ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted principally to exploring an academic debate that occurred in the field of IR subsequent to World War II. My primary intention is to reconstruct the main elements of the conversation that characterized the debate, and my purpose is to provide additional support to the revisionist consensus that the story of the first great debate between interwar idealists and realists during the 1930s and 1940s is little more than a disciplinary myth. The chapter is, in many ways, a response to some of the intriguing claims that Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran made in their 2005 Review of International Studies article where they concluded “that the concept of a ’First Debate’ is best regarded as a ’half-truth,’ or highly distorted and overly simplistic caricature, rather than a complete fiction” (Quirk and Vigneswaran 2005: 91). After carefully examining the pre- and post-World War II period of the field’s disciplinary history, I argue that there is indeed evidence of a great debate between “idealism” and “realism,” but, as the revisionists have demonstrated, it did not occur in the 1930s and 1940s. The debate that I describe took place after World War II. The focus of the debate, which I reconstruct in detail, was about the American national interest, and it was informed by rival theoretical conceptions of international politics. I argue that in order to understand the contours of the debate on the American national interest, it is necessary to view it in its proper internal disciplinary context. 1
