ABSTRACT
Stanley Hoffmann (1995/1977) once called the discipline of International Relations (IR) ‘an American Social Science’. He argued that the fully fledged discipline of IR is a recent phenomenon which came into being only in the USA after the Second World War and nowhere else. He explained the American disciplinary dominance by ‘the political preeminence of the United States’ due to which American IR research can make a difference in world politics, and by the fact that the USA was a democratic country. In contrast, pre-eminent totalitarian states did not develop free social science at all (Hoffmann 1995/1977: 224). Hence, while in some countries scholars were prevented from undertaking IR scholarship by their totalitarian masters, in other countries scholars were not interested in IR scholarship because their country was lacking power and it could not put their advice into effect in any event.
