The dangers of interpretation: C.A.W. Manning and the “going concern” of international society

Abstract

C. A. W. Manning was an important figure in the early days of what became known as the English School, and was one of the most philosophically explicit articulators of the interpretivist approach that informed that branch of scholarship. He was also a defender of the apartheid system of his native South Africa. A close examination of his work reveals both the promises and the pitfalls of a methodologically interpretive approach to explanation. An interpretive explanation involves developing the capacity in the listener to “go on” appropriately, and this makes criticizing the rules of the game somewhat difficult, but not impossible. A clearer understanding of what an interpretive explanation is may very well help us to avoid the pitfalls illustrated by Manning’s advocacy, which I argue is made possible by a category confusion that remains very much with us: a confusion between delineating the rules of a given domain, and actively advocating or defending those principles.