Critical Theories

From Last Lesson

What are the key features of the liberal school of international political theory?

Prescribed Content

Definitions and theories of power

Activating Your Thinking

Lesson Content

Social Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism - Foreign Policy Magazine, Winter 2020

Democratic Socialism: So what could socialism look like in the 21st century? It might mean a major extension of social and economic rights—a state that provides more than protection from destitution but positively guarantees housing, health care, child care, and education—and public ownership of natural monopolies and financial institutions. These would exist alongside a competitive, market-driven sphere where private capitalist ownership is replaced with worker ownership. That is, workers would elect their own management and have both moral and financial incentives to be productive by being real stakeholders who would receive a share of firm profits rather than fixed wages. Such shifts would represent the starting point for modernity’s first truly democratic and socialist society.

But whatever the precise model of socialism after capitalism is, it should be simple and require no massive changes in human consciousness. It must be driven by a serious attempt to avoid what has failed in the past—the stifling of political pluralism and civil rights in state socialist regimes, as well as the economic problems of central planning. Instead, it should take experiments that have succeeded—universal social services and worker-owned cooperatives—and build a social system around them in its drive toward the long-deferred Enlightenment promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Social Democracy: It is...necessary to distinguish between social democracy and democratic socialism. The first is fundamentally reformist and aims to blunt the harder edges of capitalism and make it sustainable. The second is transformative and aims to replace the capitalist system with a socialist order.

The fight is not fanatically attached to the idea of social equality but rather to the idea that genuine freedom requires certain social and economic preconditions. Social democracy starts with people using the instruments of a democratically controlled state to loosen the grip of liberal capitalist dogma. The question for a left foreign policy is how to harness anti-elite sentiment around the world for the cause of environmental renewal, economic and social equality, and mutual political liberation.

Critical Theory Questions

Guiding Questions:

  1. Describe the basics of Marxism.

  2. In what ways may Marx been right?

  3. What did Marx not account for?

A Critical Ethic of Care - A Feminist Approach to IR

Globalizing Care An Ethic of Care as an IR Theory .pdf

Guiding Questions:

Top of page 3

Why does the author see care as a global issue and not just a private issue?

Bottom of page 3

Why does the author see a thorough consideration of care in both ethical and practical terms as key to human security?

Top of page 4

Robinson says that she what us to “consider how our view of security in global politics would change once we recognize and accept not just interdependence among states but the ways responsibilities and practices of care grow out of relations of dependence and vulnerability among people in the context of complex webs of relations of responsibility.” What does she mean by this?

Bottom of page 5

How do you think this happens? “Relations of care are not always good or pure; indeed, part of the job of the care ethicist is to consider the conditions under which relations can, and often do, become relations of domination, oppression, injustice, inequality, or paternalism.”

Bottom of page 5 and the first paragraph on page 6

What are the practical aspects of care that are relevant in global politics and what role do women in particular play in fulfilling these aspects of care?

Bottom of page 8 and all of page 9

Robinson offers several reasons in these paragraphs as to why feminist care ethics perspective on global politics is distinctly feminine. Summarize two examples.

Care Answer Key

Guiding Questions:

  1. How do feminists in the field of international relations look at political issues?

  2. In what ways might feminists view war as gendered concept?

  3. In what ways might diplomacy might be viewed in a gendered context?

  4. How does feminism go about challenging realism?

  5. What perspectives do feminists share with liberals and constructivists that they don't share with realists?

  6. In what way are feminists constructivists?

Global Politics in Action

Guiding Prompt: Read one of the two following articles (both if you like) and explain the ways that ideas developed in your article of choice might align with Marxist political theory?

Extension Activities

Guiding Questions:

  1. What "agreement" is cultural hegemony about?

  2. Explain "control beliefs and you control people"?

  3. Can you think of three ideas that you passively incorporate into your day?

  4. In what ways in cultural hegemony an example of soft power?

  5. How is a theory like hegemony also hegemony or, stated another way, how is "cultural theory itself an idea that directs your actions"?

Guiding Questions:

  1. In what ways does the author highlight the thinking of Antonio Gramsci?

  2. What are the "new socialists" criticisms of neoliberalism?

  3. What are criticisms that the author has of the "new socialists"?

  4. What does “socialism with a spine” look like?

Click here for suggested answers to this questions.

Checking For Understanding

Please complete this quiz on International Relations Theories

Choose a current political issues and examine it through each of the five theoretical lenses we have explored and explain which components of which theories you find explain the situation best. You should not confine yourself to just one theory as the sole explanation.

For Next Class

Take notes on the following from Lamy et al.: Foreign Policy Strategies and Tools: 143-151