Review: International Relations Theory: Global Order, World of Our Making
| Author | Roger Epp |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070209104600109 |
| Date | 01 March 1991 |
| Published date | 01 March 1991 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
THEORY
GLOBAL
ORDER
Values
and
power
in
international
politics
Lynn
H.
Miller
Boulder
c:o:
Westview,
2nd
edition
199
o,
xiv,
269pp,
US$44.00
cloth,
US$16.
95
paper
WORLD
OF
OUR
MAKING
Rules
and
rule
in
social
theory
and
international
relations
Nicholas
Greenwood
Onuf
Columbia:
University
of
South
Carolina
Press,
1989,
xvi,
341pp,
US$32.95
cloth,
US$21.9
5
paper
While,
from
the
outside,
international
relations
is
the
field
of
inquiry
most
acquainted
with
death,
it
is
a
rare
textbook
that
begins
with
the
human condition
-
the
dual
experience
of
mastery
and
mortality,
sharpened
on
a
planetary
scale
by
current
technology
-
and
that
comes
to
eschatology
before
extended
deterrence.
Perhaps
even
rarer,
from
inside
the
field,
is
a
theoretical
work
that
eschews
the
tiresome
quarrels
among
neo-realists
and
neo-liberals,
promises
to
recast
international
relations
not
as
a
separate
reality
but
as
part
of
a
more synthetic
political
society
of
rule/rules,
and
engages towards
that
end
'outside'
thinkers
such
as
Weber, Wittgenstein,
and
Wolin.
That
much
should
enlist
the
initial
sympathy
of readers
impatient
at
the
narrowness
descriptive
of
much
of
academic
international
relations.
Miller's
position,
set
out
in
this
revised
edition
of
Global
Order,
will
be
the
more
familiar.
Influenced
by
the
world
order
perspective,
he
sheds
the
pretence
of
objectivity
in
favour
of
an
introductory
text
with
an
unabashed
point
of
view
-
a
global
view,
one
which
sees
the
'planetary
social
system'
as
a
single
unit
whose
environmental
or
security
problems
have become
human
instead
of
merely
national
in
scale.
Miller's
analysis
also
purposefully treats
values
as
well
as
power,
the
former
being
the
'basic
normative
choices
that
govern
social
groups'
(p
i
I).
Though
he
does
not
ask
where
values
come
from,
and
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