Ideas, Beliefs, and "Symbolic Technologies": Are Ideas Truly Social In Nature?

Do ideas really matter in foreign policy?  What actually is an idea in the first place? 

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber makes his case for rationality and contends that this notion (which has dominated political and economical theory alike for decades) is in fact, an idea—an idea that was born in the West and has begun to work its way around the world.  This idea, Weber argues, is essentially a “frame of mind” (Weber, 2002, p.161), implying that ideas are simply, as Goldstein and Keohane would put it, “just hooks: competing elites seize on popular ideas to propagate and to legitimize their interests” (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993, p.4).

While they more or less seem to agree with the general world structuring conducted by Weber, Goldstein and Keohane put forward their counterargument in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, in which they offer, “ideas matter for policy, even when human beings behave rationally to achieve their ends” (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993, p.5).  They go on to define ‘ideas’ as “beliefs held by individuals” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p.210) or by “actors” (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993, p.4).  They continue by describing ideas almost like assets (or “commodities” as Laffey and Weldes would have it), with new ones (referred to as “innovations”) being hard to come by and with the overall “supply” being relatively low (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993, p.5).  They then proceed to describe the three different types of beliefs that underpin ideas and how they are disseminated throughout social hierarchies.

Laffey and Weldes, take issue with this perspective.  In their piece, Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations, they assert,  “the definition of ‘ideas as beliefs’ is quite problematical” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997,p.206).  They make the case that ideas and beliefs are quite different things that play different roles in society and must therefore be analyzed differently.  “Beliefs”, they would suggest, are “mental states or events made possible by socially produced and defined categories and meanings” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p.206). Ideas, conversely, are simply “elements of discourse” (ibid), which they later go on to describe as “symbolic technologies”, which form “power through their capacities to produce representations” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p.210).  They argue, “meaning is constructed” by ideas, which therefore assign them a great deal of weight in the production of policy (ibid).

Of the three pieces we’ve been analyzing for this module, Laffey and Weldes’ work has been by far the most interesting.  It also happens to be the piece I seem to disagree with most of all.

As a baseline, going-in assumption, I viewed “beliefs” as having two distinctive characteristics; the first being that they are often held in a definitive affirmative “is”, “was”, or “will be”, or a definitive negative “is not”, “was not”, or “will not be”.  The second characteristic I would have suggested is that individuals hold them internally.  Nation-states, or groups of people, conversely, hold “shared beliefs”. 

As for “ideas”, I would have defined them as also having two distinctive characteristics; that they imply some form of action to be taken and that they are expressed conditionally (as in “could be” or “could’ve been”).  Like Laffey and Weldes mention in their article, the “conduit” analogy seems quite relevant for ideas.  They are produced in the mind of an individual, expressed in some form of language, which acts as “packaging” and they are then “shipped” via some conduit to whomever may be on the receiving end.  In this regard, they can indeed be seen as “commodities”, which are used both to determine actors’ interests and to (borrowing from Goldstein and Keohane) serve as “roadmaps” to aid actors in the securing of those interests (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993, p.13).

Laffey and Weldes put a great deal of emphasis on the social component of ideation, which I personally find to be quite troublesome.  Ideas, they suggest, are “intersubjectively constituted forms of social action” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p.209) or “shared forms of practice, sets of capacities with which people can construct meaning about themselves, their world and their activities”  (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p.210). They are “mechanisms” by which meaning is produced (ibid).

They go on to describe ideas as “objectified human labor”, a “reification of what is in fact a social product” (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p. 213).  This, they argue, enables us to see them as “a process, as relations among people” and as “classes rather than external objects” (ibid).

This “social” component and the focusing on the “process” of formulating ideas is troublesome in my view.  Can individuals possess ideas independent of working through some form of social process?  In an autocracy, where the “cables” described so often by Laffey and Weldes serve little purpose but to implement the “ideas” coming from the autocrat down echelon, do these cables reveal anything of significance that addresses the original question of explaining state behavior?

While I accept the argument that, contrary to the Goldstein and Keohane assertion, ideas and beliefs are inherently different, I find myself bluntly rejecting the argument that ideas “refer to social rather than to mental phenomena”  (Laffey & Weldes, 1997, p. 216).  Can a person, completely isolated from society, possess his/her own “ideas”?  If the answer is “yes”, then is it not very difficult to maintain that ideas are inherently social in nature and even more so that they are not “mental phenomena”? Are there not ideas that never escape the confines of the human mind and that never make it into the world?  If this is the case, is Laffey and Weldes arguing that ideas are only “ideas” when they are expressed in some fashion, via some median, to become the “symbolic technology” they believe so impactful?

There are many other points of contention to be raised from Laffey and Weldes' take on the role of the idea and moreso, what an idea is in the first place.  With that said, It appears that, in order to compensate for a model developed by Goldstein and Keohane that seems to favor interests, Laffey and Weldes have attempted to tip the scale in the opposite direction by going out on a rhetorical limb and stretching the meaning of the “idea” to previously unimagined heights.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter, both for and against the Laffey perspective.

Goldstein, J., & Keohane, R. (1993). Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework. Deas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change. Retrieved May 18, 2018, from https://au-mir.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/Jackson International Relations/Readings/Goldstein - Ideas and Foreign Policy.pdf

Laffey, M., & Weldes, J. (1997). Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations. European Journal of International Relations 3:2. Retrieved May 18, 2018, from https://au-mir.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/Jackson International Relations/Readings/Laffey - Beyond Belief.pdf

Weber, M. (2002). Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Retrieved May 18, 2018, from https://au-mir.s3.amazonaws.com/prod/Jackson International Relations/Readings/Weber - Prefatory Remarks.pdf