Radicals and Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century International Thought

I. Hall, I. Hall, I. Hall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137520623
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The history of international thought is a flourishing field, but it has tended to focus on Anglo-American realist and liberal thinkers. This book moves beyond the Anglosphere and beyond realism and liberalism. It analyses the work of thinkers from continental Europe and Asia with radical and reactionary agendas quite different from the mainstream.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Radicals and Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century International Thought

Ian Hall

The emergence of the history of international thought as a major subfield of International Relations (IR) is one of the most significant developments within the discipline in the past 20 years. Scholars working in the area have transformed our understanding of the origins and evolution of the discipline and the thinking about international relations that occurred prior to the coalescence of IR in the mid-twentieth century. Textbook caricatures of canonical thinkers and key texts have now been replaced with nuanced, historically sensitive interpretations of the work of major figures—from Raymond Aron and Hedley Bull to Hersch Lauterpacht and Alfred E. Zimmern (see, e.g., Davis 2009; Ayson 2012; Jeffery 2006; Markwell 1986). The evolution of important traditions of thought are now understood far better than they once were, as is their influence on various theorists and practitioners in far greater detail (see, inter alia, Ashworth 2014; Clark and Neumann 1996; Hall 2006a, 2012; 2014; Hall and Hill 2009; Haslam 2002; Holthaus 2014a, b; Keane 2002; Long and Wilson 1995; Navari 2013; Onuf 1998; Rosenboim 2014; Schmidt 1998; Rosenthal 1991; Williams 2007). As a result, we now have a much more robust and accurate account of the development of the discipline of IR and the wider development of non-disciplinary thinking about the subject. We now know, for instance, that the “Great Debates” of Anglo-American IR were more complicated than some theorists have suggested and, indeed, that at least one of those debates—the “First Great Debate” between “idealism” and “realism”—did not happen in the way that some remembered and others chose to represent it (Ashworth 2002; Long and Wilson 1995; Quirk and Vigneswaran 2005; Thies 2002; Wilson 1999).

There is, however, a great deal more work to be done on the history of international thought. So far, in the main, scholars have tended to focus on mainstream realist and liberal internationalist thinkers, and especially on English-speaking ones—or, like Aron or his contemporaries, the German-born thinkers Henry Kissinger or Hans J. Morgenthau—theorists who made their most important contributions to IR in English. But, although it is true that the center stage of IR has, for the past century, been dominated by realists and internationalists, it is also true that many others have made significant contributions from the fringe—whether radical or reactionary—and that those contributions have stimulated realist and internationalist thought. Karl Mannheim’s radical sociology of knowledge, for example, was central to the shaping of E. H. Carr’s version of realism in his iconic The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Carr 1939; cf. Hall 2006b; Jones 1998; Molloy 2003). Moreover, it is now well-established that Carl Schmitt’s thought played a key role in the development of Morgenthau’s thinking (see, inter alia, Frei 2001; Müller 2003; Pichler 1998; Scheuerman 1999).

To understand the evolution of international thought over the past century, as these examples show, we need to look at these fringe provocations as well as the canonical texts of the mainstream consensus. This book thus moves beyond realists and liberals to radicals and reactionaries and tries to escape the Anglo-centricity of the history of international thought. It also looks beyond the English-speaking world to those thinkers who flourished on the European continent—in French, German, and Italian—as well as thinkers beyond Europe, in India and Japan.

To date, only a handful of non-English language works have been widely cited in the field and the work of only a handful of non-“Anglo-spheric” scholars have been analyzed in any detail (see, e.g., Fawcett 2012). The notorious and, for some, dangerously attractive Carl Schmitt looms large among them (see Hooker 2009; Odysseos and Petito 2007; cf. Hall 2011b; Teschke 2011), but the work of a few others—notably, the Frenchman Raymond Aron (Anderson 1998; Davis 2009; Hoffmann 1985)—has also been explored. When it comes to non-Western thinkers, the literature is even thinner. Some important exploratory works on non-Western IR theory have appeared (see, e.g., Acharya and Buzan 2010), but few in-depth historical studies. Similarly, there is an emerging corpus on Chinese IR theory, but most of it is focused on ancient writers rather than modern ones, let alone twentieth-century and twenty-first century thinkers (Qin 2006, 2006; Yan 2011; Zhang 2012, 2014). But, with the exception of some excellent studies by Ryoko Nakano (2013), Giorgio Shani (2008), and Robbie Shilliam (2006, 2010), few other major works on non-Western thinkers have appeared in English.

This book aims not just to make an important contribution to the history of international thought, but also to encourage other students of past international thought to move beyond realists and liberals and beyond the Anglophone world. It urges them to look at the radicals and reactionaries that flourished during the twentieth century, against whose ideas, after all, the great realists and liberals framed their theories. Furthermore, it urges them to look at thinkers who did not live and work in the English-speaking, Anglo-American world. To those ends, it explores the work of a range of non-mainstream thinkers from across Europe and Asia, from British Labour Party radicals of the interwar period to Indian practitioners, like Krishna Menon, whose thinking was influenced by them, and from the French fascists of Vichy to the Japanese imperialist writers inspired by the work of E. H. Carr.

In this way, this book is intended to complement work ongoing in the history of political thought on what has been called “comparative political philosophy” (Parel and Keith 1992) or “comparative political theory” (Dallmayr 1999, 2004; March 2009; Thomas 2010) as well as work done by postcolonial theorists and others on non-Western political ideas (see, e.g., Chatterjee 2011 [1986] or Parekh 2000). This work aims to extend the study of political theory beyond the Western canon to explore not merely non-Western texts, but also the reception and interpretation of Western texts by non-Western thinkers. For advocates like Fred Dallmayr and Farah Godrej, these kinds of activities entail “fusions of horizons” in Gadamerian style and might underpin a more democratic political theory (Dallmayr 2004: 254; Godrej 2009). More narrowly, the work of comparative political theorists has focused on understanding the work of non-Western thinkers influential on the practice of states, communities, and individuals, especially in the Islamic world (e.g., Euben 1997), but also, increasingly, in Asia (e.g., Gray 2014). This book proceeds in that spirit: exploring the work of non-Anglophone and non-Western thinkers in an attempt to better comprehend their positions and the policies that flow from them.

Approaches

A vigorous argument rumbles on about how best to study the history of international thought. The earliest histories, like F. Melian Stawell’s The Growth of International Thought (1929), tended to take the form of grand narratives or “epic” histories, to use John Gunnell’s term (Gunnell 1978). They tended also to emphasize traditions of thought—principally, “realism” and “idealism” (or utopianism), although some, like Martin Wight, included “rationalism” (Wight 1991; cf. Donelan 1990)—and to interpret the work of canonical thinkers and key texts in terms of how they exemplified, modified, or departed from those traditions (Bull 1969; Carr 1939; Herz 1950, 1951; Thompson 1952; cf. Jeffery 2005). In the 1960s, this approach was supplemented by one that drew especially on the work of Thomas S. Kuhn on the history of science that used the concept of “paradigms” to describe particular sets of beliefs and theories existing at particular times in the past and present (Kuhn 2012 [1962]). This approach shifted the focus of historians of international thought from political positions to the different methodologies employed by scholars at different stages of the discipline’s development, exploring especially how the discipline shifted from “traditionalist,” mainly historical approaches, to “scientific” methods (Banks 1984; Holsti 1985; Smith 1987).

In the 1990s, both of these approaches—the first that relied on using “traditions” and the second that relied on “paradigms”—came under increased scrutiny. A new wave of historians of the field argued that neither were ideal for explaining its evolution and the nature of the thought of particular thinkers. Some of this new group were inspired by the work of Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and the wider “Cambridge School” of the history of political thought (see Pocock 1971; Skinner 2002; Tully 1988). They argued that the use of “traditions” and “paradigms” risked anachronistic readings of past texts and insisted that they be set aside in favor of painstaking reconstructions of the political languages of the periods in which texts were written that then formed the basis for accounts of the intentions of a text and its author (Bell 2001, 2009a; cf. Bevir 2011). Using this approach, David Armitage, Duncan Bell, Tim Dunne, Jonathan Haslam, Casper Sylvest, and a number of others provided a series of reinterpretations of past international thought (see Armitage 2012; Bell 2009b; Dunne 1997, Haslam 2002; Sylvest 2009; cf. Holden 2002).

Alongside the contextualists, two other groups also argued that inherited approaches to the history of international thought were flawed, and offered alternatives. First, drawing on the work of Gunnell in particular, one group advocated the writing of what they called “internal discursive” histories of disciplines, focusing on debate among mostly university-based scholars with regard to key concepts. They argued that the key debate in IR concerned the concept of “anarchy,” and that the best disciplinary history should focus on the discourse about that idea (Schmidt 1994, 1998, 2002). Second, another group advocated a range of approaches drawing upon critical theoretical and postmodern philosophies of history. This group drew mainly on Michel Foucault, but also on a number of other historians and thinkers, and generated a significant body of work on Anglo-American and other theorists and practitioners in IR (see, e.g., Cavallar 2002; Der Derian 1987; Molloy 2006; Odysseos and Petito 2007; Scheuerman 2011, Vigneswaran and Quirk 2010).

These differences over the best approach to the history of international thought remain unresolved—or, to put it more positively, remain in a state of creative flux. The chapters in this volume reflect that situation: all display consciousness of the weaknesses of earlier epic histories and the need to avoid anachronism, in particular, in the interpretation of past texts, but they also push and pull the newer approaches in different directions. Some—including those by Leonie Holthaus and Ian Hall—employ versions of Mark Bevir’s modified contextualism, bringing the concept of “traditions” back into their approaches (see also Bevir 1999; Hall 2012). This work is predicated on the argument that the concept of “tradition” is an essential tool for historians of thought, allowing them to evaluate the intellectual inheritances of thinkers and the evolution of their own thinking as it draws upon, modifies, and rejects elements of those inheritances (see Bevir and Hall 2014). Others take a more orthodox contextualist approach, including the chapter by Or Rosenboim, or utilize elements of the other approaches that have emerged in the last 20 years.

Altogether, they move beyond older, somewhat stale, understandings of “realism” and “idealism” as traditions and devices for explaining the development of international thought. Instead, they explore new traditions—notably, the radical and the reactionary—and intellectual genealogies that connect international thought to areas of political thought, geography, sociology, and philosophy, as well as political practice.

Radicals

Notoriously difficult to define, radicalism has, nonetheless, played a central role in shaping both Anglophone and non-Anglophone thinking about international relations in the past century. For that reason alone, it demands much more attention from historians of international thought than it has hitherto received (but see Sylvest 2014), as well as an attempt at identifying some common features of radical thought.

One helpful starting point in that journey is provided by A. J. P. Taylor, whose book The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (1957) remains one of the few major studies of the English radical tradition and the approaches of its various adherents to international relations. Taylor argued...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Radicals and Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century International Thought
• 2  Geopolitics and Nationalism: Interpreting Friedrich Ratzel in Italian, 1898–1916
• 3  A Forgotten Theorist of International Relations: Kurt Riezler and His Fundamentals of World Politics of 1914
• 4  Democratic Socialism and International Thought in Interwar Britain
• 5  The IR That Dare Not Speak Its Name: The French Extreme (and Not so Extreme) Right in the 1930s and Its Lessons from and to the History of Thought in International Relations
• 6  Prussianism, Hitlerism, Realism: The German Legacy in British International Thought
• 7  Toward Eurafrica! Fascism, Corporativism, and Italy’s Colonial Expansion
• 8  Two Regional Orders in the East and the West: E. H. Carr’s “New Europe” and the Japanese “Greater East Asian Community”
• 9  “Mephistopheles in a Saville Row Suit”: V. K. Krishna Menon and the West
• Notes on Contributors
• Index