The eternal divide? History and International Relations
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066110373561 |
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
| Author | George Lawson |
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
18(2) 203–226
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066110373561
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Corresponding author:
George Lawson, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: g.lawson@lse.ac.uk
The eternal divide? History and
International Relations
George Lawson
London School of Economics, UK
Abstract
On one level, history is used by all parts of the International Relations (IR) discipline.
But lurking beneath the surface of IR’s approach to history lies a well-entrenched binary.
Whereas mainstream positions use history as a means to fill in their theoretical frames
(seeing history as a kind of ‘scripture’ of abstract lessons), many post-positivists reduce
history to a pick-and-mix of contingent hiccups (a ‘butterfly’ of what-ifs and maybes).
Interestingly enough, this binary is one reproduced throughout the social sciences. As
such, there is a bigger story to the apparently ‘eternal divide’ between history and social
science than first meets the eye. This article uses the various ways in which history is
used — and abused — in IR to probe more deeply into the relationship between history
and social science as a whole. This exploration reveals four frameworks, two drawn from
history (context and narrative) and two drawn from social science (eventfulness and
ideal-typification) which illustrate the necessary co-implication of the two enterprises.
The article employs these tools as a means of re-imagining the relationship between
history and social science (including IR), conceiving this as a single intellectual journey in
which both are permanently in view.
Keywords
historical sociology, international history, International Relations, metatheory, theory
and practice
Introduction
Like most long-running interdisciplinary relationships, the liaison between International
Relations (IR) and history has taken many turns. In some respects, history has always
been a core feature of the international imagination. On both sides of the Atlantic, leading
figures in the discipline such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight and Stanley
Hoffman employed history as a means of illuminating their research. Indeed, Wight
(1966) made searching through international history the sine qua non of international
204 European Journal of International Relations 18(2)
theory, the best that could be hoped for in a discipline without a core problematique of its
own. Although seemingly banished to the margins of the discipline by the emergence of
behaviouralism and the association of ‘real theory’ with deductive, nomological methods,
history never really went away as an important feature of IR’s toolkit. Rather, history
became part of a broader tug of war between ‘classical’ approaches which retained history
as their central locomotive and IR’s neo-positivist laboriticians, who saw history as
providing the main ammunition for their experiments. As this article shows, history has
been employed, albeit unevenly, throughout the discipline. And given this, the rise — or
reconvening — of historically oriented research programmes such as constructivism,
neo-classical realism and the English School should be seen less as a novel breakthrough
than as a return to business as usual.
However, there is a tension which remains unresolved in the relationship between
history and IR, one which is long-standing and which reappears with regularity, even in
those texts which explicitly bestride the IR–history frontier. The issue is revealed in a
passage from one of the best known of these texts (Elman and Elman, 2001: 7):
Political scientists are more likely to look to the past as a way of supporting or discrediting
theoretical hypotheses, while historians are more likely to be interested in past international
events for their own sake. Although political scientists might turn to the distant past, the study
of ‘deep’ history is relevant to their research objectives only insofar as it enables them to
generate, test or refine theory. By contrast, for the historian, the goal of theory building and
testing is secondary — the past interests for itself.
Later in the book, the authors make this distinction even more starkly (Elman and Elman,
2001: 35):
Political scientists are not historians, nor should they be. There are real and enduring
epistemological and methodological differences that divide the two groups, and there is
great value in recognising, maintaining and honouring these distinctions.
These passages point the way towards a clear division of labour between theory-building
political scientists and chronicling historians, a first-order demarcation on which other con-
tributors to Bridges and Boundaries overlay a number of second-order distinctions: methods
(a focus on secondary sources versus primary sources); aims (identification of regularities,
mechanisms and continuities versus the highlighting of contingency, ambiguity and change);
orientation (nomothetic versus idiographic); sensibility (parsimony versus complexity);
scope conditions (analytic versus temporal/spatial); notions of causation (transhistorical ver-
sus context-specific); levels of analysis (structure versus unit level) and so on. As a result, a
list of essential differences is formed in which one discipline (IR/political science) acts as
binary opposite for and, more often than not, colonizer of the other (history).
This article questions the grounds for the construction of this ‘eternal divide’ between
history and IR. The argument presented is straightforward: despite the surface-level
closeness of the relationship between IR and history, much IR scholarship is predicated
on a view of history caught between two equally unsatisfactory stools. On the one hand,
history becomes a predetermined site for the empirical verification of abstract claims.
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