Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The growth in influence of the “economic approach to politics” within Political Science and International Relations is based on the conventionally accepted view that neoclassical economics is “the most scientific of the social sciences.” However, neoclassical economics have long been criticized for building and employing theories whose core components (assumptions, premises, postulates, axioms, etc) are readily accepted as unrealistic or false. The unrealistic nature of these central components has traditionally been defended through the deployment of instrumentalism, which itself is based in a positivist understanding of science. Drawing upon the scientific realist and critical realist critique of positivism, this paper constructs a realist critique of instrumentalism and its use in defending the scientific status neoclassical social theories. It will be shown that instrumentalism is not scientifically defensible from a realist point of view and that there has been considerable criticism of the continued use of instrumentalism to defend the practices of scholars who employ neoclassical economics as a scientific approach to social phenomena. Noting that these criticisms have not had a major impact on the practices of scholars employing the neoclassical approach, the paper turns to a critical realist explanation for this negligible impact, focusing on the larger social structures that help to generate and shape the production of “scientific” knowledge. The paper ends with a discussion of the relationship between the positivist notion of value-neutral/objective science and the role that scholars play in reinforcing and reproducing larger societal structures through the kinds of social theories they employ. The paper argues that the growing realist critique of the neoclassical approach should be taken more seriously within IR and Political Science.