyne, Sarah Duignan, Michelle Lake, Mary Hay, Jessica Edwards, Michael Appleton, Dave Broomhall, Nick Henry, Greer Harding, Leigh Mitchell and Matt Nippert.

And finally, and most importantly, I thank my parents, Bernadette O’Gorman and Mei O’Gorman, for their support and encouragement without which this work would not have been completed.

Robert Deuchars

2004

Preface

The project of which this book is the end result was brought about by a deep sense of suspicion and mistrust with one of my former jobs as a risk analyst and project risk manager. Suspicion that risk analysis was poorly understood and situated within a world-view that appeared to be imbued with abstraction, enumeration and the production of quantifiable facts. Mistrust in the world of quantitative models and the production of classifiable risks that had the appearance of objectivity and therein lay the problem, namely the introduction of objectivity into a subjective set of problematics. The purpose of what I attempt to say here is not to provide a history of risk and its associations with probability theory nor is it an attempt to provide definitive answers to the question of risk in modernity. Rather it is an attempt to highlight some major omissions in the field of International Political Economy in general and to clear the way for future research in an area that probably should have a degree of centrality in this field.

To that end I have had to step well beyond the boundaries of International Relations in general and International Political Economy in particular. I have scurried around many other disciplines looking for clues into the way risk presents itself to western modernity. I discovered many fruitful avenues in areas such as criminology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics and sociology. Perhaps more interestingly, fields such as accounting and auditing, credit-rating, statistics and insuring yielded many insights into the way we confront risk and attempt to regularise what is after all, as I argue, an article of faith. Risks are not real in any meaningful sense of the word but they do become real. Consider a very simple example. Deep vein thrombosis has been with us since long distance high altitude flight but only in the past few years has it become well-known as a risk. There is a political economy of this phenomenon known as economy class syndrome. You can now pop into your local pharmacy and purchase specially designed arm and leg covers to protect you from this risk. The phenomenon has also become entangled with insuring and politicised with airlines being lobbied to provide better quality information to passengers, not to mention legroom for this risk.

This book attempts to traverse various narratives of risk, taking as its departure point the Italian Renaissance in general and the work of Machiavelli in particular. The confrontation between Fortuna and virtù highlighted in the Prince in particular served as a very useful vehicle into what is undoubtedly a vast field of inquiry. I then tell many stories about risk in western modernity, its associations with the ideology of rationalism, enumeration, various calculative practices and the relationship between risk and power/knowledge to borrow Foucault’s term. In the second half of the book I focus on narratives of risk and governance in the international financial arena but always sidestepping along the way into state-making, market-making and self-making. Risk as a field of enquiry necessitates these forages into the three major dimensions to contemporary world affairs. If this book resonates with those equally suspicious and mistrustful of what we think we know about risk then it will have served its purpose. I am especially grateful to Professor Ralph Pettman for convincing me that this book should and could be written in the way it was.

Introduction

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has long concerned itself with questions about war and peace, diplomacy and alliances. For many years its primary focus was exclusively on the relations between states, as these stand in an anarchic states-system. As a discipline it was dominated by politico-strategic realism.

Analysts of International Political Economy (IPE), on the other hand, tend to consider the interaction between international politics and international economics and the implications of this interaction for global power and wealth. Their primary foci are issues such as trade, production, investment, labour and economic strategy. As a discipline IPE is dominated by politico-economic realism.[1]

Much of the work in IPE treats the global political economy as a series of interactions between states and markets, cast in abstract and reified terms. Questions about power tend to be treated in an abstract and reified way as well. There also appears to be a tacit acceptance to consider questions of power in the world political economy in terms of a capacity model. For traditional IR this means military power, productive power, and to a lesser extent ideological power. In IPE, however, this means state power versus the power of the firm in general, and transnational firms in particular. Many questions are asked about where this power is located, and if this power is being lost by the state to the firm. Rather less emphasis is placed on human practices, though, and even less on the social implications of these practices. Despite talk of an international civil society, this continues to be characterised as a society of nation-states or as a global village (to which we are all supposed to belong).

There are a number of challenging questions for IR/IPE scholars that are not confined to discussions about the state and the market, however. One of these questions is that of risk.

There has been a curious inattentiveness to the question of risk in the discipline of international relations. This work is an attempt to highlight this neglect, to contribute to an international political economy of risk, and to provide a more comprehensive understanding of what is one of the central features of western modernity.

Western modernity is the politico-cultural context for much of world affairs. The most powerful component of this context is the ideology known as rationalism.

Risk can be viewed as part of the modernist project’s attempt to regularise uncertainty. Using rationalistic methods and techniques, proponents of this project attempt to replace uncertainty, wherever possible, with risk, thereby making the world more certain, controllable, and governable. The results have been decidedly mixed, however. There have been both startling successes and miserable failures.

We find ourselves at a point in time where we are unsure whether the project has reached its limits or not. There are those who remain fully committed to the project and there are those who would have us abandon it altogether. Those still committed to the modernist project view it as perhaps not ideal, but as preferable to the alternatives. Those who see the project as fundamentally flawed would have us look for other ways of knowing and being.

At this point risk and uncertainty come into play. As human beings we seem to prefer our lives to be predictable. Risk appears paradoxically to provide us with a feeling of comfort, in that it prompts us to arrive at rationally derived solutions to the uncertain situations it represents. Uncertainty is also a concept that we can take comfort in, though only if we to learn to live with uncertainty, rather than attempt to eliminate it.

This book is in four parts. In the first part I look at premodernist precursors to the modernist concept of risk and risk practices locating the premodernist antecedents to risk in the Italian Renaissance and attributing them to the Italian humanistae. This is the point of departure for my attempt to explain the context in which modernist attempts at risk management first appeared. The Renaissance, and the following Cartesian transition, were pivotal moments in the advent of western modernity. This is when the ideology of objectivist rationalism took hold in western Europe. It is when a number of practices began to arise that helped embed rationalism as the preferred way of knowing the world, and of manipulating that world, for politico-strategic, politico-economic and politico-social purposes.

The opening chapter is an attempt to examine the competing themes of Fortuna and virtù. It describes the beginnings of an ontological shift in the cosmology of the time. This would culminate in Descartes’ revolutionary mind-move, and would set western Europe, and subsequently much of the world, onto the rationalist path. The consequences have been revolutionary indeed. We begin to see the steady erosion of the influence of Fortuna and the eventual triumph of what we now call virtue, although as I note throughout this book conceptions of the idea of fate are still very much with us, including those people who consider themselves to be protectors of objective ways of knowing.

I examine the work of Machiavelli in particular, whose writings give us a glimpse of a world in which calculations about risk are becoming increasingly significant, to permeate ultimately nearly every aspect of our material lives, from the world of high finance, managerialism in a the broadest sense of the word, to the act of making a simple purchase. In other words risk has become implicated in nearly all aspects of thinking about International Relations in general and contemporary International Political Economy in particular. Machiavelli is always a difficult writer to utilise for any scholarly enterprise given the level of disagreement amongst those who see what they want to in his writings. This author is no different in this regard so I would expect considerable contestation of my own interpretation of Machiavelli. I leave the reader to decide if my Machiavelli has tricked me.[2]

In the second chapter I highlight two particular and interrelated modes of governance that I believe to be of fundamental importance to the rise and consolidation of modernist capitalist practices in general especially to the rise of objectivist rationalism in particular. I refer here to insurance and statistics, which I argue are direct manifestations of the rise of rationalism in western modernity. Although not generally considered to be of great importance when compared, say, to technological improvements in machines, the practices of accounting and insuring, and of statistical thinking in general, were absolutely essential for the success of early capitalism. They became even more important when the logic of liberalist thinking was combined with increasingly sophisticated mathematical techniques to put business enterprises on a more sound and objective footing.

Chapter Three continues with this success story. It moves away from the particular modes of governance discussed in the previous chapter, however, towards a discussion of the construction of governance in general. It explores the relationship between contemporary forms of governance and risk. Notions of risk are deeply implicated in the all modes of modernist governance, both state and non-state. They render people more governable. Thus O’Malley argues that ‘risk has been a rationality of government incorporating diverse technical and moral configurations.’[3] The primary focus of the chapter is on the forms of governance premised on risk type thinking. Here I use the notion of governmentality, first introduced by Foucault in his analysis of the changes in the mode of governing of the modernist nation-state, to account for the shift from a sovereign model of state power towards a notably more diffuse one, that is disciplinary and confessional. I extend this argument to cover non-state forms of governance, and the use of practices such as accounting, sampling, credit-rating, and database creation (that is, the collection and analysis of objective data on people and institutions) to enable governance to be made economic. These are all forms of governance that see people as calculating and as calculable, using techniques and programmes designed to make people governable in a myriad different settings, and in a myriad different ways.

In part two of the book the tone changes as I attempt to explain the breakdown of what I term the reliability revolution in the light of theoretical observations on risk by those who practice a number of other disciplines. International political economy does not theorise risk in any meaningful way. Although there is clearly an international political economy of risk today there is no systematic theory on which to base any discussion of or research into the risk problematic. As a consequence IPE scholars have to take a transdisciplinary approach and bring to bear the valuable work from other fields of knowledge. I choose to focus here mostly on sociological and anthropological research. It is these disciplines that have the most sophisticated theories regarding modernist notions of risk and the most lively debates as to the significance of risk for the contemporary world. This is work that all IR/IPE scholars would do well to consider.

The book contains three case studies. A vast number of cases could have been selected but I chose to focus on as aspect of IPE that was most congruent with the central themes of this book. The first of these cases examines one institution and its specific discourse on risk, calculation and power. I critically examine the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the relationship between its discourse and the consequent power/knowledge nexus. I attempt to show how IMF truth statements reflect this nexus, adopting a Foucauldian standpoint to do so. I choose the IMF in particular, and the international financial system in general, in an attempt to highlight the highly technical, jargonised, and reified nature of this discourse and to reveal the way the truths it claims to articulate are, firstly, contestable, and secondly, a form of power.[4]

The second case looks at accounting and other such calculative practices in an attempt to demonstrate their pervasive nature, their subtlety, and the way they are not usually considered as a form of power. Accounting and calculative practices are re-visited to provide a more detailed account of their contemporary significance. Accounting language and practice still remain largely immune from sustained critique, despite their affiliation with ideologies such as neo-liberalism, and despite the fact that accounting and other such calculative practices are arguably the most powerful of the dialects of modernist rationalism. In the process I examine IMF documentation, and in particular those documents concerned with the Asian Crisis and its aftermath, to show how the discourse of accounting is deeply implicated in sustaining the power structures of the international financial system, whilst marginalising in the process alternative discourses and alternative paths to prosperity and peace.

The third and final case study examines the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which is currently stalled, but will likely resurface in due course, as it is part and parcel of the process of global liberalisation. This agreement is a highly ambitious attempt to regulate global investment. I try and show how deeply asymmetrical the proposed treaty is, by comparing the rights and risks it apportions to the public and private spheres. In very basic terms it is a massive exercise in risk transfer. I argue that such an agreement is not only flawed, but would serve the interests of transnational capitalists at the expense of ordinary people in most, if not all, societies.

The fourth and final part of the book attempts to place risk in a larger context by highlighting some of the limits of this particular form of rationalism. In the process I re-visit the work of Ulrich Beck and critique his theoretical contribution to the subject. I argue for a wider recognition of the International Political Economy of risk and for the study of risk to be incorporated more explicitly into IR/IPE. Such a study would not only highlight a neglected aspect of the discipline. It would also contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of IR/IPE, fostering the attempt to understand the effects of the world polity and economy on people in their concrete everyday existence, on their sense of themselves, and on their relations with others.

Part One: Pre-Modernist Precursors and Modernist Practices

Chapter 1: Narratives of Risk: Fortuna and Virtù

…it is not always easy to begin at the beginning, if only because the identification of a point of origin depends on where we think we are now.[5]

Introduction

In the pre-modernist western European world, prudence or practical reason was generally not privileged much in philosophical debate or in everyday conversation. These concepts were certainly debated and discussed but almost always within a framework of thinking that necessarily included the concept of fortune.[6] Suffice to say that fate and divine providence were the governing motifs in explanations of good or bad outcomes.[7] It is safe to say that by medieval times Christian notions of the will of God had been successfully merged with the memory of Greek and Roman deities, including those concerning luck, chance and what we would today describe as risk.[8]

The purpose of this chapter is to explore what might be described as a significant turning point in Western thought. During the Renaissance and subsequent to it there was a revolution in the European outlook as the temporal power of the Christian Church diminished. I will characterise this change as an ontological re-orientation in that the common sense of the era was to undergo significant transformation. In Europe the existing social ontology, dominated by the Church, had fixed notions of, for example, time and nature. The leading Church universities articulated these perspectives and used their position as the owners of official knowledge to maintain their power over the lay population.

Renaissance ideas were to lay the foundations for a substantive change in the social ontology of Europe that subsequently would firmly take hold as a consequence of attacks on religious orthodoxy, the advent of scientific discovery and a reconfigured attitude to what knowledge was, how knowledge was acquired and what its fundamental purpose should be. The outcomes of this shift in thinking may be characterised as a view of the universe fundamentally different from that of a cosmos created and wholly controlled by God. It marked a shift towards chaos inhabited by humans. Thinkers of this era were becoming aware of a new belief in their own power to intervene, powers over nature and over others, powers allowing them to secure, at least in theory, a more predictable future. Their ideas, over time, would infiltrate all aspects of human life in Europe and beyond.

The idea that man could substantively construct his own future, based not on a single plan laid down by God or by the submission to chance (Fortuna), emerged as a significant force during the Renaissance period. This period marked the beginnings of a world-view that objectified the universe, subjecting it, firstly, to philosophical subjugation, and secondly, to temporal and spatial conquest. Both of these aspirations were to be achieved through human endeavour.

In order to introduce and elaborate upon what I consider to be the emergence of a substantive shift in the human relationship to time, nature and human agency I will consider some examples of the recognition of the human ability to influence the future in the work of Niccolò Machiavelli and his contemporaries. In doing so I will elaborate upon the themes that this work explores. The first of these themes is human reason as problem solving – the essence of the rationalism that would come to dominate Enlightenment thinking. The other major theme is that of control, i.e. human control over others and over nature, which is closely connected to the belief in the predictability of future outcomes. In Machiavelli’s time these themes were explored within a framework of other competing themes. These other themes were that of virtù or the belief in the possibilities of action against the idea of fortuna, or chance. The long and steady erosion of chance paved the way for a more predictable and governable world.

The coupling of predictability and control was highly significant for the creation and the securing of wealth and was also arguably essential for the development of capitalism on a large scale, the classic examples being the maritime risk-takers, whose adventures, made them popular European heroes. It must also be noted here, that although a significant change in the European outlook did take place during this period, the full reasons are not well understood, and in all likelihood, will continue to remain the subject of competing attempts at explanation and understanding.

For the purpose of completeness, I will conclude this chapter with a short section on the departure point chosen by many for the investigation of western modernity and its leitmotif of rationalism, namely René Descartes. Descartes is quite rightly considered as the thinker in western philosophy that acted as the philosophical bridge between nascent modernity in the Italian humanist movement and Western modernity proper. The Renaissance can also be considered as the bridge that made a Descartes possible.

The Renaissance Context

It is fair to state that the Renaissance is considered to be one of the most explored periods in Western European history. Equally true is the level of disagreement as to the actual significance of this era for modernity.

Renaissance in translation means rebirth so we must ask to what extent was this period significantly different from the Middle Ages, or dark ages, as they are sometimes referred to. There is considerable debate as to whether the Renaissance was a fast break with the past or simply an extension of the late medieval period.[9] Whatever the case, the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism came to the fore, firstly in Italy from whence it spread to other parts of Europe as Italian scholars travelled abroad and as the scholars of other countries visited Italy to seek out and copy its texts and the new topics and methods of teaching.

According to Peter Burke, humanism is a term that cannot be precisely defined. It tends to be used in two distinct ways. The first refers to the belief in the dignity of man and a concern with secular issues. The second and narrower usage refers to ‘[t]he men known in fifteenth century Italy as humanistae, in other words the teachers of the studia humanitatis or humanity (as opposed to divinity), generally defined to include grammar, rhetoric, ethics, poetry and history.’[10] The humanists attracted considerable interest from abroad, very slowly at first, as there was a considerable degree of resistance as well as favourable reception to this new work, that stood so opposed to that of the northern European educational institutions, and to the established and rather fixed European cosmology.

It would appear obvious that the rediscovery of some texts from antiquity and their dissemination amongst a very narrow segment of the population cannot account for a whole movement. There is ample evidence that the medieval period was not devoid of awareness of classical texts, either.[11] Humanism was not simply a concern with classical literature. To understand it better we need to place it within its social and political context.

By the mid thirteenth century Italian city republics had been in existence for around one hundred and fifty years, in the case of Venice even longer. Their influence was not widespread outside these politico-social arrangements that were quite specific to Italy. These arrangements included communes, republican institutions and notions of the common good, distributive justice and the theory of the mixed constitution. It is for these reasons, Rubinstein argues, that the positive reception of Aristotle’s Politics at the time was a peculiarly Italian affair.[12]

The Italian republics shared some of the characteristics of the Greek civilization, or at least the interpreters of Aristotle, such as Aquinas, could find enough commonality between Aristotle and his own time for the Politics to be regarded as politically relevant and to be used to justify idealised modes of governance in the city republics. Some interpreters took Aristotle as justification for monarchical rule. Others used the same work to justify republican rule.

Along with the rediscovery of Greek texts, the Roman influence on early Renaissance thought was particularly apposite for the city based republics whose members identified their origins with the civic community of the Roman republic, not in terms of the Roman Empire but in terms of the idea of the city and its citizens. It should be noted that Italy during the time of the Renaissance was dominated by a number of principalities and petty tyrannies. Papal authority was influential but not completely hegemonic. The Italian city-states were also under constant threat from more powerful neighbours.

Luce Giard argues that whilst the universities did play a role in reconfiguring Renaissance culture the revival of the idea of the individual as a citizen was much more influential. The re-emergence of the citizen, he argues, helped to build the foundations for a vigorous civil society which managed to free itself partly from the bonds of the Church dominated universities and helped to constitute a larger lay intelligentsia, aided by the spread of printing and the practice of informal public gatherings.[13] In simple terms, the idea of the citizen had to be inculcated into people. It did not fall from the sky. People had to learn firstly what it meant to be a citizen, how citizens behave and what the limits of citizenship mean. In other words people had to be trained to be citizens and if we accept Giard’s assertions then we cannot overlook the considerations of power that a reconfiguration of this new individual invoked.

Jacob Burckhardt’s much criticised but highly influential book the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has been central to the debate on the discovery or re-discovery of the individual. There are many examples to be found in antiquity that place the problem of the knowledge of man at the centre of philosophical inquiry and we should not imagine that the individual and his place in the world is a discovery peculiar to the Renaissance. It is fair to say that the humanist scholars of the Renaissance placed a greater emphasis on the nature of human beings as individuals than as members of the group, possessing themselves a more distinct inner sense of self than their medieval predecessors, had.

Burckhardt’s thesis is basically that prior to the Renaissance in Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, man was essentially unaware of himself as an individual. Medieval conceptions of man always placed him into some other order, whether that be of family, faith or community.[14] Burckhardt argued that the originality of the Italians was that they freed man from the closed world of the dark ages and he notes that once this had been achieved, ‘the Italian mind ... turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and form.’[15]

In their discussion of Burckhardt’s thesis, Kerrigan and Braden focus on the importance of the apparent, but perhaps dim awareness of the power of objectification. They suggest that Burckhardt’s thesis has a double significance. Firstly, that in order to view the world as an external object means breaking with tradition and medieval conceptions of man and the universe and secondly, that the realisation of the external world as something that lies outside man encourages introspection and a concern with the self as a distinct object of inquiry in its own right. Thus they note:

Burckhardt seems to have overestimated the extent to which the Renaissance actually contributed ... to modern scientific methodology; but his interest is not with achieved knowledge as such but with the psychic reflex to the effort of objectification, which does not straiten the subjective but clarifies it. To become conscious of the empty space between ourselves and external reality is to become newly conscious of the self as its own world, something separate from that reality. Detachment fosters a sense of particularized identity.[16]

Kristeller supports this distinction between involvement and detachment but he suggests that the current of individuality in the Renaissance was not so clear cut. According to Kristeller the notion of man and his natural dignity was overemphasised by some Renaissance thinkers. Kristeller argues against the elevation of blind acceptance of the cheap and easy solution, being the centrality of man in the universe. He finds it quite appropriate instead to consider that opposing currents would be prevalent during the Renaissance as they were prior to the Renaissance and as they are today. Thus he notes:

The notion that man occupies an exalted place in the universe, and the opposite idea that he is a small and powerless creature at the mercy of far stronger divine, natural, or historical forces, are not only contrary to each other but also complementary.[17]

Kristeller’s argument reminds us that it is overly simplistic to assume that particular ideas completely dominate any period of time and that it is somewhat naive to make blanket assumptions when attempting to explain historical change. There are always opposing and divergent currents of thought circulating in academic and popular discourse as well as contradictory statements and positions taken up by thinkers of the times.[18] The Renaissance was no exception in this regard. It is convenient but not necessarily accurate to ascribe particular characteristics to any period that is given a label, such as the Renaissance. These labels help us distinguish what we think makes a particular period in time differ from the one that precedes it and that which follows, but we should be suspicious of these labels. This note of caution should not be mistaken for the notion of some kind of unbroken continuity, linking the present with the past, however.[19]

It would appear that Burckhardt understood this complexity and that he did not view medieval times with ignorance. He was, in fact, well versed in medieval scholarship and did not dismiss its intellectual contribution to the Renaissance as some of his critics subsequently claimed. Burckhardt’s project was not, according to Baron, a search ‘[f]or the roots of a gradual evolution toward the modern world... [I]t was instead a search] for the first appearance of a clearly modern pattern of culture and thought within the framework of a modern state and for the emergence of the psychological and intellectual characteristics of modern man.’[20]

One could continue almost endlessly with an attempt to contextualise the Renaissance and its contribution to modernity, but that would seem to be a fruitless exercise. A number of points do seem to be clear. Firstly, we can be sure that the Renaissance that began in Italy did indeed have a major impact on Western European culture and that although the Renaissance may not have been as markedly different from medieval times as is commonly assumed, this period of opening and the questioning of the authority of the Church that went with it, had far reaching implications. Secondly, we can also be sure that Italy during the Renaissance was looked upon as being different by other Europeans, who took an active interest in Italian ways of learning and knowing. Thirdly, we can also be sure that as Peter Burke points out, ‘[T]here is nothing wrong in talking about the spread of Italian humanism, provided that we remember that this term is a metaphor; or in describing or even mapping its uneven penetration of the different parts of Europe ... What would be a mistake would be to assume that the package of concepts, methods and values we now call humanism was accepted or rejected as a whole.’[21]

Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine political strategist, was certainly not one of the first thinkers and activists to advocate the new type of thinking, noted above, but he is certainly the most well known. As Eugene Garver has pointed out;

Machiavelli occupies a position in the history of prudence or practical reason roughly analogous to that of Descartes in the history of theoretical reason and reflection on natural science … Machiavelli teaches his reader that only those defenses are secure and trustworthy which depend on one’s own strength and virtù, and offers a method for achieving that kind of independence and building secure foundations for political rule.[22]

The watchwords here are self and virtù. Although there is some considerable debate over virtù, as Machiavelli used the term, it is clear that Machiavelli stresses the importance of independent thought and action, self-reliance and responsibility. These were novel concepts applied to what Machiavelli understood to be the political realm. Garver argues that Machiavelli represents a turning towards individual autonomy, although Garver himself is unsure whether or not this is a blessing or a curse. What he does highlight though, is that the world that Machiavelli makes visible for us is full of complexity, thus exposing the need not to rely overtly on past examples, but to solve each problem using reason. Machiavelli warns against too much reliance on tradition as a guide to future action. This is one of the central themes of his work. His historical method did not, however, neglect the past. Machiavelli specifically used the past, not in some idealised form, to guide action, to build a coherent picture of how outcomes had actually been shaped. He used this information to determine action aimed at the future.

Machiavelli is most famous for being the author of The Prince, which is one of the defining texts of the study of International Relations as statecraft. This particular work is most often claimed by realists as being a vindication of the unchanging, perennial nature of rulers and ruled, of the primacy of power politics in international affairs and of the application of practical reason to political problems. Machiavelli however, was not writing in a world of sovereign nation-states existing in a state of international anarchy. His primary interest was with the city-state and the problems of state formation. That his ideas and writings have been appropriated for other ends is not the focus of this chapter, however it should be noted that Machiavelli wrote in the humanist style of his day and that The Prince contains as many elements establishing a stable and viable political community based on the principle of civic virtù, as it does of supposedly hard-nosed realism.[23]

In the latter chapters of The Prince Machiavelli adopts an