International Relations, Quantum Social Theory, and Scientific Reductionism

Alex Wendt’s Quantum Mind and IR has sparked a new debate among scholars of international relations about the nature of the objects studied. Wendt points out that other disciplines’ adoption of a quantum framework has enabled them to gain explanatory power. He describes two assumptions that he admits are far from obvious but defends them by detailing the significant intellectual gains and explanatory power they add. Wendt thus argues for the quantum framework by means of an intellectual cost-benefit calculation. Quantum Mind details the benefits but attends less to the costs; the latter are the focus of this paper.