scholarly journals Context, reception, and the study of great thinkers in international relations

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Vergerio
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Methodological Reflection ◽  
Cambridge School ◽  
The Way

AbstractWhile the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.

scholarly journals Ein Modell Politischer Diskursanalyse

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Model ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Cambridge School

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

War and Peace in International Rivalry. By Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 319p. $49.50.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-516
Author(s):  
John Vasquez
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
International Rivalry ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
The Way

When the intellectual history of international relations in- quiry is written for our time, War and Peace in International Rivalry may very well be seen as a seminal book. Along with Frank Wayman, Diehl and Goertz have been at the forefront of a major conceptual breakthrough in the way peace and war are studied. This book is their major statement of the subject and presents their most important findings.

STRATEGY AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Thought

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-centuryrealpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

The Cambridge School’s “Guicciardinian Moments” Revisited

2018 ◽  
pp. 176-206
Author(s):  
John P. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common People ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Modern Republicanism ◽  
Cambridge School ◽  
Contemporary Approach

This chapter focuses on the most influential contemporary approach to the study of classical and early-modern republicanism and Niccolò Machiavelli's supposed place within that tradition—the Cambridge School of intellectual history, most prominently represented by J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. It argues that these world-renowned intellectual historians obscure important aspects of both republican and Machiavellian political thought; specifically, they largely ignore the fact that ancient and modern republicanisms secure the privileged position of elites more than they facilitate political participation by citizens. They also underplay the fact that Machiavelli's political prescriptions more substantively empower common people and more actively facilitate popular contestation of elites than did most authors and regimes that typify republicanism.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Exercises ◽  
Cambridge School ◽  
Theoretical Developments

The Introduction sets out the approach to intellectual history adopted in the book. Influenced by the Cambridge School intellectual historians—Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock—the chapter defends a contextual and empirical approach designed to avoid the anachronism and presentism that often mar studies of international relations theory and to situate theoretical developments and receptions in argumentative context. The chapter also pursues two further objectives. First, to distance itself from the dialectical-philosophical approaches that dominate critical international theories informed by German idealism and historical materialism. Second, following Ian Hunter’s investigations into the ethico-spiritual exercises performed on the self to problematize prior ethical imperatives and social comportments, the Introduction directs attention to the cultivation of the critical intellectual persona through exercises in philosophical self-fashioning.

Scandalous Writings, Dubious Readings, and the Virtues of Popular Empowerment

2018 ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
John P. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
The People ◽  
Cambridge School ◽  
Enduring Power

This concluding chapter entertains the idea of Niccolò Machiavelli possibly dismissing Leo Strauss, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in much the same manner that he disdained “the writers” who comprised the Western tradition of ancient and medieval political thought—all of whom he considered pusillanimous propagandists for the enduring power of wealthy elites. Machiavelli often exposed the powerful forces operating throughout intellectual history that disparaged the political judgment of the people, hence prompting his own defiant, often uproarious, distancing of himself from that tradition. In this sense, the book's efforts to contest the influential interpretations of Machiavelli offered by Rousseau, the Straussian school, and the Cambridge School were intended to serve as a Machiavellian critique of Machiavelli scholarship itself.

scholarly journals Return to the “Foundations” of Quentin Skinner

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Daud Kadyrov
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Cambridge School

This article provides a brief analysis of the compilation “Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought”, which under the editorship of Annabel Brett and James Tully, represents an attempt to reconsider the original work of Quentin Skinner “The Foundations of Modern Political Thought”. The authors of the compilation examine such fundamental topics as the context of Q. Skinner’s “Foundations’, his “linguistic” philosophy, rhetoric, late scholastics; upon the questions on Hobbs and democracy. In conclusion, analysis is conducted on this attempt to “reconsider” the ideas and views of Skinner, as well as his response to the remarks. The goal of this article consists in examination of the main theses and criticism of the authors of the compilation. The need for such review is substantiated by the fact that the Cambridge School of Intellectual History gains more relevance for the Russian humanities. For the Russian political science, “Rethinking of the Foundations” remains an important and untranslated source for broader understanding of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History. The author of the article attempts to partially fulfill this gap.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Hobbes among International Relations Thinkers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Boucher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
English School ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
International Issues ◽  
Civil Condition ◽  
The Individual

Among philosophers and historians of political thought Hobbes has little or nothing to say about relations among states. For modern realists and representatives of the English School in contemporary international relations theory, however, caricatures of Hobbes abound. There is a tendency to take him too literally, referring to what is called the unmodified philosophical state of nature, ignoring what he has to say about both the modified state of nature and the historical pre-civil condition. They extrapolate from the predicament of the individual conclusions claimed to be pertinent to international relations, and on the whole find his conclusions unconvincing. It is demonstrated that there is a much more restrained and cautious Hobbes, consistent with his timid nature, in which he gives carefully weighed views on a variety of international issues, recommending moderation consistent with the duties of sovereignty.

scholarly journals François Fénelon: Modern philosopher or conservative theologian?

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110020
Author(s):  
Alexandra Oprea
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Education Of Women ◽  
Political Philosopher

Ryan Patrick Hanley makes two original claims about François Fénelon: (1) that he is best regarded as a political philosopher, and (2) that his political philosophy is best understood as “moderate and modern.” In what follows, I raise two concerns about Hanley’s revisionist turn. First, I argue that the role of philosophy in Fénelon’s account is rather as a handmaiden of theology than as an autonomous area of inquiry—with implications for both the theory and practice of politics. Second, I use Fénelon’s writings on the education of women as an illustration of the more radical and reactionary aspects of his thought. Despite these limits, the book makes a compelling case for recovering Fénelon and opens up new conversations about education, religion, political economy, and international relations in early modern political thought.

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