Abstract
International Relations as an academic discipline is at a major crossroads. Since it was first constituted as an academic discipline in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, International Relations has moved through a series of ‘debates’ with the result that in the course of its development, and as a consequence of these debates, International Relations theory has been undergoing constant change and modification. After moving through the debate between Idealism and Realism in the inter–war period, between Realism and Behaviouralism in the Great Debate of the 1960s, through to the complementary impact of Kuhn’s development of the idea of ‘paradigms’ and the post-Behavioural revolution of the early 1970s and on to the rise of International Political Economy and neo-Marxist, Structuralist dependency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, International Relations has arrived at a point that Banks has termed the ‘inter-paradigm debate’.1 The effect of this evolutionary process is contradictory. On the one hand, it makes the discipline exciting and alive because of the diversity of approaches, issues and questions within it, creating opportunities for research which would previously have been deemed to be outside the boundaries of the discipline. On the other hand, the lack of an agreed core to the subject has lead to confusion and a degree of intellectual insecurity.
Some of the material in this article was first presented at Michael Banks’s ‘Concepts and Methods Seminar’ at the LSE in 1984. In addition, I benefitted greatly from discussions on International Relations theory with Hidemi Suganami during my year teaching at Keele University. Finally, a word of thanks to the MSc students at Southampton during recent years who have contributed to this chapter in ways that they may not know or recognise.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
See M. Banks, ‘The Inter-Paradigm Debate’ in M. Light and A.J.R. Groom (eds), International Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory ( London: Frances Pinter, 1985 ), pp. 7–26.
R. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976 ).
M. Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays ( New York: Seabury Press, 1972 ).
V. Kubâlkovâ and A.A. Cruickshank, Marxism and International Relations ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985 ).
S. Brucan, The Dialectics of World Politics ( London: Macmillan, 1978 ).
E. Krippendorff, International Relations as a Social Science ( Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982 ).
K. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley, 1979 ).
Herz, ‘Comment’, International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 25, No. 2, 1981 ), pp. 237–41.
R.O. Keohane and J. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, 1977 ).
S. Krasner (ed), International Regimes ( New York: Syracuse University Press, 1983 ).
R. Coate and C. Murphy, ‘A Critical Science of Global Relations’, International Interaction (Vol. 12, No. 2 1985 ), pp. 109–32.
C. Chase-Dunn, ‘Interstate System and Capitalist World Economy: One Logic or Two’, International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 25, No. 1, 1981 ), pp. 19–42.
S. Wolin, ‘Paradigms and Political Theories’ in B.C. Parekh and P. King (eds), Politics and Experience ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968 ).
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© 1989 Millennium: Journal of International Studies
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Hoffman, M. (1989). Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate. In: Dyer, H.C., Mangasarian, L. (eds) The Study of International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20275-1_4
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