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AbstractC. Wright Mills's critical work on international relations is well known, but is often dismissed as being unscholarly, reductionist, and overly polemical. However, seeing the work in the context of his earlier career can allow for a new perspective, with Mills's activist views on war and militarism shaped very clearly by his earlier theoretical and political commitments. Mills developed a distinctive political sociological understanding of international politics, theorising the state as a historically-situated structural determinant of international power: a network of elite power that was contextualised by the influence of the socially constructed realities of the international created by elites. Mills's crucial critical contribution was to see the role of the intellectual as criticising these realities through the imaginative reconceptualisation of the world, which he called the 'politics of truth'. The article argues the international politics of truth was not only Mills's distinctive theory of the international, but that it was clearly supported by his early theorisation of the international. A revised view of the importance of Mills's international relations work can help to situate Mills as part of a broader tradition of IR scholarship, a lost lineage of the critical historical and political sociology of the international.

The article develops the insights of historical institutionalism and cognate work within International Relations to examine the development of security institutions within states, dealing specifically with the development of the National Security Council (NSC) in the United States. The case focuses on the creation and reproduction of the NSC as a means to fostering civil-military coordination within the US state. The article argues that exogenous shocks are crucial in providing the necessary freedom to change existing institutions, which are then set on new contingent paths. Substantively, it is argued that World War II and the experiences derived from it provided a critical juncture for the creation of new security institutions such as the NSC, and once created the NSC was characterized by forms of path dependence that have reproduced the institution over time. The article demonstrates how historical institutionalism can clarify causal mechanisms that better explain the origins and durability of internationally oriented security institutions within states. Adapted from the source document.