The English School and British Historians

Abstract

The English school is often seen as an important point of contact between the study of history and the study of international relations. This largely derives from the belief that the school remained committed to historical (and normative) questions at a time when the International Relations discipline in America was becoming increasingly devoted to the development of general 'scientific' theories rather than seeking to account for the distinctive individuality and discontinuous evolution of the modern international system. While the 'scientists' were, according to Hedley Bull, 'cutting themselves off from history and philosophy', 1 the members of the English school were always interested in telling the story of how the modern international system had originated and changed over time, in understanding its individual character in comparison with other ways of organising international politics, and in asking whether it provided for a just world order. They were trying, as Bull rather cosily put it, 'to warm the coals of an older tradition of historical and political reflection during the long, dark winter of the "social scientific" ascendancy'. 2 However, rather than contrast the English school with political scientists in the United States, in this article I will compare their work with that of historians in the United Kingdom during the period when the school was developing its account of modern international society, from the 1950s to the 1980s (roughly the lifetime of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics). My reason for adopting this focus is that the distinction between the 'traditionalist' English school I am indebted to Molly Cochran and Ian Hall for reading this piece and offering me several valuable comments, not all of which I have been able to address, on the early development of the English school's idea of individual free will and on the school's interest in religiously inspired historical scholarship.

Causation, complexity, and the Concert: the pragmatics of causal explanation in International Relations

“…To question whether the rationalist approach is pragmatically adequate as an explanation of how it came about historically that the Concert system was peaceful is not to soften our standards, but rather to impose an additional requirement over and above the more familiar emphasis on epistemic adequacy. A focus on the pragmatics of causal explanation also highlights some of the limitations of attempts to identify generic characteristics of history and theory and to generalize about how they differ (see Keene 2008;Lawson 2010). Jervis (1992: 716) may be right that theorists, unlike historians, tend to believe 'that one or two causes are primary in each case, and … that the same factors are at work in numerous instances', but if so, are such beliefs epistemic (about the causal constitution of world politics) or pragmatic (about what sorts of explanations are most satisfactory)?…”

The English School: History and Primary Institutions as Empirical IR Theory?

“…Several members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politicsthe institutional font of the approachwere practicing historians (including Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield), while many contemporary advocates of the English School (such as Barry Buzan, Ian Clark, Kalevi J. Holsti, Richard Little, Hidemi Suganami and Edward Keene) continue to play an active role in bridging the theory-history divide (e.g. Little, 1996, 2000;Suganami, 1999Suganami, , 2008Holsti, 2004;Clark, 2007;Keene, 2008).…”

History, International Relations, and Integrated Approaches: Thinking about Greater Interdisciplinarity

“…They identify a so‐called historical turn in IR in which history is being brought back increasingly into IR analysis; in which qualitative research is gaining ground, thus putting some IR scholars in a better position to draw on the work of historians (see Elman and Elman 2008:361–64). For his part, Keene goes so far as to argue that the “new history” has moved beyond chronological description and narrative into greater analysis that resembles political science (Keene 2008:381–389).…”