Portrait of the realist as a historian: On anti-whiggism in the history of international relations
| Author | Nicolas Guilhot |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066113516812 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of
International Relations
2015, Vol. 21(1) 3 –26
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066113516812
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E
JR
I
Portrait of the realist as a
historian: On anti-whiggism
in the history of international
relations
Nicolas Guilhot
CNRS, Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CIRHUS), NYU, USA
Abstract
In recent years, a revisionist history of international relations theory has generated a
complex and nuanced picture of classical realism. In doing so, it has also contributed,
more often than not, to a normative rehabilitation of realism. Disciplinary historians,
however, have been remarkably silent about the causes of their collective bias. This
article explores the paradox of a disciplinary history that has often mobilized ‘anti-whig’
arguments in its battle against the potted history of ‘great debates,’ yet only to pursue
a not-so-covert presentist agenda. It argues that the revisionist history of international
relations is itself part of the realist tradition, and that from its early formulation by
Herbert Butterfield to its current deployment in disciplinary history, the anti-whig
argument has seamlessly woven together a vision of history and a Christian-realist vision
of politics. I suggest that the entanglement between realism and the historicist rejection
of rationalist philosophies of history has the potential of fundamentally renewing our
understanding of realism. By the same token, recovering the elective affinities between
realism and historicism casts under a new light current debates about the relationship
between realism and the Enlightenment since it suggests that realism was essentially a
form of counter-Enlightenment.
Keywords
Begriffsgeschichte, Cambridge school, disciplinary history, Enlightenment, history of
political concepts, international relations theory, liberalism, realism
Corresponding author:
Nicolas Guilhot, CNRS, Center for International Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences
(CIRHUS), NYU, 4 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Email: nicolas.guilhot@nyu.edu
516812EJT0010.1177/1354066113516812European Journal of International RelationsGuilhot
research-article2014
Article
4 European Journal of International Relations 21(1)
The new history of international relations
In recent years, the call for a more ‘historical’ understanding of the disciplines has been
heard across a number of fields, but it has nowhere been heeded as much as in political
science. Long confined to glorifications of the behavioral paradigm or to the mourning
of a defunct age when political science and political theory were hardly distinct, the his-
tories of political science have registered a momentous change, characterized by a greater
independence vis-a-vis disciplinary agendas.1 Indigenous histories and grand narratives
of progress or decline have been replaced by the careful reconstruction of arguments in
context. The waning hegemony of the behavioral agenda also explained the revived
interest in history. Political science has thus ‘become much more hospitable to history
and historical investigation than behavioralism ever was’ (Farr et al., 1995: 4–5). This
new historiography has been more self-reflective, methodologically sophisticated, liter-
ate in the history and epistemology of science, and more aware of the transnational
dimensions of intellectual life.2
International relations (IR) did not remain aloof from these developments. If any-
thing, the discipline has been central to this ‘historical turn’ and witnessed the develop-
ment of an important subfield dedicated to a new history of the field, against the
mythology of the ‘great debates’ (Bell, 2009; Elman and Fendius Elman, 2001; Little,
1999; Roberts, 2006). Realism, Morgenthau, the English School, and interwar thinkers,
among other topics, have been reconsidered in ways that challenged the self-image of the
discipline.3 The turn toward history in IR was also the result of a renewed interest in the
‘history of international thought’ that has brought into sharper focus the terms under
which international politics have been discussed and their historical transformation.4
While the new history of IR is a diverse field, its practitioners nonetheless share
important assumptions. These can be illustrated in reference to one of the first books
challenging the conventional history of the discipline, Brian Schmidt’s (1998) The
Political Discourse of Anarchy. In it, Schmidt did not present IR as the succession of
abstract doctrines (idealism, realism, neorealism, etc.), but as a set of contextualized
arguments about international politics: the evolution of the discipline, he contended, was
nothing else than the transformation of the terms under which certain political arguments
were conducted. It was ‘the history of a conversation’ (Schmidt, 1998: 37). Much of the
new IR history has thus understood itself as an extension to the study of international
politics of the approach advocated by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and other historians
of the ‘Cambridge school,’ if not in all its prescriptions, at least in its warnings against
the risks of retrospective rationalization.5 Schmidt’s (2013) reinterpretation was thus
framed as a reaction against ‘whig’ historiography or ‘presentism,’ an aspect that he has
emphasized in his more recent writings. Since, the rejection of whig history has been the
default position of most revisionist histories of IR that draw inspiration from the history
of political concepts.
What are the implications of this revisionist historiography for the discipline as a
whole? It is often suggested that it can broaden the horizon of IR scholars and ‘reconnect
the field … to wider traditions of political thought from which it has often become
estranged’ (Williams, 2012: ix). While I wholeheartedly agree, it is also hard to say what
these traditions are or how far they extend, and I fear that the relation of the new history
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