Who Were the Sea Peoples?

For the first time I am delving into the International Relations literature, in the process of reviewing a book called Liberal World Orders . (This is funny in a way, as IR was one of the specialties of my dissertation supervisor.) I was immediately struck by how prevalent Max Weber's concept of "ideal types" is in what I am reading. Here is a typical quote: "One is to map the various models of liberal international order--both in ideal-typical terms and in their historical setting." (G. John Ikenberry, "Liberal Internationalism 3.0")

Daniel Kuehn worries that I don't have a single empirical test in mind to see whether liquidity preference or the market for loanable funds is more important in determining the interest rate. Well, he is right to worry: I don't. But he was interpreting my call for "empirical" work more narrowly than I meant it. I consider this paper a "test" of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, in that it looks in fair depth at the facts about a particular boom-and-bust cycle, and asks if ABCT can help us understand it. (The answer was "yes," by the way.) The Keynesian cycle and the Hayekian cycle are ideal types. And having studied Keynes more the last few years, in order to teach him properly, I am convinced they both have explanatory adequacy.* The question then becomes, how much do they fit the facts on the ground, i.e., in Weber's terms, do they have empirical adequacy? Econometric tests are a way to examine the empirical adequacy of an ideal type, b...