Dan - not to sound difficult, but I you define "exceptionalism" in a non-standard way: as holding different views on a range of questions, such as the role of religion in public life, from people in other countries. That's *not* the claim about American exceptionalism, which is that Americans have a view of their country as exceptional, e.g., as a providential experiment in liberty with a special mission.

Of course, Drezner is not a disinterested party, as Page's conclusion, if taken seriously, problematizes Drezner's social function and privelege. No wonder then that Drezner asserts that "Foreign policy expertise is more than just a better general education—it entails more specialized training." The implication is clear--since international relations is an esoteric discipline, only those trained in it are capable of making intelligent foriegn policy decisions. And as the public is incompetent, it can rightly be ignored.

Unfortunately for Drezner, this is all mere conciet. Naturally, international relations experts take themselves very seriously, and they utilize a technical vocabulary in order to highlight and amplify their expertise. But what precisely is technical about international relations? Can we really compare it as a discipline to an actually technical subject such as physics? Are international relations problems resolved by controlled experiments utilizing technical knowledge, or are they simply the objects of facts and reasoning--two facets of inquiry seemingly available to everyone--including non-PhDs?

Unfortunately for Drezner, the fact is that international relations is not a sciences but a discipline of the humanities, intelligible to everyone. And while this fact is hurtful to Drezner's self-esteem and social stature, it should be encouraging to non-elite Americans, who have every right to demand better representation of their foreign policy views, whatever their level of education.

(And by the way, if you want to know why "social scientists" are the objects of so much contempt within the scientific community, this is why.)

To understand the depth of the problem, consider that in 2005 every country in Western Europe had a more favorable opinion of the People’s Republic of China than of the United States. This could be written off as hostility to the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, except for one problem—the same polls also show increased hostility to the American people.

D'ya think that could be that after four years of mendacity including a war based on bogus reasons, a slim majority of the American public saw fit to rouse themselvs on November 2, 2004, spend a great deal of time in line in some places and give Bush the opportunity for another four years of this mendacity?

Act as if the principle of your life could be the principle for your entire nation. -- Kant?

America is behaving exactly like a person living off someone else's savings these days.

America behaved better when it had better citizens.

I find the whole multilateral thing fascinating. Over and over again the public makes it clear that it resents the burdens of being the main guarantor of international stability, much more the burdens of anything that would smack of empire-building. The bad news is that we really need to do a lot of this marginally popular stuff (and no one else will step in if we don't, at least in the medium run). The good news is that nobody has much to fear about the US trying to take over the world, since the public would be fairly hostile to such notions.

BTW, it is very misleading to confuse neoconservative support for building democracy with Wilsonian idealism, as your review suggests both books do. The neocon argument, for better or worse, is that the spread of democracy is a tactic which will redound to the security and prosperity of the United States. So if you poll about "Do you believe that the spread of democracy and human rights reduces threats to America?" and "Do you support US efforts to spread democracy abroad?" and "Should the US try to replace hostile dictatorships with democracies when possible?" you might get different results.

Regarding Mark's sour rant upstairs:

It looks like you should probably mind your own conceit before offering critique on others:

Naturally, physics experts take themselves very seriously, and they utilize a technical vocabulary in order to highlight and amplify their expertise.

Are physics problems resolved by an innate magical ability, or are they simply the objects of facts and reasoning--two facets of inquiry seemingly available to everyone--including non-PhDs?

Unfortunately for Mark, the fact is that physics is not a discipline of the humanities but a science, intelligible to everyone with the time and tunnel vision to learn the math. And while this fact appears to be hurtful to Mark's self-esteem and social stature, it should be encouraging to non-elite Americans, who have every right to demand better engineers, scientists and technical experts whatever their level of education.

(And by the way, if you want to know what self righteous, academic conceit looks like, go read Mark's closing comment in parentheses.)

"Unfortunately for Mark, the fact is that physics is not a discipline of the humanities but a science, intelligible to everyone with the time and tunnel vision to learn the math."

I thank Babar for unwittingly reiterating my point. Yes, in order to tackle certain physics problems it's necessary to know the appropriate mathematics. Which is to say, in order to resolve certain physics problems it's necessary to possess a certain amount of technical knowledge.

Is there a singly international relations problem that presents a similary difficulty? Not one that I can concieve of, although perhaps Babar knows something I don't.

It is interesting that Babar, who is almost certainly a non-elite, would wish to uphold the mystique of elites and thus to some extent disenfranchise himself. But then this tendency is fairly typical among the college-educated.

"Which is to say, in order to resolve certain physics problems it's necessary to possess a certain amount of technical knowledge.

Is there a singly international relations problem that presents a similary difficulty? "

Think harder. I can think of several, to wit - familiarity with international law and the treaty obligations of the US, and the treaty obligations of the various countries the US deals with, masrtery of at least one of the languages in use in at least one of the major power blocs in the world, for example Arabic or Chinese, so that one is not at the mercy of the English-language press or one's own intelligence bureaucracy, and son.

You may not consider mastery of a language and the matrix culture to be a technical skill. That says more about the arbitrary limits of your defintion of what is or is not technical than anything else.

Without these skills a commneter is just an armchair bloviator. This same disablity is to blame for the bone-ignorant character of so much comment by civilians on military matters, especially with regard to the Iraq situation. An example of this was a comment on a thread on this blog discussing Rumsfeld. one commneter made the breath-takingly stupid commnet that what Rumsfeld brought to the military, as a corporate leader rather than a military person, was his experience in directing large, complex organizations and transforming them. Complete ignorance of the degree of complexity of military organization or of the history of miltary organizations and sucessful transformations in the past, is apparently no bar for some people.

Then there is this gem: "(And by the way, if you want to know why "social scientists" are the objects of so much contempt within the scientific community, this is why.)"

If you want to know why so many outside the "scientific" community think scientists are illiterate and parochial, this inaccurate narrow use of the word "science" will serve as one piece of evidence. The word "science" has been used in English for centuries with a fairly broad range of related menaings, all centering around the concept of "knowledge". Some communities may use the term in thier own artifically narrower meanings, but that hardly makes those meanings normative.

I might also point out that there is at least one social science, linguistics, whose empirical basis is every bit as solid as any physical. science.

Hey everybody, gather around--it's a two-cultures pissing match hijacking a substantive comment thread!

"Think harder. I can think of several, to wit - familiarity with international law and the treaty obligations of the US, and the treaty obligations of the various countries the US deals with, masrtery of at least one of the languages in use in at least one of the major power blocs in the world, for example Arabic or Chinese, so that one is not at the mercy of the English-language press or one's own intelligence bureaucracy, and son."

Well, a familiarity with international law would come about by reading international law. Surely non-elites can do that.

As for knowing a relevant language, I admit that that would be both a technical skill (did I suggest otherwise?) and an aid to understanding. But unlike a universal technical "language" (such as, say, abstract algebra) a foreign language can be translated, rather directly, into the ordinary language of non-speakers. And so long as the intellectual content of the ideas being expressed are non-technical in nature, then they should be intelligible to the lay non-speaker, once translated.

Of course, you could make the radical argument that translation is impossible and second-hand discussion worthless. But pragmatically we somehow manage. Or at least Daniel Drezner and his commenters do, when they discusses comptently the problems of Iraq, all the while ignorant of Arabic.

And as for my definition of science, I use the modern one: empirical inquiry via experimentation.
Which is why I and everyone else consider linguistics to be for the most part a science.

And let me reiterate what my basic point is, made in response to Drezner's book review: that international relations problems are perfectly intelligible to laymen. Thus we see philosophy BAs like Matthew Yglesias discussing very well foreign policy questions that Drezner would seem to consider outside Yglesias' "area of expertise". And when we see Yglesias make his points we notice that he employs mere facts and reasoning, and nothing more.

To me, this is heartening, as it suggests that, contra Drezner, non-elites are capable of arguing and resolving competently questions of foreign policy, just as they argue and resolve questions of domestic policy (in theory).

This is a democratic position, and yet the people in this forum seem hostile to it. Odd.

This is a democratic position, and yet the people in this forum seem hostile to it. Odd.

I made no comment on it whatsoever, so please leave me out of your spat, okay?

"Of course, you could make the radical argument that translation is impossible and second-hand discussion worthless. But pragmatically we somehow manage. "

History is littered with counter-examples.

"And as for my definition of science, I use the modern one: empirical inquiry via experimentation."

So by this "modern" definition, neither botany, geology nor atronomy are sciences. The actual definition I have heard cited is falsifiablity, as of predictions concerning possible observations, as when various claims about genetic ssytematics in botany are later borne out by DNA analysis of different, or when Hittite was found to have the missing pharyngeals that saussure had posited for Proto-Indo-European.

But Mark's main point, that non-specialists can indeed handle material in someone else's speciality, had better be right, or else we are all living in separate little universes. He seems further to be saying that the non-specialist had better be willing and able to put in the work it takes to understand what the specialist is saying. Nothing left to quibble with.

I'm fairly certain that botany, geology and astronomy all involve experimentation. And surely they're empirical. So I don't see those as counter-examples. Although I do agree that falsifiability is a more succint definition, and I regretted not writing it after I had hit the [post] button.

Nevertheless I'm glad we can agree, although I still hold that a fundamental difference can be drawn between the sciences and the humanities in regards to problem solution. And I don't mean simply experimentation. What I want to suggest is that scientific solution excercises technical knowledge--a formula, say--in the very execution of the solution. Whereas in the humanities, facts and reasoning are exercised only. So when you gave the example of international law: I would say that in solving a question of international law, what is utilized in the process of problem solution is the factual content of the law, processed by reason.

And since international law is not a technical processing tool, like a formula, but is instead simply a body of facts, then an international relations problem is ipso facto intelligible and to some degree solvable to an unfamiliar but literate layperson.

Whereas with regards to questions of science, the layperson is at a terminal disadvantage, as he is by definition unfamiliar with the technical knowledge that is utilized in the very execution of the problem solving process. And so before a layperson can tackle questions of hard science, he must first become trained in the technical knowledge relating to the problem. This is a matter of time and hard work, and not magic, as Babar suggests, but there it is.

As for the importance of the difference, if it exists, as it relates to democracy: clearly, with regards to empirical questions of science, the layperson has little to say. But in regards to questions of international affairs, contra Drezner, the layperson--the non-IR PhD--can say quite alot. Therefore as a matter of democratic justice, the democracy deficit that Page's book describes in unacceptable.

Now note that I didn't suggest that the non-elite has nothing to say about the sciences in regards to norms. So while cloning science in itself is a question for trained biologists, questions of whether or not we should clone are quite properly open to discussion by everyone, as normative questions are not technical questions.

Finally, much of the antipathy within the sciences for the social sciences springs from the technocratic sixties, when the social science disciplines, in an effort to achieve respectability or self-respect, began imitating the surface features of the sciences. This led to the creation of alot of jargon, but no science, and it was quite embarrasing all around.

Now, to be fair, this tendency has receded a bit. And certainly we see none of it in Drezner's writing, which is quite lucid.

"I'm fairly certain that botany, geology and astronomy all involve experimentation. "

Geology - don't I wish that someone would come and experiment with defusing The Juan de Fuca Subduction Zone before it flattens everything in Western Washington! It sesm to me that all the important questions in botany are being approached through observation and then wrangling over the analytical methods. I saw an article suggesting a new apportionment of species between magnolia and Michelia based on external features and backed up with DNA evidence. Experimentation won't really solve the question of descent and speciation. Same for paleontolgy, I guess - I can't think of any experiment that is going to settle the "isse" some people have with evolution, but the evidence keeps piling up and the objections keep getting demolished.

"Now note that I didn't suggest that the non-elite has nothing to say about the sciences in regards to norms. etc..."

I agree because this is an ethical debate, not a matter of scientific finding.

"But in regards to questions of international affairs, contra Drezner, the layperson--the non-IR PhD--can say quite alot."

Here we get to the nub, and this is a very live issue in our society. What is a layperson isn a position to say something worthwhile on? Moral questions, such as the handling of prisoners and treament of enenmy and other civilians - certainly nay decent human being knows all he needs to usefully comment. Matters of miltary organization? Probably not. But some matters of organizational policy, such as racila segregated units or Don't Ask Don't Tell, are as much morla issues that reflect on the Republic as they are questions of maximizing the organization to the mission.

"What I want to suggest is that scientific solution excercises technical knowledge--a formula, say--in the very execution of the solution. Whereas in the humanities, facts and reasoning are exercised only. So when you gave the example of international law: I would say that in solving a question of international law, what is utilized in the process of problem solution is the factual content of the law, processed by reason. "

...facts and reasoning... or so we fondly hope! Actually I think there is another difference. physical phenomena are simpler, or maybe just more determinstic, than social phenomena and it is easier to formmulate rules that really predict how the results the same conditions will produce in all cases. Social situations are complex enough that the conditions often cnacel each other, or whatever. The real challenge is to identify the patterns of causation. In language you find the difference betwen grammar and usage is that grammar is the patterns that almost always hold true, where usage is the patterns that you always observe but can't find a logical explanation for or which only hold true under conditions that you can't define exactly enough. Maybe this line moves as you get better information. I don't know, and people argue about it all the time.