Tilting at windmills: a final reply to Jahn

Abstract

To judge from the soothing tones of Beate Jahn's latest response, one might think she had become a card-carrying liberal theorist. In relating her own work to liberal international relations theory, she writes: So what exactly did I do? I took the work of an eminent liberal (or protoliberal) thinker, John Locke, and showed that this contains ya general claim that all human beings are rational, and a historical or empirical claim that this rationality did not result in general support for what one might for the sake of brevity call 'liberal' polities and policies. Locke's proposed solution to this problem, I showed, was to create the circumstances, the social and political conditions, under which the potential rationality of all people could be expected to result in specifically 'liberal' policies. Finally, I provided a range of evidence suggesting that Locke's solution was indeed translated into political practice over several centuries both domestically and internationally. In short, I distilled a theoretical claim from the work of John Locke and then provided empirical evidence of its centrality to subsequent liberal political practice. This general procedure does not depart in the slightest from Moravcsik's own (Jahn, 2010: 145-146).