Cultural Relativism and International Politics
English
By (author): Derek Robbins
The political and academic worlds are fractured by two competing discourses: the universalism of human rights and cultural relativism. This fracture is represented by the deep separation of cultural analysis and theories of international politics. Derek Robbins in a brilliant interrogation of European thinkers from Montesquieu to Pierre Bourdieu seeks to replace cultural relativism with cultural relationism as a step towards reconciling Enlightenment universalism and anthropological insistence on cultural difference. Inter alia he reflects on the tensions between political and social science and takes up the challenge from Raymond Aron to construct a sociology of international relations. A dazzling achievement.
- Bryan S. Turner, The Graduate Center, CUNY
He suggests that we are now experiencing a new dissociation of sensibility in which political thought and its consequences in action have become divorced from social and cultural experience. Developing further the ideas of Bourdieu which he has presented in books and articles over the last twenty years, Robbins argues that we need to integrate the recognition of cultural difference with the practice of international politics by accepting that the field of international political discourse is a social construct which is contingent on encounters between diverse cultures.
Everything is relative (Comte) and everything is social (Bourdieu), not least international politics. See more