The English school and the classical approach: Between modernism and interpretivism

Abstract

This article analyses the evolution of the English school’s approach to international relations from the work of the early British Committee in the late 1950s and early 1960s to its revival in the 1990s and afterwards. It argues that the school’s so-called ‘classical approach’ was shaped by the crisis of developmental historicism brought on by the First World War and by the reactions of historians like Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight to the rise of modernist social science in the twentieth century. It characterises the classical approach, as advanced by Hedley Bull, as a form of ‘reluctant modernism’ with underlying interpretivist commitments and unresolved tensions with modernist approaches. It argues that to resolve some of the confusion concerning its preferred approach to the study of international relations, the English school should return to the interpretivist commitments of its early thinkers.