Part One

HISTORICAL,PHILOSOPHICAL ANDTHEORETICAL ISSUES

IN INTERNATIONALRELATIONS

1

On the History and Historiographyof International Relations

B R I A N C . S C H M I D T

Thus, today, after a quarter-century ofactivity, the study of international rela-tions is still in a condition of considerableconfusion. The scope of the field, themethods of analysis and synthesis to befollowed, the proper administrativearrangements to be made in college cur-ricula, the organization of research – allthese are matters of continuing contro-versy. (Kirk, 1947: 7)

In brief, as a field of inquiry, internationalrelations today resembles a poorlymarked-out arena in which a multiplicityof research programs and strategies com-pete, coexist, overlap, or retain splendidisolation. (Plating, 1969: 11)

The field of international studies hasbecome a little like the Tower of Babel,filled with a cacophony of differentvoices – or, as some have implied, a set oftribes that are very territorial, sniping atthose who come too close and preferringto be with those like them. As a result,the field of international relations hasbecome an administrative holding com-pany rather than an intellectually coher-ent area of inquiry or a community ofscholars. (Hermann, 1998: 606)

These quotations indicate a preliminary reply tothose who question the value of engaging inresearch on the disciplinary history of the field ofinternational relations (IR).1 While a common

diagnosis of the contemporary state of the field isthat it lacks a coherent identity, the statementsabove indicate that the identity of the field hasnever been as secure as many might imagine. A cur-sory review of recent books and articles found inthe ever-expanding number of specialized journals,and the programs of the annual meetings of theInternational Studies Association (ISA) and BritishInternational Studies Association (BISA), reveals acomplex field of extraordinary scope, yet an ele-ment of suspicion continues to be cast on the task ofexamining its history. One possible explanation forthe reluctance to grant legitimacy to this researchtask is the common notion that we already know thehistory. Another possibility is that those in themainstream are satisfied with the dominant storythat is told about the development of the field. Inany event, there is no shortage of brief synopticaccounts of this history in introductory textbooks,state-of-the-field articles and ISA PresidentialAddresses.

These renditions frequently retell a conventionalstory of how the field has progressed through aseries of phases: idealist, realist, behavioralist, post-behavioralist, pluralist, neorealist, rationalist, post-positivist and constructivist. The image of the firstthree phases has been so deeply ingrained in theminds of students and scholars that there almostseems to be no alternative way of understanding theearly history of the field. Hedley Bull, for example,claimed that it is ‘possible to recognize three suc-cessive waves of theoretical activity’: the ‘idealist’or ‘progressivist’ doctrines that were dominant inthe 1920s and early 1930s, the ‘realist’ or conser-vative theories that developed in the late 1930s and

1940s, and lastly the ‘social scientific’ theories thatarose in the late 1950s and 1960s ‘whose origin layin dissatisfaction with the methodologies on whichboth earlier kinds of theory were based’ (Bull,1972: 33). This story of the field’s evolution is, inturn, often buttressed by the closely related accountof the field evolving through a series of ‘greatdebates’, beginning with the disciplinary defining‘great debate’ between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ andextending perhaps to the latest debate todaybetween ‘rationalists’ and ‘reflectivists’ (Banks,1986; Katzenstein et al., 1999; Keohane, 1988;Lijphart, 1974a; Maghroori, 1982; Mitchell, 1980).This particular construction of the field’s historytends to have the effect of making the presentdebate a matter that all serious students of IR mustfocus on while relegating previous debates toobscurity.

Finally, the field’s history is commonly chroni-cled by reference to the external events that havetaken place in the realm that has been conventionallydesignated as international politics. There is a strongconviction that significant developments in interna-tional politics such as wars or abrupt changes inAmerican foreign policy have, more fundamentallythan any other set of factors, shaped the develop-ment of IR. The birth of the field, for example, oftenassociated with the founding of the world’s firstChair for the study of international politics, in 1919at the Department of International Politics at theUniversity College of Wales, Aberystwyth, is char-acteristically viewed as a reaction to the horror ofthe First World War (Porter, 1972).

My main intention in this chapter is to problema-tize these prevalent interpretations of how the fieldhas developed and to indicate that the history of thefield is both more complicated and less well knownthan typically portrayed in the mainstream litera-ture. While it is quite evident that we do not possessan adequate understanding of how the field hasdeveloped, there are a number of reasons why it iscrucially important for contemporary practitionersand students of IR to possess an adequate familiar-ity with this history.

First, numerous theoretical insights, of largelyforgotten scholars, have been simply erased frommemory. Yet, once recalled, these insights can havecritical purchase in the present. Second, the fieldhas created its own powerful myths regarding theevolution of the field that have obscured the actualhistory (Booth, 1996; Kahler, 1997; Osiander,1998; Schmidt 1998a, 1998b; Waever, 1998;Wilson, 1998). Third, an adequate understanding ofthe history of the field is essential for explaining thecharacter of many of our present assumptions andideas about the study of international politics.While current intellectual practices and theoreticalpositions are often evoked as novel answers to thelatest dilemmas confronting international politics, amore discriminating historical sense reminds us that

contemporary approaches are often reincarnationsof past discourses. Without a sufficient understand-ing of how the field has evolved, there is the con-stant danger of continually reinventing the wheel.There is, in fact, much evidence to support theproposition that much of what is taken to be new isactually deeply embedded in the discursive past ofthe field. Finally, a perspicacious history of the fieldoffers a fruitful basis for critical reflection on thepresent. Knowledge of the actual, as opposed to themythical, history may force us to reassess some ofour dominant images of the field and result in open-ing up some much needed space in which to thinkabout international politics in the new millennium.

My purpose in this chapter is not to provide acomprehensive history of the broadly defined fieldor discipline of IR. Not only would such anendeavor be impossible in this context, but, as I willindicate below, there is sufficient ambiguity con-cerning the proper identity of the field, with respectto its origins, institutional home, and geographicalboundaries, that simply writing a generic history ofIR without addressing these sorts of issues in detailhas reached the point of being counter-productive.Moreover, while much of the previous work on thehistory of the field has not exhibited sufficienttheoretical and methodological sophistication inapproaching the task of providing an adequate his-torical account, some recent work in this area isforcing scholars to confront a number of historio-graphical issues. This latest wave of scholarshipclearly recognizes the necessary link that existsbetween establishing the identity of the disciplineand presenting an image of its history. Furthermore,the manner in which the history of IR is recon-structed has become almost as significant as thesubstantive account itself, and therefore it becomescrucially important to address the basic researchquestion of how one should approach the task ofwriting a history of the field.

I will begin by briefly discussing a number of lin-gering and contentious issues concerning the extentto which there is a well-defined field of IR that hasa distinct identity, as well as the equally controver-sial question of whether the history of the fieldshould be written from a cosmopolitan frame ofreference – that does not pay significant attention todistinct national and institutional differences – orwhether it is necessary to approach this task fromwithin clearly demarcated national contexts.Although it should be evident that IR is a discreteacademic field after more than fifty to a hundredyears of evolution, depending on how one dates thegenesis of the field, ambiguities have continuallyarisen regarding both the character of the subjectmatter and the institutional boundaries of the field.Adding to the confusion surrounding the identity ofthe field is the fact of the overwhelming and contin-uing dominance of the American IR scholarly com-munity that sometimes leads to the erroneous

HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS4

conclusion that the history of IR is synonymous withits development in the United States. While there ismuch merit in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1977) assertionthat IR is an American social science, despite theinfluence of a great many European-born scholars, itis also the case that notwithstanding the globalimpact of the American model, there are manyindigenous scholarly communities that have theirown unique disciplinary history. This is, for exam-ple, clearly the case with the English School, whosecontributions have only recently begun to be prop-erly documented and assessed (Dunne, 1998; Little,2000). Certainly these communities have beendeeply impacted by theoretical and methodologicaldevelopments in the United States, but there arenevertheless differences in how the subject is stud-ied in different parts of the world (Jorgensen, 2000).The interdisciplinary character of the field and dif-ferences in national settings sometimes lead to theconclusion that a distinct discipline or field of IRdoes not really exist, but despite ambiguities aboutdisciplinary boundaries and an institutional home,IR, as an academic field of study, has a distinctprofessional identity and discourse.

I next focus on the historiography of IR, that is,both the scholarship on the history of the field andthe methodological principles involved in thatresearch and writing. My attention will focus on twofundamental problems: first, presentism, whichinvolves the practice of writing a history of the fieldfor the purpose of making a point about its presentcharacter; and second, contextualism, whichassumes that exogenous events in the realm of inter-national politics have fundamentally structured thedevelopment of IR as an academic field of study. Iwill attempt to illustrate these issues by reviewingthe existing literature. Recently, there has been anotable increase in both the quantity and quality ofliterature on the history of the field, and it can beargued that, in general, the history of the socialsciences is becoming a distinct research specialty.This new literature has cast increasing doubt on theconventional images of the development of IR. Mycritical purpose in this chapter is to challenge thedominant understanding of how the field has pro-gressed and to encourage more sophisticated workon the disciplinary history of IR.

Throughout the chapter, I will occasionally makereference to a conceptual framework developed byJohn Gunnell (1998). The framework, whichGunnell terms the ‘orders of discourse’, is applica-ble to analyzing various issues in the field of IR,since it shares many of the characteristics associ-ated with the other social sciences. In Gunnell’s ter-minology, the social sciences are second-ordermetapractices that ‘are identified, in terms of logic,function, and self-understanding, by the fact that invarious ways they speak about and sometimes tofirst-order activities’ (Gunnell, 1998: 22). First-order practices, which include natural science,

religion, music, art and politics, are defined byGunnell as ‘modes of activity that are primordialand “given” in that their various forms and histori-cal manifestations represent functionally necessaryelements of human activity’ (1998: 19). Withrespect to the relationship between the orders ofdiscourse, the crux of the issue concerns thatbetween second-order and first-order practices. Theformer have sought in various ways to acquire epis-temic and practical authority over the latter.Gunnell writes that ‘the history of the socialsciences has largely been driven by the issue of howto vindicate its cognitive claims and translate theminto a basis of practical authority’ (1998: 3). Inapplying this framework to the intellectual historyof IR, we can see how the various theoretical,methodological and epistemological positions thathave arisen since the field first came into existencehave often been involved with seeking to achieveauthority over the practice of international politics.And histories of IR, like many of those offered inthe other social sciences, have often served tovouchsafe a particular rendition of the field in orderto legitimate a contemporary image of a scientificapproach. This search for validation explains in partthe attraction in social science of turning to thehistory and philosophy of natural science, anothersecond-order practice, in accounting for the growthof the field. It will be through the medium of disci-plinary history which, in Gunnell’s terms, qualifiesas a ‘third-order discourse’ (i.e., those that haveanother metapractice as their object) that I willexplore the manner in which the field of IR hassought to acquire the authority of knowledge thatwould provide theoretical and practical purchase inits relationship to international politics.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

AS AN ACADEMIC FIELD OF STUDY

The task of demarcating the disciplinary boundariesof the field is an important prerequisite to establish-ing authority over its object of inquiry. Yet the ques-tion of whether a distinct field or discipline of IRexists has been a matter of consistent controversy(Gurian, 1946; Kaplan, 1961; Neal and Hamlett,1969; Olson, 1972; Olson and Groom, 1991; Olsonand Onuf, 1985; Palmer, 1980; Thompson, 1952;Wright, 1955). While the controversy is, in someways, related to the contentious issue of the originsand geographical boundaries of the field, it morefundamentally involves the question of the identityof IR as a second-order discourse and the status ofits subject matter. Although it is apparent that thisquestion has never been answered satisfactorily, dis-ciplinary history does provide an insightful vantagepoint for viewing the manner in which the field hasattempted to establish its own identity.

ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR 5

The period that precedes the point at which wecan discern the identity of the field as a distinct aca-demic practice can be termed its ‘prehistory’. Herethere was a gradual change ‘from discourse to dis-cipline’ (Farr, 1990). This period is important foridentifying many of the themes and issues thatwould later constitute the field as it took formduring the early decades of the twentieth century(Schmidt, 1998b). The field’s antecedents includedinternational law, diplomatic history, the peacemovement, moral philosophy, geography andanthropology (Olson and Groom, 1991). In TheStudy of International Relations (1955), QuincyWright identified eight ‘root disciplines’ and sixdisciplines with a ‘world point of view’ that hadcontributed to the development of IR.2 Wright,along with a number of others, argued that the taskof synthesizing these largely autonomous fields ofinquiry hampered the effort to create a unifiedcoherent discipline of IR (Bailey, 1932; Gurian,1946; Kirk, 1947; Wright, 1955). Moreover,Kenneth Thompson observed that ‘there was noth-ing peculiar to the subject matter of internationalrelations which did not fall under other separatefields’ (Thompson, 1952: 433). The interdiscipli-nary character of the field and the fact that otherdisciplines studied various dimensions of its subjectmatter has sometimes led to the question of whether‘international relations is a distinctive discipline’(Kaplan, 1961). This is an interesting and importantquestion that has often been answered by pointingto the field’s unique subject matter, typicallydefined in terms of politics in the absence of centralauthority as well as by adducing various epistemo-logical and methodological grounds. Yet while thequestion of whether IR is a distinct discipline isintriguing, it is important not to let this become anobstacle to reconstructing the history of the study ofinternational politics.

These issues do, however, highlight the impor-tance of clearly identifying and focusing on theinstitutional context of the field. The variability ininstitutional context is, in part, responsible for thewide range of dates that have been used to mark thebirth of the field. It makes a large difference, forexample, whether IR was institutionalized as aseparate discipline, as was largely the case after theFirst World War in the United Kingdom, where anumber of independent Chairs were created, or as asub-field of political science, as was the case in theUnited States, Germany and France.3 Yet orthodoxhistories have been more inclined to emphasize theimpact of significant political events on the develop-ment of the field than the character of the institu-tional setting of the field. In the case of the UnitedStates, for example, it is impossible to write thehistory of IR without locating it within the discipli-nary matrix of American political science. This isdifferent from the historical experience of IR in theUnited Kingdom, where it was not a part of

political science, but rather a new field of inquirywith a separate departmental home (Hill, 1987;Waever, 1998). In addition to these institutionalvariations, there are numerous differences withrespect to intellectual climate, access to informa-tion, research support, links between governmentand academia, and the general structure and charac-ter of the university system (Simpson, 1998;Smith, 1985).

The significance of institutional context isclosely related to the issue of the national context ofthe field. Variations in institutional structure areintimately related to the national setting in which IRis situated. The issue of whether the boundaries ofIR should be demarcated in terms of one particularcountry or whether it should be viewed as a morecosmopolitan endeavor without regard to nationaldifferences complicates the task of writing a historyof the field. Yet while the creation of a truly globaldiscipline may, perhaps, be an aspiration, studiescontinue to indicate that the academic study ofinternational politics is marked by British, andespecially American, parochialism. Ever sinceStanley Hoffmann published his famous article ‘AnAmerican Social Science: International Relations’,discussion has ensued about the extent to which theAmerican academic community dominates the‘global discipline’ of IR, and about the profoundconsequences that this dominance has for the disci-pline as a whole (Alker and Biersteker, 1984;Crawford and Jarvis, 2001; Goldmann, 1996;Hoffmann, 1977; Holsti, 1985; Kahler, 1993;Krippendorf, 1987; Smith, 1987, 2000; Waever,1998). Yet despite the alleged American hegemony,it is a fundamental mistake to associate theAmerican study of international politics withthe ‘global discipline of IR’. For although it is oftenthe case that many national IR communities seem tobe susceptible to embracing American theories,trends and debates, IR, as Waever notes, ‘is quitedifferent in different places’ (1998: 723). I arguethat disciplinary histories of IR should be commit-ted to reconstructing the discursive history of thefield in both its global and indigenous dimensions.Although limitations of space prevent me fromcommenting on the history of IR in every country inthe world, and much of what follows focuses ondevelopments in the United States and the UnitedKingdom, it is important that more country-specificstudies of the development of IR be undertaken.4

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

One of the most significant problems in work on thehistory of IR is that these histories have failed toaddress adequately the question of how one shouldwrite a history of the field. The tendency has been

HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS6

to describe the history of IR as if a completeconsensus existed on the essential dimensions ofthe field’s evolution. In the absence of any signifi-cant controversy concerning how the field hasdeveloped, there has been little or no attentiondevoted to historiographical issues. Yet as a num-ber of related academic disciplines such as politicalscience have begun to examine more closely theirdisciplinary history, several theoretical andmethodological controversies have arisen over whatin general constitutes proper historical analysis and,particularly, what is involved in disciplinary history(Bender and Schorske, 1998; Collini et al., 1983;Dryzek and Leonard, 1988; Farr et al., 1990;Gunnell, 1991; Ross, 1991; Tully, 1988). The his-toriographical concerns that this literature hasraised have, however, made little if any impact onthose who reflect on the history of IR. A majorexception to this generalization is found in OleWaever’s article ‘The Sociology of a Not SoInternational Discipline’ (1998), which is a signifi-cant contribution to the literature. With respect tothe existing state of the available literature on thehistory of the field, Waever disapprovingly notesthat it is ‘usually not based on systemic research orclear methods’ and that it amounts to little morethan ‘elegant restatements of “common knowledge”of our past, implicitly assuming that any good prac-titioner can tell the history of the discipline’(Waever, 1998: 692). But while the lack of theo-retical sophistication is definitely rooted in theassumption that practitioners already know thehistory of the field, additional factors are at work inreinforcing the tendency to simplify, and thusdistort, that history.

Traditions: Analytical and Historical

There is a general assumption that the history of thefield can be explained by reference to a continuoustradition that reaches back to classical Athens andextends forward to the present. The IR literaturecontains numerous references to the idea that thereare epic traditions of international thought that havegiven rise to coherent schools or paradigms such asrealism and liberalism (Clark, 1989; Donnelly,1995; Holsti, 1985; Kugler, 1993; Zacher andMatthew, 1995). Furthermore, and more impor-tantly for the discussion at hand, there is a wide-spread conviction that these ancient traditionsrepresent an integral part of the field’s past and,therefore, are relevant for understanding the con-temporary identity of the field. One example of thisbelief can be found in Jacek Kugler’s survey of theliterature on conflict and war in which he claimsthat the ‘classic account of international war comesfrom the realist tradition in world politics’, and thatthe realist ‘approach to the study of war has a verylong tradition that can be traced from Thucydides

(400 BC), to Machiavelli (1513), to Hobbes (1651),to Hume (1741), to von Clausewitz (1832), toMorgenthau (1948), to Organski (1958), to Waltz(1979) and to Gilpin (1981)’ (Kugler, 1993:483–4). While it is certainly the case that the studyof the theorists associated with the classic canon ofWestern political thought constitutes an element ofthe practice of IR, as evidenced, for example, byKenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War (1959), itis, nevertheless, a fundamental misconception topresume that the work of classic political theoristssuch as Thucydides or Kant can be construed asconstitutive antecedents of the literature ofcontemporary IR.

There is a certain irony in the widespreadtendency of contemporary scholars to make refer-ence to the writings of classic political theorists inthat one of the dominant assumptions for manyyears was that the canon of classic texts from Platoto Marx did not have very much to say about inter-national politics. This was the view popularized inMartin Wight’s polemical essay ‘Why is There NoInternational Theory?’ (1966), which was presentedat the inaugural meeting of the British Committee onthe Theory of International Politics in 1959. Wight’sargument contributed to the widespread view thatthere was a rich and well-defined tradition of politi-cal thought but an impoverished and essentially con-tested tradition of international thought. This view,along with the scientific ambitions of the behav-ioralists who directly challenged the relevance of thecanon, led the fields of political theory and IR todrift apart, producing a profound sense of estrange-ment that only recently has begun to change(Boucher, 1998; Brown, 1992; Knutsen, 1997;Schmidt, 2000; Walker, 1993; Williams, 1992).David Boucher has argued that one of the reasonswhy IR does not have an established canon of clas-sic texts stems from the mistake that IR theoristsmade when they ‘cut themselves adrift from themainstream of political theory in order to developtheir own theories and concepts’ (1998: 10).

The strained and troubled relationship betweenpolitical theory and international relations theoryhas not, however, prevented scholars from con-structing numerous typologies and traditions forclassifying the ideas of classic political theoristsand linking them to the work of contemporary stu-dents of international relations (Boucher, 1998;Donelan, 1990; Doyle, 1997; Holsti, 1985; Kauppiand Viotti, 1999; Wight, 1992). While, symboli-cally or metaphorically, contemporary practitionersmay wish to describe themselves as descendants ofThucydides or Kant, a serious conceptual mistake ismade when the history of the field is written interms of the development of an epic tradition begin-ning with classical Greece or the Enlightenment andculminating in the work of contemporary scholars.This common practice, which can be found in amultitude of synoptic accounts of the history of the

ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR 7

field, commits the error of confusing an analyticaland a historical tradition, resulting in significantobstacles to tracing the actual historical develop-ment of IR (Schmidt, 1994). Although discussionsof a tradition of IR are widespread and, as RobWalker (1993) has noted, far from monolithic, theytend to refer less to actual historical traditions, thatis, self-constituted patterns of conventional practicethrough which ideas are conveyed within a recog-nizably established discursive framework, than toan analytical retrospective construction that largelyis defined by present criteria and concerns. In thecase of the disciplinary history of IR, such retro-spectively constructed traditions as realism arepresented as if they represented an actual or self-constituted tradition in the field, and seriousproblems in understanding and writing the historyof IR result when the former is mistaken for, orpresented as, the latter.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that such epicrenditions of the past divert attention from the actualacademic practices and individuals who have con-tributed to the development and current identity ofthe field. Instead of a history that traces the genea-logy of academic scholars who self-consciously andinstitutionally participated in the professional dis-course of IR, we are presented with an idealized ver-sion of the past in the form of a continuous traditionstretching from ancient times to the present. Theseepic accounts, which are the norm in many of theleading undergraduate texts, serve to reinforce theidea that we already know the history of the field.Attention usually is devoted to ‘founding fathers’such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Kant, while ahost of individuals who contributed to the institu-tionalized academic study of international politicsare routinely neglected. While academic scholarssuch as James Bryce, Frederick S. Dunn, PitmanPotter and Paul S. Reinsch may not be as historicallyfascinating, they are much more relevant for tracingthe actual development of the field.

Presentism

The widespread tendency to write the history of thefield in terms of its participation in an ancient orclassic tradition of thought often serves to conferlegitimacy on a contemporary research program.One of the primary purposes of the various historiesof IR is to say something authoritative about thefield’s present character, and this often contributesto the tendency to distort the history of the field. Inorder either to advocate a new direction for the fieldand to criticize its current structure, or, conversely,to defend the status quo, scholars often feel com-pelled to justify their position by referring to andcharacterizing the general evolution of the field.For example, histories that seek to account for therise and subsequent dominance of realist theory

frequently feel obliged to demonstrate the timelessinsights of the realist tradition, beginning withThucydides or Machiavelli. And those who periodi-cally criticize the pluralistic character of the fieldquite often make reference to an earlier period whenthere was supposedly a dominant paradigm orapproach that united it. The crux of the matter isthat many of the attempts to reflect on the history ofIR are undertaken largely for ‘presentist’ purposesrather than with the intention of carefully and accu-rately reconstructing the past.

‘Whig’ history, which Herbert Butterfield (1959:v) described as the tendency ‘to emphasize certainprinciples of progress in the past and to produce astory which is the ratification if not the glorificationof the present’, and the problem of presentism ingeneral, has become a controversial issue amongthose who are engaged in writing the history ofthe social sciences (Collini et al., 1983; Dryzek andLeonard, 1988; Farr et al., 1990; Gunnell, 1991;Ross, 1991). The problem with presentism is notthat historical analysis is utilized to make a pointabout the present, but that history is distorted as it isreconstructed to legitimate or criticize a positionthat the writer has set out in advance to support orto undermine. Whig history ‘consists in writinghistory backwards’, whereby the ‘present theoreti-cal consensus of the discipline … is in effect takenas definitive, and the past is then reconstituted as ateleology leading up to and fully manifested in it’(Collini et al., 1983: 4).

Given the elusive but persistent goal of main-stream IR in the United States to achieve the statusof a ‘true’ science, it is understandable why somany of the existing accounts of the history ofthe field continue to be Whiggish in character.Histories of the field, and images of that history, arefrequently advanced for the purpose of either illus-trating theoretical progress and scientific advanceor diagnosing an obstacle that is preventing the fieldfrom making scientific progress (Brecher, 1999).George Stocking provided an early and persuasiveexplanation for why the professional social scientistwas likely to be Whiggish. According to Stocking,there is ‘a sort of implicit whiggish presentism vir-tually built into the history of science and by exten-sion, into the history of the behavioral sciences’(Stocking, 1965: 213). The reigning logical posi-tivist account of science that was offered byphilosophers of science during the 1950s and1960s, which is the medium through which mostsocial scientists acquired their understanding ofscience, was one of incremental and cumulativeprogress whereby a greater understanding of thenatural world was made possible by an increasingcorrespondence between theory and fact. Since logi-cal positivists claimed that there was an essentialunity and hierarchy of scientific method, the historyof social science was bound sooner or later to repli-cate the same forward advance of knowledge.

HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS8

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of ScientificRevolutions (1970) challenged the logical positivistaccount of science and provided a basic impetus forpost-positivist philosophers and historians ofscience. Not only did Kuhn attack logical posi-tivism’s central premise of the separation of theoryand fact, as well as the correspondence theory oftruth, but he sought to replace the orthodox text-book account of the history of science with the ideaof a discontinuous history marked by scientific revo-lutions, that is, ‘those non-cumulative developmen-tal episodes in which an older paradigm is replacedin whole or part by an incompatible new one’(Kuhn, 1970: 92). Kuhn’s theory of paradigms andscientific revolutions represented a significant chal-lenge to the orthodox account of scientific develop-ment. The crucial point of Kuhn’s revisionistaccount of the history of science was his argumentthat there was no transcendental vantage pointfrom which to claim that the replacement of oneparadigm by another constituted ‘progress’,because the criteria for progress was paradigm-specific. While Kuhn made a significant impact onphilosophers and historians of science, many ofwhom were displeased by the relativistic implica-tions of the argument that resulted in the inability tovindicate scientific progress, his book had anequally dramatic impact on the field of IR, espe-cially with respect to how many scholars havecome to understand the history of the field. The factthat IR scholars increasingly have turned to Kuhnand other philosophers of science, particularlyImre Lakatos (1970), who, for many, appeared tore-establish evaluative criteria of progress, serves toillustrate the point that the task of writing thehistory of the field often has been subordinate to themore fundamental task of demonstrating progressin the field.

Paradigms and the Historiography of IR

There are two principal ways in which the work ofKuhn in particular, and the literature emanatingfrom the philosophy and history of science ingeneral, has had an impact on the historiography ofIR. First, IR scholars quickly set out to establishtheir own paradigms. The situation was very muchthe same in political science where political scien-tists began to use the word paradigm to denote spe-cific schools of thought such as behavioralism(Almond, 1966). In IR, realism has been assumedby many to be the leading candidate for a paradigm,and scholars have repeatedly undertaken the task ofdefining and operationalizing the core assumptionsof the realist paradigm (Guzzini, 1998; Keohane,1983; Lijphart, 1974b; Vasquez, 1983). In a histori-cal sociology of realism, Stefano Guzzini arguesthat the realist paradigm that was most eloquentlyarticulated by Hans J. Morgenthau served the

disciplinary function of defining an independentfield of study. Realism, according to Guzzini, ‘setthe paradigmatic boundaries of the discipline’(1998: 27). While Morgenthau argued that inter-national politics, like politics in general, was char-acterized by a continuous struggle for power, hemaintained that the struggle was qualitatively dif-ferent in the international field where an over-arch-ing central authority was missing (Morgenthau,1948). The notion, which later would become thecardinal claim of neorealists, that the internationalsystem was characterized by a condition of anar-chy, helped to differentiate domestic politics frominternational politics (Waltz, 1979). The exclusivefocus that neorealists placed on the anarchicalstructure of the international system subsequentlycame to provide the predominant framework foranalyzing a wide variety of issues in the areas ofinternational security, international organization,foreign policy and political economy.

The prevalence by which references are made tothe realist paradigm have led some to term it the ‘tra-ditional paradigm’ which, according to ArendLijphart, ‘revolves around the notions of state sover-eignty and its logical corollary, international anar-chy’ (1974b: 43). Quite frequently references to therealist paradigm are used interchangeably withreferences to the ‘realist tradition’ or the ‘realistschool of thought’. Recently, a number of scholarshave problematized the notion that realism repre-sents a singular, coherent theoretical position, andinstead have argued that there are actually a varietyof realisms (Ashley, 1981; Doyle, 1997; Dunne,1997; Frankel, 1996; Goldmann, 1988; Guzzini,1998). Nevertheless, almost everyone in the field isable to identify the central tenets that are associatedwith realism, which typically include the followingclaims: that the sovereign state is the most importantactor in international politics; that state behavior canbe explained rationally; that states are unitary actors;that there is a sharp distinction between domesticand international politics; that states pursue power inan anarchical self-help setting; and that the issues ofwar and peace are paramount. The dominance ofrealism has led Jack Donnelly to suggest that ‘tracingthe fate of realism provides a partial yet still usefulsurvey of the development of the field of inter-national relations’ (1995: 175).

Yet while realism is considered by many to bethe leading paradigm in the field, it has certainly notbeen the only candidate for paradigmatic status.Scholars have made reference to a host of alterna-tive paradigms, which are almost always defined inopposition to the propositions of realism and whoseorigins are typically linked to developments ininternational politics. A classical example of this,even though it allegedly predates the realist para-digm, is the so-called idealist paradigm of theinter-war period. John Vasquez claims ‘that thefirst stage of international relations inquiry was

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HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS10

dominated by the idealist paradigm’, which was‘important in terms of institutionalizing the fieldand creating the emphasis on peace and war’ (1998:33–4). The central features of the so-called idealistparadigm, which largely have been defined retro-spectively by post-Second World War realist cri-tics, are the exact antithesis of the tenets attributedto realism (Bull, 1972; Carr, [1939] 1964; Guzzini,1998; Hollis and Smith, 1991; Kegley andWittkopf, 1989; M.J. Smith, 1986; Vasquez, 1998).Some of the other rival paradigms to realism haveincluded the ‘behavioralist paradigm’ (Lijphart,1974a), ‘world politics paradigm’ (Keohane and Nye,1972), global society and neo-Marxist paradigms(Holsti, 1985), a ‘new paradigm for global politics’(Mansbach and Vasquez, 1981), and pluralism(Little, 1996; Viotti and Kauppi, 1999).

The Great Debates

Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm as well as other con-cepts borrowed from the philosophy and history ofscience, such as Lakatos’s (1970) conception of a‘scientific research programme’, have not only beenused to provide grounds for defining distinct‘schools of thought’, but also to evaluate the overallevolution of the field as well as specific approachesin the field (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1993;Guzzini, 1998; Keohane, 1983; Kugler, 1993;Lijphart, 1974b; Smith, 1987; Tellis, 1996;Vasquez, 1998; Walt, 1997). Arend Lijphart, forexample, has argued that ‘the development of inter-national relations since the Second World War fit’sKuhn’s description of scientific revolutions’(1974a: 12). The underlying purpose of utilizinganalytical frameworks borrowed from the philoso-phy and history of science largely has been todemonstrate that scientific advances are being madeand that the field as a whole is progressing. In thequest for cognitive authority over the subject matterof international politics, IR has been drawn tophilosophers of science in the belief that they canprovide the grounds for empirical judgment andevaluation. Ferguson and Mansbach, for example,note that the attraction of the Kuhnian frameworkfor describing the history of IR is that it allowed‘international relations scholars to see progress intheir field while surrounded by theoretical incoher-ence’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1993: 22). Yet thisis simply a misuse of Kuhn, since he argued that hisaccount of the development of science was notapplicable to the history of the social sciences, sincethey were ‘pre-paradigmatic’. Moreover, analyticalconstructs such as idealism and realism do not meetthe criteria of a paradigm as Kuhn described it. Andwhile Kuhn’s framework has been employed todemonstrate progress, his basic argument was that itwas not possible to speak of progress from asecond-order perspective.

Within the orthodox historiography of IR, it hasbeen through the organizing device of the image ofa series of ‘great debates’ that the story of thefield’s development has been framed. This hasserved to demonstrate either coherence or incoher-ence but, most commonly, scientific progress. Thewidespread belief that the field’s history has beencharacterized by three successive great debates is sopervasive and dominant that, as Waever notes,‘there is no other established means of telling thehistory of the discipline’ (1998: 715). The story ofthe field’s three great debates is, as Steve Smith(1995) and Kjell Goldmann (1996) have argued,one of the most dominant self-images of the field.While all academic disciplines experience theirshare of disciplinary controversy, IR may be uniquein that most practitioners believe that the history ofthe field has been singularly marked by thesedefining debates. This view has been reinforced byexplaining the debates in terms of exogenous influ-ences such as the outbreak of the Second WorldWar, the rise of OPEC, the Vietnam debacle and theend of the Cold War. For many in the field, it seemsself-evident that changes in the practice of inter-national politics necessarily and directly bringabout a transformation in how the subject is studiedand taught. This is, for example, the standard expla-nation of the alleged paradigm shift from ‘idealism’to ‘realism’ that occurred after the Second WorldWar. Perhaps more than any other claim about thegeneral history of the field, that which postulatesthree great debates must be critically examined(Kahler, 1997; Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Smith,1995; Waever, 1998; Wilson, 1998). It is notentirely clear that all of the debates actually havetaken place, and an examination of the discursiveartifacts of the field leads one to ask if the field’shistory has been seriously distorted by viewing itwithin this framework. I do not deny that the fieldhas experienced numerous controversies, but Iquestion the appropriateness of understanding themin terms of the conventional story of the field’sthree great debates.

According to the conventional wisdom, the firstgreat debate, which Miles Kahler (1997) has termedthe ‘foundational myth of the field’, was betweenthe interwar ‘idealists’ and the post-war ‘realists’.5

Almost every historical account concedes that therealists won the first debate and, as a result, reori-ented the field in a more practical and scientificdirection (Dunn, 1948; Fox, 1949; Guzzini, 1998;Kirk, 1947; M.J. Smith, 1986; Thompson, 1960).The alleged superiority of the realist view has madeit appear unnecessary to consider carefully thenature of the claims made by those writing in thefield prior to the Second World War or eventhe writings of many of those who are considered asearly realists. The interwar ‘idealists’, who aregreatly disparaged, are typically depicted as a groupof utopian pacifists and legalists who focused their

ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR 11

attention on reforming international politics ratherthan on analyzing the realities of politics amongnations. The ‘debate’, which allegedly took place asthe League of Nations system broke down, is oftendescribed in Kuhnian terms. While the idealists sup-posedly envisioned ever-lasting peace, the SecondWorld War is depicted as a glaring anomaly repre-senting a severe crisis in the idealist paradigm,which eventually resulted in its replacement by therealist paradigm, which was superior in its abilityto rationally explain the persistent and ubiquitousstruggle for power among nations (Guzzini, 1998;Hollis and Smith, 1991; Vasquez, 1998). Sometimesthe idealists are represented as alchemists who wereconcerned with ‘what ought to be’ while the realistsare portrayed as scientists focusing on ‘what is’,which was a prerequisite for creating a science ofpolitics (Carr, [1939] 1964). This story of the‘debate’ between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ continuesto exert a strong influence on how the field under-stands its own history, and this accounts in part forthe perpetual need to retell the tale of how IR wasonce rooted in idealism but was fortunate, after theSecond World War, to have embraced realism.

The second great debate, as characteristicallydescribed in the literature, took place within thecontext of the behavioral revolution that wasalready deeply impacting the social sciences, espe-cially political science, and which pitted ‘tradition-alists’ against ‘behavioralists’ or ‘scientists’. Thedebate is symbolized by the intellectual exchangebetween Hedley Bull (1966), who sought to defendwhat he termed the ‘classical approach’, andMorton Kaplan (1966), who was one of the earlyadvocates of what came to be known as the‘scientific approach’. A growing sentiment amongAmerican scholars was that the field was losingground in its quest to acquire the mantle of science.While realism, it was argued, served a number ofparadigmatic functions, some scholars claimed thatits tenets, such as the a priori foundational claimthat the struggle for power stemmed from basic bio-logical drives rooted in human nature, as well as itsmethodology, which relied heavily on historicalexamples, were preventing the field from achievingscientific status.

As in the case of political science, the debatebecame polarized between those who believed thatthe methods of the natural sciences, or at least thosedescribed by logical-positivist philosophers ofscience as the hypothetico-deductive model, couldbe emulated and adopted in the study of inter-national politics, versus those who argued that thestudy of the social world was not amenable to thestrict empirical methods of natural science (Knorrand Rosenau, 1969; Morgenthau, 1946; Nicholson,1996; Reynolds, 1973; Rogowski, 1968; Vital,1967). George Liska described the period in whichthe debate between traditionalists and behavioralists

took place as the ‘heroic decade’ and suggested thatthe key division was ‘between those who are pri-marily interested in international relations and thosewho are primarily committed to the elaboration ofsocial science’ (1966: 7). The debate over themerits and adequacy of a positivistic approachsurely has not diminished, but there is, neverthe-less, a common view that the debate helped tofoster the scientific identity of the field through thewidespread acceptance and utilization of scientificmethods which aided in the task of developing acumulative theory of international politics. MortonKaplan’s (1957) systems theory, Karl Deutsch’s(1953, 1964) communications and cyberneticstheory, Thomas Schelling’s (1960) early gametheory, Richard Snyder, H.W. Bruck and BurtonSapin’s (1954, 1962) development of decision-making theory, and J. David Singer and MelvinSmall’s (1972) data collection in their correlates ofwar project at the University of Michigan, aregenerally viewed as contributing to the scientificidentity of the field.

Historical accounts of the third debate tend to bemore ambiguous than that of the other two debates,but it is commonly described as an inter-paradigmdebate that took place in the early 1980s amongrealists, pluralists and structuralists (Banks, 1985;Maghroori, 1982; Olson and Groom, 1991;Waever, 1996). The typical explanation of the ori-gins of the third debate holds that, during the 1970s,realism fell on some difficult times when events inthe realm of international politics, particularly inthe economic sphere but also regarding matters ofpeace and security, appeared to contradict some ofthe key realist assumptions about the nature of inter-state politics (S. Smith, 1987). As a result of thisapparent incongruity, it is generally believed thatalternative ‘approaches’ such as Robert Keohaneand Joseph Nye’s ([1977] 1989) theory of ‘complexinterdependence’, Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974,1980) ‘world systems theory’, John Burton’s ‘cob-web theory’ (1972), and ‘dependency theory’(Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Evans, 1979) weredeveloped and directly challenged many of thecentral tenets of realism. Most fundamentally, cri-tics of realism attacked the core claims of state-centrism, the notion that independence rather thaninterdependence characterized the condition ofinternational politics, and that a clear distinctioncould be made between ‘high politics’ (i.e., militaryand security issues) and ‘low politics’ (i.e., eco-nomic, environmental and human rights issues). Ithas been suggested that it was within this context ofa growing focus on interdependence (Cooper, 1968;Rosecrance and Stein, 1973) that the distinct sub-field of International Political Economy emerged(Katzenstein et al., 1999).

While it was argued that the publication ofWaltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979)

gave a new lease on life to realism in the form ofneorealism, which rapidly became the new ortho-doxy, most accounts of the third debate do not con-clude that realism was the victor. Unlike theprevious two ‘great debates’, the ‘third debate’ is,according to Waever, ‘seen as a debate not to bewon, but a pluralism to live with’ (Waever, 1996:155). In other words, claims about the ascendancy ofneorealism did not mean that adherents of a liberal(pluralist) or Marxist (globalist) approach stoppedcontributing to the discourse of IR, and some haveeven questioned whether the three ‘paradigms’ wereever in competition with one another. Adding to theconfusion of understanding this period of discipli-nary history in terms of a ‘third debate’ was theemergence, during the 1980s, of a number of post-positivist approaches that were sharply critical of allthe mainstream approaches in the field (Der Derianand Shapiro, 1989; George and Campbell, 1990;Peterson, 1992). According to Yosef Lapid, theattack by feminists, Frankfurt School critical theo-rists, and post-structuralists on what they perceivedto be the positivist epistemological foundations ofthe field signaled the dawn of a ‘third debate’,which he claimed consisted of a ‘disciplinary effortto reassess theoretical options in a “post-positivist”era’ (1989: 237). That the literature can simultane-ously make reference to two fundamentally differ-ent controversies under the same label of the ‘thirddebate’ should be enough to indicate that there issomething seriously wrong with this understandingof the history of the field.

What’s Wrong With the Imageof the Great Debates?

The newest cohort of disciplinary historians haveboth noted the peculiarity of the field’s self-imagebeing derived from the idea of a set of recurrentdebates and pointed to some of the problems thatare involved in viewing the history of the field inthis manner (Goldmann, 1996; Kahler, 1997;Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Smith, 1995; Waever,1998; Wilson, 1998). There are so many problemsand difficulties involved in understanding thehistory of the field within the framework of thethree great debates that we might be better off sim-ply to reject discussing this account of how the fieldhas developed. In the first place, when attention isdirected to the details of the field’s history, it is notevident that all of the three debates actually tookplace. This is especially the case with respect to thefirst ‘great debate’ (Wilson, 1998). Second, the styl-ized versions of the debates do not do justice to thenature of the controversies that were in fact takingplace. Third, by focusing only on the three greatdebates, a number of additional and, extremelyimportant, disciplinary controversies continue tobe overlooked. Finally, the use of the analytical

framework of a series of great debates to accountfor the field’s history is a conservative move thatgives the field a greater sense of coherence than theactual history of the field warrants (Waever, 1998).

One of the surprising findings to emerge from therecent scholarship on the history of the field is that,contrary to popular belief, the field was never domi-nated by a group of utopian scholars who adhered tosomething akin to what has been described as theidealist paradigm (Baldwin, 1995; Kahler, 1997;Little, 1996; Long, 1991; Long and Wilson, 1995;Osiander, 1998; Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Wilson,1998). In most cases, it is difficult to find a scholarwho was self-consciously and institutionally amember of the field of IR who adhered to the tenetsthat are frequently associated with a constructtermed ‘idealism’ or ‘utopianism’. While it is thecase that the interwar scholars had a practical mis-sion to reform the practice of international politics,this objective, which is endemic to the very natureof second-order metapractices, has continued toanimate the history of the field. This objective, Iargue, does not in and of itself qualify the enterpriseas utopian. Many of those who have been dubbed‘idealists’ turn out, upon closer inspection, to sub-scribe to a position that is quite different from themanner in which they have been characterized inthe secondary literature. The conventional label ofidealism that has been attached to the interwarperiod of IR scholarship seriously misrepresents theactual character of the conversation that was beingdirected toward understanding international politics(Osiander, 1998; Schmidt, 1998a; Wilson, 1998).Apart from seriously distorting the formative yearsof the field’s history, the idealist tag has inhibitedunderstanding some of the deep discursive continui-ties that exist between the present and the past.

Perhaps the most important continuity is the con-cept of anarchy that has given the field of IR a dis-tinct discursive identity. Although it might appearto those who are not familiar with the institutionalhistory of IR that anarchy is some newly discoveredresearch puzzle that lends itself to the latest tools ofsocial scientific inquiry, anarchy – and the closelyrelated concept of sovereignty – has served as thecore constituent principle throughout the evolutionof the field (Schmidt, 1998b). The interwar scholarswere keenly aware of the fact that their subjectmatter, which included an analysis of the causes ofwar and peace, directly dealt with issues arisingfrom the existence of sovereign states in a conditionof anarchy (Dickinson, 1916, 1926). Many of thosewriting during the interwar period understood thatsovereignty and anarchy were inextricably associ-ated with, and mutually constitutive of, each other,and this explains why much of the interwar discoursefocused on the concept of state sovereignty. Intheir study of the state, political scientists estab-lished a theoretical link between the internal andexternal aspects of state sovereignty as well as

HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS12

between domestic and international politics. Thejuristic theory of the state, which, during the early1900s, was the most influential paradigm for thestudy of political science, depicted the internationalmilieu as one where states led an independent andisolated existence (Willoughby, 1918). Proponentsof juristic theory evoked the pre-contractual imageof individuals living in a state of nature to describethe external condition of states and drew many ofthe same pessimistic conclusions that realists havemade about politics conducted in the absence of acentral authority.

Beginning in the 1920s, juristic theory was chal-lenged by a new group of thinkers who collectivelyput forth the theory of pluralism that fundamentallytransformed the discourse of both political scienceand IR (Gunnell, 1993; Little, 1996; Schmidt,1998b). Pluralists such as Harold Laski (1921,1927) and Mary Parker Follett ([1918] 1934) arguedthat juristic theory was entirely inconsistent withthe modern condition of interdependence, and thisclearly indicated that the state was no longeromnipotent and immune from all other sources ofauthority. The interdependent quality of inter-national politics, which pluralists took to beaxiomatic, along with the existence of many inter-national public unions (Reinsch, 1911), raised seri-ous doubts about the validity of the claim that eachnation-state was entirely sovereign in relation to allother actors. There are many similarities betweenthe pluralist critique of juristic theory and thedebate over interdependence that took place duringthe 1970s, and yet there is almost no recognition ofthis earlier discourse (de Wilde, 1991). Richard Littleargues that one of the main reasons why the intellec-tual heritage of pluralism has been obscured stemsfrom the ‘willingness of the discipline to accept theattachment of the idealist tag to this seminal litera-ture’ (1996: 69). The ‘idealist tag’ has alsoobscured the manner in which the interwar scholarsapproached the study of international security(Baldwin, 1995) and international organization.While the interwar scholarship is most often associ-ated with the ill-fortunes of the League of Nations,not everyone writing during this period assumed thatthe introduction of this new international organiza-tion would by itself alter fundamentally the logic ofinternational politics (Duggan, 1919; Hicks, 1920).The most pressing theoretical issue for thoseinvolved in the study of international organizationconcerned the manner by which various concep-tions of state sovereignty could be reconciled withthe operation of the League of Nations. This wascertainly the case for Pitman Benjamin Potter, whowas the person responsible for giving specific formto the study of international organization in theUnited States (Potter, 1923, 1925).

Refuting the notion that the interwar period wasdistinguished by idealism does not, however, rest

on denying that the field experienced a change ofemphasis after the Second World War. By the early1940s, it was apparent that the field was undergoinga transition, which was best exemplified by theargument that the study of international politicsshould replace international organization as thecentral focus of the field (Dunn, 1948; Fox, 1949;Kirk, 1947; Schuman, 1933; Schwarzenberger,1941). Those who began to enter the professionunder the self-proclaimed ‘realist’ identity wereresponsible for changing the emphasis in the field, butit is important not to exaggerate the discontinuitiesbetween the pre- and post-war discourse of IR. Likethose writing before the Second World War, the aimof many of the ‘realists’ was to speak truth to power.This was especially the case with the émigré schol-ars who deeply impacted the discourse of both polit-ical science and IR. A careful reading of the texts byE.H. Carr ([1939] 1964), Hans J. Morgenthau(1948) and Frederick L. Schuman (1933) reveals anumber of continuities with the earlier discoursewhich have been entirely overlooked as a conse-quence of viewing their work in terms of the dubi-ous dichotomy between idealism and realism. Whileit is the case that Morgenthau and the other ‘realists’helped to make ‘international politics’ the nucleus ofthe field, it was not the case that those writing beforethe outbreak of the Second World War were unfa-miliar with many of the core claims of the ‘new’power politics model (Bryce, 1922; Reinsch, 1900).The discursive artifacts of the field’s history do notlend much support to the claim that a debate, in thesense of an intellectual exchange between opposingtheoretical positions or paradigms, ever took placebetween the interwar and the post-Second WorldWar scholars.

Compared with the recent research on the inter-war period of the field’s history, the details gener-ally associated with the ‘second great debate’ or the‘traditionalism versus scientism debate’ have notbeen carefully and systematically investigated.Consequently, this later period is not very wellunderstood, and additional research is required.Within the existing literature on the second debate,which typically construes it as a debate about thescientific status of the field, two different accountsof the nature of the controversy have been put forth.Many of the early accounts of the controversy her-alded it as a ‘great debate’ that contributed to a majortransformation in the field (Bull, 1972; Kaplan,1966; Lijphart, 1974a, 1974b). Lijphart, for exam-ple, claimed that the ‘traditionalism-science debateof the 1960s’ was more substantive and fundamen-tal than the earlier debate between idealism andrealism (1974a: 11). He argued that the behavioralrevolution in IR resulted in a new paradigm – ‘thebehavioral paradigm’ – that was at great odds with thesubstantive claims of the traditional realist paradigm.According to this view, the traditionalists – those

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who approached the study of international politicsfrom a legal, philosophical, historical, or inductivepoint of view – lost out to what was perceived to bea scientific approach that sought to emulate themethods of the natural sciences. The result was thatIR became more scientific, realism lost its dominantposition, and the field was brought more in line withthe other social sciences.

Beginning with John Vasquez’s influential bookThe Power of Power Politics (1983), an alternativeview of the ‘second debate’ began to emerge thatargued that the controversy was really only a pseudodebate which was largely confined to methodologi-cal issues and did not involve substantive aspectsof the subject matter of international politics(Guzzini, 1998; Hollis and Smith, 1991; Holsti, 1985,1998; Vasquez, 1998). Vasquez (1983) sought todemonstrate that the behavioralists largely workedwithin the realist paradigm and merely sought toadvance the methodological credentials of the field.In this manner, the debate has been construed as a‘methodological debate’ which took place ‘within asingle [realist] theoretical orientation’, and that itwas ‘about how to conduct inquiry within thatapproach’ (Hollis and Smith, 1991: 31). Holstiendorses this view and argues that the ‘behaviouralrevolution did not inaugurate a new way of lookingat the world, a new paradigm, or a new set of nor-mative problems’ (1998: 33). One of the more sig-nificant implications of this revisionist interpretationis the view that the ‘field has been far more coher-ent, systematic, and even cumulative than all the talkabout contending approaches and theories implies’(Vasquez, 1998: 42).

While I concede that there is some merit in eachof these accounts, neither sufficiently captures thenature of the disputes that occurred during the 1950sand 1960s. One way of coming to grips with thisperiod is to view the events in terms of Gunnell’sframework of the orders of discourse. A crucialissue that informed the behavioral debate was theproblem of IR’s cognitive authority as a second-order discourse. It increasingly became the case,especially within the American context, that scienceprovided the model for achieving the authority ofknowledge, and the quest during the 1950s and1960s, as well as before and after this period, was toemulate what were believed to be the canons ofinquiry in natural science. The commitment toachieving a body of knowledge about internationalpolitics that was scientifically credible and thatcould command practical authority has always beena defining goal of the field. What has changedover the course of time is the content of the ideaof science.

One of the consequences of neglecting a carefulstudy of the history of the field has been a failure torecognize adequately the work of the members ofthe Chicago School of political science. In the

1920s and 1930s, Harold Lasswell, CharlesMerriam and Quincy Wright believed that theywere at the forefront of developing a universalscience of politics (Fox, 1975; Kahler, 1997). AsWilliam T.R. Fox has noted, when World Politicsbegan publication in 1948, there were two very dif-ferent schools of thought reshaping the academicstudy of IR: the realist school and the school led byMerriam, which ‘had its roots in homegrownAmerican political science, in pluralist pragmatism,and in an abiding faith in the power of the humanintellect gradually to create a better world’ (1975:597). The Chicago School’s idea of a science ofinternational politics was one that viewed inter-national relations as merely a single subdivision ofa more inclusive approach that focused on the roleof power across a broad range of associations fromthe local to the global level.

There are a number of explanations of why theidea of science that the bahavioralists brought to thefield during the 1950s and 1960s largely centeredon the concept of an international system (Kaplan,1957; Rosenau, 1969). The idea of a system wascentral to the behavioral movement, but its applica-tion to IR took on a number of distinctive and prob-lematic properties. Within political science, thesystems approach (Easton, 1953) was meant toreplace the study of the state, which the behavioral-ists deemed to be archaic and contributing to thebackwardness of the discipline. Yet within IR,where the influence of the behavioral persuasionarrived late and where the theory of realism wasdominant, the adoption of the concept of a systemdid not supersede the focus on the interaction ofstates, since it would have risked the very identityof the field (Little, 1978, 1985). The propertiesaccorded to the ‘international system’ were largelyderived from a detailed, and increasingly quantita-tive, analysis of the units (states) (Buzan and Little,2000). The systems approach gave rise to what hasbeen termed the ‘level of analysis problem’, whichinvolves the question of the relative weight thatshould be attributed to the units as opposed to thesystem as a whole (Buzan, 1995; Hollis and Smith,1991; Singer, 1969). Waltz’s (1979) later attempt toconstruct a systems theory was based on the modelof microeconomics, which sought to overcome theproblem of reductionism that he attributed to theearlier generation of systems thinkers. It wouldappear that Buzan and Little (2000) are correct toargue that the concept of an international system isdeeply contested, and I would suggest that carefullyexamining the period that has been construed interms of the second debate might add a sense ofclarity to the present conversation.

Whether or not we accept the idea that a ‘greatdebate’ took place, it is important that we do notde-emphasize the consequences that the increasingattachment to scientism had for the development of

ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR 15

the field. First, it has resulted in IR surrenderingits intellectual autonomy to a number of cognatefields that appeared, for whatever reason, to be morescientific. This is plainly, and I would argue unfor-tunately, the case today with the field’s fascinationwith, and incessant borrowing from, microeconomicmodels of analysis. Second, the commitment toscience contributed to a growing rift between theAmerican scholarly community, which sought toemulate the positivist approach to knowledge, andmuch of the rest of the world that remained deeplysuspicious of studying international politics in thismanner. The members of the English School,Hedley Bull, Herbert Butterfield, John Vincent,Martin Wight and others, were, for example, ‘skep-tical of the possibility of a scientific study ofInternational Relations’ (Dunne, 1998: 7). Theychose to focus on what they termed an ‘internationalsociety’ that involved the study of history, culture,religion and philosophy (Dunne, 1998; Epp, 1998;Grader, 1988; Little, 2000). Yet their work, as wellas most of the scholarship from Britain, was, untilrecently, almost completely ignored by Americanscholars. A third consequence was a divorcebetween political theory and international relationstheory (Boucher, 1998). Just as the history of politi-cal thought became a focal point of attack by behav-ioralists in political science, the idea that the studyof international political theory could advance thescientific credentials of the field was rejected.Fourth, the bifurcation of political theory and inter-national theory had the effect of marginalizingnormative concerns and contributed to what SteveSmith has termed the ‘forty-years detour’ whereby itbecame ‘simply old-fashioned, and very unacade-mic, to introduce normative concerns into analysisunless they were themselves to be the objects ofanalysis’ (1992: 489). The field has only recentlybegun to recover from this detour and has rediscov-ered normative international political theory.

The limitations of utilizing the ‘great debates’framework for understanding the history of the fieldis plainly apparent when we come to the 1980s andthe so-called ‘third great debate’. As the field hasbecome increasingly pluralistic, perhaps owing, inpart, to its institutional growth, there seems to be aplethora of debates. In addition to the two versionsof the ‘third debate’ mentioned earlier, the inter-paradigm and post-positivism debates, there is thedebate between neorealism and neoliberalism(Baldwin, 1993; Kegley, 1995); between rational-ists and reflectivists (Keohane, 1988; Walker,1989); between rationalists and constructivists(Katzenstein et al., 1999; Ruggie, 1998; Wendt,1999; see also Fearon and Wendt, Chapter 3 in thisvolume); between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ real-ists (Mearsheimer, 1994/1995; Schweller, 1996);and between communitarians and cosmopolitans(Brown, 1987, 1992; Hoffman, 1988). Yet this

listing only begins to scratch the surface, sincethere are also numerous debates within specificapproaches such as constructivism, feminism,realism and post-structuralism.

Although it is difficult to provide an adequate his-torical perspective on these more recent develop-ments, it is simply impossible to lump all of thesecontroversies under one grand master debate. Nomatter what general characteristics we assign to thedebate, it would not help us to understand the mostrecent history of the field. Waever has suggestedthat one way to get beyond the confusion of view-ing recent developments in terms of a singular thirddebate is by acknowledging that we have entered a‘fourth debate’ (1996). Here Waever, like severalothers in the field (Lapid, 1989; Smith, 2000;Vasquez, 1995), suggests that we make a sharp dif-ferentiation between, on the one hand, approaches,such as critical theory, post-structuralism, postmod-ernism and specific versions of constructivism andfeminism, that fall under the post-positivism labeland, on the other hand, the mainstream, which heargues is wedded to a rationalist orthodoxy. The lat-ter is seen as resulting from what Waever (1996)terms a ‘neo-neo synthesis’ in which, during the1980s, neoliberalism and neorealism essentiallybecame indistinguishable on the basis of theirshared commitment to a rationalist research pro-gram. This view of a ‘neo-neo-synthesis’ is morepopular outside the United States than within,where neoliberalism and neorealism continue torepresent the basic divisions within the field despitethe new emphasis on constructivism.

Post-positivism has sparked a considerableamount of meta-theoretical reflection on the currentidentity and composition of the field. The activityof reflecting on the nature of theory has come tocomprise a significant component of the discourse inIR. As in other fields where the challenge to posi-tivism has been mounted, post-positivists in IRview the traditional epistemological foundations ofthe field, often assumed to emanate from theEnlightenment, as no longer a philosophicallydefensible basis for making authoritative judgmentsabout validity in political inquiry. In this manner,‘post-positivism has placed the scientific studyof world politics in a serious crisis’ (Vasquez, 1995:234). Many of these ‘alternative’ or ‘dissident’approaches seek to deconstruct the traditional posi-tivist foundations of the field and to embrace a radi-cal anti-foundationalism that can enable multiplevoices or perspectives to be heard. This is seen bysome as leading to a major restructuring of IR,allowing for additional space in which to thinkabout the issues that currently comprise the subjectmatter of the field (George, 1994; George andCampbell, 1990; Neufeld, 1995). For others,post-positivism, and postmodernism in particular,has raised fears about relativism, as the loss of

HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS16

an epistemological foundation is believed toundermine the authority of scholars to providetranscontextual grounds for truth (Rosenau, 1990;Vasquez, 1995).

While there is little doubt that various post-positivist approaches have contributed to the field’spluralistic character, generated an expansive bodyof interesting literature, and forced the field to con-front a host of new meta-theoretical questions, howlarge an impact they have made on the mainstreamcore of the field is still not clear. Like previous‘alternative’ approaches, the main object ofthe post-positivist critique has been realism, yetrealism, in one form or another, survives and con-tinues to provide what many would argue to be theinitial essential assumptions for explaining interna-tional politics as it has been traditionally defined bythe field of IR (Grieco, 1997; Jervis, 1998;Mearsheimer, 1994/5). This can partly account forwhy, of all the alternative approaches that haveentered the field since the early 1980s, Wendt’s par-ticular conception of constructivism, which acceptsmany of the assumptions of realism, is the approachbeing taken most seriously by the mainstreamtoday. To the dismay of some of the critical schol-ars in the field, Wendt (1999) claims that his ver-sion of constructivism is able to entertain the role ofideas, norms and the process of identity-formationwhile at the same time subscribing to a realistworld-view and a positivist epistemology. In thismanner, some of the most recent literature on thestate of the field is heralding constructivism as thefield’s newest approach or paradigm to the study ofinternational politics (Katzenstein et al., 1999;Walt, 1998).

CONCLUSION

Although there is a general sense that we alreadyknow the field’s history, l have attempted to demon-strate that there are many problems with the con-ventional story about how the field has developed.Some of the more recent work on the history of IRsuggests that many of our dominant understandingsof the field are nothing more than myths (Booth,1996; Kahler, 1997; Wilson, 1998), and one of theproblems with such myths is that they often notonly misrepresent the past but continue to misin-form the present. Research on the history of the fieldis not simply an exercise in antiquarianism but anattempt to increase our capacity to examine criti-cally the contemporary nature of the field by anunderstanding of the intellectual roots from which ithas evolved. There is an intimate link between dis-ciplinary identity and the manner in which weunderstand the history of the field. For a field thatappears to be perpetually consumed by identitycrises, careful attention to some of the previous

identities by which we were possessed wouldrepresent a fruitful research agenda. There is ampleopportunity for the diverse approaches in the fieldto explore their own intellectual roots and, thereby,to recognize some of the continuities between thepast and the present. Such an exercise might evenhelp to prevent the tendency for the field to pro-claim something quite old as new.

In order for the investigation of the history of thefield to receive the same intellectual respect as otherareas of research, more attention should be placedon the theoretical and methodological assumptionsinvolved. The absence of such attention in much ofthe existing literature on the history of the field hasserved to reinforce the view that the history of IR isself-evident or trivial. One example is the explicit aswell as implicit contextualism that has informed somany of the orthodox accounts of the field’s devel-opment. Although it is often suggested that theexternal context provided by ‘real world’ politicalevents can be conceived as an independent variablethat explains the character of the field at a specifichistorical juncture, the actual link between the twois seldom as straightforward and self-evident as itmight appear. The relationship between externalevents and the internal disciplinary response mani-fested in conceptual or theoretical change must beempirically demonstrated and not merely assumed.Although IR is conceived as an academic enterprisedevoted to the study of international politics, thisdoes not automatically imply that the exogenousevents that comprise the subject matter at any givenpoint in time can explain what happens inside thefield. From the point of view of disciplinary history,the crux of the issue should be how the field has, orhas not, responded intellectually to external factorsrather than how these factors can account for thedynamics inside the field. And more attentionshould be placed on the internal context of the fieldsuch as its setting in the university system, sourcesof funding and professional norms. An internal ascompared to an external focus may well help toaccount for the distinct national differences in howthe field has developed.

While I have suggested that it might, for variousreasons, be beneficial for the various approaches orschools of thought in the field to chronicle their owndiscursive development, this does not mean that dis-ciplinary history should merely serve as a vehicle forlegitimation and critique. As Gunnell has stated,truth is very often more convincing than fiction andcarries as much critical force (1991). Although theremight be a tendency for histories of the field to bepresentist, it has become obvious that this oftenresults in serious distortions. Rather than seeking tosay something authoritative about the field’s presentcharacter, it might be more useful to attempt to saysomething definitive about the field’s past.

It is quite evident that a number of differentapproaches and methodologies can be used to

recover the disciplinary history of IR. While I haveelsewhere advocated a historiographical approachthat can be described as a critical internal discursivehistory (Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b), Guzzini (1998)advocates a historical sociological approach, Waever(1998) embraces a sociology of science view, andSmith (1995) advocates a genealogical methodinformed by the work of Foucault. There is room forall these approaches and more, but the importantpoint is that disciplinary history can be a vehicle infostering critical insights and opening additionalspace in which to think about the central dilemmasthat continue to confront the study of internationalpolitics. These insights, however, depend on dis-pelling the misconceptions that have plagued pastwork on the history of IR.

Notes

I wish to thank John G. Gunnell, Steve Smith and the edi-tors for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlierversions of this chapter.

1 The abbreviation IR refers to the institutionalizedacademic field of international relations.

2 The eight root disciplines included international law,diplomatic history, military science, international politics,international organization, international trade, colonialgovernment and the conduct of foreign relations. The dis-ciplines with a world point of view included world geo-graphy, world history, psychology, sociology, languageand biology.

3 Waever, 1998 provides a very useful discussion ofthe evolution in IR in Germany, France, the UnitedKingdom and the United States.

4 Although few in number, there is a growing body ofliterature that examines the development of IR fromwithin a specific country setting. For example, the editedvolume by Hugh C. Dyer and Leon Mangasarian (1989)includes chapters on the study of IR in the formerSoviet Union, China, Brazil, the Federal Republic ofGermany, South Africa, France, Japan, Italy and theUnited Kingdom among others. Other examples of thisundertaking include Chan, 1994; Groom, 1994; andJorgensen, 2000.

5 The first generation of self-ascribed academic real-ists and their most influential work included: E.H. Carr1939; George F. Kennan, 1951; Hans J. Morgenthau,1948; Reinhold Niebuhr, 1940; Frederick L. Schuman,1933; Georg Schwarzenberger, 1941; and Nicholas J.Spykman, 1942.

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