Haas's Empirical Generalizations

In Haas’s attempt to explain empirical generalizations and their limits, he initially starts out with a paragraph stating that none of these generalizations are really “true” per say, but are instead just verified. He labels them as “imperfect pretheories” of regional integration, and continues on to say that they are a mixed jumble of terms that lack any hierarchy of terms, constructs and concepts. This only helps to prove the criticism that functionalism is teleological, that is it attempts to describe social institutions solely through their effects and thereby does not explain the cause of those effects. Functionalism has no concept of change and is unable to account for stuctural contraditions, conflict, or social changes.

Haas seems to contradict himself, where after miticulously going through the different empirical generalizations, such as mutual interdependece, industrialized-pluralistic nations, and late developing nations, he states that, “…A consideration of conceptual problems which remain ill defined and unresolved in the study of regional integration depite the wealth of empirical generalizations which have been generated.” In other words, after dedicating half of his article to these so called “generalizations” they actually nothing is proved and nothing is stated that helps the conceptuals problems of regions, which is one of the main criticisms of neofunctionalism.