The experience of a world out of control is all-pervasive: a pandemic with unknown long-term consequences, a threat of mass starvation in the Global South because of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Israel’s war of retribution in response to Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, increasing numbers of extreme weather events occurring in all parts of the world in the era of global warming – these are a few of the events capturing current world politics. At the same time advances in science and technology yield astonishing results: vaccines developed in a matter of months, a new capacity to peer into the distant past of the universe, and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that question the very meaning of being human. No wonder that pervasive uncertainty intrudes deeply into our personal and political lives. The centennial issue of Foreign Affairs, a widely circulated and read journal of international relations, is quite appropriately titled “The Age of Uncertainty.”Footnote ¹

The lead essay of that issue speaks not of uncertainty but of catastrophic risk; no other essay puts the concept of uncertainty in its title. This conflation of risk with uncertainty is common. The relation between risk and uncertainty is complementary and fluid and creates a conundrum.Footnote ² Predictable normalcy occurs in the small world of risk; unpredictable crisis in the large world of uncertainty. Writing about international relations, Henry Kissinger argued that risk and uncertainty require different types of leaders. Periods of predictable normalcy ask for the day-to-day stewardship of managerial leaders. Periods of unpredictable crisis demand farsighted statesmen who know how to temper their vision with a wariness that accepts the limits of their actions.Footnote ³ Islands of stability and predictability in a tumultuous world are fragile accomplishments easily overwhelmed at any moment. Plotting routes in the domain of risk differs from doing so in the domain of uncertainty. Adding a wrinkle to the old story of the blind men and the elephant, my story is about seeing only one elephant where there are two, risk and uncertainty. It resonates with everyday experience. Before they happen, many events are unfathomable; after they have happened, many appear to have been inevitable. A priori underdetermination and a posteriori overdetermination are two halves of the same nut, reflecting the risk-uncertainty conundrum.

This chapter sorts out how we can distinguish small worlds and conditions of risk from large worlds and conditions of uncertainty along three dimensions (section 1). Unnoticed by students of world politics, in many domains of knowledge the twentieth century saw an important collective shift in terminological resources from Newtonian humanism to post-Newtonianism and para-humanism. These two worldviews are therefore discussed (in sections 2 and 3). Both engage uncertainty more openly than Newtonian humanism does. In any field of study, including world politics, “speaking differently” in a new conceptual language can make distinct contributions to understanding – contributions that can be as important as “arguing well” by relying on conventional terminology. In this case, speaking differently helps us rethink the risk-uncertainty conundrum.

1. From Small to Large Worlds: Context, Process, Language

In our quest for knowledge, Joan Didion writes, we freeze into fixed story lines “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”Footnote ⁴ And that experience, filtered through the views of small and large worlds, feeds our individual imaginations and the imaginaries of our theories and models. The small world of risk expands along three dimensions to the large world of uncertainty. The first dimension moves from homogeneous to heterogeneous contexts, the second from invariant to variable processes, and the third from “representational,” world-mapping models of language to “re-presenting” and world-making ones. These dimensions are continua offering “more-and-less” distinctions rather than “either-or” categorical divisions. Moving along them opens intellectual spaces to better understanding, navigating and reimagining the risk-uncertainty conundrum. Downplaying or ignoring altogether the domain of incalculable uncertainties makes the presuppositions of unreflective Newtonians as non-discussable as the water that fish swim in. “Water?” asks the fish, “what’s water?”Footnote ⁵

For heuristic purposes the cube depicted in Figure 2.1 maps small and large worlds along these three dimensions. The upper left and the lower right corners of the cube capture the conditions that differentiate the two worlds most clearly. Those predisposed to acknowledge uncertainty often fail to recognize elements of risks introduced by homogeneous contexts, invariant processes, and the representational role of language (the upper left corner). Those prone to focusing on risk often fail to acknowledge elements of uncertainty introduced by heterogeneous contexts, variable processes, and the re-presentational character of language (the lower right corner). The arrows symbolize the feedback effects that small and large worlds have on context, process, and language. The entanglements of both worlds are depicted by the absence of clearly demarcated cells inside the cube. Small and large worlds continually bump into each other, becoming entangled, disentangled, and re-entangled in ways that our stories often fail to capture.

Figure 2.1 Context, Process, and Language in Small and Large Worlds

Figure 2.1Long description

The diagram is of a cube, where two opposing corners are marked. The near corner is marked with the texts: Small World of Risk, Invariant process, Representation of Language, and Homogeneous Contexts. The opposing, far corner is marked with the texts: Large World of Uncertainty, Variable Process, Re-presentation of Language, and Heterogeneous Contexts.

2. Post-Newtonianism

Post-Newtonianism highlights the entangled nature of the world. Entities in the world exist not as separate objects but in the specific contexts provided by their entanglements with other entities. The language which describes these relations is mathematical and metaphorical. Like Newtonian humanism, a post-Newtonian worldview has its share of intellectual tensions and contradictions that leave plenty of space for different theories and models. Based on strong scientific principles and practices it does not seek to restrict the hardness of its science to the calculation of risk. And in sharp contrast to how students of world politics typically go about their business, post-Newtonianism highlights instead the importance of uncertainty. It holds that measuring the world is an entangling practice that occurs internal to the world; there is no world that exists external to the observer. Post-Newtonianism’s conception of spacetime flies in the face of Newtonianism’s linguistic representations, which are organized by conventional understandings of separate dimensions of time and space. And in contrast to Newtonianism, for post-Newtonianism novelty is not recombinatorial, based on law-like generalizations and identifiable causal mechanisms operating in closed systems.Footnote ⁸⁶ It insists instead on the existence of open systems filled with infinite potentialities and possibilities. In brief, for scholars of world politics who focus only on risk post-Newtonianism is an intrusive, alien spaceship.Footnote ⁸⁷

Newton believed that both God and Nature made the universe simple. Einstein agreed. He stripped away Newton’s metaphysics and argued that the subatomic level possesses a symmetry that invites simple explanations. For example, with time and space conceptualized as distinct dimensions, Maxwell’s eight field equations as the basis of classical electrodynamics were clunky and opaque. Once Einstein had developed his theory of spacetime as a fourth dimension, rotating these equations across a higher dimension collapsed them into one simple equation, reflecting Einstein’s brilliant insight of the symmetry of time and space as equivalent observations.Footnote ⁸⁸ Could gravity change time? Could speed and position alter the nature of space? Backed by compelling experimental evidence, Einstein’s affirmative answers to both questions established that reality could not be grasped intuitively. The concepts of spacetime and the relative nature of reality should have shocked conventional theories of world politics holding to the notion of a clock-like universe. The fact that they did not is testimony to humanist Newtonianism’s firm grip on the study of the political world and world politics.Footnote ⁸⁹

Over the last century, quantum physics has generated hypotheses with great predictive accuracy about the natural world that are superior to those derived from the classical model. Yet, for the most part, following the lead of economics, students of world politics continue to adhere to Newtonian humanism.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even though nuclear weapons became a central concern for students of world politics, post-Newtonianism as a worldview remains virtually unacknowledged. In the late nineteenth century Newtonian physics became the model for economics, anointed royalty of the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. The quantum discovery of discrete and discontinuous packages of energy in 1900 and the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s set the stage for quantum technologies in the second half of the twentieth century such as nuclear weapons, lasers, transistors, fiber optics, computers, mobile phones, drones, and the world wide web. At the dawn of the era of AI we now discern quantum computing, quantum cosmology (a unified theory of the beginning, evolution, and end of one universe or an infinity of universes), and quantum consciousness (human and artificial).Footnote ⁹¹

Quantum mechanics differs from the classical model.Footnote ⁹² Matter is not dead stuff but a form of energy operating at many scales, from particles to galaxies. The elementary parts of the natural world are entangled and not fully separable. A century of research has generated powerful results establishing particle entanglement without any observable mechanisms, creating what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” This action has been confirmed strongly by experiments reported in recent years.Footnote ⁹³

In this post-Newtonian view life does not evolve as points in space existing in an empty container; and it is not organized by time as a linear, universal referent. Following Einstein, life is instead an iterative evolution of four-dimensional spacetime that teems with possibilities.Footnote ⁹⁴ The world is made of fields that are subject to tiny fluctuations. Basic particles are continually created and destroyed.Footnote ⁹⁵ “The world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities” writes physicist Carlo Rovelli, “a world of happenings, not of things.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The future is uncertain or indeterminate and open. Possibilities are always being reconfigured with new ones opening up as others close down.Footnote ⁹⁷ The concept of a probability wave, Heisenberg argued, is a quantitative restatement of the old concept of potentiality, a strange kind of physical reality between possibility and reality.Footnote ⁹⁸ The world’s presentation of an infinitude of relational possibilities cannot be controlled; but it can be captured by smart experiments and isolated cause and effect chains. In this view, uncontrollable surprises, accidents, and unintended consequences are normal.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rather than being focused on Newtonian constraint and necessity, post-Newtonianism centers on uncertainty, indeterminacy, potentiality, and possibility.

Defying common sense, quantum mechanics has established or fortified concepts such as uncertainty, complementarity, entanglement, non-locality, and superposition. The elementary entities in quantum mechanics are entangled. Conceived of as particles and as waves they are ruled by the principle of uncertainty. Their functions represent the probability of finding particles at a specific location only if we choose to look there. The question of probability goes to the heart of physics, where before “everything had seemed to be regulated by firm laws that were universal and irrevocable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Quantum entities exist in both particle and wave form, until they collapse at the moment of observation. Their velocity and position cannot be measured simultaneously. They correlate across enormous distances. They can pass through impermeable barriers. And, in thought experiments, they can produce contradictory states. Quantum mechanics strains to discuss these phenomena in non-mathematical language. It yields a picture of an entangled universe that is both holistic and atomistic.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the words of James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt “as a fundamental worldview, theory of reality and enabler of new technologies, quantum touches everything, in theory and increasingly in practice.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Although they shared in the same worldview, the inventors of twentieth-century quantum mechanics differed widely on questions of theory, and those disagreements were reflected in public debates. In Weimar Germany, for example, Einstein’s theory generated fierce public controversy. A pacifist and a Jew, he was a ready target of conservatives and ultra-nationalists. Like Newton before him, Einstein mused “this world is a strange madhouse. Currently every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The political salience of quantum physics declined as its practical significance increased. Empirical applications of quantum mechanics have made stunning progress in many different fields of technology touching many aspects of world politics.

This, however, has not resolved deep-seated disagreements about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity is a good example. In Bohr’s analysis of the Planck constant, the collapse of the wave function can be described only as an interaction between the measurement apparatus and the light being measured. Reality is not a set of more or less contingent cause and effect relations. This is irreconcilable with the very idea of causality. It challenges commonsensical understandings of reality as much as did Einstein’s theories of relativity. Complementarity holds that mutually exclusive pictures are the necessary constituent parts of a more complete description of the phenomenon being investigated. For example, for Bohr Schrödinger’s wave function and Heisenberg’s matrices, the wave-particle duality, were both valid. The contradiction between the two approaches could not be resolved. No single frame of reference was sufficient to capture a contradictory reality. Measured in one set of experiments observations would yield waves, and in another particles. “Neither was a perfect reflection,” writes Benjamín Labatut, “and both were models of the world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Although physics encountered this paradox in the study of the interaction between light and material bodies, the principle of complementarity, Bohr argued, should be adopted in any field of science in which complex phenomena are analyzed by relying on simple concepts.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ His colleagues and associates, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born, developed similar arguments about the relevance and applicability of the principle of complementarity to the human sciences in general and psychology in particular.

Disagreements about some of the theory’s deeply paradoxical features have continued among successive generations of physicists.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ One disagreement concerns the very meaning of the term “measurement.” Does it refer to an apparatus in the lab or also to language? For some, like Karen Barad, Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation insist that when humans measure they affect both the material and the symbolic world. What Bohr “really” meant in his many and often opaque commentaries remains unresolved, as do differences of opinion over how one should think about the physical world with or without language and human experience – a debate powerfully revived by recent advances in AI. But Slobodan Perović argues convincingly that throughout his career Bohr grounded his philosophical arguments in experimental data. His general principle of complementarity was the end-result of painstaking work developing and testing hypotheses and developing middle-range theoretical constructs. Everyday language and classical terminology were needed to report the experimental results in the first stage of induction.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The second quantum stage reports performed experiments, the nature of the apparatus, the observer, and other quantum concepts in tentatively intermediary and general hypotheses that, eventually, may produce a master hypothesis that grasps the overall experimental context. Such hypotheses can introduce metaphysical ideas and models that do not agree with the classical view of the material world, such as the entanglement of observed objects and the instruments used to interpret them. The limitations of language were a great obstacle to dealing with the quantum weirdness that Bohr addressed as a practicing physicist.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Heisenberg agreed about language as “re-presentation” and world-making. He conceded that Bohr’s concept of complementarity forced physicists to rely on ambiguous language.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry,” Heisenberg wrote. “The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

A post-Newtonian worldview tolerates widely diverging theories of Quantum Realists and Quantum Instrumentalists. Their different positions recall debates between “frequentists” and “subjectivists” in the discussion of probability discussed in Chapter 1. “Quantum Realists” believe that the history of the world is a history of endless splits, which occur every time a macroscopic body is tied to a choice of quantum states. They stipulate an inconceivably large number of uncorrelated multiverses, for David Mermin “the reductio ad absurdum of reifying the quantum state.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Realists are waiting for a post-quantum revolution that will make quantum mechanics a special case of a more general theory not yet invented. Such a revolution might thus start a new cycle in which quantum physics would be subsumed, just as it subsumed Newtonian physics in the early twentieth century. Physics Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg characterized that quest as interesting but also as “whistling in the dark.”Footnote ¹¹² For now, from the perspective of Quantum Realists, uncertainty and entanglement are viewed as constitutive elements of the world and, by extension, of world politics.Footnote ¹¹³

“Quantum Instrumentalists” believe that when human beings measure the world, they produce that world at some fundamental level. The natural world is not governed by impersonal physical laws that control everything. Quantum Bayesianism (or QBism) offers instead a radically subjective interpretation of quantum mechanics that provides an unconventional answer to the mysterious meaning of the subatomic world.Footnote ¹¹⁴ For Mermin “QBism is as big a break with 20th-century ways of thinking about science as cubism was with 19th-century ways of thinking about art.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ QBism grapples with the “weirdness” of central aspects of quantum physics, specifically the interpretation of quantum probabilities.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It stipulates that each actor makes bets and updates odds.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Based on evolving experience and new information, and following the rules of Bayesian probabilities, agents update their prior beliefs to improve their predictions of future events. In QBist interpretations, all probabilities are interpreted as exclusively private beliefs of individuals. Information is intrinsically private and inaccessible to others. Information updating does not produce intersubjectively shared, consensual beliefs about the world in the medium- or long-term. QBism does not allow for social or interpersonal relations. The updating process involves only the agent’s evolving experiences and beliefs. Einstein would not have any of this: if God had wanted to play dice, he argued, “then he would have done it quite thoroughly and not stopped with a plan for his gambling. In for a penny, in for a pound [Wenn schon, denn schon]. Then we wouldn’t have to search for laws at all.” Rüdiger Schack answers Einstein: “God has done it thoroughly. That’s the message of QBism. It is not a plan for his gambling, but for ours.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ And the “our” is a collection of isolated individuals existing without society. In the words of Christopher Fuchs, QBism postulates that “nature and its parts do what they want, and we as free-willed agents do what we can get away with. Quantum theory, on this account, is our best means for hitching a ride with the universe’s pervasive creativity and doing what we can to contribute to it.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

For QBism humans are part of a participatory rather than an inert universe.Footnote ¹²⁰ Many trillions of elementary observer-participatory acts help constitute the shape of the universe, without determining it.Footnote ¹²¹ Every action by the self can be met by uncontrollable and unforeseen consequences from the world. “The objective world asserts itself unmistakably, unpredictably and uncontrollably in its immediate response to any of our interventions.”Footnote ¹²² When actors prod the external world, the world can and often does generate something new that no agent could have predicted. The core of QBism is about something that is profoundly personal, relational, and unpredictable. Confirmed by the private experiences of individuals, the laws of nature eventually crystallize into conventional wisdom.Footnote ¹²³ For QBism quantum mechanics is a technique for navigating the world. It is not human experience that yields to the world, as in the classical model. It is the world that yields to human experience – until the cumulation of experience changes.

QBism holds that self’s understanding of the world rests entirely on individual experience. “When I sleep or die” writes Oswald Spengler, “my world ends with me, but the world of the others remains. With every newborn child awakens also its world.”Footnote ¹²⁴ It is self’s uncommunicable experience that matters – the individual “I” not the intersubjective “we.” It is “each of us” as a singular entity and not a collective “us.”Footnote ¹²⁵ This is not to argue that the world exists only in the head of self.Footnote ¹²⁶ The material from which self constructs a picture of the external world includes the effects that the world has on self’s experience of other. It leads self to reason that other is very much like self, with its own private experiences. This is as firm a belief as any that self has. Self could not function in the world without it. Asked to assign a probability to this statement, self would choose p=1. The source of that confidence remains outside of the scope of the theory, surely a source of bafflement to social constructivists and other social scientists.Footnote ¹²⁷ QBism is not a solipsistic theory that holds that each of us is free to make up our own private world. There exists a world external to each agent.Footnote ¹²⁸ This empirical proposition is more useful and strongly confirmed by experience than any other. An important part of self’s private experience is the impact on self by other’s effort to communicate in speech or writing other’s personal experience.

QBism differs from Wendt’s book on quantum consciousness.Footnote ¹²⁹ Wendt’s argument seeks to ground human consciousness in the materiality of the world. He hopes to create a consistent, coherent, and complete system of knowledge. QBism is different. It is pragmatic. It takes experience (or Wendt’s consciousness) as given. Knowledge is not a set of securely anchored systematic propositions. It is, rather, a set of successive attempts to cope with problematic situations that are more or less successful in specific contexts.Footnote ¹³⁰ Like all of physics, QBism is a product of human thought and culture. There is no “reality” out there. It is all in our heads and the world is created through individual experience, beliefs, and information updating. For QBism, human experience (Wendt’s consciousness) is foundational and creates the quantum world. For Wendt, quantum physics is the foundation on which he grounds his far-ranging search for consciousness (QBism’s experience). For QBism, the move is from individual experience (or consciousness) to the world; for Wendt, the move is from the world to individual consciousness (or experience). For QBism, worldviews are epistemologically grounded. For Wendt, individuals are ontologically walking wave functions. These arguments are different though not necessarily antithetical. In fact, they may be complementary, just as Russell’s and Whitehead’s philosophical arguments connecting materialism and idealism.Footnote ¹³¹ In the words of Jairus Grove “much like a magnet can have two opposing forces, positive and negative, in one object so can matter have conscious and nonconscious properties.”Footnote ¹³²

Within a post-Newtonian worldview theoretical disagreement extended also to the broader application of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Erwin Schrödinger, for example, saw little value in quantum mechanics for the humanities and social sciences. Other physicists insisted on the theory’s relevance while disagreeing on its precise contribution. Formalists like Max Born thought that the relations between human and social phenomena could be expressed mathematically, and that this might generate novel explanations and probabilistic predictions. Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others were similarly convinced of the theory’s contribution to our understanding of the construction and sharing of human knowledge beyond the material world. Students of world politics and the social sciences more generally, however, have resisted exploring such avenues. They have sidelined uncertainty and struggled unsuccessfully with the risk-uncertainty conundrum.

That is not to argue that Bohr and Heisenberg agreed on the meaning of uncertainty and indeterminacy.Footnote ¹³³ Heisenberg thought of uncertainty as the unavoidable trade-off in the knowledge of quantum systems such as the relation between the position and momentum of a particle; more certainty about one meant less certainty about the other. Uncertainty was for him a quantitative and measurable concept. Bohr understood indeterminacy as a qualitative phenomenon rather than a measurable probability. Indeterminacy was not the same as Heisenberg’s “principle” governing objective experimental observation. It was part of complementary “relations” due to the inseparability of subject, object, and instrument in quantum experiments. Heisenberg focused on measurability and how things “are,” Bohr on knowability and how things “appear.” This distinction points to a split in the community of quantum physicists that emerged in the mid-1920s. One group focused on mathematics (such as Einstein, Born, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Heisenberg), the other on philosophy (Bohr and Pauli in particular). Despite these disagreements on fundamental issues of ontology and epistemology, all agreed that quantum mechanics revealed something profoundly novel about the constitution of the world.Footnote ¹³⁴

Early on, some political scientists agreed.Footnote ¹³⁵ For example, in 1927 William Bennett Munro, then president of the American Political Science Association, delivered his address on the topic of “physics and politics,” regretting that the study of government was “still in bondage to the eighteenth-century deification of the abstract, individual man.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Twenty years later, in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Hans Morgenthau acknowledged the importance of changes in physics for the analysis of world politics.Footnote ¹³⁷ For Morgenthau Newtonian physics was “a ghost from which life has long since departed.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Since the classical model had been disproved and rejected by physicists, Morgenthau argued, it should no longer serve as a guide for the social sciences. Students of world politics should accept the complex worldview underlying quantum mechanics. Scientific studies of world politics would therefore have to settle for a disquieting mixture of the knowable and the unknowable.Footnote ¹³⁹ By introducing the concepts of uncertainty and indeterminacy, quantum mechanics had radically transformed the calculable, determinist universe of the classical model.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ “The next quantum jump of an atom is as uncertain as your life and mine.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Although probabilistic predictions and scientific laws can provide insights into the modal tendencies of statistical aggregates, like quantum physics they cannot provide any insight into individual units of observation. Morgenthau thus called for a thorough revision of simplified social science modeling.Footnote ¹⁴² And he insisted that modern science should re-establish “the unity of the physical and social world, to which the modern age aspired in vain” making “man aware of his ignorance in the face of the unknown and unknowable and of his impotence in the face of the superior and insuperable.” Morgenthau argued that when we take quantum mechanics rather than the classical model as our guide, “the structure of the natural world finds its exact counterpart in the social world.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Toward the end of his life he criticized rational scientism as a cover for emotional commitment rather than an instrument for understanding how the world works. “The pervasive flaw,” Morgenthau writes about Herman Kahn’s soothing theorizing about nuclear war, “is the discrepancy between his optimistic conclusions and the allegedly unemotional, factual, quantitative, objective, scientific assumptions from which the conclusions are supposed to derive with logical necessity … His argument is propelled forward by an emotion as strong as any ever to ruin scientific intent: to prove that we can live with nuclear war.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Though they are largely forgotten, half a century later, Morgenthau’s theoretical and moral arguments still ring true.

A post-Newtonian worldview provides an intellectual foundation for addressing the complementarities of risk and uncertainty, recognizing the importance of entanglements, and tracking the technological revolutions that have transformed world politics. Uncertainty is an important part of those revolutions, illustrated at the dawn of the nuclear era. In the race to build a nuclear bomb, the German team, led by Werner Heisenberg, invested in what turned out to be an unworkable technology. The American team did not. An instance of “contingency on steroids,” this had enormous consequences for the eventual end of World War II and the Cold War that followed.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Decades later, senior diplomats like former US Secretary of State George Shultz and former Armenian President Armen Sarkissian, a theoretical physicist turned politician, spoke of “quantum diplomacy” and “quantum politics.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Governments and corporations are in the process of investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing new technologies, such as quantum computers and AI, that will touch world politics profoundly in the coming decades. The mobilization of quantum mechanics is driven not by fads but necessities. “To ‘quantize’ IR,” Jayson Waters argues, “is merely an attempt to better understand our world and ourselves in line with our best physical theories.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

In their foundational treatments of realism and liberalism, Kenneth Waltz and Robert Keohane neglect the risk-uncertainty conundrum.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The index of Waltz’s book has no entries for either risk or uncertainty. Applying the insights of micro-economics to international relations, Waltz overlooked that indeterminacy is central to the oligopolistic markets that most closely approximate great power balancing. As Jonathan Kirshner writes, “the implications of systemic forces are inherently and irretrievably indeterminate … theories of imperfect competition tell us that oligopolists and duopolists have more to gain from colluding with each other than they do by competing with each other … it remains shattering that the central analytical analogy of Theory of International Politics is fundamentally misapplied.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ While the index of Keohane’s book has no entry for the concept of risk, it lists the concept of uncertainty eighteen times. But all of those entries refer to the quality of information, as discussed in the field of transaction economics. None refers to power laws or Bayesian subjective probabilities as admittedly problematic ways of dealing with the risk-uncertainty conundrum. Almost forty years later, John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato agree with Keohane. International politics operates in an information-deficient, that is for them, uncertain environment.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ These scholars say different things while speaking the same language. Post-Newtonianism differs. It highlights, as Waltz and Keohane, Mearsheimer and Rosato fail to do, deep uncertainty and unpredictability in an entangled universe.Footnote ¹⁵¹

3. Para-Humanism

Since there exists a multiplicity of ways of knowing nature and the universe, the concept of para-humanism has multiple meanings.Footnote ¹⁵² Applied to different human and non-human contexts, and open to different languages and types of communication, para-humanism holds that the world generates a heap of deeply entangled life forms. Enriched by a growing appreciation and understanding of non-Western systems of knowledge, decades of careful work in the biological and behavioral sciences point the way to different forms and types of intelligence. “The non-human world seems suddenly alive with intelligence and agency … This idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligences … emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Although it may seem esoteric for political scientists and scholars of international relations, this view is quite common in the natural sciences including in biology, chemistry, and computational science.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Para-humanism differs from anthropocentric versions of humanism. Strong versions of anthropocentrism hold that humans are at the center of all things, are the only beings with intrinsic value, and are the most important part of reality.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The precise meaning of such claims remains a matter of debate. In a basic sense humans cannot help but be anthropocentric. They can know their world only from a human point of view. A view “from nobody” is not an option. Strong versions of anthropocentrism view humans as superior to other beings, combining a kind of human chauvinism with a belief in the moral superiority of the human species. Weak versions of anthropocentrism agree that humans can know the world only from a human point of view. But they do not believe that the human species is morally superior to others.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Para-humanism does not replace humanism. But generally speaking, para-humanism “is critical of traditional humanism and associated theories about the superiority of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Marcy Norton, for example, rejects the biblical separation of “humans” from “animals” and prefers instead “wild” and “tame” beings. For Norton humans and animals are defined by their entangled relations not by the resources they control.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Para-humanism invites the humanities and social sciences to engage with natural sciences such as biology, geology, and cosmology. It focuses on environmental and ethical questions as it probes the relations of humans with non-human subjects.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ It reaches beyond human language to incorporate other articulative practices. A multispecies and more-than-human ethics thus is attentive to the entanglement of different beings and material objects with one another without a shared sense of time and space.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Testing the boundaries of good taste and offending deeply humanist sensibilities Edward Albee grapples with some of these issues in his play The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? The deep love and sexual attraction a prize-winning architect develops for a goat explodes his tight-knit family and with it the entire humanist cosmos. Para-humanism points to Christianity’s anthropocentric idea that God created the world for humankind as one important source of modernity’s ecological crisis. It emphasizes instead a more encompassing ecological ethics of care less beholden to the self-possessed and self-obsessed ego-centrism of humanity.Footnote ¹⁶¹

In its eco-, cosmo-, and machine-centered forms, para-humanism goes “around” and “beyond” humanism, choosing a stance that is critical of traditional humanist tenets. In an eco-centered version nature and society are conceived as complex, overlapping, entangled, open systems. As in post-Newtonianism, the human species is not “above” but “inside” nature. In contrast to closed systems, open ones require an understanding not only of their different components, as in the mechanical worldview of the classical model, but also of their adaptive capacities and the evolving environment of which they are a part. Such systems are always in flux and through positive feedback loops can move toward, away from, or around different equilibria. Global warming, for example, leads to the thawing of the Arctic tundra, the release of more greenhouse gases, and further global warming. In contrast to Newtonian physics, such feedbacks are contingent not deterministic, and they are time-irreversible. Interactions in complex systems generate non-linear emergent properties at the system level that are “superadditive”; they are more than the sum of their parts. Guesswork and conjecture often replace prediction when one seeks to gauge the effects of human action on complex climate systems. And as in quantum physics, “within and between complex systems, cause and effect are understood to be potentially non-local and simultaneous.”Footnote ¹⁶² In Bohm’s terminology quoted in the Introduction of this book, “implication” hints at an entanglement not fully captured by causal language.Footnote ¹⁶³

Human evolution establishes humanity’s relation with a rich multi-microbial ancestry. Humans host billions of organisms that are vital to their well-being.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Humanity’s incomplete control over nature has been accompanied by its unprecedented disconnection from nature. This has altered relentlessly the web of ecological connections. Rob Dunn argues that it is in humans’ narrowly conceived self-interest as a species to reclaim some bodily wildness, avoiding the wilderness of deadly diseases and “large carnivores eating our loved ones.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ This restates an often misquoted Thoreau, who wrote that wildness, not wilderness, “is the preservation of the world.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The human body is not a self-contained Leviathan but a vessel of co-evolved messmates enmeshed in complex relationships.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ A microbial perspective locates world politics in biocentric rather than anthropocentric coordinates. Planetary politics is entangled with a biosphere that is increasingly unable to support many life forms. Today natural rates of species extinction exceed prior rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

In an eco-centered perspective para-humanism transcends the dualism that in recent times has set humans apart from nature. As recently as the tenth to eighteenth centuries the non-human sphere was not clearly demarcated from the human one. In almost 200 documented cases, ecclesiastical courts held pigs, bulls, horses, and other animals criminally accountable for their actions. When found guilty, animals were executed, hanged, or burned. Occasionally they were acquitted. Plagues of rodents, locusts, and other small animals created more complications for legal proceedings. In one sixteenth-century case some rats were exonerated by the smart lawyerly argument that they could not reasonably be expected to show up in court; too many cats were waiting for them en route. In other cases animals were issued written orders to leave particular properties on a specific day or hour. Subject of the 1993 movie The Hour of the Pig (a.k.a. The Advocate), the medieval perspective on animal mind and consciousness differed sharply from the Cartesian distinction between humans and animals.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Para-humanism includes the natural world in its manifold life forms. The human is a messy medley and the non-human is more than background.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ This worldview does not reject humanism.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Instead, it places humanism within a broader context.Footnote ¹⁷² It does reject those elements of humanism that regard the human species as somehow exceptional or unique and set apart from the rest of nature.Footnote ¹⁷³ Political theorist William Connolly is not the only one who argues that treating humanity as independent and unique has led to planetary and ecological crises that reveal the extent to which the human species is in fact deeply involved with the rest of nature.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Similarly, Jane Bennett points to the active participation of non-human forces in the world. Going beyond Newtonian humanism, they open up vistas for recognizing the deep entanglement between the human and the non-human and, perhaps, also new avenues for an environmentally less destructive politics.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

As active participants, all humans exist inside the world. They are not self-contained actors existing outside, looking at the world from a distance. Eduardo Kohn, among others, advocates for an anthropology that stretches “beyond the human” and explores representational forms that go beyond conventional linguistic and symbolic ones. Humans share with other living organisms semiotic modalities that pervade what he calls “the open whole.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Humanistic forms of representation cast humans as players on the stage of nature. Para-humanistic representational forms consider how the players and stage shape one another. Tim Ingold puts forward a conception of “the human being as a singular nexus of creative growth within a continually unfolding field,” of broader and more-than-human relationships and meshworks.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

What is true of humans also holds for forests and trees. The “greening” of the Arctic is a reminder of the reduced ability of the tundra to reflect solar radiation, another indicator of the extent of global warming that is transforming the world.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The “wood-wide-web” is driven by the discovery of networks of fungal filaments shuttling nutrients and information. Forests live relationally. German forester and global bestselling author Peter Wohlleben describes forests as systems of complex interdependence among trees that share a resilient, communal life.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For him the forest is a site for the comfort offered by slow evolutionary change. No apocalyptic news disturbs Wohlleben’s forest. Soft-floor fungal bodies feed trees and extend themselves in skeins that bind roots, nurture organisms, and offer a collaborative meshed net.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Suzanne Simard’s hard-science experimental work has been an important driver of this research agenda that for now poses, yet leaves unresolved, the notion that plants possess some kind of sentience that might form the basis for both collaboration and exploitation.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Even though it has attracted much popular interest, this vibrant research program remains deeply contested.Footnote ¹⁸² But there is widespread agreement that underground mycorrhizal fungal networks offer trees vital nutrients while fungi gobble up the carbon trees provide. One estimate suggests that 5 billion tons of carbon, or more than 10 percent of the world’s total, flow from plants and trees to fungi each year.Footnote ¹⁸³ Generalizing this point to the communicative practices of plants is very controversial. Yet the complex adaptive capacities of plants to their environment are widely acknowledged. Ted Farmer, a Lausanne botanist, resists the idea that plants have “intelligence” or “consciousness.” Yet, he backs the idea of interplant communication.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Para-humanists acknowledge human agency but put it in relationship to the agency that inheres in animals, plants, objects, earth, and the entire cosmos. Since the 1920s cosmologists have probed matter, energy, and the cosmos at large with different theories and models that they test against an ever-increasing body of data made available by new technologies.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Scientific cosmology embraces the sciences (in the plural) as an engaged human enterprise that places humans in a vast, non-human spatial and temporal context. It all started, the Standard Model tells us, with the “big bang,” a moment of infinitely dense matter and energy about 13.6 billion years ago. This explosion created an expanding universe marked by smoothness and homogeneity in the distribution of matter and energy, with life emerging about 10 billion years later. Today, its early life forms are gradually becoming known. Deep life differs from surface life. It is based on residual chemical and radioactive sources of energy and makes up a significant fraction of earth’s biomass that exists in deep, high-pressure environments formerly thought to be sterile.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Stars and galaxies evolved from the universe’s physical and chemical elements and created the atomic level and everything beyond and below it. Alternative theories – among them multiverse models, string theory, and variable law models – seek to address puzzles that the Standard Model cannot explain in its original form.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ At the beginning of the universe, the very big and the very small, cosmology and quantum, were one. At the macro level of relativity theory, spacetime is curved and smooth; at the micro level of quantized spacetime, that smoothness disappears as discrete quanta jump over a flat spacetime governed by global symmetries. The two theories are partial and in contradiction with each other, supporting the notion that worldviews can be incoherent and provide space for the articulation of different theories and models.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Despite this, like the Copenhagen interpretation, most cosmologists accept the Standard Model as the most accurate and plausible story we have today.

Disconfirming evidence, however, has accumulated in recent years, enhancing the sense that cosmology’s understanding of the origins of the universe may be less solid than had been assumed during the last half century.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Fully formed galaxies appear to have existed much earlier than the Standard Model can explain. For decades different ways of measuring the expansion of the universe have yielded incommensurate results. And normal matter makes up only 4 percent of the universe; the rest is made of invisible dark matter and dark energy. It is possible that the incremental ways of “normal science” can resolve these and other anomalies. If so, eventually general relativity and quantum mechanics will be brought together and provide, writes Heinz Pagels, “the basis for cosmology, the study of the entire universe.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ But it is also possible that cosmology is heading toward a revolutionary moment requiring fresh reconceptualizations of the nature of time, space, law-like regularities, and observation. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein developed theories that had broad cultural impacts challenging the notions that humans held a special place in the universe, that humans were fundamentally different from animals, and that common-sense ideas about the flow of time were true. Astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser speculate that “we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it” – and perhaps about ourselves as well.Footnote ¹⁹¹

Lee Smolin’s entangled cosmological story gives us a glimpse of a para-humanist perspective that rethinks science, knowledge, meaning, and humanity’s position in an evolving universe.Footnote ¹⁹² Smolin suspects that many scientists still hope to gain access to eternally valid laws of the universe. They may have lost confidence in Newton’s laws but not in the idea of the laws of nature. Mathematics is for them a powerful tool in the endeavor of finding the universal and eternal. But for Smolin the problem with mathematics is that it looks at things in the universe from the outside, as if things were moving against a neutral background. Relational cosmology breaks with this implicit Newtonianism.Footnote ¹⁹³ Although astronomers have developed many theories in recent decades, the cosmos itself existed for billions of years before the discipline of astronomy was “invented” or “evoked.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Smolin argues that a single, open, and causally highly complex cosmos comprises the universe. Nothing exists beyond it.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The universe is what it has evolved into being, specifically networks of entanglements in time. They cannot be explained by scientific laws any more than they can be explained by religious entities.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ We are all in and of the universe – and not in or of anything else. Scientific cosmology insists on the “simple fact that all possible observers are inside the system they study.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ And, in real time, that system is teeming with mini matters that are forever opening up and closing down new possibilities and thus constitute the universe as a history of its entangled relationships.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Time, in this view, is a measure of change in the evolution of the universe’s entanglements. Everything changes in this relational universe, including change, that is, time itself. It is not only the phenomena that change but also the observed regularities, the supposed laws and the constants of nature.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Denying an external “God eye’s” view to all, the universe incorporates everything and everybody. Escher’s picture “Drawing Hands” depicts two hands drawing each other without giving the viewer God’s absolute vantage point.Footnote ²⁰⁰ There exists no view from nowhere which could ground who we are and what we do. At both the micro and the macro level and in both space and time, the evolution of the universe is entangled.

The world is not inert matter moved by predictable, physical laws. It is active with often unpredictable effects. Non-human devices can alter natural and human possibilities.Footnote ²⁰¹ Over four decades the late Bruno Latour developed this perspective more fully than any other scholar. Latour’s theory became known as actor-network theory.Footnote ²⁰² Less theory than method, it eliminates the distinction between subject and object, central to Newtonianism, and between things and persons, central to humanism. Latour rejects the certainties of those who imagine “a social world without objects” and “a natural world without humans.” The inanimate objects of scientific study, so-called “actans,” are simply less familiar to us than the anthropomorphic “actors” whom we believe we know better. There exists no easy distinction between the “objects of the natural world,” deanimated, inert, stripped of all action, and the “subjects of the human world,” overanimated, endowed with souls or consciousness, and free.Footnote ²⁰³ Latour offers a vivid example. When Alexander Fleming, a Scottish doctor, returned from a vacation in 1928 he found in his laboratory a petri dish covered in mold that inhibited the growth of bacteria. In the discovery of penicillin, Latour asks, was Fleming the more important actor or was it the mold? In his answer, Latour describes a world that is co-produced by both.Footnote ²⁰⁴ For Latour ecologies are about beings and things. Human and non-human actans are meshed together in networks, forming distinctive political ecologies. The nineteenth-century Scottish-American naturalist John Muir described such ecologies very simply. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”Footnote ²⁰⁵

In a similar vein, Donna Haraway argues that in the evolving world of machines cyborgs consist of collectively produced systems rather than self-regulating ones.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Such systems lack spatial and temporal boundaries. They rely on information and control provided by distributed components, linked symbiotically in complex entanglements. More broadly, conceptions of “self-regulating” systems like the free market rest on a humanistic worldview in which economic systems do not interact meaningfully with or impact on other climatological, biological, or social systems.Footnote ²⁰⁷ This flies in the face of experience. The coronavirus is the latest reminder that humans are not self-contained but inseparable parts of others existing within them (bacteria and viruses) and around them (plants, animals, other humans, and possibly even extra-terrestrial beings). The entanglement of humans with others sets the stage for the outbreak of global pandemics. The avian flu, for example, could infect up to 32 billion chickens raised worldwide. Were it to mutate and evolve from birds to humans, this could have devastating consequences for human life.Footnote ²⁰⁸

Para-humanists hold different beliefs and entertain different theories and models, just like post-Newtonians and Newtonian humanists. Some believe that humanity is malleable and can flourish in different cosmic environments especially when assisted by machine intelligence. This appears to be the position of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of, among other companies, SpaceX. In his youth Musk read a lot of science fiction. He is deeply committed to seeding space and relies on reusable rockets to bring down costs. Firmly believing that most of human effort should be concentrated on remedying conditions on earth through investments in corporations such as his own Tesla and Solar City, he believes that a small fraction of global capital should be invested in building a self-sustaining city on Mars. This would make humanity a multiplanetary species and thus diminish the odds of a cosmic catastrophe, perhaps an asteroid, eliminating humans as it did dinosaurs 60 million years ago. His argument is both defensive and inspirational. “The idea of us being a space-faring civilization,” Musk argues, “and being out there among the stars is incredibly inspiring and exciting and something to look forward to.”Footnote ²⁰⁹ Like other tech billionaires smitten by the ideology of space spectacles as the ultimate imperial ambition of the super-rich, Musk argues that we are a knowledge-seeking and frontier-busting species.Footnote ²¹⁰ Why wait?

A strong humanist taboo, rooted in anthropocentrism, prohibits acknowledging the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. To be sure the US Defense Department issues an annual report about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) commonly still referred to as UFOs. And because of public interest and controversy among astrophysicists, UFOs were the subject of a 2022 Congressional hearing. Alexander Wendt asks whether states will be able to mobilize and unify their citizens against non-human forms of intelligence that may have no interest in terrestrial politics. And if they do not, he asks, what will be the consequences – fear, worship, awe – which could delegitimate the entire international and global political order?Footnote ²¹¹ Extra-terrestrial beings are featured in Spielberg’s enchanting movie ET and in the unsettling movie Arrival, which is based on Ted Chiang’s short story. But as Wendt and Raymond Duvall have shown persuasively, these movies have not received any attention from students of world politics.Footnote ²¹² Astrophysicist Milan Ćirković compares the adherents of anthropocentric arguments to an overwhelmingly strong cartel with a vested interest in human exceptionalism, geo-centrism, and other parochial forms of opposition to human bio-enhancement and the exploration and colonization of the universe. The possible discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence, likely much more advanced than human intelligence, reveals for Ćirković a medieval anthropocentrism hiding underneath modernity’s thin veneer. For him anthropocentrism is the doctrine of eternal infantilism, fortified by a powerful close-mindedness that prevents thinking and acting in the face of potential earthly catastrophes. Ćirković indicts contemporary anthropocentrism as a “deep and insidious form of anti-humanism.”Footnote ²¹³

Science writers, literary scholars, novelists, and visionary businesspeople have also contributed to the corpus of para-humanist writings and understandings of deeply relational life forms. Monica Gagliano’s memoir Thus Spoke the Plant insists that humans have to understand themselves to be an integral part of the world rather than sitting apart from it.Footnote ²¹⁴ One scholar of eighteenth-century English literature, Laura Brown, draws on ecocriticism and the new materialism in writing about The Counterhuman Imaginary, a realm of human imagination that exceeds human understandings of order.Footnote ²¹⁵ Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a real-life scholar, a pioneering scientist who regards deforestation as a suicidal, even homicidal, act. She appears as a central character in Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which traces life through the lens of trees.Footnote ²¹⁶ Her bio-conservative stance is earth-bound and understands humanity as linked inseparably to the earth system.

Worldviews are informing all human efforts to explain, understand, engage, and navigate the world. These views are gigantic cocoons hanging from the branches “of a cosmic tree” as Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz has written.Footnote ²¹⁷ They have a performative side to them that creates meaning. Worldviews and their offshoots differ in their scope, scale, and depth of institutionalization.Footnote ²¹⁸ Widely accepted worldviews, such as Newtonian humanism, post-Newtonianism, and para-humanism, accomplish the demanding task of stabilizing an unfathomable world. Internally incoherent, as all worldviews are, they provide space for the development of different theories, models, and methods to explore how the world works and what the world means. At the cost of blending out the uncertainties that create the risk-uncertainty conundrum, as sweet common sense this is true of Newtonian humanism. Although not sweet common sense, post-Newtonianism and para-humanism are widely accepted in the sciences and humanities. Like Newtonian humanism they are beset by internal inconsistencies and contradictions, reflected in a bounty of theories, models, and methods. What sets them apart from Newtonian humanism is their forthright acknowledgment of uncertainty, an indispensable step toward full engagement with the complementarities of risk and uncertainty – and their minuscule impact on the social sciences.

4. Conclusion

The concepts of risk and uncertainty point to different philosophical traditions informing the analysis of world politics in America and beyond: neo-positivism, critical realism, and social constructivism.Footnote ²¹⁹ Neo-positivism sees uncertainty arising in a closed universe as the result of a combination of incomplete data and models as well as the inherent vagaries of a probabilistic world. Uncertainty is a problem of inference. For many positivists with strong commitments to a unified science the “faith that our world must be rational and well-ordered through and through” retains great attraction.Footnote ²²⁰ The call of neo-positivists is simple: one science for a real world. The call is loudly proclaimed and widely heard, but not everybody heeds it. For it is not self-evident that the social and political world is closed. Unlike closed material and biological systems, human communication and creativity leave the social and political world open. Furthermore, all causal arguments depend on counterfactuals. Critical realists thus point to the difference that exists between the observable, empirical world and the real world that includes unobservable phenomena, some of which are causally relevant. For critical realists uncertainty is rooted in the world of not-actualized causal potentials. Conventional and critical social constructivists draw on positivist and critical realist arguments. They hold that all knowledge is unavoidably shaped by partial, subjective and intersubjective beliefs. Risk and uncertainty, one might quip, are what we make of them. Cast into theories and models, these beliefs feed social processes of knowledge creation.

Ardent believers in any one of these traditions are convinced that they get to ride a white horse on the king’s highway toward a secure knowledge about the world. In fact, translating and debating plural knowledge claims about the world is normal business in the analysis of world politics.Footnote ²²¹ Knowledge is built on a matrix of competitive and complementary insights. Adam Mastroianni’s research into the inconclusive results of the effectiveness of flossing confirms skepticism about white horses and royal highways – and perhaps also about the benefits of flossing.Footnote ²²² A meta-study of thirty-five randomized-controlled trials with 3,929 participants generated the dismal finding that flossing “may” reduce gingivitis; but the effects were uncertain and barely significant statistically. Mastroianni’s humble optimism seems apposite in the face of our ignorance that is profound, forgivable, and temporary. The two mistakes we should avoid are believing that we have no more errors to make, and that our errors are permanent and irreversible. Everyman is of course free to fall asleep with this nursery rhyme: “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. If horse turds were biscuits, they’d eat ’til they died.” But during the day, night dreams turn to pipe dreams. In world politics there is no white horse and no king’s highway. Instead, there are muddy trails walked by multitudes wondering where they and the world may stumble next.

The same is true of the growing importance of Chinese theories of world politics.Footnote ²²³ In Chinese writings realist concepts of power, liberal notions of cosmopolitanism, and constructivist ideas of relationality resonate with established paradigms and American and European concepts and approaches. It is noteworthy that Chinese scholars have shown surprisingly little interest in a broad range of critical theories of IR, including Marxism. Anathema to China’s reigning state capitalist ideology, Marxism may not have a chance, for now, of establishing itself as a legitimate part of the Chinese School of IR. While negotiating the difficulties of working under an authoritarian system, Chinese scholars are bound to open up new avenues of investigation. They may do so, Malaysian scholar Bo Yuan suggests, if they turned to the indigenous “anthropocosmic worldview of Oneness between Heaven and Humanity.”Footnote ²²⁴ It resonates with post-Newtonianism and para-humanism and is more encompassing than the worn-out cultural exceptionalism currently favored by many Chinese politicians and scholars. For now, adhering to Newtonian humanism Chinese scholars remain caught up by its tensions and contradictions and the risk-uncertainty conundrum.

There exist other options to deal with the risk-uncertainty conundrum. Here I mention only two. One is to reduce our aspirations and set aside the search for robust and valid generalizations. In current research practice, the specification of scope conditions in your typical seminar on world politics is a ritual that is treated with the kind of indifference that your average airline passenger gives to the “fasten your seat-belt sign” before take-off and landing. In fact, scope conditions are of enormous relevance for any piece of research. Are they a step toward establishing valid generalizations or are they an articulation of a specific context, in time and space? Observed regularities reflect temporary, local stabilities in a highly selective subset of factors. This may generate a specific small world theory or model which might be able to explain specific patterns of events or outcomes. Exposed to endogenous change and large world exogenous shock, their truth content and usefulness are unavoidably “only-here-and-for-a-short-time.” Transportability depends on comparable conditions. Reminiscent of Weber’s ideal type, this addresses the risk-uncertainty conundrum spanning small and large worlds. A second option is to fully historicize the analysis of world politics and view it as one eventful moment or an unfolding series of events. This would follow astrophysicist Lee Smolin, who argues that in the relational universe everything changes, including the observed regularities, the laws of nature, and change itself.Footnote ²²⁵ The French revolution was not known to its participants by that name. It was created after 1789, combining a series of effect-full events that seemed to order-seeking historians to hang together. A theory of world politics could thus be a historical analysis of different small and large world developments that fully acknowledges the complementarity of risk and uncertainty. Or it could continue on as before, grounding itself in Newtonian humanism and shouting “Surprise, surprise!” when the world takes still another of its familiar turns to the unknown.