Description
The years since the end of the Cold War have witnessed a substantial growth of interest not only in the historical evolution of academic International Relations (IR), but also the methods most appropriate to its study. Methodological debate has focused predominantly on the supposedly naive "internalist" approach favoured by many disciplinary historians, despite their protestations that they do not ignore “external” contexts. The following paper intervenes in this methodological debate by complementing and complicating existing critiques of internalism in the disciplinary history of IR. It argues that such critiques are to a large extent valid, but do not hold universally. More importantly, they leave unquestioned a further, and perhaps deeper, methodological assumption contained in the literature: namely, that the early formative history of IR holds the keys to understanding, and intervening in, the discipline today. This assumption I term “originalism”, and I argue it has unintentionally downplayed the significance of much of IR’s later development, particularly since the 1970s. Future histories of IR, I conclude, should aim to transcend the internalist/externalist binary while avoiding originalism. In this way, the paper offers a novel methodological perspective on IR’s disciplinary history, one that promises a more comprehensive understanding of the discipline’s past and present.
