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Chapter 2 Language and the Problem of Order Policy makers faced in 1945 a problem of the same type that they face today.1 At the end of an era of sweeping global conflict, and confronting an entirely new set of challenges, how could they craft a stable and secure international order? What rules of conduct would they seek to establish? And what rules of thumb would they embrace in their efforts to explain the emergence of new patterns of behavior or the persistence of old ones? Like all arenas of human activity, international relations are governed by rules. Rules are statements that have simultaneously constitutive and normative force.2 The assertion that states ought not to meddle in the internal affairs of other states seems to tend more obviously toward the normative. It is an example of the sort of statement we typically take to be a rule. To say that states are sovereign entities, on the other hand, serves more obviously to constitute distinct internal and external domains of authority. Ordinarily, we might call this an assertion or statement rather than a rule. Roy Bhaskar followed Immanuel Kant’s lead in arguing for just this sort of distinction between two kinds of language.3 Yet it is a mistake to believe that language has either one purpose or the other. It always has both effects. Because one of these effects is frequently more apparent than the other, a statement may appear predominantly normative or constitutive, but that is a difference of degree rather than kind, and of perspective rather than essence . This chapter will describe how the constitutive and normative properties of language, together, serve as the building blocks of meaningful social activity in international relations as in other spheres of human behavior.4 It will argue that language functions to create social order in certain regularized ways, even in the anarchic realm of international relations. And it postulates that, as a result, the defense of any particular order is likely to exhibit a logical, semantic, and moral structure characteristic of one (or more) of these linguistic strategies. 21 22 Cultures of Order Language itself is the ordering of things through vocabulary and syntax. We also use other physical or social tools to produce order, of course, but order begins with language. Language divides up our experiences into categories (words), patterns (syntax), and ultimately meanings. When brute force is used, it may produce the conditions for order, but it never produces order itself. That is, it may rearrange physical or social relationships. Yet order is the understanding that such arrangements, patterns, and differences exist. This chapter gives careful attention to language in an effort to discern how speech gives rise to these understandings. Like the term rule, order is commonly used to denote one of two different things. On one hand, it refers to a recognizable pattern or arrangement. In this sense, order is linked to the constitutive function of language. To the extent that we can describe some thing, and say how it differs from other things, we have also described a relationship and, thus, declared a certain order. Yet an order can also be a command. More generally, order can refer to the resolution of problems of governance. This is the sense in which Hobbes articulated a “problem of order,” and it is the more typical use of the term in contemporary social science. To explain the emergence of a social order, then, is not just to explain any pattern, but especially a pattern of authority. Nicholas Rengger makes a strong case that the latter meaning is characteristically modern and that it reflects the extent to which bureaucratic governance has replaced faith in the essential unity of all things in a divine plan. Leibniz, he suggests, “was the last thinker of the very first rank to reason quite seriously about the politics of the Respublica Christiana and locate his conception of order in that frame,” seeking as he did so to reveal “the essential unity of theology, metaphysics, mathematics, ethics and politics.”5 Rengger’s plausible macrohistorical claim notwithstanding, a rigidly dichotomous understanding of order is no more helpful than the same dichotomy applied to language. Just as rules have both constitutive and regulative effects, order is both pattern and authority. We will thus treat it as both: that is, as a pattern of authoritative social relations. A given order is an arrangement that allocates value in social relations, extending to and including international relations. Orders...

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