“A scientific politics can develop only if the materials of politics are treated in terms of systems of actions.” In the light of this statement of Kaplan with regard to application of systems theory to political science, critically examine the drawbacks of its application. (1999)
The claim belongs to Morton A. Kaplan, whose System and Process in International Politics (1957) was the most ambitious product of the behavioural turn in international relations. A system of action, for Kaplan, is a set of interrelated variables, marked off from an environment, whose behaviour shows describable regularities. Science begins when the configuration, not the single state, becomes the unit of explanation. The ambition is defensible; its application exposed drawbacks that are fatal to Kaplan’s version, though not to systemic thinking as such.
The Application
- Kaplan built his theory deductively, as six models: balance of power, loose bipolar, tight bipolar, universal, hierarchical and unit veto.
- Each model is specified by essential rules, transformation rules, and actor, capability and information variables. The balance of power, for instance, needs at least five essential actors, who must stop fighting rather than eliminate an essential actor and must oppose any aspirant to predominance.
The Drawbacks
- Taxonomy, not theory. The models sort cases into boxes without a causal mechanism linking structure to outcome. Stanley Hoffmann’s criticism stuck: the models are rigorous in form and empty of politics.
- Rules asserted, not derived. The balance-of-power rules are read off eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European diplomacy and presented as deductions. Saying a system persists while its rules hold is near-tautology.
- Systems without a system. Measured against Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory or David Easton’s political system, Kaplan’s system has no specified environment, since it contains every state. It also has no inputs, no conversion, no authoritative outputs and so no feedback. He borrowed the vocabulary and left the explanatory machinery behind.
- Failed prediction. The loose bipolar model cast uncommitted states as marginal actors the blocs would seek to enlist. Instead, the non-aligned group led by Jawaharlal Nehru’s India grew from the 25 states at Belgrade in 1961 into a movement of over a hundred — a residual category that reshaped the system.
- Domestic politics erased. Regime type, ideology, leadership and public opinion do no work, so the Cold War’s end, driven from inside the Soviet Union, lay beyond its reach.
- Actor blindness. Multinational firms, transnational networks and armed non-state groups fit none of its categories.
- The limits of verification. In the Second Great Debate, Hedley Bull (“International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach”, 1966) posed a dilemma. Strict verification yields little of significance; saying anything substantial means smuggling back the classical judgement Kaplan disowned.
- Hidden values. Treating equilibrium as the system’s normal state encodes a status-quo preference while claiming value-neutrality.
What Survives
Kaplan made structural assumptions explicit and legitimised the systemic level of analysis. Kenneth N. Waltz (Theory of International Politics, 1979) showed the premise could work by reducing structure to anarchy and the distribution of capabilities, with a mechanism — competition and socialisation — Kaplan never had.
Conclusion
Kaplan’s statement is half right. Scientific politics does need systemic abstraction, but not only systems of action. Without mechanism, history and domestic politics, systems theory becomes classification in a laboratory coat. His failure indicts the execution rather than the idea — and confirms Bull’s point that judgement cannot be engineered out of politics.