ABSTRACT
Disorder, the problem of order, and the demand for a justly ordered world: these concerns course through Hayward Alker's work. The title of an important paper he wrote with Thomas Biersteker – “The dialectics of world order: Notes for a future archeologist of international savoir faire” – captures both this concern with the problem of order and Alker's strong sense that its solution depends on dialectical processes. In the following decade, “modern order/disorder” emerged as Alker's primary concern. This turn of phrase researchers find, not in his scholarly work, but in the last syllabi for his doctoral seminar in advanced international relations and his undergraduate lecture course on order and disorder in global affairs. This chapter reviews these two syllabi, as would an “an archeologist,” to convey a sense of modernity's importance for Alker in the last years of a life cut short.
