Interests as Ideas vs Interests from Ideas

Having read Laffey and Weldes and Keohane and Goldstein and discussed it with the class, I must confess the whole breakdown of Laffey and Weldes is still nebulous and difficult to grasp. Some parts of the argument make sense to me, that the rationalists view ideas and interests as separate and the constructivists view them as one singular entity; in this way you get the interests coming from ideas and interests as ideas scenario.

I will continue to subscribe to the rationalist approach because it is, well, rational. The rationalist approach is an easier method of forecasting actor behavior than the constructivist one as far as ideas and interests go. In my mind as a student of political science that is by far the most important thing. But I cannot discount the constructivist approach out of hand because I know that it is the more realistic of the two, meaning that it seems more in line with human behavior. Laffey and Weldes treat ideas as social, that interests and ideas are symbiotic in that they react with one another and can't exist without one another. These points are true, but in practice become muddled.

The constructivists make good points, though, that undermine the rationalist position, at least as they approach the idea of, well, ideas. The way we look at the world determines how we go about approaching it. As such, our interests are tied to our ideas and cannot be separated. Weber has an even better point, though it is wrapped in a rather haughty and slightly racist essay, that rationality is an idea. Ditching the notion that rationality was developed by Europeans, the statement by itself does stand. People are not inherently rational; indeed rationality is an idea.

This module had my brain doing figure eights, but it also opened up the door for a newfound appreciation of the constructivist approach to IR.