Collective intentionality, complex pluralism and the problem of anarchy
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088217715789 |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| Author | Alex Prichard |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217715789
Journal of International Political Theory
2017, Vol. 13(3) 360 –377
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217715789
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Collective intentionality,
complex pluralism and the
problem of anarchy
Alex Prichard
University of Exeter
Abstract
In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of collective intentionality force us to
think about anarchy in new and challenging ways. In the years since Wendt declared the
state a person, the collective intentionality of groups has become the focus of important
scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. But this literature will not sit easily
with mainstream International Relations for two reasons. First, contemporary theories of
collective intentionality are difficult to square with the idea that the personified state is an
intentional agent, with first-person plural self-awareness and moral obligations. However,
by contrast, the same theories make it eminently plausible for all sorts of other groups
to be intentional, agential, moral persons and can tell us how states are constructed. In
short, this set of theories radically pluralises and transforms standard political ontology
while also accounting for common misperceptions. I push these insights further to argue
that radical pluralisation suggests that anarchy may be the structural context for politics
as such. What we know from mainstream International Relations theory is that politics
without an orderer is well-ordered regardless. It may be time to recast these insights in
order to demonstrate how complex pluralism is not chaos but anarchy.
Keywords
Anarchy, collective intentionality, ontology, pluralism, social theory, state theory
Introduction
The possibility of theorising anarchy in world politics is largely dependent on prior
assumptions about the formal or empirical characteristics of states and their ontological
Corresponding author:
Alex Prichard, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ,
UK.
Email: a.prichard@exeter.ac.uk
715789IPT0010.1177/1755088217715789Journal of International Political TheoryPrichard
research-article2017
Article
Prichard 361
status in any social theory. Standard conceptions of anarchy see it as an emergent struc-
tural form, dependent on the prior hierarchical internal arrangement of states and their
external formal equality and material autonomy. This image of world politics is also
largely predicated on the personification and anthropomorphism of the state, making
anarchy something states alone must contend with.
Alex Wendt gives this set of arguments a philosophically or scientifically realist foun-
dation, and in so doing moves beyond simple personification to claim that the state is in
fact a person (Wendt, 1999, 2004). For Wendt, it is possible to show that the state is a
collective consciousness, with emergent properties that make it an actual person with
first-person intentionality. Because ‘states are people too’ as he puts it, we can see how the
previously a-social, material structures of anarchy can be understood to have cultural
forms too. By ascribing intentionality to states, and accounting for these state-persons’
ability to signal their intentions and understand the cultural characteristics of other states,
Wendt also aimed to show how states were able to overcome the security dilemma. Rather
than seeing this nominally Hobbesian condition as universal and permanent, Wendt
argued that states-as-persons constructed their environment in such a way that they could
transcend their material insecurity in anarchy, moving first to a thin Lockean anarchy, and
ultimately beyond a Kantian pacific union to an inevitable world state (Wendt, 2003).
To make this argument, Wendt theorises the agency of the state on the basis of a prior
set of arguments about group intentionality and collective consciousness. Interestingly,
the theories of group agency that he understands to be robust enough to ground a theory
of state personhood seem not to be strong enough to support the inclusion of intentional
groups in his general social theory. In eliding the constitutive role of intentional group
agents in social life, Wendt’s statism radically underestimates the extent of the problem
of anarchy for International Relations (IR) theory and, by implication, political science
more generally. His own social theory provides the bones of a critical theory of anarchy,
which I develop considerably here.
I revisit Wendt’s theory and update it with reference to more recent interventions in
the study of collective intentionality (e.g. Chant et al., 2014; Jankovic and Ludwig, 2017;
List and Pettit, 2011; List and Spiekermann, 2013; Tuomela, 2013). On the basis of these
arguments, I propose that we revisit the plurality of social life as constituted by the varied
forms and infinite number of collectively intentional group agents therein. In so doing, I
propose an alternative account of anarchy that draws on previous work, and a long his-
tory of left pluralist social theory, in particular the work of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and the prominent inter-war political theorist and Labour Party activist, Harold
Laski (e.g. Laski, 1919; Morefield, 2005, 2016; Prichard, 2011, 2013a, 2013b).
This call to take groups seriously is not just a minor skirmish in a niche debate. For
Wendt (2004), ‘the question of the reality of state persons goes to the heart of IR’s epis-
temic authority as a science of world politics’ (Wendt, 2004: 316). The political implica-
tions of this debate are also tremendous. Writing in 1939, E.H. Carr (1946) said something
very similar: ‘Personification is the category of thought which expresses the continuity
of institutions; and of all institutions the state is the one whose continuity it is most essen-
tial to express’ (1946: 149–150). There is an inevitable connection between the empirical
and the normative, as I expose below. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Prichard,
2011), making the case for a pluralist ontology of politics is a radically anti-statist
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