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Debates about Debates
Probably every academic field gives rise to a meta-narrative. This overarching narrative
provides a thumbnail sketch of the field’s intellectual history; it also identifies a set of problems
deemed as central to the field as well as the leading alternative approaches to dealing with those
problems. Such a meta-narrative provides a way to socialize new graduate students into the field.
It is also useful in framing research. For example, when scholars submit a paper for publication,
the meta-narrative makes it simple for scholars to describe in the paper’s introduction how their
research relates to the rest of their field.
In International Relations, the standard view of the field emphasizes the concept of
debates. From a diachronic perspective, the meta-narrative holds that the field has developed
through a series of “great debates.” These eventually gave rise to a more-or-less stable set of
major paradigms, permitting the field to be described in a synchronic perspective as driven by
various inter-paradigm debates.
Most overviews of IR theory agree that there are now three major paradigms. It is
potentially troubling to note, however, that theorists do not always agree on the names of the
major paradigms or on where the boundaries between them are. It is possible that this results
from a truncated view of what the debates are about. If so, issues that are being debated without
attracting much explicit notice might be creating some of the difficulty knowing where one
paradigm ends and another begins.
The notion that there are three major paradigms or traditions apparently began with
Martin Wight and his followers in the so-called English School. All prominent summaries of the
major paradigms identify realism as one of their set. In addition to the realist tradition, Wight
also distinguished what he labeled the rationalist and revolutionist traditions.
1
Especially in the
work of Wight’s student, Hedley Bull, these three traditions have been associated with Hobbes,
Grotius, and Kant, respectively. One sign of terminological fluidity, however, is that Bull
departs from Wight’s labels, and calls the Grotian approach “internationalist” and the Kantian
approach “universalist.”
2
1
Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991). This
book was published posthumously on the basis of lectures Wight gave in the 1950s.
2
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1977), pp. 24-27.
Convention