There now exists a substantial body of publications on international relations which may be fairly described as the output of a distinct school. Though its seminal thinkers, Charles Manning and Martin Wight, are no longer with us, the core of its extant membership (Hedley Bull, Michael Donelan, F. S. Northedge, Robert Purnell and others) is still in its prime and young recruits are constantly coming forward. Though delighted by this human prospect, its literary possibilities find me something less than enthusiastic. For it seems to me that repetition has set in and is likely to get worse as the years pass.

Among the school of scholars of international relations, neatly called by Roy Jones the ‘English School’, the work of Martin Wight is placed in particularly high esteem. More perhaps than anyone else, he is regarded as the scholar who did international relations as it ought to be done. I suppose no one would assert that this form is exclusive and needed no complement. The need for the discussion of economic factors in international relations for example would presumably not be denied, nor that such a discussion might not need other methods. What I take to be asserted, however, is that the sort of problem which Wight faced is central to international relations (and given the generality of some of these problems, for some issues, at least, this would not be widely denied) but more importantly that the way he tackled them is the right way.

Since Rousseau political theorists have had frequent recourse to a contrast between the fragmented nature of modern social and political life and the allegedly communitarian character of the Greek polis. At the heart of this opposition was the belief that the polis represented a condition of unsurpassable harmony in which citizens identified freely and spontaneously with their public institutions. Unlike their ancient counterparts, modern citizens exhibited less identification with their public world than resolution to advance their separate individual interests and pursue their private conceptions of the good. Nevertheless, the disintegration of the polis was not depicted in the language of unqualified loss. History had not been simply an unmitigated fall, because the individual's claim to scrutinize the law of the polis on rational grounds involved a significant advance in man's self-consciousness. The positive aspect of its decline was man's transcendence of a parochial culture in which neither the right of individual freedom nor the principle of human equality had been recognized. If the modern world had lost the spontaneous form of community enjoyed by the ancients, it surpassed that world in its understanding and expression of freedom.

It is my contention that theories of international relations derive from or can be reduced to two basic arenas of discourse, which I term pluralist and structuralist in their central preoccupations.

Professor Frankel in his reply to our article ‘A Double Omission’, not only denies the existence of any such omission (let alone double) as we there described, but argues that the perception of such a (non-existent) omission lays the authors open to the charge of being guilty of an omission more glaring than that which we attributed to the more myopic side of Western international theory. Professor Frankel in his rebuttal considers that neither Marx nor the Soviet Marxist-Leninists have anything of import to contribute to Western thinking on international relations and that our article, in other words, had no substance whatsoever. He makes the claim that Marx's writings not only ‘require specialized skills’ in order to be studied but that even when these are brought to bear the intellectual profits are ‘likely to be scanty’. But, in any case, argues Frankel, these (writings) were ‘given full due … in writings on such special areas of international relations as revolution, conflict or imperialism’, — not, that is to say, on international relations in the more general sense.

‘The constant intrusion, or potential intrusion, of power renders meaningless any conception of equality between members of the international community.’