Description
Historiographical investigations are currently blossoming in International Relations. This interest in history is partly due to historical studies shifting their interest towards global/world history and global intellectual history. It is also partly due to International Relations becoming more interested in its own disciplinary history and aiming to further globalise the discipline. Particularly feminist, postcolonial, and (historical) sociological contributions have challenged conventional histories of international politics in recent years. In its wake, also the work and political activism of classical realists have been reassessed. This paper makes a contribution to these historiographical efforts, demonstrating that reconsidering the work of classical realists not only is of historical interest but their approach to international politics was also historically informed. Hence, classical realists aimed to historicise International Relations in order to gain a more comprehensive picture of the conditionality, contingency, and ephemerality of international politics. While variations of this claim have been made before, to date we only have a scattered understanding about the origins of this classical realist approach. While the influence of history, sociology, jurisprudence, and psychoanalysis has been recorded, the influence of art history on classical realism has received little consideration. To close this gap, this paper focuses on Hans Morgenthau, arguably the most well-known classical realist, and Heinrich Wölfflin, whose student Morgenthau was, to demonstrate that classical realism was informed by similar aspirations that still inform current International Relations discourses on aesthetics and emotions.
