Chronicle of a Death Foretold? The 1953–4 CFR Study Group Meeting and the Decline of International Thought

Abstract

The CFR Study Group on International Theory of 1953–4 falls in the middle of an unusual period in IR history, and it thus serves as an interesting mid-term vignette for understanding many of the wider processes going on in American IR. The standard reading of this period of the high Cold War sees it as the triumph of a classical realism and even the birth of the field of IR itself. Here, I suggest another way to read it. By looking at the group not from the immediate concerns of the mid-1950s, but rather as part of a longer history from the 1920s to the 1970s, a different story emerges. Missing or mangled approaches from the past are seen as slipping away into obscurity, an unsure group meets in the shadow of the Bomb and communism, and underlying it all are the first signs of weakness that would lead to the behavioural and post-behavioural revolutions in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than the triumph of classical realism, the study reveals what might be called a pivot period: where ideas on how the world is to be understood have gone out of fashion, but nothing has yet emerged to replace it.