The logic of habit in International Relations
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066110363502 |
| Author | Ted Hopf |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
16(4) 539–561
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066110363502
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Corresponding author:
Ted Hopf, 2176 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
Email: hopf.2@osu.edu
The logic of habit in
International Relations
Ted Hopf
Ohio State University, USA
Abstract
IR theory is dominated by the logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. But Max
Weber offered four logics of choice, not just two. Beyond the instrumental rationality
of Zweckrationalität and the normative rationality of Wertrationalität are affect and
habit. Drawing on Weber, James, Dewey, and Bourdieu, and habit’s microfoundations in
neurocognitive psychology, I explore the logic of habit and its consequences for several
fundamental puzzles in IR theory. The logic of habit necessarily precludes rationality,
agency, and uncertainty, and so offers a different interpretation of cooperation, security
dilemmas, enduring rivalries, and security communities in international politics. The logic
of habit also fills a gap in mainstream constructivism’s theorization of intersubjective
structures, returning the taken-for-granted lifeworld to the center of attention.
Keywords
agency, cognitive neuroscience, doxa, enduring rivalr y, habit, Pierre Bourdieu, practice,
regime, security dilemma, security community, uncertainty
Introduction
Social theorists from Weber to Bourdieu have argued that most humans most of the time
act in the world habitually, not reflectively. Moreover, in the last 15 years cognitive neu-
roscientists have established that people regularly perceive, feel, and act before they
think; we respond to the world without rational reflection. Nonetheless, habit is virtually
absent from the study of international politics. Instead, we concentrate on the deliberate
actions of agents. Either they are making rationalistic cost–benefit calculations about
their choices, as stylized by the ‘logic of consequentialism’, or they are making choices
with conscious reference to norms and rules that correspond to their identities, or accord-
ing to the ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1998).1
We have been ignoring what most people do most of the time in their social lives.2 We
have exaggerated actors’ agency, rationality, and uncertainty. We have underestimated
540 European Journal of International Relations 16(4)
the stability of patterns of cooperation and conflict in world politics, and mistaken their
causes. We have created security and cooperation ‘dilemmas’ that are not dilemmas at
all, but straightforward habitual routines of enmity and amity.
Despite intersubjective reality being the very heart of social constructivism, conven-
tional constructivist scholarship in International Relations, with its concentration on con-
sciously apprehended identities and deliberately contested norms, has ignored one of its
foundational postulates. In doing so, it has privileged agency over constraining struc-
tures, and exaggerated the ease with which change may occur in world politics. Any
efforts to change have to first overcome the power of habitual perceptions, emotions, and
practices. The recent ‘practice turn’ in International Relations has stressed the non-
reflective side of social order, but it has not yet appreciated habit’s role as a structural
obstacle to social change. It also has not explored the relationship between habit, agency,
rationality, and uncertainty in world politics. Where the logic of habit predominates,
international relations have less agency, less rationality, and less uncertainty than other
logics would lead us to expect.
In foregrounding the logic of habit, I am not arguing that consequentialism and appro-
priateness are absent, only that there are domains of world politics, especially areas of
long-term relationships of cooperation and conflict, where we should expect habit, and
not instrumental or normative rationality, to apply.
In the first section below, I explain what habits are, what they do, how they are acquired,
and how they are broken. I combine a discussion of how habits have been conceptualized
by a range of social theorists with the more narrow and precise findings of cognitive neuro-
science. The latter provide the ‘nano-foundations’ for the logic of habit in IR.3 In the second
section, I explore how the logic of habit relates to the other logics of social life: consequen-
tialism, appropriateness, and, at much greater length, practice. I concentrate on the logic of
practice because its advocates have recently advanced ideas most closely related to the
logic of habit. But, in doing so, they have ignored habit’s power to perpetuate the status quo.
In the third section I explain the logic of habit’s unique take on rationality, uncertainty,
and agency in IR theory, deduce testable hypotheses from the logic of habit, and show how
their implications would manifest themselves in enduring cooperative and conflictual
relationships between and among states. In particular I offer an understanding of security
communities from the perspective of the logic of habit. I also elaborate some principles for
research designs to assess the competing claims of the different logics of IR.
The social theory and neuroscience of habit
What are habits?4
Max Weber distinguished among four ‘orientations’ for social action: instrumental ratio-
nality, or Zweckrationalität; value rationality, or Wertrationalität; ‘affectual — especially
emotional, through given affects and states of feeling’; and ‘traditional, through the
habituation of long practice’ (Weber, 1968 [1925]: 12). Instrumental rationality entails
cost–benefit calculations for any choice, or the logic of consequentialism. Value rational-
ity implies reference to some norm when making a choice, or the logic of appropriate-
ness. Social actions based on affect expect emotions and ‘feeling states’ to govern choice.
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