Writing The World

Writing the world:
disciplinary history and beyond
DUNCAN BELL *
Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one
must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet
necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi, the glass bead game (New York, 1979 [1943])
The publication of an anniversary edition of International Affairs offers an opportunity to reflect on the history of the field with which the journal is so closely
associated. Recent years have seen a burst of interest in the disciplinary history of
International Relations (IR), as scholars have probed its origins and development,
piecing together long-forgotten debates, dusting off long-unread volumes, and
tendering new perspectives on old questions. In this article I explore some of the
benefits and pitfalls of analysing the modern social sciences.1
The historical study of the social sciences sometimes invites the charge of
narcissism. What is the point of academics scrutinizing the past offerings of other
academics? Reflecting this concern, one senior British IR scholar writes that he
shudders at the thought that the history of the discipline of political science might
itself become a recognised research field.2 Such anxieties are misplaced. The social
sciences stand at the nexus of power and knowledge in the modern world. Universities and other research institutions have generated, incubated and helped to
disseminate forms of knowledge, and programmes for social and political action,
that have played a fundamental role in shaping the world in which we live. Global
politics during the twentieth century and into our own times cannot be understood adequately without taking into account this dimension of human activity.
In the next section I survey some recent work on the intellectual history of
international relations, focusing in particular on the academic discipline of IR.
*
I thank the following for discussions on relevant points, and/or their comments on earlier drafts: Ben Jackson,
Sarah Fine, Nicolas Guilhot, Ian Hall, Joey Ansorge, Srdjan Vucetic, Charles Jones, Tarak Barkawi and Jim
Kloppenberg. In particular, Joel Isaac and Casper Sylvest have provided inspiration and excellent advice.
1
There are different accounts of what is encompassed by the social sciences. I would include, minimally, sociology, economics, history, geography, psychology, anthropology and political science. See Theodore Porter
and Dorothy Ross, Writing the history of social science, in Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds, The
Cambridge history of science, vol. 7: The modern social sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.
110.
2
Chris Brown, International political theorya British social science? British Journal of Politics and International
Relations 2: 1 , 2000, p. 118.
International Affairs 85: 1 (2009) 322
2009 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Duncan Bell
Following that, I argue that disciplinary history writing should be complemented,
and possibly complicated, by the study of histories of the globalhistories, that
is, of the multiple ways in which global politics (or aspects of it) has been conceptualized across a variety of institutional sites, including universities, research
laboratories, think-tanks, philanthropic foundations and government agencies. In
the final two sections I point to some of the ways in which this agenda might be
pursued, concentrating on the analysis of how certain institutional formations and
modes of knowledge come into being (historical ontology) and how scholarly
identities are created and reproduced. Throughout the article I draw chiefly on
developments in the United States, which since the Second World War has acted
as the centre of gravity for the social sciences. However, the methods I discuss can
be utilized to analyse a wide variety of phenomena across diverse national and
transnational contexts.3
Disciplining international relations
The intellectual history of international relations has assumed various forms since
the late 1980s.4 Perhaps the most prominent has been a blossoming of interest in
how major figures in the history of political thought, including Hobbes, Rousseau,
Kant and Mill, conceived of war, imperial domination and global capitalism.5 While
this scholarship is often very impressive, it tends to concentrate most heavily on
the early modern period, usually running out of steam by the twentieth century,
and it says little about what difference, if any, was made to the creation and dissemination of visions of global order by the institutional development of the modern
research university.
The social sciences originated in the second half of the eighteenth century,
developing rapidly over the following decades. Driven by diverse impulses,
including the desire for social amelioration, the ambition to rationalize government activity, and sheer curiosity about the world, they came to play an everincreasing role in political life, emerging as a form of knowledge appropriate for
the highest echelons of state power and providing a strategy for knowing and
administering territories and populations.6 During the late nineteenth century,
3
The study of national and/or transnational approaches to IR is now blossoming. See esp. Arlene Tickner and
Ole Waever, International Relations scholarship around the world (London: Routledge, 2008); Knud Erik Jrgensen
and Tonny Brems Knudsen, eds, International Relations in Europe: traditions, perspectives and destinations (London:
Routledge, 2006); Ole Waever, The sociology of a not so international discipline: American and European
developments in International Relations, International Organization 52: 4, 1998, pp. 687727. Cf. Raewyn
Connell, Southern theory: social science and the global dynamics of knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
4
On the fortunes of intellectual history in general, see Anthony Grafton, The history of ideas: precept and
practice, 19502000 and beyond, Journal of the History of Ideas 67: 1, 2006, pp. 132; Annabel Brett, What is
intellectual history now?, in David Cannadine, ed., What is history now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp.
11332.
5
David Armitage, The fifty years rift: intellectual history and International Relations, Modern Intellectual
History 1: 1, 2004, pp. 97109.
6
Theodore Porter, Speaking precision to power: the modern political role of social science, Social Research
73: 4, 2006, pp. 1275, 1281. See also Lawrence Goldman, Science, reform and politics in Victorian Britain: the Social
Science Association, 18571886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Thomas Haskell, The emergence
of professional social science: the American Social Science Association and the nineteenth-century crisis of authority (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977); Dorothy Ross, The origins of American social science (Cambridge: Cambridge
4
International Affairs 85: 1, 2009
Writing the world

and largely following the German model, British and American universities
(among others) began to develop the institutions and scholarly practices that structure most universities today. Social science was transformed from a largely amateur
pursuita genre of public and administrative deliberation rather than a specialised academic discourse7into a well-funded professional activity. Analyses of
the social sciences, then, need to employ interpretive protocols and techniques
that map the complex institutional terrain of the modern university, including the
varied and dense array of linkages to government and corporate actors, as well as
cognate sites of intellectual production.
Scholars routinely tell stories to each other and to themselves about how their
discipline or specialism emerged, how it evolved over time and how they fit into
this account. These are discipline-defining mythologies.8 Myths, on this anthropological reading, are highly simplified narratives ascribing fixed and coherent
meanings to selected events, people and places. They are easily intelligible and
transmissible, and help to constitute or bolster particular visions of self, society
and world. Like many political mythsincluding myths of the nationthey often
assume common forms, despite the widely divergent plots they narrate: stories of
origins and foundings, stories of the exploits of culture heroes, stories of rebirth
or renewal, and eschatological stories.9 Disciplinary mythologies perform various
legitimating functions, classifying some positions as the product of intellectual
progress, others as consigned for ever to the proverbial dustbin of history. Engines
of identity construction, they help to mark and police the boundaries of disciplines, as well as shaping the self-understandings of scholars.
During the 1980s a group of scholars, including John Gunnell and James Farr,
challenged the predominance of mythological renderings of the history of political science. Much of this work focused on the United States, anatomizing various
subfields, disciplinary identities and conceptions of social science.10 A much
smaller literature interrogated aspects of the British experience.11 Following in
the wake of this pioneering research, the history of IR has been booming since the
University Press, 1991); James Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed
(London: Yale University Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collge de
France, 19771978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
7
Porter, Speaking precision to power, p. 1278.
8
See e.g. Gabriel Almond, Political science: the history of the discipline, in Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter
Klingemann, eds, A new handbook of political science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 5096.
9
Christopher Flood, Political myths (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 41. Cf. Duncan Bell, Agonistic democracy
and the politics of memory, Constellations 15: 1, 2008, pp. 14866.
10
For examples, old and new, see John Gunnell, The descent of political theory: the genealogy of an American vocation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John Gunnell, Imagining the American polity: political science and
the discourse of democracy (Philadelphia: Philadelphia State University Press, 2004); David Easton, John Gunnell
and Luigi Graziano, eds, The development of political science: a comparative survey (London: Routledge, 1991); James
Farr, John Dryzek and Stephen Leonard, eds, Political science in history: research programs and political traditions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, eds, Discipline and
history: political science in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Ido Oren, Our
enemies and US: Americas rivalries and the making of political science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
11
For example, John Burrow, Stefan Collini and Donald Winch, That noble science of politics: a study in nineteenthcentury intellectual history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir and
Shannon Stimson, eds, Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007). The paucity of work on Britain is discussed in Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, The
history of political science, Political Studies Review 3: 1, 2005, pp. 116. IR is now a partial exception to this.
5
Duncan Bell
late 1990s. Its practitioners have sought to dissolve the myths that have pervaded
(and helped to produce) the discipline.12 Historians of various stripes have taken
aim at what we might call the progressivist narrative of IR, the story most
commonly recounted, to themselves and to their students, by working scholars.
This narrative characterizes the discipline as a direct reaction to the horrors of the
First World War, locating its institutional origins in 1919, with the creation of the
worlds first chair in international relations at the University College of Wales,
Aberystwyth. The act of creation was followed, the story continues, by a period
in which idealist scholars dominated debate, arguing passionately that international institutions (and above all the League of Nations) could help to end war.
This chapter usually culminates with the First Great Debate in which the archetypal realist E. H. Carr skewered the nave pretensions of the idealists, with the
Second World War serving as empirical proof of realist sagacity. The remaining
chapters plot the postwar dominance of realism, and the victory, in the so-called
Second Great Debate of the 1960s, of scientific approaches to the study of international politics over more traditional modes of inquiry, including history, law
and philosophy. The current discipline is seen as the product of this trajectory.
The narrative can be told in the register of decline, as signalling the rejection of
a rich and multifaceted understanding of political life in favour of a misplaced
(even dangerous) obsession with science, or as a tale of victory, of the welcome
transition from maddeningly vague and unsystematic attempts to comprehend the
world to a proper social-scientific enterprise.13 Aside from its caricatured view of
the past, the progressivist narrative has served as a powerful legitimating device for
certain substantive positions in postwar IR (notably political realism) and certain
methodological orientations (notably neo-positivism).
Revisionist historical scholarship has demonstrated the inadequacy of the
progressivist narrative. In particular it has redrawn the intellectual map of the
interwar years, demonstrating that debates about international politics, both
within the academy and in the wider public sphere, were considerably more
sophisticated and diverse than the idealist label implies.14 The claim that there
was a great debate, a sparring match between univocal realist and idealist camps,
has proven deeply misleading.15 Another achievement of the revisionist scholar12
For a useful survey of the literature, see Brian Schmidt, On the history and historiography of International
Relations, in Walter Carlsnaes, Beth Simmons and Thomas Risse, eds, Handbook of international relations
(London: Sage, 2002), pp. 323.
13
For one version of a triumphal narrative emplotment, see Kenneth Waltz, Realist thought and neorealist
theory, Journal of International Affairs 44: 1, 1990, pp. 2137.
14
David Long and Peter Wilson, eds, Thinkers of the twenty years crisis: interwar idealism reassessed (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1995); Peter Wilson, The international theory of Leonard Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Lucian
Ashworth, Creating international studies: Angell, Mitrany and the liberal tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Rene
Jeffrey, Hugo Grotius in international thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), chs 45; Brian Schmidt, Lessons
from the past: reassessing the interwar disciplinary history of IR, International Studies Quarterly 42: 3, 1998,
pp. 43359; Casper Sylvest, Interwar internationalism, the British Labour Party and the historiography of
International Relations, International Studies Quarterly 48: 2, 2004, pp. 40932.
15
Lucian Ashworth, Where are the idealists in interwar International Relations?, Review of International Studies
32: 2, 2006, pp. 291308; Miles Kahler, Inventing International Relations: International Relations theory
after 1945, in Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry, eds, New thinking in International Relations theory (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1997), pp. 2053; Andreas Osiander, Re-reading early twentieth century IR theory: idealism
revisited, International Studies Quarterly 42: 3, 1998, pp. 40932; Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, The
6
Writing the world

ship has been to wrest some key thinkersand bodies of workfrom the grip of
deadening stereotypes. This has meant reading them in discursive context rather
than assigning them slots in a simplistic disciplinary plot-line. The main beneficiary of this historical sensitivity has been realism, which has been reinterpreted as
a sophisticated, albeit amorphous, body of political theory that draws deep from
the well of western (above all German) social and political thought. Attention has
been lavished on Hans Morgenthau, the migr scholar who did so much to define
postwar realism, and a variety of other figures have also been rescued from the
enormous condescension of posterity, including Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin
Wight, Raymond Aron, Alfred Zimmern and John Herz.16 Finally, liberal internationalismoften (mis)conceived as the nave other of realismis now being
subjected to serious historical analysis, which has revealed its internal diversity and
complex developmental patterns.17
A related stream of scholarship, of which the most prominent example is Brian
Schmidts The political discourse of anarchy (1998), has sought to trace the development
of a self-conscious academic discipline of IR, a field defined by its own institutional
structures, discourses and scholarly identities. A recurrent topic running through
the history of IR concerns its intellectual character and institutional location: the
question of whether it should be seen as a discrete subfield of political science (as
it is in the United States), or rather as an interdisciplinary venture, drawing on
but moving beyond political science (as it is often portrayed in the UK). Each of
these distinct configurations evolved out of a variety of different scholarly fields,
including diplomatic history, politics, and international law, during the first half
of the twentieth century, metamorphosing into their current forms largely since
1945.18 (It is arguable that full institutionalization did not take place in Britain until
construction of an edifice: the story of a first great debate, Review of International Studies 31: 1, 2005, pp. 89107;
Cameron Thies, Progress, history, and identity in International Relations theory: the case of the idealist
realist debate, European Journal of International Relations 8: 2, 2002, pp. 14785; Peter Wilson, The myth of the
first great debate, Review of International Studies 24: 5, 1998, pp. 115.
16
On realism, see the references in Duncan Bell, Under an empty sky: realism and political theory, in Bell, ed.,
Political thought and International Relations: variations on a realist theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
pp. 126. On the British fortunes of realism, see Ian Hall, Power politics and appeasement: political realism
in British international thought, c.19351955, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8: 2, 2006, pp.
17492. See also Michael Cox, ed., E. H. Carr: a critical appraisal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Charles Jones,
E. H. Carr and International Relations: a duty to lie? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jonathan
Haslam, The vices of integrity: E. H. Carr, 18921982 (London: Verso, 1999); the special edition of International
Relations dedicated to Herz (22: 4, 2008); Reed Davis, An uncertain trumpet: reason, anarchy and Cold War
diplomacy in the thought of Raymond Aron, Review of International Studies 34: 4, 2008, pp. 64568; Ian Hall,
The international thought of Martin Wight (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Ian Hall and Lisa Hill, eds, British international thought from Hobbes to Namier (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2009).
17
Casper Sylvest, British liberal internationalism, 18801930: making progress? (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009); Jeannie Morefield, Covenants without swords: idealist liberalism and the spirit of empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005); and, on liberal militarism, David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 192070
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Also relevant here is the literature on liberalism and empire
produced by scholars such as Jennifer Pitts, Karuna Mantena, Georgios Varouaxakis, Uday Singh Mehta and
Martti Koskenniemi. Cf. Duncan Bell, Empire and international relations in Victorian political thought,
Historical Journal 49: 1, 2006, pp. 28198; Duncan Bell, ed., Victorian visions of global order (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
18
Brian Schmidt, The political discourse of anarchy: a disciplinary history of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). On the postwar dynamics of discipline-formation, see David Long, Who killed
the International Studies Conference? Review of International Studies 32: 4, 2006, pp. 60322. See also Tim
Dunne, Inventing international society: a history of the English School (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
7
Duncan Bell
the 1970s.) This historical scholarship has also begun to investigate the imperial
origins of IR, identifying the tendency of early scholarly debates to revolve
around questions of race and colonial administration.19 It challenges the wilful
forgetting about imperialism prevalent among later generations of IR scholars.20
There is much work to be done here, and not only in the US context.
The mutually supporting conceptual (and disciplinary) architecture of the
modernist social sciences is dependent on a series of abstractive moves, each
producing a reified object of analysis, each with its own history. The establishment and stabilization of a discipline requires the delineation of a specific domain
which its members can claim as their own, demarcating it from other disciplines
and providing a focal point for research and debate. Sociologists grappled with
society, anthropologists with culture. According to Timothy Mitchell, our
current understanding of the economy, as a discrete object that can be measured,
calculated and acted upon, emerged only in the 1930s.21 Hans Morgenthau illustrated the ambition for autonomy when he lamented, during the early 1950s, that
IR lacked a principle or order or focus for intellectual curiosity without which
no academic discipline can exist.22 An important moment in this story, only now
coming to light, occurred in May 1954, when the Social Science Division of the
Rockefeller Foundation convened a meeting to discuss the possibility, nature, and
limits of theory in international relations and to encourage a more theoretical
stance in the field.23 Under the guidance of Kenneth Thompson, a distinguished
group of scholars was assembled, including Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Dean Rusk,
Paul Nitze, William Fox, Walter Lippmann and Arnold Wolfers. Raymond Aron
and Herbert Butterfield sent their apologies; George Kennan submitted a paper
for discussion. As Nicolas Guilhot notes in his commentary on the exercise, the
aim was simultaneously to help constitute IR as a self-standing discipline, focusing
on a set of basic questions and deploying specific theoretical techniques, and to
train the policy personnel for the State Department and other policy institutions. He also argues that we can see this as an attempt by self-declared realists
to create a scholarly field insulated from the behavioural revolution sweeping
the social sciences. It was a call for intellectual secession. The theorization of IR
19
Schmidt, The political discourse of anarchy, ch. 4; David Long and Brian Schmidt, eds, Imperialism and internationalism in the discipline of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Robert Vitalis,
The graceful and generous liberal gesture: making racism invisible in American International Relations,
Millennium 29: 2, 2000, pp. 33156; Brian Schmidt, Political science and the American empire: a disciplinary
history of the politics section and the discourse of imperialism and colonialism, International Politics 45: 6,
2008, pp. 67587.
20
Robert Vitalis, Birth of a discipline, in Long and Schmidt, eds, Imperialism and internationalism, pp. 160, 161.
21
Timothy Mitchell, Economists and economy in the twentieth century, in George Steinmetz, ed., The politics
of method in the human sciences: positivism and its epistemological others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005),
pp. 12641.
22
Hans Morgenthau, Area studies and the study of international relations, International Social Science Bulletin 4:4,
1952, p. 647.
23
Cited in Nicolas Guilhot, One discipline, many histories, unpublished manuscript, Social Science Research
Council, Nov. 2008. The Rockefeller Foundation also provided key funding for political theorists: Emily
Hauptman, From accommodation to opposition: how Rockefeller Foundation grants redefined relations
between political theory and social science in the 1950s, American Political Science Review 100: 4, 2006, pp.
6439. See also Inderjeet Parmar, To relate knowledge and action : the Rockefeller Foundations impact
on foreign policy thinking during Americas rise to globalism, 19391945, Minerva 40: 3, 2002, pp. 23563.
8
Writing the world

was essentially meant to delineate this territory and make it immune to the cues
of behaviouralism.24 As well as rejecting a particular approach to the philosophy
of social science, Guilhot contends that this was also a political project, an intellectual counterforce to the complacency of American liberalism and its legalistic
conceptions of international order. Yet the event failed to meet expectations,
resulting in an unfocused discussion, misunderstandings, equivocal notions,
disagreements about fundamental concepts, and much soul-searching that remains
inconclusive.25 By the end of the decade, American IR was well on its way to
integration with the other social sciences, a position which remains the case to
this day. Following the lead of Kenneth Waltz and others, classical realism was
eventually displaced by a neo-positivist variant taking its inspiration mainly from
economics.26 The Rockefeller meeting highlights the mechanismsas well as the
difficultiesof discipline formation, demonstrating the multifarious interactions
between government imperatives, philanthropic agencies and diffuse scholarly
agendas.
Beyond disciplinary history
There are two main types of argument justifying the writing of disciplinary
histories. Endogenous arguments identify the intellectual benefits for the discipline under discussion. On this view, the best reason to study the history of (say)
political science is that it will help to improve the quality of contemporary scholarship on politics. This position is usually adopted by those working in the discipline
they study. Exogenous arguments, on the other hand, are not constrained by disciplinary imperatives; they emphasize a variety of other political and intellectual
purposes. As Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross note, for example, the social
sciences attract the attention of historians largely because of their influence on
postwar society, governance, and culture, particularly in the United States.27 In
this section I outline an exogenous case, arguing that the most compelling reason
for studying the history of the social sciencesincluding but not limited to their
constituent disciplinesis that it presents a fascinating site for analysing the interweaving of knowledge, power and institutions.
Most disciplinary historians are keen to stress the relevance of their work for
contemporary debates.28 Brian Schmidt, for example, outlines four reasons why it
is crucially important for contemporary practitioners and students of IR to posses
an adequate familiarity with this history: (1) there are important theoretical insights
24
Nicolas Guilhot, The realist gambit: postwar American political science and the birth of IR theory,
International Political Sociology 2: 4, 2008, pp. 282, 289. On behaviouralism, see Robert Adcock, Interpreting
behavioralism, in Adcock et al, eds, Modern political science, pp. 180209.
25
Guilhot, One discipline, many histories.
26
See esp. Waltz, Theory of international politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979). On Waltzs residual structuralfunctionalism, see Stacie Goddard and Daniel Nexon, Paradigm lost? Reassessing Theory of international politics, European Journal of International Relations 11: 1, 2005, pp. 961.
27
Porter and Ross, Writing the history of social science, p. 8.
28
Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir and Shannon Stimson, A history of political science, in Adcock, Bevir and
Stimson, eds, Modern political science, pp. 1217.
9
Duncan Bell
to be gained from studying past thinkers whose ideas have often been forgotten; (2)
the field is shrouded in a mythology about its origins and development that distorts
debate; (3) historical knowledge is important for understanding the character of
many of our present assumptions and ideas about international politics; and (4) it
allows for critical reflection on the present. Historical knowledge, he concludes,
may force us to reassess some of our dominant images of the field and result in
opening up some much needed space in which to think about international politics
in the new millennium.29 These are the ethico-political functions of disciplinary
history writing. While they are all compelling arguments, disciplinary historians
should be sceptical about their likely impact. Legitimating narratives play important roles in establishing and reproducing scholarly identities, and correctives or
challenges to them, especially when they are clearly tied to alternative contemporary agendas, are easily ignored or downplayed.30 In such circumstances, the force
of the better argument rarely wins out.
Some scholars employ a distinction between internal and external accounts
of disciplinary history.31 Externalist accounts explain scholarly developments by
positing a primary causal role to events or processes in the wider world. They
might identify IR as an institutional reaction to the First World War, or argue
that the character of the postwar field is a reflection of the global balance of
power.32 While not denying the significance of external events, internalists
maintain that they do not determine the specific shape or content of a discipline,
which is chiefly the product of more local scholarly concerns. Internal histories therefore focus on the the history of the conversation that constitutes IR,
arguing that theoretical shifts and scholarly reorientations are largely matters of
internal academic debate.33 Yet the internal/external distinction occludes as much
as it illuminates. While the content of disciplinary history cannot be explained
adequately through reference to external socio-political contexts, important as
these undoubtedly are, the internalist view is unnecessarily restrictive. It turns a
useful corrective heuristic into a problematic methodological precept. Part of the
problem is that the internal/external binary presents a false choice. These are not
29
Schmidt, On the history and historiography of International Relations, p. 4. A similar argumentone that
has had a greater impact on the fieldis often made for studying the history of political thought.
30
A prominent example is John Mearsheimer, E .H. Carr vs. idealism: the battle rages on, International Relations
19: 2, 2005, pp. 13952. Mearsheimer simply repeats the caricatured vision of Carr and the interwar period
against which the disciplinary historians have inveighed repeatedly.
31
e.g. Brian Schmidt, The historiography of academic International Relations, Review of International Studies 20:
2, 1994, pp. 34967. On conventional understandings of internal versus external explanatory schema, which
figured heavily in debates over the history of science, see Donald Kelley, Intellectual history and cultural
history: the inside and the outside, History of the Human Sciences 15: 2, 2002, pp. 119; Grafton, The history of
ideas, pp. 58.
32
A commonly cited example of the latter is Stanley Hoffmann, An American social science: International
Relations, Daedalus 106: 3 (1977), pp. 4160. Schmidt also identifies contextualism with externalist approaches.
Yet there are many different types of contextualism. For a prominent linguistic variant, which does not fall
prey to Schmidts criticisms, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of politics, vol. 1: Regarding method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002). I have argued for the adoption of this perspective in IR in various places,
including Language, legitimacy, and the project of critique, Alternatives 27: 3, 2002, pp. 32750. See also
Gerard Holden, Who contextualises the contextualisers? Disciplinary history and the discourse about IR
discourse, Review of International Studies 28: 2, 2002, pp. 25370.
33
Schmidt, The political discourse of anarchy, pp. 37, 38.
10
Writing the world

the only options available. Rejecting internalism does not entail a commitment
to an extra-academic externalism. Historians and disciplinary sociologists are best
advised to remain agnostic about what general forces shape academic institutions
and discourses, for these forces differ across time and space. Moreover, the various
contexts or factors that it is necessary to invoke in order to address particular
historical questions will, to a large extent, be determined by the types of question
being asked. Some would benefit from an analysis of internal debates: Who were
the main figures responsible for the emergence of the (sub)discipline? Was realism
ever hegemonic in IR? What role has the International Studies Association (ISA)
played in setting the agenda of the discipline? But others cannot be adequately
answered in this way: What impact have IR debates had on American foreign
policy?34 Why did the International Studies Conference disappear in 1954?35
Why did IR scholars adopt a specific understanding of science in the postwar
years? And how did national security imperatives influence the field? After all,
as David Engerman notes, during the Cold War there was a very close confidential [relationship] between academic disciplines and national security organs.36
Such questions can only be answered by looking beyond the internal conversations of the disciplines. The limits of disciplinary history writing are especially
apparent in the case of IR which, throughout its relatively brief history, has been
an institutionally heterodox and intellectually carnivorous enterprise, drawing its
scholarly lifebloodits methods, its central concepts, its theoretical machinery
largely from cognate disciplines, notably economics, psychology and sociology.
Work on the history of IR could be enriched by placing it in a comparative
perspective, locating it in the constellation of the social sciences; and the history
of the postwar social sciences, as it is usually practised by historians, could benefit
from paying more attention to IR, which they often ignore.37 Such a dialogue
would be mutually beneficial. There is also a good case for opening the interpretive aperture even further. However sophisticated in execution, disciplinary
history writing remains intimately tied to the agendas and institutional forms
of the discipline it places under investigation. Its aims are revisionist, but selflimiting. In order to trace how ideas about global politics have been produced and
disseminated, we should analyse histories of the globalhistories of the multiple
and conflicting ways in which global politics (or dimensions of it) have been and
are envisioned across a plethora of institutional spaces. Disciplines are but one
element of the fluid institutionalintellectual matrix of the modern university,
the collection of schools, faculties, departments, research institutes, administrative organs and what Joel Isaac terms the interstitial academy of committees and
34
For a recent discussion, see Bruce Kuklick, Blind oracles: intellectuals and war from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
35
Long, Who killed the International Studies Conference? p. 621, suggests that internalism cannot account
for this development.
36
David Engerman, American knowledge and global power, Diplomatic History 31: 4, 2007, p. 603. On the
dangers of over-emphasizing the Cold War frame, however, see Joel Isaac, The human sciences in Cold War
America, Historical Journal 50: 3, 2007, pp. 72546.
37
e.g. Ira Katznelson, Desolation and enlightenment: political knowledge after total war, totalitarianism and the Holocaust
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
11
Duncan Bell
informal networks.38 Universities in turn form only one element in an array of
institutions and networks in which knowledge is generated, alongside think-tanks,
foundations, private laboratories and government agencies. As well as generating
knowledge, these institutions usually constitute the prime vectors for the trans
lation of ideasoften in abbreviated and distorted formsinto public policy.39
In order to grasp the historical development of the modern social sciences, it is
insufficient to concentrate either on mapping the history of concepts and argumentation or on institutional sociology. Instead, scholars should address the complex
intercalating of institutions, agents and knowledge production. Here we could
draw a heuristic (as opposed to ontological) distinction between knowledge-practices
and knowledge-complexes.40 Knowledge-practices are articulations of thinking, and
of claims to valid knowledge, encompassing (indeed demarcating) both empirical
and theoretical domains.41 This includes theories, arguments, conceptual
schemes, specialized vocabularies, political ideologies and policy prescriptions,
as well as the numerous ways in which knowledge is constructed and validated,
expertise assigned and intellectual legitimacy distributed. Knowledge-complexes
are the ecologiesinstitutions, networks, organizational structures, or assemblages of all of thesein which knowledge is fertilized, rendered intelligible and
disseminated. In order to analyse the modern social sciences it is essential to pay
attention to both dimensions.
Many of the most important developments in the postwar social sciences are transversal phenomena, criss-crossing and helping to (re)constitute various disciplines
and fields. Four brief examples will suffice to illustrate the point: modernization
theory, neo-conservatism, neo-liberalism and the knowledgepower nexus of
modern warfare.42 Drawing on a variety of different scholarly fields, including
38
Joel Isaac, Conditions of knowledge: theory, philosophy, and the human sciences at Harvard University, ch. 2, unpublished
manuscript, Queen Mary, University of London, 2008.
The most studied think-tank is RAND; see e.g. S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing capitalist democracy: the Cold War
origins of rational choice liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); David Hounshell, The Cold
War, Rand, and the generation of knowledge, 19461962, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
27: 1, 1997, pp. 23767; Fred Kaplan, The wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); Jennifer Light, From warfare to welfare: defense intellectuals and urban problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003). See also Inderjeet Parmar, Think tanks and power in foreign policy: a comparative
study of the role and influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 19391945
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
40
The terminology is indebted, but not reducible, to the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucaults own historical projects are in many respects flawed, and while his methodological injunctions can result in an implausible
determinism, he produced insights of immense value to historians of the human sciences. (The same could
be said of Pierre Bourdieu.) For criticisms of Foucault, see Gareth Stedman Jones, The determinist fix: some
obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s, History Workshop Journal 42: 3, 1996, pp. 1935. Cf. Gary Gutting, Foucault and the history of madness in Gary Gutting, ed., The
Cambridge companion to Foucault, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 4974.
41
I employ the term practice to reinforce the viewoften denied by counterposing thought (or ideas or
theory) to practicethat forms of thinking always have practical dimensions. See also Joel Isaac, Tangled
loops: theory, history, and the human sciences in modern America, Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming, 2009). For a parallel discussion, drawing on Bruno Latour, see Christian Bger and Frank Gadinger,
Reassembling and dissecting: international relations practice from a science studies perspective, International
Studies Perspectives 8: 1, 2007, pp. 90110.
42
Another example would be the role of demographic knowledge in shaping population control policies,
on which see Matthew Connolly, Fatal misconception: the struggle to control world population (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008). On the movement of social data into everyday life, see Sarah Igo, The aver39
12
Writing the world

political science, anthropology and economics, modernization theory was one of
the lodestars of social science during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the ideological
battle against global communism, scholars such as Walt Rostow and David Apter
sought to identify and prescribe the developmental trajectories along which traditional societies should travel to reach the promised land of modernity. They stood
as heirs to the generations of European thinkers who had constructed accounts
of the conditions and normative superiority of civilization. Modernization ideas
shaped attitudes and policies to what used to be called the Third World, as well as
politico-military strategy in Vietnam. They continue to play a subterranean role
in contemporary debates about development. Focusing on a number of different
knowledge-complexes, including the famed Department of Social Relations at
Harvard, MITs Centre for International Studies and the Social Science Research
Councils Committee on Comparative Politics, scholars have tracked the development and impact of modernization theory, its ideological functions, and the
multiple interconnections between academic research and government. David
Engerman and Nils Gilman, for example, indict the authoritarian, technocratic
high modernism of the mandarins of the future, unpacking their attempts to
impose crude developmental models on recalcitrant peoples around the world in
the name of progress.43
Neo-conservatism, so prominent in post-9/11 debates over American foreign
policy, originated in the 1930s, and grew in strength over the course of the
twentieth century.44 It can only be grasped by shifting the interpretive gaze away
from the universities and onto other knowledge-complexes. Incubated chiefly in
the network of Washington think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), neo-conservatism left a relatively small footprint in the modern academic
social sciences. The same cannot be said for the wider world. Neo-liberalism, the
dominant ideology of the global economic architecture since the 1970s, remains
poorly served by intellectual historians.45 (Perhaps it represents a case of Hegels
owl of Minerva, capable of being grasped only at the moment when it fades away:
aged American: surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Light, From warfare to welfare.
43
David Engerman, Modernization from the other shore: American intellectuals and the romance of Russian development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the future: modernization theory in
Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). They borrow the term high modernism from Scott, Seeing like a state. See also Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds, International development
and the social sciences: essays on the history and politics of knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
David Engerman, Nils Gilman and Mark H. Haefele, eds, Staging growth: modernization, development, and the
global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Michael Latham, Modernization as ideology:
American social science and nation building in the Kennedy era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000); David Milne, Americas Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008).
44
Murray Friedman, The neoconservative revolution: Jewish intellectuals and the shaping of public policy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America alone: the neo-conservatives and
the global order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Nicolas Guilhot, The democracy makers: human
rights and the politics of global order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
45
From an underdeveloped literature, see R. M. Hartwell, A history of the Mont Pelerin Society (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1995); Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen and Gisella Neunhffer, eds, Neoliberal hegemony: a global
critique (London: Routledge, 2005); Jamie Peck, Remaking laissez-faire, Progress in Human Geography 32: 1,
2008, pp. 343; Michel Foucault, The birth of biopolitics: lectures from the Collge de France, 197879, trans. Graham
Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
13
Duncan Bell
we can live in hope.) Developed in the late 1940s, through, among other things, the
Free Market Project of the University of Chicago Law School (1946) and the Mont
Pelerin Society, an association of intellectuals that included such pivotal figures
as Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, neo-liberalism
soon began its march through the institutions, including (another key site for
investigation) the majority of business and management schools in the western
world. Its proponents also created their own archipelago of support institutions,
including a variety of influential foundations and think-tanks, such as the AEI, the
Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Institute of Economic Affairs
(London). The rapid diffusion of neo-liberal ideas into elite policy-making circles
is one of the most momentous politico-intellectual stories of recent decades.
In tracing the multiple ways in which war has been conceived of and performed,
we again witness the centrality of non-university knowledge-complexes, such as
national security think-tanks, corporate research facilities and the large body of
scholars based in military educational establishments. Four brief examples will
illustrate some of the avenues open for research. First, scholars have long recognized
that military thought has been heavily influenced by the latest scientific thinking.
Some of the most innovative work on this topic identifies the role of cybernetics,
the decision sciences, and theories of chaos and complexity in reformulating the
ways in which militaries in the West, above all in the United States, conceive of, train
for, and enact warfare.46 Second, during the course of the twentieth century, but
especially during the Cold War, the US national security establishment routinely
funded and sought advice from science-fiction authors, asking them to help imagine
future weapons systems and design potential politico-military scenarios. There is
evidence that at least some of these ideas fed into the development of technocentric conceptions of warfare, as well as specific technologies of destruction.47
Third, Adam Tooze has focused on what he labels the military-historiographical complex, a loose assemblage of amateur and professional military historians,
often (but not always) funded by government agencies. He argues that US military
strategy in the post-Vietnam era was profoundly reshaped byand indeed in part
modelled onthe Wehrmachts experience during the Second World War, and
that this in turn relied on revisionist historical arguments about the performance
of the German military.48 Fourth, another aspect of the weaponization of knowl46
Antoine Bousquet, The scientific way of warfare: order and chaos on the battlefields of modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Peter Galison, The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic
vision, Critical Inquiry 21: 1, 1994, pp. 22866; Slava Gerovitch, Mathematical machines of the Cold War:
Soviet computing, American cybernetics and ideological disputes in the early 1950s, Social Studies of Science 31:
2, 2000, pp. 25387; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The worlds of Herman Kahn: the intuitive science of thermonuclear war
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
47
Charles Gannon, Rumors of war and infernal machines: technomilitary agenda-setting in British and American speculative
fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
48
Adam Tooze, Revivifying bellicism, unpublished MS, University of Cambridge, Nov. 2008. On the militaryindustrialmediaentertainment networkthe interaction of military intellectuals, hi-tech industry
and new simulation/computer technologiessee James Der Derian, Virtuous war (Boulder, CO: Westview,
2001). See also Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Simulating the unthinkable: gaming future war in the 1950s and
1960s, Social Studies of Science 30: 2, 2000, pp. 163223. On how the radical French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari are employed in Israeli military doctrine, see Eyal Weizman, Hollow land: the architecture of Israeli occupation (London: Verso, 2007), ch. 7.
14
Writing the world

edge concerns the use of social science, especially anthropology, in elaborating
ways of understanding other cultures in order to fight them more effectively. This
is a practice that reaches back to the collusion of anthropology in the history of
European imperialism, but it was an important, albeit highly ambivalent, feature
of the Cold War intellectual order and today it remains a controversial issue in
respect of the deployment of teams of social scientists in Afghanistan and Iraq.49
The world as laboratory: knowledge and performance
The analysis of knowledge-practices and knowledge-complexes constitutes part
of what the philosopher Ian Hacking terms historical ontology. Historical ontology
refers, in a general sense, to the study of the emergence, diffusion and effects of a
wide variety of things, including concepts, institutions, technologies and modes
of classification. All have specific histories, points at which they were brought
into being; and once in existence they exert influence of various kinds, shaping
the range of possibilitiescognitive, institutional, ethicalavailable to agents.
In short, historical ontology is the study of what it is possible to be or to do in
particular times and places.50
One important branch of historical ontology is historical meta-epistemology,
which seeks to track the fabrication and roles of organizing concepts concerned
with knowledge, belief, opinion, objectivity, detachment, argument, reason,
rationality, evidence, even facts and truths.51 What counts as a scientific argument
in a specific context? What is history or historical knowledge? What demarcates
truth, objectivity, neutrality? The answers to all of these questions have changed
dramatically over time, and they differ significantly within and between academic
fields.52 Studies of this kind, then, identify what is considered legitimate knowledge
in particular contexts. In doing so, they highlight the historical variability of
conceptions of reason and illustrate how power circulates in communities through
the attribution of legitimacy, credibility and expertisewhose voice should
49
David H. Price, Anthropological intelligence: the deployment and neglect of American anthropology in the Second World
War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); David H. Price, Subtle means and enticing carrots: the
impact of funding on American Cold War anthropology, Critique of Anthropology 23: 4, 2003, pp. 373401; Peter
Mandler, Deconstructing Cold War anthropology in Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, eds, The Cold War in pieces:
new perspectives on postwar America (forthcoming, 2009). On post-9/11 Pentagon funding for the social sciences
and especially Project Minervasee http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/, accessed October 2008.
50
Ian Hacking, Historical ontology, p. 22. The term originates in Foucault, What is enlightenment? (1984), in Paul
Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 3250.
51
Hacking, Historical ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 9, 8.
52
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007); Karin Cetina Knorr, Epistemic cultures:
how the sciences make knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Peter Novick, That noble
dream: the objectivity question and the American historical profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Theodore Porter, Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Mary Poovey, A history of the modern fact: problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth
and society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); George Reisch, How the Cold War transformed philosophy
of science: to the icy slopes of logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mark Smith, Social science in
the crucible: the American debate over objectivity and purpose (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); John
Zammito, A nice derangement of epistemes: post-positivism in the study of science from Quine to Latour (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
15
Duncan Bell
count, according to which set of (epistemic) criteria.53 This is, of course, of direct
relevance to the history of the social sciences, which can be seen, in part, as the
history of claims to expert authority about and over the social world. IR is no
exception.
But the study of historical ontology is not exhausted by meta-epistemology. It
is also concerned with how categories and concepts, theories and research agendas,
are created and employed, and how, through various kinds of feedback process
or what Hacking labels looping effectsthey can then influence the people, or
institutions, or phenomena, that they are supposed to represent or explain. Such
effects are often unintended and multiplex, but they are significant features of
the social world. Much of the most interesting work in this vein has focused on
psychology and economics. Hacking, for example, has investigated how groups
of people are classifiedas traumatized, as mentally disturbed, as abnormal in
one way or anotherand how these classifications can shape their senses of self
and determine the ways in which they are treated by others, including the coercive
apparatus of the state.54 These dynamics are sometimes described in terms of the
performativity of theoretical practices. Sociologists of capitalism have in recent
years illuminated the performative dimensions of economic knowledge-practices,
demonstrating how highly abstract technical theories can act as technologies
of capitalism, as well as how the theories themselves, through counterperformativity, are reformulated, or used in different ways, as a result of their own
impact.55 Theoretical instruments are not cameras passively recording the world,
but engines actively engaged in constructing it.56 This dynamic opens up new
vistas for analysts of the social sciences, who, as Joel Isaac argues, must follow
theories out into the worlds that those same theories help to constitute.57
This will be a major task for historians of the global, and for disciplinary historians of IR. Scholars pursuing their own research agendas, David Engerman
reminds us, have created categories and measures that had a profound impact on
modern international relations and the modern world. These categoriesincluding
measurements of food supply, population growth, and economic activityare
so powerful because they seem to be natural and neutral yardsticks rather than
human creations. For this reason, he concludes, historians should analyze ideas as
seriously as we analyze interests, take monographs as seriously as memos, and
53
For an argument that neo-positivists in IR routinely claim legitimacy by drawing on the most culturally
authoritative sciences, see Duncan Bell, Beware of false prophets: biology, human nature, and the future of
International Relations theory, International Affairs 82: 3, 2006, pp. 47996.
54
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995); Ian Hacking, Making up people, in Historical ontology, pp. 99115.
55
Michael Callon, The laws of markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia
Sui, eds, Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007); Marion Fourcade, Theories of markets and theories of society, American Behavioural Scientist 50: 8,
2007, pp. 101534; Neil Fligstein and Luke Dauter, The sociology of markets, Annual Review of Sociology 33,
2007, pp. 10528; Timothy Mitchell, The work of economics: how a discipline makes its world, European
Journal of Sociology 46: 2, 2005, pp. 297318.
56
Donald MacKenzie, An engine, not a camera: how financial models shape markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006).
57
Isaac, Tangled loops.
16
Writing the world

rank professors on a par with policymakers and film producers.58 The interpretive gaze can be turned on the modes of classification and conceptualization that
have shaped international politics: the terrorist, civilization, the Cold War, the
war on terror, the suicide bomber. To this we can add the various ways in which
states have come to be understoodas liberal democratic, totalitarian, rogue,
failed or eviland how these attributions structure the space of political and
imaginative possibility. An instructive case study could be mounted by tracking
the ways in which ideas about the democratic peacethe argument that democracies do not go to war with one anotherpercolated from their academic point
of origin, and impacted on wider policy discourses and political action. Another
might analyse the genealogy of the now fashionable idea that states, either singly
or collectively, have a responsibility to protect.
One of the key questions that has animated revisionist disciplinary historians
has been whether the First World War inaugurated or transformed the scholarly
investigation of international politics. This is a subset of a much wider debate about
whether or not the war irreversibly ruptured modern consciousness, heralding a
chastened new world. Yet in terms of the social sciences, the key break happened
during (or as a result of ) the Second World War. The way in which society and
politics were conceptualized, and the tools necessary to study them, were transfigured by a range of intersecting intellectual and political developments, many
of them the direct consequence of the mobilization of knowledge by the allies
during the war. The mushroom cloud towered sublime above the new era, reconfiguring the space of human possibility to include, for the first time, that of the
auto-destruction of the species. But many other intellectual and organizational
innovations also migrated into the postwar world. For the natural sciences, the
unprecedented mobilization of science and technology ushered in the age of
big science, as governments poured vast resources into the quest to understand
and control the forces of nature.59 Science came to be seen as a pivotal aspect of
national survival.
We can see an analogous process at work in the study of humanitythe
emergence of big social science. Different tributaries fed the river. On the one
hand, a large influx of migr European scholars, fleeing the Nazis, brought with
them to America the intellectual styles that had dominated the cultural life of the
continent. This influx helped to reshape the humanities and social sciences. Political
theory, for example, was sent in new directions by the arrival of Hannah Arendt,
58
Engerman, American knowledge and global power, pp. 600601. A good example, collapsing distinctions
between domestic and international, is the now-pervasive idea of social capital, on which see James Farr,
Social capital: a conceptual history, Political Theory 32: 1, 2004, pp. 633, and the reply by Ben Fine, Eleven
hypotheses on the conceptual history of social capital, Political Theory 35: 1, 2007, pp. 4753. See also Ben Fine,
Social capital versus social theory: political economy and social science at the turn of the millennium (London: Routledge,
2001).
59
Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds, Big science: the growth of large-scale research (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1992); John Krige, ed., American hegemony and the postwar reconstruction of science in Europe (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006). David Kaiser notes that funding for physics in 1953 was 20 to 25 times greater, controlling for
inflation, than it had been in 1938: Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower and the production of American physicists after World War II, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33: 1, 2002, p. 132.
17
Duncan Bell
Leo Strauss, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, among numerous others.60 In
IR this transatlantic migration was felt through the work of Morgenthau, Herz,
Klaus Knorr, Nicholas Spykman, Arnold Wolfers, Karl Deutsch and a cohort of
other scholars deeply attuned to the perversities and violence of political life, their
ideas seared by the failures of Weimar democracy and the obscene horrors of a
genocidal war. But the most significant change came about through the valorization of scientific theorizing. Many key tools in this brave new intellectual world
were forged in the white heat of war. Peter Galison, for example, has emphasized
the development of what he labels the Manichean sciencesoperations research,
game theory and cybernetics.61 They emerged out of the intense wartime collaboration of physicists, mathematicians, psychologists and economists, in a variety
of secret knowledge-complexes throughout the United States and Britain. While
they were originally developed to address specific technical problemsin the case
of cybernetics, the difficulties of tracking enemy aircraftmany of them were
soon adapted to the study of the social world. For their most ambitious prophets,
these sciences could generate theories of everything, models and explanatory
schema that could comprehend the patterns of social and biological life. Norbert
Wiener, for example, proselytized a cyborg metaphysics, with no respect for traditional human and nonhuman boundaries.62 For the less ambitious, the Manichean
sciences still promised to explain the puzzles and paradoxes of social action. In
various ways, and at different speeds, they permeated and transformed the study
of humanity.63
This is an important story, essential for understanding the development
of the postwar social sciences, including IR, but it also raises some intriguing
questions about the normative, epistemic and ontological status of those ideas.
The Manichean sciences each conceived of politics as a space of strategic interaction between rational agents. This account was, as Galison notes, derived from a
picture of a mechanized Enemy Other, generated in the laboratory-based science
wars of MIT and a myriad of universities. [W]e find ourselves, he concludes,
in the grip of a powerful set of cultural meanings, meanings which are indissolubly tied to their genealogy.64 The manmachine hybrids produced to win a
cataclysmic world war continue to provide some of the most influential frameworks for thinking about politics.
60
On the postwar development of political theory, see Gunnell, The descent of political theory; Hauptman, From
accommodation to opposition; Emily Hauptman, A local history of the political, Political Theory 32: 1,
2004, pp. 3460; Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, The remaking of political theory, in Adcock et al., eds,
Modern Political Science, pp. 20934.
61
Galison, The ontology of the enemy. See also Andrew Pickering, Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer,
and Pask, Social Studies of Science 32: 3, 2002, pp. 41347; Steve J. Heims, John von Neuman and Norbert Wiener:
from mathematics to the technologies of life and death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980); Steve J. Heims, The
Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: the bounds
of reason in modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). On rational choice, see also
Richard Tuck, Free riding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Amadae, Rationalizing capitalist
democracy.
62
Andrew Pickering, Cyborg history and the WWII regime, Perspectives in Science 3: 0, 1995, p. 31.
63
Philip Mirowski, Machine dreams: economics becomes a cyborg science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002); Galison, The ontology of the enemy, pp. 2547.
64
Galison, The ontology of the enemy, pp. 231, 261, 264.
18
Writing the world

Social science as way of life? Subcultures and spiritual exercises
Historians of IR, like intellectual historians in general, have tended to focus their
attention on the analysis of arguments expressed in written texts. While this is an
essential feature of historical practice, it can be augmented by analyses of the ways
in which the intellectual and institutional worlds of social scientists are formed:
how they come to be certain kinds of people.
A productive way of tracing the dynamics of scholarly identity-production
is through the exploration of what Joel Isaac labels theoretical subcultures.
Subcultures exist where scholars seek to create their own distinctive communal
norms and ways of life. Those that have played generative roles in the postwar
social sciences include the behaviouralist, the cyborg, the modernizationist and
the rational choice.65 More could be added to the list: the interpretivist, the
Straussian, the Marxist, the post-colonial. Subcultures, as the examples attest, are
rarely constrained by disciplinary boundaries, forming cross-cutting networks of
allegiance and affiliation. When they come into contact with one another, as they
invariably do, the result is often incomprehension, distrust and academic turf wars.
But this is not always the case. Isaac borrows the influential idea of a trading zone
from Galison to show how working alliances can be formed, communication and
cooperation across subcultural borderlines established. For Galison, theoretical
cultures in interaction frequently establish contact languages, systems of discourse
that can vary from the most function-specific jargons, through semispecific pidgins,
to full-fledged creoles rich enough to support activities as complex as poetry and
metalinguistic reflection.66 These contact languages allow for practical coordination, and the identification of shared concerns and purposes, without requiring
core intellectual commitments to be jettisoned. Area studies programmesthat
special Cold War beast67were exemplary sites of creole communication. So too
are many interdisciplinary centres and projects today. Like historians of science,
then, Isaac points to the importance of a wide variety of factors in accounting for
the success and failure of politico-intellectual programmes.
The rise and fall of theoretical doctrines in the human science disciplines is never a simple
matter of validity, rhetorical persuasion, predictive success and falsification. Theories may
also prosper by providing instruments for disciplinary training and self-transformation;
they may become attached to the epistemic and moral norms of a community of enquirers;
and they help to make certain kinds of people. A theorys success in so embedding itself in
this subcultural form helps to determine its historical prominence, its waxing and waning
in the culture of its time.68
This is a promising agenda for the study of histories (and anthropologies) of the
global. The rise and fall of theoretical approachesand schools of thought more
65

66
Isaac, Tangled loops.

Peter Galison, Image and logic: a material culture of microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),
p.783.
67
David Kaiser, The physics of spin: Sputnik politics and American physicists in the 1950s, Social Research 73:4,
2006, p. 1225.
68
Isaac, Tangled loops; Isaac, Conditions of knowledge.
19
Duncan Bell
generallyare rarely explained in terms of which party had the better argument,
not least because there are rarely agreed-upon grounds for adjudicating such
disputes. This agenda also points in the direction of embarking on micro-studies,
of examining influential knowledge-complexes in ethnographic detail.69 Some
of these have already received attention: centres at MIT, Harvard and Chicago;
the RAND Corporation and the Cowles Commission. But there is much more
work to be done in this vein. The Trilateral Commission and the World Economic
Forum (Davos) are ripe for detailed investigation.70 An example of central importance to the development of postwar political science is the Correlates of War
Project, founded by J. David Singer at the University of Michigan in 1963 and
still going strong today. The stated goal of the project is to further the systematic
accumulation of scientific knowledge about war. It has also performed a discipline-stabilizing function, promoting cumulative science in IR: By helping to
establish a clear temporal and spatial domain for research, promoting the use of
clearly defined concepts and common variable operationalizations, and allowing
replication of research, the project has been a mainstay of rigorous international
relations scholarship.71 The data and theoretical techniques developed by Singer
and his collaborators have exerted a profound effect on how war has been conceptualized and studied over the last four decades.
In order to address the intriguing question of how social scientists are formed
how their scholarly identities are fashioned and reproduced, challenged and
validatedwe can draw inspiration from the analysis of what the historian and
philosopher Pierre Hadot calls spiritual exercises, and what Michel Foucault,
following his lead, characterized as technologies of the self .72 Investigation of
what we might term technologies of the scholarly self would focus on the kinds
of activities that individuals undertake to become scholars of a particular stripe,
people of a certain kind. One entry point is through studying the construction
of varied intellectual personae. Ian Hunter argues that we should conceive of
thinking as an embodied practice, as constituted by ensembles of cognitive and
ethical arts maintained in particular institutional settings.73 Scholarly performance
69
Cf. Clifford Geertz, The way we think now: toward an ethnography of modern thought, in Geertz, Local
knowledge: further essays in interpretative anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 15663. As Galison
notes, the turn to local explanations (micro-histories) in the history of science is the single most important
change in the last thirty years: Peter Galison, Ten problems in the history and philosophy of science, Isis 99:
1, 2008, p. 119.
70
For a Gramscian study of the Trilateral Commission, see Stephen Gill, American hegemony and the Trilateral
Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
71
Correlates of War Project, Project History, http://www.correlatesofwar.org/, accessed Nov. 2008. The
project archive is currently housed at Penn State. Cf. Tarak Barkawi, War inside the free world, in Tarak
Barkawi and Mark Laffey, eds, Democracy, liberalism and war: rethinking the democratic peace debates (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 2001), pp. 107208.
72
See esp. the second and third volumes of Foucaults History of sexuality, The uses of pleasure (Harmondsworth:
Viking, 1985) and The care of the self (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1988); also Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life:
spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Alexander Nehemas,
The art of living: Socratic reflections from Plato to Foucault (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
73
Ian Hunter, The persona of the philosopher and the history of modern philosophy, Modern Intellectual History
4: 3, 2007, p. 574. See also Conel Condren, Ian Hunter and Stephen Gaukroger, eds, The persona of the philosopher
in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ian Hunter, The history of theory,
Critical Inquiry 33: 1, 2006, pp. 78112; and the exchange between Hunter and Fredric Jameson in Critical
Inquiry 34: 3, 2008, pp. 56359.
20
Writing the world

is not a disembodied intellectual exercisereason operating as a fixed universal, free
from contamination, interests or affectbut an assemblage of logico-rhetorical
methods, cognitive techniques, and ethical exercises. It draws on a repertory of
techne and practicestimetables, architectures and spatial organizations, practices
of meditation and self-scrutiny, sceptical exercises of various kinds, and a whole
variety of discursive rhetoricswhose mode of existence is that of the historically
instituted arts of the self . Through pedagogical and training routinesbeginning
in undergraduate programmes, accelerating through graduate school, cemented
in diverse professional activities and reinforced through assorted subcultural
practicesindividuals of a particular (scholarly) kind are created and reproduced.
In this sense, scholarly practices can be seen as expressing, even requiring, a form
of spirituality, characterized as an array of acts of inner self-transformation, of
work on the self by the self, aimed at forming personae suited to an open-ended
variety of ethical aspirations, psychological deportments, cognitive dispositions,
public duties, and private desires.74 To become a scholar of a particular kind
especially a scholar strongly committed to one perspective or subcultural form
requires various kinds of self-discipline, monitoring, habituation and cognitive
transformation.
While Hunter uses this idea to explore the personae of the philosopher in early
modern Europe and of the Self-as-Theorist in the postwar humanities academy, it
also provides a fruitful way of exploring some of the modes of identity-construction found in the modern social sciences. Forms of scholarly self-fashioning were
bound up in the Rockefeller meeting on IR theory, one of the aims of which
was to establish a regular research seminar, and to link junior scholars with senior
mentors, in order to encourage the growth of young men in the field.75 We can
see the same idea in Bruno Latours wry observation on graduate humanities
education in the United States that entire PhD programs are still running to make
sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up,
that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to the truth,
that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular
standpoint, and so on.76 My own scholarly training in political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge involved immersion in a particular
regime, one that cultivates the persona of the radical historicist, the scholarly
self always seeking to identify the genealogies of the beliefs and practices that
shape our lives.77 Above all, in the postwar social sciences, we see the fashioning
of the rational social scientistthe individual who comes to view the world in
a certain way, as capable of explanation (even prediction) through the application
of the arts of scientific reasoning. If strongly held, these views come to form an
important part of the individuals identity, structuring how they see the world and
74
Hunter, The persona of the philosopher, p. 574; Ian Hunter, Talking about my generation, Critical Inquiry
34: 3, 2008, p. 586.
75
Cited in Guilhot, One discipline, many histories.
76
Bruno Latour, Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern, Critical Inquiry
30: 2, 2004, p. 227.
77
I borrow the term radical historicist from Mark Bevir, Political studies as narrative and science, 18801980,
Political Studies 54: 0, 2006, pp. 583606.
21
Duncan Bell
act in it. The training regimes, and practices of self, of the modern social scientist
are productive subjects for historical and ethnographic analysis.
While it will not apply to or illuminate the activities of all scholars equally, the
study of subcultures and personae offers an interesting avenue for future research
into histories of the global, identifying how and why arguments attain salience at
particular times and in particular places, and illuminating the embodied, affective
dimensions of thinking and scholarly performance.
Conclusions
Disciplinary historians of IR have done sterling work in recent years, dissolving
the mythologies that have helped to constitute the discipline in the postwar era.
From the rubble of the old they are fashioning far more interesting and elaborate structures. As I have sought to argue, however, disciplinary history writing is
constrained by its very object of analysis. It can be augmented by the analysis of
histories (and anthropologies) of the global, of the disparate ways in which global
politics (or specific aspects of it) has been imagined across different institutional
spaces. Such an exercise might also include the attempt to trace the various ways
in which such visions have had performative consequences, feeding into the very
worlds they have tried to describe or explain.
The analysis of the modern social sciences, especially in an Anglo-American (or
Euro-Atlantic) context, is not, of course, the end of the story. Visions of global
order have been produced by a vast array of people in different geographical
locales, working in a wealth of media. Painting, cinema, architecture, the internet
and computer games are all potential sites of investigation. A single stunning
photograph, hurriedly snapped in 1968 by an amateur cameraman, profoundly
influenced the way in which countless people conceived of the world itselfits
fragility, its beauty, its singularity. Among other things, Earthrise, the image
captured by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, helped to catalyse the modern environmental movement, one of the most significant social forces in contemporary global
politics.78 Writing histories of the global can help to illuminate the ways in which
the human imagination shapes the course and character of politics.
78
Robert Poole, Earthrise: how man first saw the Earth (London: Yale University Press, 2008).
22

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