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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.

Papers presented at a conference devoted to the applications of game theory to negotiations, held under the auspices of the Institute for defense analyses, at Princeton university, Princeton, N.J., Oct. 7, 1961.

A plea for theory as the core of the discipline of international relations, stressing that the present confusion concerning the proper method & purposes of the discipline can be dispelled only by systematic empirical theory divorced from 'policy scientism' & reconnected with pol'al philosophy. The main contemporary theories are reviewed & critically discussed: the `realist' theory of power politics, philosophies of history, behavioral `systems' theory (based on a confusion between the methods of the physical sci's & the purposes of the soc sci's & consequently unable to explain world politics), & attempts at organizing the discipline around a central unifying concept such as equilibrium or decision-making. Instead of such theories, 2 kinds of systematic res are suggested: (1) historical sociol (description & comparison of historical systems of international relations, analyzed in terms of 4 series of data: the structure of the world, the forces which cut across the units, the relations between the domestic & the foreign policy of those units, the relations between them); & (2) the building of `relevant utopias' (a resumption of the traditional task of pol'al philosophy which would take into account the realities of world politics so as to avoid impatient perfectionism). AA-IPSA.

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.