As its title suggests, the motivation behind Progress in International Relations Theory is to assess whether the IR subfield's work is improving over time. The editors begin by acknowledging that it is impossible to assess whether progress is being made in IR without some idea of what actually constitutes "progress"; they then advocate Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP) as a good point of departure for any such appraisal. In brief, Lakatos argues that research programs should be judged on the basis of their ability to successfully generate predictions of novel facts that are subsequently corroborated with empirical evidence, and the Elmans defend Lakatos's MSRP as a useful metric for assessing whether research programs in IR are making progress over time.

The volume progresses as follows: In Chapter 2, the editors offer an outline of Lakatos's MSRP which includes a detailed discussion of what constitutes a "novel" fact. Lakatos himself was ambiguous on this point, and so this discussion is particularly useful. The editors also review and debunk several myths about Lakatos's MSRP and then highlight the metatheory's most serious weaknesses. In and of itself, Chapter 2 is an important contribution because, although Lakatos is widely cited in the IR literature, he writes in tortured prose that is notoriously difficult for readers to process; moreover, as the editors rightly emphasize, different IR theorists have interpreted and applied his work in radically different ways. The Elmans' concise treatment of Lakatos in Chapter 2 will probably become standard reading in methodology courses and it should impose some overdue discipline on how practitioners interpret and apply the MSRP.

In Chapters 3 through 7, contributors to the volume put MSRP to the test and evaluate theoretical and empirical progress in several IR research programs: institutional theory, power transition theory, liberal IR theory, the democratic peace, and operational code analysis. Not surprisingly, given that each of the chapters is written by a proponent of the research program in question, the findings are generally positive: according to the contributors, each of these research programs is "progressive," albeit with some shortcomings. Noticeable by its absence is any treatment of the growing constructivist research program in IR.

Chapters 8 through 10 focus less on Lakatos and more on conceptual issues such as how we can properly identify IR research programs and their rivals. These chapters include treatments of the cooperation debate between realism and neoliberalism, an assessment of neoclassical realism, and an assessment of the empirical aspects of normative research. Finally, rounding out the volume is a series of excellent commentaries, both on applications of Lakatos as well as on the volume's larger themes.

The commentaries highlight an important idea that runs throughout the Progress volume: however necessary it is to adopt some standard measurement when assessing progress in IR theory, Lakatos by no means provides a perfect metric. Indeed, one senses among the contributors a uniform dissatisfaction with Lakatos. Among the more serious problems with the MSRP, which the Elmans highlight in Chapter 2, are the difficulties encountered in identifying the hard core and other elements of a research program; the failure of the metatheory to arrive at a single, agreed-upon meaning of "novel fact"; and the disproportionate emphasis placed on novel prediction as an indicator of theoretical progress. These problems come up again and again in the various chapters.

Setting Lakatos aside for a moment, an irony highlighted by Progress in International Relations Theory is that, notwithstanding the heated "paradigm wars" that create demand for such edited volumes on theory appraisal, there actually appears to be much less real competition between IR theories than is often presumed. Indeed, how else can one explain the fact that each of the volume's contributors is able to make a plausible case that his or her research program is "progressive"? The only way to explain such a proliferation of research programs is to admit that there is more room in IR for different brands of theory than the paradigm wars would suggest. As Andrew Moravcsik argues in his own contribution to the volume, "international relations is ineluctably multi-paradigmatic" (199).

Nor, would I argue, is this proliferation of research programs that surprising. First, as contributor Robert Jervis notes, scholars from the various "isms," like realism, liberalism, and constructivism, tend to study different worlds (283). In other words, scholars from the different research programs usually take interest in very different empirical phenomena. To take one prominent example, neoliberal institutionalists tend to concentrate on international political economy and on the environment while realists are prone to study international security and the causes, conduct, and consequences of war. Second, even where different research programs do provide competing explanations for prominent outcomes like World War I or the end of the Cold War, the available evidence is often insufficient to discriminate between those explanations, either because the outcome itself is overdetermined or because the competing explanations are describing different aspects of the very same case. The end result is that each research program can claim to provide a plausible explanation for the outcome in question.

Finally, I would argue that each of the major research programs in IR has indeed progressed over time. As contributor David Dessler argues, theories tend to follow a recognizable trajectory: "A simple model is identified; it is extended by relaxing an unrealistic assumption; and the new, more complicated model is corroborated by showing that it accounts for data that the simpler, less realistic model cannot explain. Where increasing verisimilitude leads to greater explanatory power in this fashion, theories gain corroboration" (402). Insofar as each of the major research programs in IR has followed this trajectory, it is possible to argue that each has progressed in its own way. In sum, however tempting it might be to measure progress in IR theory by looking for the ascendance of one research paradigm over its "rivals," neither Progress in International Relations Theory nor the larger history of the subfield itself suggest that convergence on a single paradigm is likely.

John Schuessler, The University of Chicago

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