ABSTRACT
The modern academic study of International Relations (IR) was a consequence of the great inter-state conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. Its problematic was war, endemic insecurity and the possibilities of peace through international cooperation, and its focus was upon nation-state actors in an international system without centralised authority. In the dominant Realist conception, a Hobbesian anarchy prevailed in which order might only precariously be maintained through a balance of power. Twentieth-century political Realism, as most famously expounded by Carr (1939) and Morgenthau (1948), was in itself a conscious reaction to political and military events of the 1930s and 1940s, and in particular to the way in which they supposedly demonstrated the bankruptcy of an earlier academic orthodoxy, liberal internationalism—or, as the Realists would style it, Idealism or Utopianism. The latter flourished in the aftermath of the Great War and brought an essentially optimistic and liberal approach to the project of reforming the international system through the building of cooperative institutions and the development of international law.
