Rereading Early Twentieth-Century IR Theory

The orthodox self-perception of IR as an academic undertaking holds that the discipline had an initial phase in the early part of this century commonly labeled Idealist. This chapter presents a “revisionist” synopsis of the thinking of some important early twentieth-century IR writers usually included under the Idealist label (Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf, and Alfred Zimmern will be the authors cited most often, but other authors will also be drawn on). ¹ My contention is that the Idealist writers discussed in this chapter ground their interpretations of international politics on a shared paradigm that has hitherto gone largely unrecognized. Indeed, from E. H. Carr onward it has been dramatically misconstrued.