The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics and Its Central Figures

Abstract

The British Committee stands out as a remarkable and unusual intellectual project. A product of its place and time and of a particular academic culture, it did not pretend to represent the full range of British thinking. Its membership intentionally omitted such major figures as E.H. Carr and C.A.W. Manning. Whatever direct influence it had on contemporary British scholarship in international relations can be attributed partly to bonds of friendship, across generations, and to the performances of individual members in the lecture hall. Though the Committee incubated a good deal of its members' work, sometimes published posthumously, its collaborative output was never prolific. Only two collective works can be attributed to it: Diplomatic Investigations (1966) and The Expansion of International Society (1984). As such, the Committee's enduring impact might be regarded with surprise, for that impact was never a sure thing, and any satisfactory account of it cannot rest on a home-side advantage of having stood for Britain in some epic, transatlantic epistemological match.