The English school on the frontiers of international society: a hermeneutic recollection

Abstract

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah Arendt

It is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.