Description
Since its popularisation by Hedley Bull in the 1960s, the concept of the ‘domestic analogy’ has gradually become one familiar to scholars within the discipline of International Relations (IR). It is not only a key concept in the formative output of the so-called English School, but one that scholars of varying theoretical persuasions, alongside historians of international thought, have made recourse to. Despite the concept’s recognisability within the field, there is presently no history detailing its origins and evolution. While Hidemi Suganami’s seminal 1989 study provided an elegant account of how past thinkers applied analogical reasoning from the domestic sphere, his treatment is one that transforms the phrase ‘domestic analogy’ into a timeless concept. One can therefore elucidate how, for example, Kant or Hobbes used domestic analogies, even if neither actually used the phrase ‘domestic analogy’. This paper differs in purpose and approach. Rather than providing a history of a particular form of analogical reasoning in the style of Suganami, we reconstruct an etymology of a specific phrase. To the extent that scholarship addresses the latter, what exists is an incomplete history locating the concept’s origins in the thinking of C.A.W. Manning. We return to fill-in this patchy account, discerning the varied uses of the ‘domestic analogy’ within the history of international political thought during its pre-Bullian phase, before delving into how the phrase gained wider academic currency and cohered around the fixed meaning to which it is associated in contemporary IR
