ABSTRACT
The so-called “I” is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting “corporate we’s”’, Kenneth Burke (1959:263) remarked around the time when most of the contributors to this volume were born. The discipline of International Relations (IR) has, by treating its own history as a series of debates or a set of paradigms or traditions or schools, come to honour this epigram. It tends to see its practitioners as nothing more than incidental sets of views and specialities. Perhaps one could think of the weave of this volume as an attempt to reverse Burke’s epigram. We started with the ‘corporate we’ of the discipline of International Relations, identified twelve threads of authorships, and scrutinized them in their own right. The time has come to step back and have a look at the weave once again, and to comment on the stuff of our masters’ theorizing, on how they have taken care of their IR selves in charting their trajectories, and finally on what kind of weave the discipline of IR may be said to be when judged on the strength of those trajectories taken together. Before all that, however, it may be meet to honour all the calls for reflection which rise from these chapters by reflecting a little on what has been gained by our exercise. Contrary to IR, other social disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and for that matter history tend to represent themselves in terms of genealogies of their own great and good. We have apparently followed their example, and reinstated the Author as the central figure of the discipline. Inasmuch as this is a move which brings IR further into line with other social inquiry, it could be argued that what is going on here is the ‘normalization’ of a discipline, in the sense that its self-representation edges closer to that of its cousins.
