Description
“International society,” understood not simply as an arena for where state actors interact but rather as an historical subject in its own right, has, despite its recent rediscovery, a long pedigree, back to Heeren and Ranke, the last of the German Statistikers. It was one that comprised actors and institutions of numerous types; it paid some attention to historical development and invited historical comparison. It was buried by the enthusiasm for national histories in the 19th century, subsumed into ‘international history’ in the early 20th, and made a sudden and rather dramatic return in the context of the British Committee, where two step changes of great significance occurred. One was to include in international society large scale political formations that were not states as both context and subjects of historical change, presaged in Wight’s 1977 International Systems and presented as an historical sequence in Adam Watson’s The Evolution of International Society. The second was to focus on institutions as the markers of change and as the effective structures of international society, presaged by Holsti in Taming the Sovereigns and argued by default in Buzan’s From International to World Society in 2004. This chapter reviews the argument and tracks its development in recent literature.
