The English School’s Histories and International Relations

Abstract

Ian Hall’s chapter on the English school explores an important episode in the development of international relations (IR) theory in the English-speaking worlds, one that showcases the importance of history as the disciplinary matrix for the English School of International Relations. In Britain, Hall argues, IR “bore some of the scars of earlier debates” in the field of history, and in particular those resulting from the multi-pronged reaction against the crisis of progressive visions of history (or the “Whig” conception of history, as it would be popularized by Herbert Butterfield). Hall distinguishes three reactions to the post-First World War unraveling of what he calls “developmental historicism”: a more radical historicism, represented by Collingwood and Oakeshott; a modernist response open to the social sciences and eventually ending in some form of social history; and the synthesis between the previous two attempted by Butterfield, which would define the historiographical profile of the English school, and be taken in different directions by Hedley Bull and Martin Wight.