Derek Robbins 
Cultural Relativism and International Politics [EPUB ebook] 

‘The political and academic worlds are fractured by two competing discourses: the universalism of human rights and cultural relativism. This fracture is represented by the deep separation of cultural analysis and theories of international politics. Derek Robbins in a brilliant interrogation of European thinkers from Montesquieu to Pierre Bourdieu seeks to replace cultural relativism with cultural relationism as a step towards reconciling Enlightenment universalism and anthropological insistence on cultural difference. Inter alia he reflects on the tensions between political and social science and takes up the challenge from Raymond Aron to construct a sociology of international relations. A dazzling achievement.’
– Bryan S. Turner, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Through historical studies of some of the work of Montesquieu, Comte, Durkheim, Boas, Morgenthau, Aron and Bourdieu, Derek Robbins examines the changing and competing conceptualisations of the political and the social in the Western European intellectual tradition.



He suggests that we are now experiencing a new ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in which political thought and its consequences in action have become divorced from social and cultural experience. Developing further the ideas of Bourdieu which he has presented in books and articles over the last twenty years, Robbins argues that we need to integrate the recognition of cultural difference with the practice of international politics by accepting that the ‘field’ of international political discourse is a social construct which is contingent on encounters between diverse cultures.



‘Everything is relative’ (Comte) and ‘everything is social’ (Bourdieu), not least international politics.

Table des matières

Montesquieu: Cultural Relativist and Proto-Positivist?

Comte: Positivist Science and History

Durkheim: Post-Positivist Social Science and Politics

American Anthropology and Political Realism

Aron: Politics and/or Sociologism

Bourdieu: Reflexive Sociologism and the Field of Politics

A propos de l’auteur

Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. He is the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor of the 4-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series (2000) and of a 3-volume collection of articles on Lyotard in the same series (2004). His On Bourdieu, Education and Society was published by Bardwell Press in July, 2006, and he was the editor of the Special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Bourdieu which was published as 23 (6) in November, 2006. In 2007-8 he was in receipt of an ESRC award to study the work of Jean-Claude Passeron, and he has written an introduction to a translation of Passeron′s Le raisonnement sociologique which will be published in 2011 by Bardwell Press, Oxford, as Sociological Reasoning. As Directeur associé in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Marseille in 2009-10 he gave courses on the comparative epistemology of the social sciences, and he is currently exploring the influence of Husserl on 20th Century French social theory, particularly in relation to the development of the thought of Lyotard and Bourdieu.