The collection of readings regarded a lot of deep thought and questioning.
I liked Weber's piece as a primer to get you out of your own head and the conceptions you may have of the idea of..well, the idea. He focuses mainly on capitalism (special emphasis on adventure capitalism) and the development and the (slightly racially-charged) perfecting of ideas carried out in the West. While lending credit to thinkers, healers and men of science from other cultures, it is clear he places the responsibility for advancing mankind forward on Western intellect, particularly Europe. What I got out of the piece (aside from a very interesting breakdown of how capitalism and the drive for profit can be man/states' guiding light) was that ideas, particularly rationality, are not necessarily innate.
Goldstein and Keohane take ideas and try to fit them properly into the rationalist framework. The clearly delineate the two. The crux of their argument is that interests are a rational aim one works toward accomplishing, some for of material gain. An idea is a non-material interest, immeasurable, a belief in one's head. They break down their entire argument as ideas vs interests.
Laffey and Weldes push back and things get rather weird. They disagree with rationalists in that they view ideas AS interests. They do not like the rationalist idea that the immeasurable (ideas) is less important than the measurable (interests). Their claim is that the way one looks at the world is how one goes about approaching. Ideas are social constructs, not individual ones and are practices. The phrasing they use for ideas is symbolic technologies, i.e. rationality is an idea and interests come from ideas.
This whole series of readings left me with more questions than answers. I prefer the Goldstein/Keohane approach because the constructivist approach paints a world where determining an actor's interests is damn near impossible as it requires knowing how each and every actor views the world, seeing through their eyes, and provides no across-the-board baseline for applying it to predicting behavior. I agree with Laffey and Weldes' in theory, but resort to Golstein and Keohane in practice.
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