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

Abstract

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.

On the History and Historiography of International Relations

“…This is especially the case for those like Holden and others who have associated a contextual approach to disciplinary history with the work of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock on the history of ideas. The claim is that advocates of an internal approach do not understand their work very well and therefore inappropriately dismiss it (Holden, 2002;Quirk and Vigneswaran, 2005). The basic argument of Skinner and the Cambridge School of intellectual historians is that ideas have to be situated in their proper historical and linguistic context.…”

The liberal renaissance and the end(s) of history

“…The first concern focuses on the historical development of the discipline itself and has already shattered some of the received and taken-for-granted truths about the discipline's origins and major debates (Schmidt 1994(Schmidt , 1998Wilson 1998;Ashworth 2002;Quirk and Vbigneswaran 2005). A second concern that can be identified in the literature seeks to situate classical thinkers historically, to examine the development of their thought, and to consider critically the ways in which this thought has contributed to contemporary IR research (Walker 1992;Jahn 2006;Shilliam 2006Shilliam , 2007.…”

Feminist Creativities and the Disciplinary Imaginary of International Relations1

“…The story of the coagulation of IR as an autonomous discipline―or its foundational myth (Kahler 1997; Schmidt 2002a)―takes the form of a myth of rescue: as the story goes, IR emerged as a social science when realists saved the study of “the international” from a group of utopian pacifists, the idealists. A closer look at the texts of the period will reveal that the two camps were not so coagulated―in the sense of clusters of scholars sharing the same agendas; that the debate between the camps never occurred―in the sense of extensive and structured reciprocal engagement between the alleged camps; and that relying on this myth implicates more omission than inclusion, if our purpose is mapping out the debate space of the period (Crawford 2000; Ashworth 2002; Schmidt 2002b; Quirk and Vigneswaran 2005).…”