ABSTRACT
In a rather generous and sympathetic appraisal of my work Richard Falk has recently argued that I had “always been a Humean”, and that he remembers me as one graduate student at Princeton who did not have to engage with lengthy soul-searching that is usually part of a graduate career.1 True, by the time I met Richard and he had become my dissertation mentor I was well on my way to defining my approach to politics that – admittedly – was rather removed from the dominant “isms”, be it realism, liberalism, or (at that time still) Marxism. Robert Gilpin had encouraged me during my seminars to follow up on the issue of “conventions”, which seemed promising to him, but coming from a “realist” his suggestion left me somewhat puzzled at first. Actual help could have been available just a few buildings down College Walk since David Lewis was – if I remember correctly – at that time still in the philosophy department at Princeton. Unfortunately, I never met him and
only later discovered his work which took off from Hume. Rather, it was Richard Falk who (in a long talk several months after the dissertation defense) twisted my arm and encouraged me to draw out the implications on signaling, on the emergence of custom, and of “unspoken rules” which develop through interaction, all of which had been the topic of my dissertation (which dealt with the emergence of the Cold War and attempts of détente).2 What was needed was a much more integrated statement of a research program that could be built on such a conventionalist approach.
