Abstract
If the history of British political thought, as one of the contributors to this book recently suggested, has been “one of the most fertile areas in anglophone historical scholarship of the past half-century,” the history of international thought has remained comparatively unfilled ground during most of that time.1 In the past decade, however, work has begun in establishing the broad contours of the field, and although the “historiographical turn” has not quite occurred in international theory, there are signs that the “fifty years’ rift” between intellectual historians and students of international relations is starting to heal.2 Contributions to this nascent field of the history of international thought have come from historians, political theorists, and indeed international theorists, and it is the spirit of maintaining this interdisciplinary conversation that the scholars writing in this volume were invited to participate. The topics of conversation—within this book and beyond it—have varied. Great efforts have been spent to debunk myths about the ideas of past thinkers that have persisted in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and on providing new interpretations of their work.3 Similar industry has been shown in the recovery of the international thought that lurks on the fringes of the political philosophies of canonical writers from Thucydides to John Rawls.4
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Notes
David Armitage, “Introduction” to his edited British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.
Herbert Butterfield & Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 17–34
Duncan S. A. Bell, “International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3:1 (2002), 115–126
David Armitage, “The Fifty Years’ Rift: Intellectual History and International Relations,” Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004), 97–109.
See, for example, Tim Dunne, “Mythology or Methodology: Traditions in International Theory,” Review of International Studies 19 (1993), 305–318
Peter Wilson, “The Myth of the ‘First Great Debate,’” “Review of International Studies 24 (Special Issue) (1998), 1–13.
See especially Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger, eds., International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
D. A. Welch, “Why International Relations Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003), 301–319.
Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations (New Haven, CT, & Oxford: Yale University Press, 2002)
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and International Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Hedley Bull, “The Theory of International Politics, 1919–1969,” in Brian Porter, ed., The Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919–1969 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 35.
David Long and Peter Wilson, eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J. A. Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Christopher Stray, ed., Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre and International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Derek Drinkwater, Sir Harold Nicolson and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
W H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf (New York: Palgrave, 2003)
Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Internationalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Charles Jones, E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 1999).
Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001)
Sean Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2006)
Michael C. Williams, ed., Realism Reconsidered: The legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
William E. Scheuerman, Morgenthau (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
For a sophisticated version of this story, see Kalevi J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Renée Jeffery, “Tradition as Invention: The ‘Traditions Tradition’ and the History of Ideas in International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34:1 (2005), 57–84.
See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future ofWorld Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
Uday Singh Mehta, liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteen-Century British liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperialist liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
David Long and Brian Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005).
See Knud Erik Jørgensen, “Continental IR Theory: The Best Kept Secret,” European Journal of International Relations 6:1 (2000), 9–42
Gerard Holden, “The Politer Kingdoms of the Globe: Context and Comparison in the Intellectual History of IR,” Global Society 15:1 (2001), 27–51
Jörg Friedrichs, European Approaches to International Relations Theory: A House of Many Mansions (London: Routledge, 2004).
See, for example, the essays in Ian Clark, ed., Classical Theories of International Relations (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996)
Beate Jahn, ed., Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Visions, Ethics and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
For contrasting uses of Kant, see Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1996)
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with the Ldea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
One of the first to draw attention to this idea in the work of Hobbes, albeit in an oblique way, as Jeanne Morefield’s chapter shows, was Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, in The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926).
This attribution is made by Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 46–47.
David Hume, “Of the Balance of Power,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1987). Online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL30.html (accessed 6 August 2007).
John Stuart Mill, A Few Words on Non-Lntervention, Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 8 (London: Libertarian Alliance, n.d. [1859]).
On the Covenant, Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London: Constable, 1934).
Sir Charles Webster, “The Art and Practice of a Diplomatic Historian: Sir Charles Webster, 1886–1961,” International Politics 42 (2005), 470–490.
For representative texts in this mold, see R. R. Davies, The First British Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Allan Machines, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For a critical assessment of the ways in which Hobbes has been treated, see Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations,” in his Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 432–456.
For one carefully argued attempt to do this, using Martin Wight’s “three traditions,” see Edwin van der Haar, “David Hume and International Political Theory: A Reappraisal,” Review of International Studies 34 (2008), 225–242.
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Hall, I., Hill, L. (2009). Introduction. In: Hall, I., Hill, L. (eds) British International Thinkers from Hobbes to Namier. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101739_1
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