Classics of International Relations

Essays in Criticism and Appreciation

Henrik Bliddal, Casper Sylvest, Peter Wilson, Henrik Bliddal, Casper Sylvest, Peter Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135018658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Classics of International Relations introduces, contextualises and assesses 24 of the most important works on international relations of the last 100 years. Providing an indispensable guide for all students of IR theory, from advanced undergraduates to academic specialists, it asks why are these works considered classics? Is their status deserved? Will it endure? It takes as its starting point Norman Angell's best-selling The Great Illusion (1909) and concludes with Daniel Deudney's award winning Bounding Power (2006). The volume does not ignore established classics such as Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations and Waltz's Theory of International Politics, but seeks to expand the 'IR canon' beyond its core realist and liberal texts. It thus considers emerging classics such as Linklater's critical sociology of moral boundaries, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, and Enloe's pioneering gender analysis, Bananas, Beaches and Bases. It also innovatively considers certain 'alternative format' classics such as Kubrick's satire on the nuclear arms race, Dr Strangelove, and Errol Morris's powerful documentary on war and US foreign policy, The Fog of War. With an international cast of contributors, many of them leading authorities on their subject, Classics of International Relations will become a standard reference for all those wishing to make sense of a rapidly developing and diversifying field.

Classics of International Relations is designed to become a standard reference text for advanced undergraduates, post-graduates and lecturers in the field of IR.

Introduction

Henrik Bliddal, Casper Sylvest and Peter Wilson¹

DOI: 10.4324/9780203761472-1

For better or worse, International Relations (IR), like all fields of academic enquiry, gains its identity and establishes a degree of coherence by reference to tradition: its core concerns, staple approaches, and landmark or ‘classic’ contributions. This book provides introductions to and critical engagements with classical works of IR since c. 1900; i.e. the point when IR began to emerge as a recognizable socio-intellectual space, with its own concerns, debates and literature, if not yet its own professional space within the academy. At a time when the research agenda of the field is expanding and fragmenting, there is a growing trend to introduce IR through a combination of theory exegesis and a return to the discipline's founding fathers and classic books. At the same time, the changing nature of academic learning in conjunction with the proliferation of scholarly books and articles means that students and even some faculty rarely have the time or the opportunity to engage properly with more than a handful of these books. Classics of International Relations speaks to this predicament. It provides coherence by introducing the intellectual landmarks and core concerns of the field and gives students and scholars authoritative treatments of a considered selection of classics. Classics of International Relations aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the identity of the discipline. Not shying away from the politics involved in establishing a canon, the book's broad and inclusive understanding of ‘the classic’ — covering inter alia the acknowledged classic, the classic in-the-making, and the ‘alternative format’ classic — is intended to facilitate such debate.

This Introduction has four aims. First, to provide a brief history of the idea of a classic text. Second, to set out the broad concept of classics around which the volume is organized. Third, to justify the purposes of the book and discuss some of the pitfalls involved in bringing it together. The volume is inescapably involved in the process of canonizing, engaging as it does in potentially powerful practices of inclusion and exclusion. Fourth, to provide a brief overview of the organization of the volume and set out the principles that have informed our selection of classics.

What is a classic?

The notion of a classic work of IR, history, sociology, politics or indeed any field of scholarly and scientific endeavour derives from literature. It is a notion tied to the process of secular canon-formation from the beginning. The Romans used the term classici to distinguish citizens of the pre-eminent class, those enjoying a certain fixed income, from the poorer citizenry beneath them, infra classem. The first writer to employ the term classicus figuratively was Aulus Gellius in the second century ad.² He used it to distinguish superior, authoritative texts, i.e. texts that could constitute a model for future writers, from those less worthy. Since that time, the term has been used repeatedly to distinguish the finest literary products of Western civilization from the mass. A classic work goes beyond the merely useful, noteworthy and valuable. It is a work that is considered in some important respects seminal or exemplary. A classic work is required reading for a person of culture. It is a work that all such persons ought to read or at least ‘ought to have on their bookshelves’.³ Yet it cannot be assumed that there was ever a time when a consensus prevailed, on anything more than a very general level, on the qualities and characteristics that define a classic. A classic work is certainly one that to some degree has stood the test of time. It is a work that continues to be read across the generations and in this sense is said to have ‘endured’. But how many generations does a ‘classic’ need to cross? How long does it need to endure? What is it, most importantly, about this classic that has enabled it to cross the generations and endure? In addition to crossing generations, a classic is often deemed to be a work that crosses frontiers. Its appeal goes beyond the country and perhaps even the culture of its birth, often in time being translated into many different languages. But how many frontiers does it need to cross?

To these questions many answers have been given, with the outer boundaries of a centuries-old debate being defined by two broad positions. The first position, which held sway until the twentieth century, and could still be heard in the strong voices of T. S. Eliot and Q. D. Leavis well into that century, might be termed the essentialist. The second position, which holds sway today, though containing many disparate evocations, might be termed the sociological. The essentialist position finds one of its strongest statements in a celebrated essay by the nineteenth-century French literary critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. He acknowledged at the outset that the question ‘What is a classic?’ is delicate and different answers could be proposed ‘according to times and seasons’. He went on to present, however, his own unequivocally essentialist account of what a classic work entails. ‘The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition, fashions and transmits itself, and endures.’ It is a work that enriches the human mind, increases its treasure, and causes it ‘to advance a step’. It discovers some ‘moral and not equivocal truth’ and reveals ‘some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered’. It expresses itself in a form ‘broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful’; and in a style peculiar to itself yet which is ‘found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time’.⁴ The idea that a classic expresses certain timeless verities and speaks not to this or that culture but to the whole world goes to the heart of the essentialist position. However, the conceptual vessels ‘timeless verities’ and ‘speaking to the whole world’ are in themselves quite empty and have been filled in a variety of ways. Eliot, for example, contended in 1944 that the classic must display inter alia wit, magniloquence, maturity and urbanity. The one work that Eliot considered to be a true classic, Virgil's Aeneid (according to him, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine and Milton wrote, at best, ‘relative classics’), moreover exhibited comprehensiveness, centrality, a sense of destiny and the gift of prophecy. But it also possessed a certain universality: ‘The classic must … express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling which represents the character of the people who speak that language’. Universality for Eliot unlike Sainte-Beuve was paradoxical; it resided in this ‘comprehensiveness in particularity’.⁵

Such nuances in Eliot's essay anticipate the sociological position which received its best-known expression in Frank Kermode's The Classic, published some three decades later. According to Kermode, classics are ‘old books which people still read’.⁶ An important factor in the making of a classic is ‘a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value of a classic’. This contrasts with what Kermode calls Eliot's ‘imperial’ model which expresses the timeless verities of a culture or civilization.⁷ Rather than containing anything timeless, classic works possess ‘an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions’.⁸ Here, Kermode echos Ezra Pound's contention of the 1930s that ‘[a] classic is a classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is a classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness’.⁹ He also anticipates Calvino's contention that ‘[a] classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’ and ‘[t]he classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading’.¹⁰ For the essentialists, a classic is by and large a closed book which specialized study and learning can partly open. As late as 1969, Leavis maintained that many peripheral readings of a classic were possible but only one central reading.¹¹ In Kermode's view, however, the classic is an open text capable of generating new meanings and understandings, ideas and interpretations. The classic signifies different things to different generations and different people within those generations. Classic works endure not because they lack substance and are open to infinite interpretation, but because they possess substance that is ‘patient of interpretation’. Rather than express timeless verities, a work becomes a classic because it is sufficiently complex and open-ended to enable different cultures, generations and societies to find in it new meaning.¹²

From this brief exegesis one conclusion can be drawn: classic is a status we give to a work that separates it from often worthy but professedly inferior peers. It says this is a book one should read. It says this is a book one should prioritize over others because of its timeless qualities or because of the high value a given society, community or culture attaches to it. It is a term inextricably linked to the notion of a secular canon, a body of works if not sacred and eternal then in some important respects superior and deemed to be of continuing value and importance.

What is an IR classic?

There has been no comparable debate about what makes a classic of IR. The field has a number of texts that are routinely referred to as classics, a number of others to which classic status is occasionally attributed. All too often, however, the label is employed as a loose synonym for ‘landmark’ or ‘groundbreaking’. This reflects an unsatisfactory degree of critical self-awareness in applying the concept and an underdeveloped appreciation of its discursive functions and possibilities. Before suggesting a typology that will help us to heighten our consciousness and sharpen our appreciation of the IR classic, it is important to make some preliminary distinctions regarding the use of the prefix ‘classic’ in IR discourse.

First, it is important to distinguish a classic work, in the sense understood in this volume, from a work of the classical tradition. The term classical tradition (also sometimes termed ‘international theory’)¹³ is usually used to refer to that broad body of thought that predates IRas a specialized and professional field of study, and to which the IR community continuously adds by the ‘discovery’ of old works. Its originators are philosophers, political theorists, lawyers or publicists who have written significant, perhaps profound, things about the international system or society, who have influenced later thought, and whose works are deemed to be worthy of serious study. Among them can be counted such illustrious names as Vitoria, Hobbes, Grotius, Vattel, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, Kant, Hegel and Gentz — to cite the subjects of one well-known collection of essays¹⁴ — though the extent to which such disparate figures may be said to constitute in any meaningful sense a ‘tradition’ can be, and indeed has been, questioned.¹⁵

Second, it is important to distinguish a classic work from a work that employs the classical approach. The classical approach is a term originating from and still mainly used by those associated with the English school of IR.¹⁶ The classical approach, in Bull's words, signifies ‘that approach to theorizing that derives from philosophy, history, and law, and that is characterized above all by explicit reliance on the exercise of judgment’ and ‘the scientifically imperfect process of perception or intuition’.¹⁷ Bull derived this understanding of the approach from what he took to be the analytical methods of classical, i.e. pre-twentieth century, thinkers, thus closely linking the classical tradition and the classical approach. He held these methods to be superior, or at least more honest and realistic, than the behavioural, scientific or quantitative methods that were at the time taking hold in the social sciences. Bull's definition and his subsequent argument are concerned with methodology and epistemology, not with the status of any body of work or particular work. While he certainly used the word ‘classical’ to lend gravitas to an approach he personally favoured, he was not using it to suggest that by the very fact of being ‘classical’ it was superior to others.

The classic work as understood in this volume, therefore, has no logical connection to the classical tradition or to the classical approach. These refer to particular types, bodies and methods of work, not a work's status. It is perfectly possible for classic works to hail from the ‘scientific’ as from the ‘classical’ camp (to use Bull's imperfect categories). The fact that the majority of IR classics as specified here come from the classical camp says perhaps more about the age of this camp than its intellectual superiority. It also, however, reflects the non-positivist inclinations of the editors, our understanding of the discipline as a conversation between competing theoretical standpoints rather than a quest from a single standpoint for a single, universally valid, truth — the goal of much ‘scientific’ theory.

There are, we contend, five types of classic work in the field of IR. We have arrived at three of these types by reflecting on the works that are generally or increasingly deemed to be classics, not through the application of any a priori conceptions or understandings. Our approach here is therefore ‘sociological’, not ‘essentialist’, though the possibility of arriving at some essentialist conclusions have not been ruled out. Yet to this fairly conventional understanding of classic must be added, if we are to capture the current IR field in all its diversity, two further types. The five types are:

1. The acknowledged or undisputed classic. These are works such as The Twenty Years' Crisis and Theory of International Politics whose status as classics few in IR would deny.
2. The archetypal classic. These are works seen as the best expressions of an important school of thought, paradigm or approach. They are widely deemed and utilized as exemplars of that approach. Examples include The Anarchical Society (English school) and Political Theory and International Relations (cosmopolitanism).
3. The classic in the making. These are works published relatively recently such as Social Theory of International Politics and Bounding Power, which show signs in terms of their disciplinary impact of becoming classics in the future.
4. The overlooked classic. These are works such as Three Guineas and Bananas, Beaches and Bases, which have a small but intense following within certain disciplinary sub-groups but which have yet to be more broadly acknowledged. A parallel in the world of film would be the cult classic.
5. Alternative format classic. Types (i) to (iv) generally betray a conventional understanding of ‘text’: a published, academic book; the academic monograph. A broader notion of text would embrace film, literat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A pillar of air? Norman Angell and The Great Illusion
• 3 A democratic critique of the state: G. Lowes Dickinson's The European Anarchy
• 4 Attacking Hitler in England: patriarchy, class and war in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas
• 5 Power, morality and the remaking of international order: E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis
• 6 A new politics for a global age: David Mitrany's A Working Peace System
• 7 Politics between and beyond nations: Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations
• 8 The enduring logic of the three images: Kenneth N. Waltz's Man, the State, and War
• 9 The conditions and consequences of globality: John H. Herz's International Politics in the Atomic Age
• 10 Realism meets historical sociology: Raymond Aron's Peace and War
• 11 Towards a liberal realism: Inis L. Claude's Power and International Relations
• 12 The joke's on you: International Relations and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
• 13 The virtue of uncertain advice: Robert Jervis' Perception and Misperception in International Politics
• 14 Probing the institutional fabric of world politics: Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society
• 15 A circumspect revival of liberalism: Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye's Power and Interdependence
• 16 The politics of international theory: reading Waltz 1979 as a classic
• 17 The cosmopolitan turn: beyond realism and statism in Charles R. Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations
• 18 Obligations beyond the state: Andrew Linklater's Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations
• 19 The making of IR/IPE: Robert W. Cox's Production, Power and World Order
• 20 Gendering geopolitics, gendering IR: Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases
• 21 The limits of international relations: R. B. J. Walker's Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory
• 22 The state has a mind: Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics
• 23 A modest realist in a tragic world: John J. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
• 24 Interrogating the subject: Errol Morris's The Fog of War
• 25 Restraint in the global polity, the remix: Daniel Deudney's Bounding Power
• 26 Conclusion
• Index