ABSTRACT
Stanley Hoffmann famously described International Relations as “an American social science” in his classic article about the subject first published in Daedalus in 1977. Hoffmann’s students, and a great many others, have picked up on the phrase and the ideas embedded within it in subsequent citations and publications about the development of the field (Kahler 1997). There is good reason for this, because the phrase contains a great deal of truth. The integration of the study of the international with the analytical methods of social science has been most assiduously pursued in the United States. There are more IR degreegranting institutions, more IR faculty, and more IR dissertations, degrees, associations, and conferences in the U.S. than in any other country on the globe. Most of this development has taken place in the U.S. since 1945, coinciding with the dawn of what many have described as “the American century,” and there is a broad consensus in the U.S. about the importance of using the most sophisticated methods of social science to pursue the analysis of international relations.
