| Summary/Abstract |
There is no place for strategic culture in an intellectual world of indistinguishable billiard balls. In that rarified space, culture is still permitted to exist as a social concept; arguing that all peoples everywhere construct identical societies requires an indifference to contrary evidence so impressive as to be beyond the capacity even of most social scientists. Yet, for a great many IR theorists, culture manages both to be axiomatically central to human life and society and also, somehow, not to matter very much in describing how international relations works. One simply pins on a “neoliberal” or “neorealist” school membership badge and gets on with the business of crafting theoretically elegant models of how humans and their institutions act. Or, at least, how they would act if people were not irritatingly mammalian. The tendency of individuals to respond to stimuli with something other than perfectly rational responses carefully calculated to optimize their interests, as those interests are ranked and prioritized by theorists, is inconvenient.
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