Theory and International Relations I: Past Debates

Wherever different territorially-based political orders coexist in the same social world some form of international relations is to be found — even though the term itself was not coined until the end of the eighteenth century (Bentham 1789/1960: 426). The academic study of International Relations, on the other hand, hardly existed before the First World War. In the second half of the nineteenth century when the social sciences as we know them today began to be differentiated, when ‘Economics’ emerged out of Political Economy as an allegedly scientific field of study, and when ‘Sociology’ and ‘Politics’ and ‘Social Theory’ came to be seen as addressing different agendas — a position that would have surprised Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith or Immanuel Kant — ‘International Relations’ remained unidentified as a discrete focus for study. Instead, what we nowadays think of as International Relations was seen as simply one facet of a number of other disciplines — History, International Law, Economics, Political Theory. It was not until the slaughter of 1914–1918 persuaded a number of influential thinkers and philanthropists that new ways of thinking about these problems were required that the discipline emerged.