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The Science, or as others prefer to call it, the study of international relations is one of the youngest members of the family of the social sciences. Its independent status has not yet been fully recognized by all academic circles and many historians and international lawyers would consider it to be trespassing on their respective fields of study. This is especially true for Europe.

It has become customary to begin a discussion of the nature and present state of the discipline of international relations with a number of complaints. This article will not abandon the custom; indeed, its purpose is, in the first place, to state the conviction that many of the problems we face in our field can be solved only by far more systematic theoretical work than has been done in the past—a conviction shared by most writers. Secondly, however, I will try to show that recent approaches to a general theory of international relations are unsatisfactory, because each one is, in its own fashion, a short cut to knowledge—sometimes even a short cut to a destination that is anything but knowledge.

How far may we hope to go in theorizing about international affairs? That question is at the center of this article, which consists of several more or less eclectic stabs at the problem.I shall be writing as though some theory of power politics were the only possible candidate for being the theory of international relations. Let that be regarded as an act of methodological faith—certainly I can think of no scientific demonstration of it, and I would rather leave the philosophy of the matter for another occasion. There are a number of stock objections against any general theory of international relations oriented towards power politics, and these I shall try to rebut, chiefly by extending and correcting my own previous efforts in the genre. I shall then introduce objections of a rather more abstract sort, and, again from my own previous work, I shall try to show that the difficulties which these latter present are indeed formidable. But I hope it will be understood that neither kind of objection need be relevant to meories of international relations other than those built around the concepts of force, power, and security.