Positivism and Beyond by Steve Smith- Summary

7:24 PM Bella Noir Beauty 0 Comments

International Relations has been dominated by positivism in the last 40 years

The discipline has tended to accept implicitly a rather simple and crucially an uncontested set of positivist assumptions which have fundamentally stifled debate over both what the world is like and how we might explain it

There are three main chronological variants of positivism in the history of the social sciences, with the third of these being the most relevant for international relations

The first variant, developed by Auguste Comte is based on the methods of the natural sciences, namely observation. Its aim was to reveal the evolutionary casual laws that explained observable phenomena

Positive science was a distinct third stage in the development of knowledge which progressed first from theological to metaphysical knowledge and then to positivist knowledge.