International relations and the 'problem of history'

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 115-136

  Vaughan Williams, Nick ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844439061     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298050340011301     Document Type: Review

References (126)

1. Throughout the article I follow the convention of using capital letters to distinguish between International Relations (IR) and History as academic disciplines on the hand, and international relations and history as subject matter on the other.
2. Stephen Hooben, 'Historical Sociology: Back to the Future of International Relations?', in Historical Sociology of International Relation, eds. Stephen Hobden and John Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50.
3. R. B. J. Walker, 'History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1989): 171.
4. The most obvious example being Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1979).
5. Hobden and Hobson, Historical Sociology, 4-5.
6. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, 'The Benefits of a Social-Scientific Approach', in Contending Approaches to International Politics, eds. Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 53
7. Christopher Thorne, 'International Relations and the Promptings of History', in Review of International Studies, 9, (1983), 123
8. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 1-2.
9. Duncan S. A. Bell, 'International Relations: the Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3, no. 1 (2001): 115-126.
10. Hobden, 'Back to the Future?', 56.
11. Bell, 'Historiographical Turn?', 123.
12. There are, however, notable exceptions. See for example Richard K. Ashley, 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Post-Structuralism, and War', in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, eds. James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989);
13. David Campbell, 'MetaBosnia: Narratives of the Bosnian War', Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 261-81;
14. Patrick Finney, 'Still Marking Tune? Text, Discourse, and Truth in International History', Review of International Studies 27 (2001): 291-308;
15. Jonathan Isacoff, 'On the Historical Imagination of International Relations: the Case for a Deweyan Reconstruction', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2002): 603-626;
16. and Thomas Smith, History and International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
17. Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), ix.
18. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1.
19. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 263.
20. Alan Feldman, Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 17.
21. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 262.
22. Gabrielle Spiegel, 'History and Post-modernism', Past and Present 131 (1991): 194-208.
23. Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London and New York. Routledge, 1997), 38.
24. See, for example, Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970), 132.
25. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 57-8.
26. Ibid., 57.
27. G. Elton, The Practice of History (London. Fontana, 1969), 70.
28. Jenkins, Rethinking History, 57, my emphasis.
29. Ibid., 58.
30. Jenkins, Rethinking History.
31. Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
32. Notably, A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: Fontana, 1973).
33. See Christopher Haigh, The English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
34. Jenkinss, Refiguring History, 15.
35. Ibid., 3.
36. Ibid., 19.
37. Ibid., 29.
38. Though, as Foucault points out, the concept of 'ideology' is not unproblematic, 'because it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth'.
39. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. and ed. Colin Gordon (Padstow: The Harvester Press Ltd, 1980), 118.
40. Jenkins, Rethinking History, 21.
41. Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85.
42. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6, (London: Penguin, 2003).
43. Jenkins, Rethinking History, 31.
44. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), x.
45. Ibid., 5.
46. Ibid., ix.
47. Ibid., 11.
48. David Roberts, Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 5.
49. See, for example, Lawrence Stone, 'History and Post-Modernism', Past and Present 131 (1991): 217-8.
50. Arthur Marwick, 'Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (Including Post-Modernism) and the Historical', Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (1995): 29, my emphasis.
51. Though, for Marwick, 'at least Derrida had a charming playfulness about him',
52. See, for example, Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4;
53. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 48;
54. and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 150,
55. and The Function of Criticism:.From 'the Speculator' to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 96.
56. Finney, 'Still Marking Time?', 296.
57. Stone, 'History and Post-Modernism', 217.
58. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2nd ed. (London: Granta Books, 2000), 124
59. Finney, 'Still Marking Time?', 296.
60. Patrick Finney, 'Beyond the Postmodern Moment?' (unpublished article under review), 25.
61. This point is made by Spiegel in 'History and Post-Modernism'.
62. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
63. See Russell Berman, 'Troping to Pretoria: the Rise and Fall of Deconstruction', Telos 85 (1990).
64. Jacques Derrida, 'Following Theory: Jacques Derrida', in life.after.theory, eds. Michael Payne and John Schad (London and New York: Continuum, 2003).
65. This phrase is borrowed from Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: the Frankfurt School, Existentialism, and Post-Structuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
66. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 1981), 41.
67. See for example, Jacques Derrida, '"What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!" Letter to a Japanese Friend', in Derrida and Difference, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985).
68. Derrida, Positions, 41.
69. Ibid., 42.
70. Ibid., 43.
71. Ibid.
72. See Jacques Derrida, 'Differance', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1982).
73. Martin McQuillan, ed, Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 16.
74. This point, of course, also calls into question the veracity of the metaphysical tendency to privilege 'speech' over 'writing' as if it were somehow more direct, unmediated, pure or self-present.
75. Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 26.
76. Derrida, Positions, 24.
77. Derrida, 'Differance', 3.
78. Derrida, Positions, 110.
79. Ibid., 111.
80. Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, 26.
81. Roberts, Nothing But History, 194.
82. Ibid., 196.
83. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 5.
84. Derrida, in Payne and Schad, life.after.theory, 27.
85. Ibid., 21.
86. Ibid., 27.
87. Roberts, Nothing But History, 106.
88. Payne and Schad, life.after.theory, 44.
89. Tony Bennett, 'Texts in History: the Determinations of Readings and Their Texts', in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, eds. Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 109.
90. Caroline Williams, in Politics and Post-structuralism: an Introduction, eds. Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 33.
91. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, 'Derrida and Fidelity to History', History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 16.
92. Ibid., 18.
93. Derrida, Positions, 56-9.
94. Rayment-Pickard, 'Derrida and Fidelity', 18.
95. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5.
96. Jacques Derrida, 'The Time is Out of Joint', in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp, (New York. New York University Press, 1995), 25.
97. David. Carroll, ed., The States of 'Theory': History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990), 11.
98. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 29.
99. Ibid., 34-5.
100. Ibid., 36, emphasis added.
101. Derrida, Archive Fever, 68.
102. Ibid., 68.
103. Ibid., 90.
104. Isacoff, 'Historical Imagination'.
105. S. Burchill, ed., Theories of International Relations, 2nd ed. (Hampshire and New York. Palgrave, 1996), 6-7.
106. Smith, History, 11.
107. Ibid., 1.
108. Finney, 'Still Marking Time?', 293.
109. Colin Elman and Miriam Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 27, emphasis added.
110. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 264.
111. Of course this term is fraught with difficulties; not least that most writers with whom it most commonly associated would deny its salience. Derrida, for example, is 'eager to maintain [the concept of 'post-structuralism'] as suspect and problematic'.
112. Jacques Derrida, 'Deconstruction: The Im-Possible', in French Theory in America, eds. Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 16.
113. Finney, 'Still Marking Time?', 292.
114. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 279.
115. Sergei Prozorov, 'X/Xs: Prolegomena Towards a General Theory of the Exception', paper presented at the Beyond the State Conference, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 27-30 October 2004, 20.
116. Jacques Derrida, 'Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms', in States of 'Theory', 85-6.
117. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 279.
118. Derrida, 'Statements and Truisms', 85-6.
119. Ibid., 68.
120. Ibid., 92, emphasis edded.
121. Ibid., 92-3.
122. Campbell, National Deconstruction.
123. Feldman, Formations of Violence.
124. Campbell, 'MetaBosnia', 281.
125. Smith, History, 11.
126. Ashley, 'Border Lines', 274.