POL 2103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Individualism, Materialism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 2103
• Professor: Kevin Mc Millan

Document Summary

25 years ago, didn"t exist: first used in 1989 in two separate books published in the same year however those books while well regarded were not very widely read and outside the mainstream of ir theory at that time, wasn"t until alexander wendt published an article 1992: anarchy is what states make of it the social construction of power politics: proposes constructivist theories: however because of where he published it his article was put front and center and rapidly (5/10 years) treated as the major rival. All individuals fundamentally the same: individualists within social sciences in order to explain social phenomenas like globilization for example, we can explain them fundamentally by relying on terms explained by individuals, in practice they can go farther than this, they don"t tend to treat all individuals as relevant to these explanations: tend to treat them more or less the same in core respects.