Suchergebnisse

Gunther Hellmann, Klaus Dieter Wolf, and Michael Zürn (eds.), Die neuen Internationalen
Beziehungen. Forschungsstand und Perspektiven in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos
Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), pp. 614.The intensification in recent years of interest in the history and sociology of IR (as a discipline) has been manifested in a growing number of publications dealing with aspects of different IR communities. The appearance of a weighty and semi-official volume summarising the state of the art in German IR is therefore a noteworthy development, and one that merits attention beyond the German-speaking world where it will find its main audience. I refer to this volume as 'semi-official' because it has been published under the auspices of the Section for International Politics of the German Political Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, DVPW). The book does not attempt to speak for IR scholars in Austria or Switzerland and so represents a national rather than a linguistic community, though not all the contributors teach at universities in Germany.

Recent literature on the disciplinary history of IR has furthered our understanding of aspects of the discipline without specifying its own methods clearly enough. 'Critical' or 'internal discursive' disciplinary historians have rejected Quentin Skinner's contextual approach to the history of ideas in ways that suggest they have misunderstood it, and have failed to appreciate its potential. Furthermore, 'critical IR' itself can and should be subjected to intellectual-historical examination. The article suggests that 'critical IR' has been a form of anglophone academic radicalism specific to the late Cold War and early post-Cold War periods, and advocates further comparative work on the history of non-anglophone IR communities.

Because international relations (IR) has been considered an American social science, IR has been unable to make any universal claims. This article offers some tools to investigate the movement of ideas from one context to another, since a detailed study of international cultural & scientific relations is essential. A dichotomy between the domestic & world markets is used to investigate bounded IR communities. The contributions of the German & French IR communities as to questions of culture & civilization in world politics are examined because they can be observed over time. Since Anglo-Saxon IR scholars have paid insufficient attention to the possibility of divergence between different intellectual communities, the article addresses some often overlooked areas of the global aspect of IR. E. Larsen