How Should We Approach the History of International Thought?

2018 ◽  
pp. 79-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucian M. Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
History Of ◽  
International Thought

American diplomatic history and international thought: a constitutional perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C Hendrickson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
American Founding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
International Thought

This essay offers a constitutional perspective on the American encounter with the problem of international order. Its point of departure is the American Founding, a subject often invisible in both the history of international thought and contemporary International Relations theory. Although usually considered as an incident within the domestic politics of the United States, the Founding displays many key ideas that have subsequently played a vital role in both international political thought and IR theory. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ideas and to take account of their passage through time, up to and including the present day. Those ideas shine a light not only on how we organize our scholarly enterprises but also on the contemporary direction of US foreign policy and the larger question of world order.

scholarly journals Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benno Gerhard Teschke
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
International Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Intellectual Product ◽  
International Thought

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.

The history of international thought and International Relations theory: from context to interpretation

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Hall
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Made In ◽  
International Thought

Over the past two decades, historians of international thought have markedly improved our understanding of the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) and its wider intellectual history. During that period, ‘contextualism’ has become a leading approach in the field, as it has been for half a century in the history of political thought. This article argues that while the application of contextualism in IR has improved our understanding of its disciplinary history, its assumptions about the proper relationship between historians and theorists threaten to marginalise the history of international thought within IR. It argues that unless the inherent weaknesses in contextualism are recognised, the progress made in the field will go unrecognised by a discipline that sees little reason to engage with its history. It suggests that historians of international thought adopt an extensively modified version of contextualism that would allow them to rebuild bridges back into IR, especially IR theory.

scholarly journals Political Thought, International Relations theory and International Political Theory: an interpretation

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Past History ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Thought

The relationship between political theory, including the history of political thought, and International Relations theory, including the history of international thought, has been, and to some extent remains, complex and troubled. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mid-twentieth century founders of International Relations as an academic discipline drew extensively on the canon of political thought, but approached the subject in an uncritical way, while political philosophers largely disdained the international as a focus. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of the ‘justice industry’ based on critiques of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and a consequent recovering of the past history of cosmopolitan and communitarian thought. A new discourse emerged in this period – International Political Theory – bridging the gap between political thought and international relations and stimulating a far more creative and scholarly approach to the history of international thought. However, in a social science environment dominated by the methods of economics, that is, formal theory and quantification, the new discourse of International Political Theory occupies a niche rather than existing at the centre of the discipline.

The construction of an edifice: the story of a First Great Debate

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Quirk ◽  
Darshan Vigneswaran
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Critical Literature ◽  
International Thought

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations.

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