In the spirit of week 8’s seminar on Global Intellectual History I have decided to address some of the things I have been thinking through in relation to the upcoming essay deadline. I will be writing on Global Legal History, which is a discipline in which Intellectual history is employed heavily.
I will open with the observation that a majority of the ‘global’ intellectual histories of International Law which I have read, see their global approach as a corrective to status quo politics or ‘ways of seeing’ history. Whilst it is not a necessary component of a global intellectual history, it seems to me (in my admittedly narrow reading) that many scholars in this area identify with more ‘critical’ epistemologies. This is an interesting observation for me, considering that in my other discipline of international relations, literature on International Law is dominated by scholars within the ‘classical liberal tradition,’ who forward positions which would be anathema to the Marxists and Post-colonialists whose work has dominated the last two weeks of my studies.
A second observation would be that these scholars, liberal, critical or otherwise almost always default to a traditional theoretical framework within which to study global intellectual currents. Variants of world-systems theory and realpolitik seem to be in vouge in my current area of research, having replaced the cosmopolitanism of soviet scholars and earlier anti-colonial perspectives. However, pretty much any serious debate between these academics (for anyone interested I would direct you to a written debate between Arnulf Becker Lorca, Jean-Louis Halpérin and Douglas Howland) admits that such overarching theories are insufficient to write any totally valid global intellectual history. Tensions between different localised intellectual ideas simply prove impossible to fit within the ambit of one model. This has led me to think that the task of writing a truly global intellectual history which does not deal in certain generalisations is probably a chimera. However, that is not to say that global intellectual history is useless (if it was, I wouldn’t be doing a project on it). Like other ‘global histories’ scholars can mess around with micro and macro perspectives to identify, explain and contextualise certain intellectual trends, which I have seen frequently termed as ‘glocalism’. However in employing a glocal approach it becomes necessary to identify new containers and categories which comprise the ‘local’, a task that simply takes us back to the problems of national history, just without the vitriol. My recent reading has really made me question the value of purportedly universal theoretical modelling within global scale research.
Of course, any good theorist admits their model will not account for all eventualities, and I think even the most ardent of post-colonialists or realists would not suggest their theories had universal explanatory value. As such, I almost feel like my frustration with theory is a bit of a straw man. However, in my own defence, academics continue to deploy all the theories I have mentioned into global contexts they are not really suited to explain. I feel like, especially from my very brief foray into Global Legal History, a turn away from theory would be beneficial. I have little doubt that these issues (nb. These are issues in my opinion and others may not see them as such) persist across global history. It just happens that Intellectual and legal history is the area which interests me most and as such, where I am best placed to see this.