Description
Traditionally, the origins of International Relations (IR) as a stand-alone academic discipline have been traced to 1919 and the inspiration of a generation of so-called liberal idealists. Since the late 1990s, however, a growing revisionist literature has challenged both of these assumptions. First, revisionists usually claim that the roots of IR may lie at the turn of the twentieth century or after the Second World War. Second, they contend that the emphasis on liberal internationalism is over-stated. One issue that has not been treated by either traditional or revisionist scholars is the role of Marxist thought in the formative years of IR. This is striking because the first four decades of the twentieth century were not only crucial for the development of IR, they were also an exceptionally fertile period for Marxist political thought—this was, after all, the era of Lenin, Kautsky, Bukharin and Luxemburg. Is it really possible that these Marxist intellectuals had a negligible impact on early IR, as the historiographical literature would have us believe? Contra this position, Building on the work of revisionist scholars, the thesis reconstructs the writings of five benchmark IR thinkers. and reviewing the cases of Henry Brailsford, Leonard Woolf, Harold Laski and Norman Angell, I argue that Marxism played a significant role in the formative development of IR.
