{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0264445123815347, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003362885967594008, 'mean_word_length': 5.43996062992126, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What If They Gave a Crisis and Nobody Came?: Interpreting International Crises. By Hirschbein Ron. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. 223p. $59.95.

According to Ron Hirschbein, most of those seeking to make sense of "international reality" have yet to hear the good news about interpretive theory. In What If They Gave a Crisis and Nobody Came, Hirschbein both brings that news and shows how to make use of it. And despite backsliding into realist/empiricist language from time to time, he has been edified enough by his news to recognize that "international reality" is a product of interpretive imposition. Hirschbein's treatment also contains a lot of old news—for example, elaborate exegeses of various contemporary approaches to crisis decision making—to which he applies critiques based on his notions of what constitutes both interpretive and explanatory adequacy. Happily, unlike the bulk of practitioners in the international relations field, Hirschbein is a post-Kantian. In a refreshingly lively set of discussions and analyses, he portrays crises as "meaning-making projects" (p. 16). This perspective, amplified with extended discussions of interpretative practices in various social science disciplines and with applications to Kennedy's and Nixon's Cuban crises, turns the reader's attention away from a world of unmediated facticity and toward the constructive imaginations of subjects. Kantian epistemology impugned approaches to meaning that relied on a world of things in themselves, and Hirschbein shows that the condition of possibility for the emergence of "international crises" is not the world of raw matter but the interpretive culture of subject/actors who make decisions. The interpretive culture of Hirschbein's subject/actors articulates itself through metaphors and narratives. These symbolic equivalences and storylines combine to invent what are perceived as urgent situations. Enduring action stories (among others) reach out from the past and continue to impose meanings for those who must respond to the exigencies of the present. In developing this perspective, Hirschbein acknowledges an impressive variety of thinkers—philosophers and practitioners of interpretation, theorists of international decision making, cultural anthropoligists, biographers, and media analysts, among others. His book is an ambitious, comprehensive, and focused attempt to improve our understanding of crisis decision making, as it is understood by those who function within a state-oriented, geopolitical imaginary. I add that last phrase because Hirschbein's project—an attempt to introduce a thoroughgoing hermeneutic mentality into a field dominated by a empiricist-realist perspective— fails on one of the most crucial dimensions of critical hermeneutics; it is not self-reflective about the predicates of the world it imposes. Hirschbein supplies no critical thinking about the practices of space (the geopolitical imaginaries) within which his "crises" emerge; he uncritically adopts the locus of enunciation of state officials as his own. This most serious shortcoming of What If They Gave a Crisis is previewed when Hirschbein evokes and then dismisses (a caricature of) a postmodernist perspective because, he says, he does not want to succumb to "the joys of postmodern sects by abandoning the search for meaning" (p. 48). Apart from the way Hirschbein's remark effectively abandons his own position—that meaning is imposed not found— had he heeded postmodernist insights, he would have found perspectives that challenge his approach to subject/actors. While he succumbs to the joys of abandoning fixed objects and situations, he joylessly locks his subject into a spatially fixed and psychologized mentality. Despite his reference to the "symbolic turn in international relations" (p. 6), his subject is psychologically rather than discursively constructed. Moreover, his only subjects are U.S. public officials, whose intelligible world is a function of the reigning system of state sovereignties. A critical approach to "crises" would raise issues about the discourses—the dominant structures of intelligibility—within which decision makers constitute the world of danger. Hirschbein's approach to hermeneutics strengthens the hold of those structures of intelligibility rather than analyzing and questioning them. In addition, granting that Hirschbein's project is to provide a better account of the terra cognita he shares with state officials rather than allowing other worlds to presence, his analyses fail even on their own terms. While he evokes the concept of an interpretive culture, his case studies rely primarily on psychobiographical insights into the mentalities of individuals. And while, at a discursive level, he privileges interpretation over explanation, he frequently lapses into empiricist commitments to unbiased explanations (even misreading the Gadamerian idea of prejudice as bias) (p. 97). Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, the good news about interpretation in What If They Gave a Crisis has redemptive qualities. Hirschbein's text frequently knows more than what it argues. In his construction of crisis decision making as a "meaning-making project" (p. 16). Hirschbein shows himself to be attuned to the limits of a reliance on mentality or structures of apprehension and the "contradictory dimensions of subjectivity" (p. 71). Were he to pursue the implications of a conceptually enriched notion of projects, he would be showing how the worlds of danger emerge not simply because of how people think within their decision-making cultures but because of how those cultures are constituted as a set of involvements or practices with considerable historical depth. Hirschbein's promising notion of the project, along with some of his other insights into the ways in which the organization of decision-making cultures involves more than mere cognitive styles, should encourage more investigations into aspects of the habitus within which danger emerges. And his attention to the narrative dimension of state actors' projects, which situate danger in an unstable mythos rather than a fixed logos, should encourage an attention to various other narratives. A recognition of other narratives, for example, those of indigenous peoples and other cultures within states who fail to achieve a presence in the discourses articulating state actors' meaning-making projects, would reveal a world of danger for various peoples victimized by the frames of meaning surrounding crisis decision making.