Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945-1975. By Ian Hall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 254 pp., $31.46 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-984-59099-5). This book offers an intellectual history of the development of International Relations (IR) as a discipline in the United Kingdom. The context is the sharp decline in the postwar power and standing of the United Kingdom. Hall is not primarily concerned with whether decline occurred, but whether the scholars of IR he is concerned with perceived it to be occurring, how they addressed it or, in many cases, failed to address it. He rejects the strong hypothesis that British decline brought about a decline in British thinking about world politics after 1945, believing it to be too deterministic. He prefers instead to focus on the traditions of thought that dominated British thinking about IR in the postwar period and to trace how these evolved. To accomplish this, he draws on the framework established by Mark Bevir for understanding traditions as webs of belief, which are composed of many inherited ideas and assumptions. Such traditions have a momentum and internal life of their own, which may or may not have much contact with international politics. The book uses British decline as a context, but much of its content is about the internal development of particular traditions of thought in British international relations. The principal focus of the book is on the liberal internationalist tradition and the Whig diplomatic tradition. The radical dissenting tradition and the strategic studies tradition are also considered, …