That dangerous discipline: The function and place of the international relations discipline in the modern university.

摘要

This dissertation aims to locate the place and function of the international relations discipline within the modern university. In order to do so, I engage with the writings of Immanuel Kant, whose ideal of the modern university was behind the founding of the University of Berlin and was later imported into the United States to become a widely-replicated model. Kant argues that modern universities ought to have several faculties, along with a philosophical faculty, whose claim to universal reason put it at the core of this model. Building on Kant, I argue that the discourse of International Relations (IR) is, along with philosophy, at the core of the project of the modern university. This is so because IR theoretical discourse has important implications for the Kantian architectonics of the university with philosophy at its core. What IR theoretical discourse does is actively repudiate the universality of reason, and Kantian philosophy, by pointing to the international as the sphere beyond the applicability of reason and progress. That IR does so, however, does not mean for Kant that reason in the hands of philosophy is bankrupt. Instead, and in line with Kant's work in The Critique of Pure Reason, reason requires limits for it to be able to function. Kantian philosophy needs limits for the applicability of reason and IR provides those limits. IR discourse does so by casting the inside of the state as the only realizable domain for progress and order against an opposing violent international arena.;An analysis of the disciplinary history of IR shows the core theme of the discipline to be the multiplicity of "sovereign reasons" in an anarchic order, which problematizes the universality of reason. My conclusion is that the IR discipline is the "dangerous yet necessary supplement" to philosophy's centrality in the Kantian architectonics of the modern university. The spatio-temporal limits and boundaries that IR discourse imposes on philosophy, makes the latter dependent on the former in order to be able to appear complete. What this means is that the IR discipline is inseparable from philosophy, and philosophy's apparent centrality is dependent on repudiating IR.