The political discourse of anarchy: A disciplinary history of international relations

This study is a disciplinary history of academic international relations as a subfield of American political science from the mid-1800s to the period beginning with the outbreak of World War Two. The basic intention is to provide a detailed account of the academic history of international relations by reconstructing and following its internal discursive development. One of the critical purposes of this project is to recover and differentiate the actual history of international relations from the variety of rhetorical and legitimating histories that inform the field. A core argument upon which this study has been premised is that the actual history of the field is different from the dominant image portrayed by academic practitioners.; I argue that besides being marked by paucity, conventional accounts of the history of the discipline are plagued by two pervasive historiographical assumptions that distort the way the development of international relations has been told. These assumptions include the idea that the development of the discipline can be explained by a continuous tradition that reaches back to classical Athens and extends forward to the present, and the contextual premise that events within world politics have had a causal effect upon the development of the discipline. To overcome these problems, I advocate an approach described as a critical internal discursive history. The aim is to reconstruct the internal academic conversation of the field.; One of the important themes that has served as a connecting thread throughout the history of international relations is what I describe as the political discourse of anarchy. In reconstructing the history of the field, I illustrate the manner in which the concept of anarchy, and the closely related principle of sovereignty, has served as the framework within which the discourse of international relations took place. Each of the historical chapters reveal the manner in which the topics that were of concern to the discipline such as the study of the factors leading to war and peace, the study of international law, the administration of colonial possessions, and the means of achieving international cooperation were grounded in an ontology of anarchy.