The dangers of interpretation: C.A.W. Manning and the “going concern” of international society
| Author | Patrick Thaddeus Jackson |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220905333 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220905333
Journal of International Political Theory
2020, Vol. 16(2) 133 –152
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1755088220905333
journals.sagepub.com/home/ipt
The dangers of interpretation:
C.A.W. Manning and
the “going concern” of
international society
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
American University, USA
Abstract
C. A. W. Manning was an important figure in the early days of what became known
as the English School, and was one of the most philosophically explicit articulators of
the interpretivist approach that informed that branch of scholarship. He was also a
defender of the apartheid system of his native South Africa. A close examination of
his work reveals both the promises and the pitfalls of a methodologically interpretive
approach to explanation. An interpretive explanation involves developing the capacity
in the listener to “go on” appropriately, and this makes criticizing the rules of the game
somewhat difficult, but not impossible. A clearer understanding of what an interpretive
explanation is may very well help us to avoid the pitfalls illustrated by Manning’s
advocacy, which I argue is made possible by a category confusion that remains very
much with us: a confusion between delineating the rules of a given domain, and actively
advocating or defending those principles.
Keywords
Explanation, interpretation, language, C.A.W. Manning
Charles Anthony Woodward Manning is not a scholar whose work is read much these
days, either in international studies or beyond it. This may seem an odd fate for the sec-
ond, and to date the longest, occupant of the world’s second-oldest professorship in
International Relations (the Montague Burton professorship)1 and the person who “put
the concept of ‘international society’ on the intellectual map” of Anglophone interna-
tional studies scholarship (Navari, 2013: 210). Part of the explanation may be Manning’s
Corresponding author:
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, American University, Washington, DC 20016, USA.
Email: ptjack@american.edu
905333IPT0010.1177/1755088220905333Journal of International Political TheoryJackson
research-article2020
Article
134 Journal of International Political Theory 16(2)
exclusion from the British Committee on the Theory of International Relations, the
founding core group of what is often called “the English School” by many contemporary
scholars (e.g. Dunne, 1998). Another part may be Manning’s relatively sparse published
output; Hidemi Suganami’s exhaustive list of Manning’s publications (Suganami, 2001:
106–107) contains only 38 items, not a lot for an academic career lasting over 40 years—
and of those published items, only one was a book, a few were articles in academic
journals, and the rest contained “a number of radio talks and short articles in relatively
obscure places” (Suganami, 2001: 92). Manning’s influence was, rather, through his
teaching (a good number of the second generation of British international studies schol-
ars were his students) and his general intellectual influence on his colleagues, which
went hand in hand with his sustained efforts to establish the study of international affairs
as a separate academic endeavor in the United Kingdom.2
But I cannot help but think that another important part of the explanation for Manning’s
general absence from the pantheon of foundational thinkers in Anglophone international
studies might have to do with his late-in-life defense of his home country South Africa’s
apartheid system. In 1964, he published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “In Defense
of Apartheid” in which he argued that because “within the confines of geographical
South Africa there are more than one or two societies,” and because those societies were
at different levels of development, the apartheid system was therefore a justified way to
preserve the autonomy and existence of those separate societies (Manning, 1964: 148).
And on 14 October 1965 he appeared before the International Court of Justice at the
Hague, which was hearing a case concerning South Africa’s imposition of the apartheid
system in its “mandatory” territory3 of what was then called South West Africa; during
his testimony, Manning argued that
It makes a difference, and this not merely in philosophical analysis but in administrative
practice and in constitutional planning, whether one thinks of the individual as the only reality,
or, of the group as equally real, or, whether one is prepared to accommodate and embrace
within one’s social picture both the primordia reality of the individual and the social reality, or
quasi-reality, of the group: for you find two competing dispositions or tendencies, the one
stressing, the other seeking to minimize, the differences between various ethnic groups — the
one accepting and paying respect to the diversity of cultures within the confines of a given
territory, the other tending to disregard the multiplicity of lesser communities within the totality
of a country as a whole. (Manning, 1966: 5–6)
Here, Manning extends the approach he generally took toward international affairs
into the question of the relations between ethnic groups. Overall, his intellectual project
might be justly characterized as “an ‘interpretive’ approach that concentrated on the
beliefs of individual actors in international relations, assuming that explaining and evalu-
ating their actions depends on interpreting the meaning they had for the actors who per-
formed them” (Hall, 2015: 34). This interpretive approach was widely shared by
Manning’s contemporaries in the English School, none of whom would have found much
to disagree with in Manning’s declaration that in order to make sense of international
affairs, it was necessary to start with “international society” just because the actors them-
selves started with such a notion:
To continue reading
Request your trial