ABSTRACT
Like all academic subjects, International Relations (IR) is heavily influenced by the historical narratives that make up the myths about the discipline’s foundation and course. These narratives provide justifications for the present structure and goals of the discipline. Of all the events in IR’s past perhaps the most crucial is the realist– idealist Great Debate of the 1930s and 1940s. It represents both a scientific coming of age, and the explanation for the dominance of realism after 1945. Yet, while IR specialists have often been able historians of the actual events of past international history, they have often proved rather lax in the study of the history of the ideas of their own discipline. Traditionally, the purpose of history within IR has been more as a source on which current theories can be applied, rather than as a means of studying where that history has come from. 1 Thus, the period of the 1930s has been treated more as a vindication of realist thought, and the disproving of idealism, rather than as the site of different ideas about the international sphere. Modern IR theorists have regarded the interwar period as the testing ground of modern realism, and thus they have tended to ignore the theoretical debates of the time. Instead they have imposed the view of an arriviste idealism, which is beaten off by the atemporal tenets of realism. The latter, in turn, are given new vigor by their reapplication to post-war international politics.
