Bruce Andrews: POLI SCI, 1975–1984

Arras Introduction

Introduction to POLI SCI

Thirteen political writings, 1975–1984: foreign policy, social theory, imperialism, and the crossover between political science and experimental poetry.

POLI SCI gathers thirteen political writings by Bruce Andrews from 1975 to 1984, a period in which the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, the decline of postwar American economic dominance, the growth of multinational capitalism, and the arrival of structuralist and post-structuralist theory were unsettling the established terms of international relations. The collection documents Andrews’s attempt to create a political science adequate to those changes. It also records an increasingly close encounter between his academic work and his experimental poetry.

Andrews entered political science through the problem of Vietnam. His Harvard dissertation investigated competing explanations of American intervention, but the question that persists throughout POLI SCI is larger: why do governments treat certain international projects as necessities when those projects cannot be explained by national survival alone? Phrases such as “national interest,” “security,” “credibility,” and “balance of power” present political choices as if they were facts of nature. Andrews’s project is to reverse that process—to recover the domestic interests, institutional arrangements, social hierarchies, and habits of thought that give those apparently self-evident imperatives their meaning.

The first major statement of this approach, “Social Rules and the State as a Social Actor,” appeared in World Politics in 1975. Andrews challenged the image of the state as a unitary, rational object responding mechanically to an anarchic international environment. He also found the fashionable alternative—Graham Allison’s bureaucratic-politics model—insufficient. Breaking the state into competing offices and officials might explain how a decision was reached, but it did not explain why the principal actors shared a particular range of acceptable purposes in the first place.

Drawing on Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, Alasdair MacIntyre, ethnomethodology, and the philosophy of action, Andrews proposed a “Social Actor Model.” Foreign policy, he argued, should be interpreted as a rule-governed social practice. A state’s purposes acquire meaning within a domestic context, much as an utterance acquires meaning within a language. Strategic action therefore refers beyond itself: it expresses a conception of the society being defended, the interests entitled to representation, and the future that policy is intended to secure. Explanation becomes an act of excavation, moving beneath an official relationship of ends and means to disclose its domestic referents.

This was a remarkably early intervention. In their 2024 history of constructivism, Martha Finnemore and Alexander Wendt identify Andrews’s article as an “unheralded exception” to the prevailing materialism of 1970s international relations. They describe his interpretive, rules-based theory as “far ahead of its time” and observe that it still rewards reading fifty years later. Many propositions subsequently associated with constructivism—that interests are constituted rather than simply given, that norms and rules help produce political actors, and that material conditions matter through socially constructed meanings—are already present in Andrews’s work. Yet his position is more openly critical than the constructivism that entered the disciplinary mainstream in the 1990s. He is interested not simply in how meanings make political action possible, but in whose power those meanings preserve. Read Finnemore and Wendt’s history of constructivism.

The theoretical argument is tested in Public Constraint and American Policy in Vietnam (1976). Here Andrews enters a dispute involving two otherwise opposed groups. Traditional writers such as Gabriel Almond, Walter Lippmann, and James Rosenau depicted the mass public as uninformed, volatile, and potentially bellicose, thereby justifying elite control over foreign policy. Antiwar writers including Daniel Ellsberg and David Halberstam also attributed considerable power to a feared public backlash: presidents supposedly prolonged the war because they dreaded being accused of “losing” Vietnam. Andrews’s analysis of polls, elections, party alignments, and official records finds both versions exaggerated. The public was frequently passive, uncertain, or more open to withdrawal than policymakers admitted. Rather than forcing escalation, it had to be persuaded to accept it.

The political importance of this finding extends beyond public-opinion research. By invoking a supposedly punitive public, officials converted their own commitments into external constraints and displaced responsibility for the war. The public functioned as a rhetorical alibi. In a contemporary review, Garry Wills called Andrews’s analysis a “prize sample” of how rulers manufacture a counterpressure to their own preferences and then present policy as the mechanical result of social forces. Read Wills’s review.

“Representation and Irresponsibility in Foreign Policy” (1977) develops this argument formally as well as conceptually. Its numbered propositions are accompanied by a second voice running in the margin: qualifications, questions, citations, and abrupt counterstatements continually interrupt the main exposition. This divided page challenges the usual authority of academic prose. It also dramatizes Andrews’s subject. The principal argument can no longer pretend to be self-contained; its exclusions and presuppositions remain visibly present beside it. The essay concludes that insulating foreign policy from mass participation did not preserve a neutral rationality. It helped sustain a specifically liberal-imperial program by preventing international commitments from being compared openly with neglected domestic needs.

Between 1978 and 1980, the argument expands from Vietnam and democratic representation into international political economy. Andrews confronts three dominant approaches: liberal pluralism and interdependence theory, associated with writers such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye; the statist or neomercantilist work of Stephen Krasner and Robert Gilpin; and Marxist or world-system explanations associated above all with Immanuel Wallerstein. He finds something useful in each, but refuses their characteristic reductions. Liberalism remains too close to visible bargaining and policy inputs. Statism makes the government’s autonomy into an explanation rather than a problem. Instrumentalist Marxism can reduce policy to the direct wishes of corporations, while world-system theory can dissolve particular states and societies into positions within a global structure.

Language, political economy, and power

“The Language of State Action” (1979) is the pivotal essay. Andrews treats foreign policy as a form of writing: individual policies operate as parole, while the domestic social order supplies something like their langue. Saussure, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Ricoeur, Jameson, Derrida, Habermas, and Foucault enter an international-relations discussion that had rarely admitted contemporary literary theory. Andrews uses structuralism but also criticizes it. A global system can explain the relations among states, but if treated as a self-sufficient totality it erases the specific domestic content of their actions. The language analogy consequently moves from formal structure toward ideology critique: political meaning is constructed, contested, naturalized, and sometimes deliberately disguised. Read the article record.

John Ruggie soon adopted Andrews’s phrase “the language of state action” when describing international regimes as systems of shared expectations, an indication that the essay’s conceptual vocabulary had begun to circulate within the field. More broadly, Andrews’s attention to constitutive rules, contextual meaning, and social practices anticipated concerns that would become central to constructivist and critical international-relations theory.

Andrews’s concept of “surplus security” sharpens the political stakes. “Basic security” means the defense of territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Policies extending beyond that minimum require a different explanation. Their object is not simply the survival of a state but the reproduction of a particular social order—its economic system, governing coalition, class relations, and preferred forms of authority. This is the “domestic paradigm” embedded in foreign policy. The distinction allows Andrews to ask why the maintenance of open markets, compliant governments, investment opportunities, or American credibility is so readily redescribed as national defense.

A corresponding development takes place in Andrews’s conception of power. In the earliest essays, domestic rules sometimes appear as shared conventions connecting state and society. The later work becomes more suspicious of that apparent consensus. Rules may be the sediment of earlier political victories; institutions may represent some groups by preventing others from reaching the agenda at all. In “Privacy and the Protection of National Security,” surveillance, infiltration, and secrecy are not unfortunate departures from an otherwise democratic system. They help create the passivity that an interventionist foreign policy requires. “Criticizing Economic Democracy,” published in Monthly Review in 1980, likewise argues that participatory reforms cannot fulfill their promises if investment and production remain governed by private accumulation. See the issue in the Monthly Review archive.

“The Political Economy of World Capitalism,” published in International Organization in 1982, represents Andrews’s most extensive engagement with Marxist world-system theory. He accepts its global scale and its account of core-periphery exploitation but criticizes its economism, functionalism, and political fatalism. Nations are not merely stamped into shape by an impersonal market. Power also works productively, constituting institutions, political subjects, and standards of normal development. A centralized world state would not necessarily emancipate those subjects; it might reproduce domination on a still larger administrative scale. Andrews consequently turns toward a dispersed politics of resistance rather than an automatic passage from capitalist contradiction to socialism. Read the article record.

This Foucauldian turn becomes explicit in “The Prison-House of the Capitalist World System.” The essay compares colonial violence with the transition from spectacular punishment to modern discipline described in Discipline and Punish. Direct military intervention is only one technology of imperial control. Debt, development policy, investment criteria, administrative training, and institutions such as the IMF and World Bank can induce nations to supervise and restructure themselves. Domination becomes more continuous precisely because it looks less coercive.

Poetry inside political science

Here poetry enters the political writing directly. The analytical prose is repeatedly interrupted by italicized clusters taken from the manuscript that became I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). Phrases collide through montage, punning, discontinuity, borrowed idiom, and compressed political satire. They do not illustrate the argument from outside. They perform its account of language: slogans, bureaucratic euphemisms, commercial speech, and political commonplaces are cut loose from their normal surroundings so that their violence becomes audible. Earlier formal experiments—the marginal countervoice of “Representation and Irresponsibility” and the ten unanswered questions composing “Economic Diplomacy and the New International Order”—prepare the way for this fusion.

The relationship between poetry and political science is therefore reciprocal. Political analysis gives Andrews’s poetry its concern with institutions, ideology, accumulation, and the manufacture of consent. Poetry gives the political essays techniques for resisting the smoothness of authoritative explanation. Juliana Spahr observes that Andrews’s critique of claims made “in the name of the public” parallels his poetic resistance to claims made in the name of a passive or unified reader. His writing instead makes reading an active and potentially self-questioning form of participation. Andrews later described the goal more generally as making readers confront the operations of power and opening writing beyond conventional genre boundaries. Read Spahr on Andrews and an interview with Andrews.

The concluding essay, “The Domestic Content of International Desire,” appeared in the 1984 International Organization symposium on “The New Realism,” following essays by Richard Ashley, Robert Gilpin, and Friedrich Kratochwil. Andrews refuses a choice between traditional realism and its more theoretically sophisticated critics. Realism treats power, balance, and national interest as ends in themselves; some of its challengers redescribe international practices as grammars or shared protocols but still remain at the surface. Andrews’s persistent question is: what makes a state desire participation in that game? The answer must be sought in the domestic order whose continuation the state’s international projects secure. Read the article record.

Across the collection, Andrews’s thought develops without abandoning its original problem. The “social rules” of 1975 become the “domestic paradigm,” then the disciplinary production of political subjects, and finally the “domestic content of international desire.” Explanation moves from recovering shared meanings to exposing how meanings are organized by unequal power. The state moves from social actor to writer, mythmaker, surveillant, and producer of compliant forms of life. Academic prose moves from a recognizable journal style toward montage, interruption, and formally divided argument.

The collection ends where it began, with the demand to make apparently natural policies strange again. If imperial commitments express a domestic social order, changing foreign policy requires more than better strategy or better officials. It requires changing the interests, institutions, and relations of power that give the state its desires. That conclusion joins Andrews’s political science to his poetry: both attempt to break the spell of the self-evident, reveal the social machinery inside ordinary language, and return the production of meaning to political struggle.