Michael Pugliese <michael098762001 at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> Justin, you haven't been reading this
> conservative have you ;-)
>
> With a new preface by the author
>
> Grasping the Democratic Peace:
> Principles for a Post-Cold War World
> Bruce Russett
No, but I know Russett's work; haven't read it for years -- I did International Relations stuff -- Bombs 'n Rockets, mostly US and Soviet foreign policy, in my polisci work back at Michigan. Mostly in that area I worked with Matt Evangelista, now at Cornell. That's an era ago, though.
I actually don't have a clear impression of Russett's politics, but I recall that his work seemed pretty solid to me at the time -- solid, careful, well-argued, thoughtful. It won't come as any surprise to you all that, as a fan of Hayek, Oliver Williamson, and Posner, I'm not scared away from some view because it's advocated by someone on the right.
Whether I got the idea that democracies don't fight each other from Russett, hard to say. I was also influenced by the conservative Michigan political scientist Harold Jacobson, who argued that warmaking tendencies are reduced by enmeshment in networks of international agreements. (Jacobson gave me my only A+ in grad school, btw -- at the time I was sort of aggressively red, and he was startled by my demonstration in his World Politics class that Lenin's theory of imperialism could operationalized, tested by Michigan quantitative standards, and substantially confirmed in many important respects. . . .)
Have you any objections to the factual accuracy of the observation that capitalist democracies tied into international agreements tend not to fight each other? In fact, haven't done so? Do you expect to see the Bundeswehr make another sweep through Belgium towards Paris anytimes oon?
Of course, there is a possibility that we are talking about too short a term-- 50 some years -- and that Eurasia will go to war with Oceania and Eastasia again. Mary Kaldor used to talk that way. Personally, I'm very skeptical.
jks
--- Michael Pugliese <michael098762001 at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> Justin, you haven't been reading this
> conservative have you ;-)
>
> With a new preface by the author
>
> Grasping the Democratic Peace:
> Principles for a Post-Cold War World
> Bruce Russett
>
> Paper | 1994 | $19.95 / £12.95 | ISBN: 0-691-00164-2
> 184 pp. | 6 x 9 | 10 tables
>
> e-Book | 2001 | $9.95 (Microsoft Reader format) |
> ISBN: 1-4008-0692-5
> e-Book | 2001 | $9.95 (Adobe Reader format) | ISBN:
> 1-4008-0694-1
>
>
> Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents
>
> By illuminating the conflict-resolving mechanisms
> inherent in the relationships between democracies,
> Bruce Russett explains one of the most promising
> developments of the modern international system: the
> striking fact that the democracies that it comprises
> have almost never fought each other.
>
> Reviews:
>
> "Russett finds this [the proposition that
> democracies do not fight each other] to be an
> extraordinarily robust conclusion.... [The book]
> presents a challenge to realists while providing a
> rigorous undergirding to what has become a
> widespread view."--Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs
>
> "The ambition and scope of the study provides the
> illuminating and unexpected insights into the
> relationships between war and democracy."--Roland
> Dannreuther, Survival
>
> "The descriptive phase of scholarly research on the
> absence of war between democratic dyads has been
> largely completed, and attention is now shifting to
> alternative explanations for this well-confirmed
> empirical generalization. The best place to begin,
> both for a summary of the descriptive evidence and
> for an attempt to explain it, is Bruce Russett's
> Grasping the Democratic Peace."--Jack S. Levy,
> International Studies Review
>
>
>
>
> Michael Pugliese
>
> ___________________________________
>
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