Where are We Now in the Debate about the First Great Debate?

Much progress has been made in understanding what happened in the early years of the field of International Relations (IR) and how it came to be represented as it did. While there may not be a consensus on how the early decades of IR should be characterized, the simplistic representations that held sway in the past are now widely rejected, and there is a far greater appreciation of the complexity of the ideational and discursive reality of the time. It is gratifying that my ‘Myth of the First Great Debate’ (Wilson 1998) was a spur to the growth of this appreciation. But while I have contributed to this growth in various ways since its publication, particularly through my work on Woolf, Carr and Murray, I have not hitherto engaged, at least not directly, with the other main contributions to what might be called the debate about the first great debate. This is what I intend to do in this concluding chapter, with the overriding objective of discerning where we are now in this debate.