…and continued the philosophical tradition of “On Politics,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” Hobbes’ “Leviathan.” Do you mean Aristotle’s “Politics”? Also, are you going to discuss the Complexity science approach, (if such an approach exists) or is that irrelevant? Great sequence by the way!
In general, yes, international relations is a complex adaptive system, and that could be relevant. But I’m just not sure how far the tools of complexity theory can get you in this domain. I would agree that complexity science approaches seem closely related to game theoretic rational actor models, where slight changes can lead to wildly different results, and they are unstable in the chaos theory / complexity sense. I discuss that issue briefly in the next post, now online, but as far as I am aware, complexity theory not a focus anywhere in international relations or political science. (If you have links that discuss it, I’d love to see them.)
…and continued the philosophical tradition of “On Politics,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” Hobbes’ “Leviathan.” Do you mean Aristotle’s “Politics”? Also, are you going to discuss the Complexity science approach, (if such an approach exists) or is that irrelevant? Great sequence by the way!
Yes, I did. Whoops, fixed.
In general, yes, international relations is a complex adaptive system, and that could be relevant. But I’m just not sure how far the tools of complexity theory can get you in this domain. I would agree that complexity science approaches seem closely related to game theoretic rational actor models, where slight changes can lead to wildly different results, and they are unstable in the chaos theory / complexity sense. I discuss that issue briefly in the next post, now online, but as far as I am aware, complexity theory not a focus anywhere in international relations or political science. (If you have links that discuss it, I’d love to see them.)