Article Review: Dessler “What is At Stake in the Agency Structure Debate”

Dessler’s expanded ontology under the transformational model cannot be thought of as presenting any objective truth. Rather, it achieves its own goal of accepting social rules for a structural interpretation of international relations. Dessler has a personal purpose for how he decides to expand ontology. Thus, as much as Dessler achieves eliminating structural determinism of Waltz’s theory, not recognizing Dessler’s own agency as an actor in international relations ignores the deterministic aspect of accepting any theory as objective, dualist and separate from the world the theorist theorizes.