Abstract
AbstractWhile the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.
Highlights
International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of analyzing, celebrating, and appropriating the thoughts of those it considers great thinkers
After a so-called ‘fifty years rift’,3 the past two decades have witnessed a rapprochement of the two fields, which share a particular interest in the history of international political thought, that is, political thought on the relations between states, empires, and other political entities,4 an area that long remained a blind spot of the history of political thought (HPT), which has generally focused on the state and its internal politics
Though some scholars have sought to account for the reception of certain authors in IR, there has been a little explicit methodological reflection on what these types of studies entail
Summary
International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of analyzing, celebrating, and appropriating the thoughts of those it considers great thinkers.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.