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The notion of the sovereign was one response to social disorder; obsession with witchcraft was another. Neither reaction is far distant from us. Not long ago public-spirited men condemned large numbers of innocents on witchcraft charges which they, and in many cases their victims, believed to be true. What was illusory was explained by an elaborate mythology to which rulers, jurists, and academics devoted detailed study. What was not the case was exactly described in learned and reputable volumes. A modern founder of the notion of sovereignty, Bodin, was familiar to many of his contemporaries for the handbook on witchcraft that he published in 1586. Demons and spirits might be a source of disorder. Its cure, in Bodin's view, lay in the creation of a supreme centralized power.

It is not simply because an inter-disciplinary journal is such a rarity that a retiring editor of the Review looks back on an unusual experience. In the variety of responses to the challenge of studying international relations two opposing general tendencies constantly assert themselves. One is the tendency to see international problems wholly in terms familiar to long established disciplines; the other is to define international relations so particularly as to exclude contributions from traditional modes of understanding. The existence of the Review suggests that its own correct and humane function is to moderate both these tendencies, without thereby depleting the ambition to create new styles of discourse or the determination to maintain the vigour of the old. Among its more demanding readership the Review may even stimulate efforts to transcend them. Selecting, commissioning and preparing material for publication with such aims in mind certainly tests the categories of the editor's own thinking to an unusual degree. For this experience he ought to be, and in the present case certainly is, duly grateful.

There now exists a substantial body of publications on international relations which may be fairly described as the output of a distinct school. Though its seminal thinkers, Charles Manning and Martin Wight, are no longer with us, the core of its extant membership (Hedley Bull, Michael Donelan, F. S. Northedge, Robert Purnell and others) is still in its prime and young recruits are constantly coming forward. Though delighted by this human prospect, its literary possibilities find me something less than enthusiastic. For it seems to me that repetition has set in and is likely to get worse as the years pass.