Yosef Lapid's 'The Third Debate' 25 Years After: A Symposium

I'm currently sitting on a political science hiring search for my department, and have thus been very busy this last couple of weeks. It's fascinating how reviewing applications brings back a lot of memories about graduate school and the academic job search when I was first on the market years ago.

In any case, since I'm in such a professional political science mode, here's an interesting symposium at the International Studies Quarterly homepage, "The 'Third Debate' 25 Years Later."

You can click all the articles at the link, although I just finished reading Cynthia Weber's, "The Gentrification of International Theory," which kinda gave me a chuckle at how disgruntled are critical IR scholars at the supposed lack of progress toward a really radical IR paradigm. I actually love reading this stuff, and often bring a lot of it into my classes, if for nothing else but to highlight the fringes of the field and some of the kookier stuff that's out there. For example, Weber has a forthcoming piece that bemoans the absence of a genuine "queer" international relations paradigm, "Why is there no Queer International Theory?" And as you can see, it's probably a pretty good bet that Professor Weber is queer herself, although she's clearly by no means as attractive as Professor Caroline Heldman (while I suspect she's a helluva lot smarter).

In any case, back to the symposium. Yosef Lapid is Regents Professor and Director of the Masters of Arts Program at the University of New Mexico. The symposium is revisiting his 1989 research paper, "The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era." (I love how you can access all these old academic articles on the web nowadays. Lots of great pieces have been posted in PDF format, no doubt to the consternation of the original journal publishers who own the copyrights.)

This "third debate" was pretty much on the margins of mainstream scholarship when I was at UCSB for grad school. The department was very mainstream and positivist, so to the extent that we read this literature it was mostly for reasons of breadth rather than as part of an active research program. Indeed, now that I think of it, UCSB's Department of Political Science was pretty tame ideologically. The one guy who was literally radical was Professor Fernando Lopez-Alves, a comparativist and Latin American expert who taught the department's core seminar on Theories of Comparative Politics. He was so radical that he's no longer a faculty member the department, having moved over to the Department of Sociology, a place obviously more in tune with the hardline collectivist, post-colonial ideologies of the ubiquitous Marxist professoriate in the U.S. (Professor Lopez-Alves assigned Perry Anderson's "Lineages of the Absolutist State" back in the day, which I recently pulled off the shelf to reread the first chapter. Heh, a totally Marxist explanation of the class basis of feudalism's transition to the modern monarchic-absolutist state system in Europe --- and a great read!)

Well, that's enough for now. I should get back to my regular piddly ideological blog battles with idiot Internet trolls and wannabe #FullCommunism online collectivists, lol.