898883
IPT0010.1177/1755088219898883Journal of International Political TheoryBevir and Hall
research-article2020
Article
The English school and
the classical approach:
Between modernism
and interpretivism
Journal of International Political Theory
2020, Vol. 16(2) 153–170
© The Author(s) 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219898883
DOI: 10.1177/1755088219898883
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Mark Bevir
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Ian Hall
Griffith University, Australia
Abstract
This article analyses the evolution of the English school’s approach to international
relations from the work of the early British Committee in the late 1950s and early
1960s to its revival in the 1990s and afterwards. It argues that the school’s so-called
‘classical approach’ was shaped by the crisis of developmental historicism brought on
by the First World War and by the reactions of historians like Herbert Butterfield
and Martin Wight to the rise of modernist social science in the twentieth century.
It characterises the classical approach, as advanced by Hedley Bull, as a form of
‘reluctant modernism’ with underlying interpretivist commitments and unresolved
tensions with modernist approaches. It argues that to resolve some of the confusion
concerning its preferred approach to the study of international relations, the English
school should return to the interpretivist commitments of its early thinkers.
Keywords
Classical approach, English school of international relations, historicism, international
relations theory, interpretive theory, interpretivism
The English school of international relations (IR) has long been criticised for an apparent
lack of clarity about its preferred approach to researching the field (see, for example,
Copeland, 2003 or Finnemore, 2001). Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that the
Corresponding author:
Ian Hall, Griffith University, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, QLD 4111, Australia.
Email:
[email protected]
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Journal of International Political Theory 16(2)
school is characterised by ‘methodological naïveté’ (Holsti, 2009: 126). In response, some
in the English school argue that an absence of commitments to particular philosophical
and methodological positions is actually an advantage, because it supposedly provides its
adherents more analytical flexibility than its competitors (see, for example, Little, 2000).
Others have responded by seeking to clarify a set of methods they think appropriate for
the school (see especially Navari, 2009; cf. Murray, 2013). Rightly, in our view, they contend that the school stands for more than just a concept or set of concepts, as Little (2000)
or Buzan (2014) suggest, and that it represents a distinctive way of studying IR.
We argue, however, that not enough has yet been done to lay out the philosophical
commitments of the school and its key figures, despite the pioneering work of Suganami
(1983), Dunne (1998) and others. This work is necessary, we think, both because the
early school did stand for a particular, so-called ‘classical approach’ distinct from other
contemporary schools of thought, and because the interpretivism of some of its members
holds out the possibility of developing new and valuable research agendas in contemporary IR. This article therefore seeks to explain the foundations of the English school’s
so-called ‘classical approach’ (Bull, 1966) and to make the case for re-grounding the
contemporary school in a thoroughgoing interpretivism. It revisits the work of the early
school, especially the work of Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight and Hedley Bull. To
better grasp their commitments, it discusses their work in the wider context of intellectual debates about the study of history and politics that arose after the end of the First
World War. In particular, it situates it in the crisis of what we call ‘developmental historicism’ and the emergence of the modernist social sciences. The article then traces how the
classical approach emerged as a response to those two pressures and why it took the form
that it did, as a kind of halfway house between interpretivism and modernism.1
Throughout, we highlight the early English school’s commitments to interpretivist
positions: to historicism and historical explanation; to the investigation of beliefs, theories, ideas and ethical principles, and their relationship to social institutions, norms and
rules; and to explaining social behaviour by reference to the meanings that actions have
for socially situated agents.2 We recognise, of course, that parts of the early English
school – and indeed the revived school, from the mid-1990s onwards – are committed to
other approaches borrowed from what we call the ‘modernist social sciences’. But we
argue that this borrowing – which over time produced what we call a kind of ‘reluctant
modernism’3 – undermines the claim that the ‘classical approach’ offers a distinctive and
superior way of researching IR, fuelling the charge that the school is confused and naive.
In sum, we suggest that a thoroughgoing interpretivism offers both a better way of doing
social science and a better foundation for the English school.
The origins of the classical approach
Like the wider field of IR in Britain, the English school was established by scholars from
different disciplines, including law, philosophy and theology. Historians, however, predominated (Dunne, 1999; Hall, 2012, 2019). Their disciplinary background and beliefs
shaped the evolution of the field, the school and the classical approach. But so too did
developments within history and within the social sciences in the inter-war and post-war
years to which they had to respond, especially the collapse of ‘developmental
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historicism’ and the rise of modernist social science. The reluctant modernist ‘classical
approach’ took the form that it did, we argue, because it was a compromise: it attempted
to preserve a historicist orientation – albeit shorn of the progressivism inherent in development historicism – while incorporating some modernist aims and methods.
Developmental historicism and modernist empiricism
Developmental historicism was the dominant approach to the study of history and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bevir, 2016, 2017: 1–16; Burrow,
1981; Collini et al., 1983; Den Otter, 1996). It was ‘historicist’ in that it assumed that at
different times societies had different beliefs, practices and institutions. It was ‘developmental’ because it held that each successive society in history displayed superior beliefs,
practices and institutions, demonstrating progress over time. It was influenced by romanticism, which emphasised the ability of human agents to make and remake social life;
Whiggism, which viewed history as story of the eventual triumph of political forms that
upheld personal liberty; and Hegelian Idealism, which conceived history progressing
through stages in which greater human freedom was achieved at each stage, culminating
in the creation of nation-states (Bevir, 2016: 585–586).
Developmental historicists produced narratives that demonstrated continuity and progress in social life. Both historians and political scientists used these narratives to try to
educate present political practitioners and the public, affirming JR Seeley’s aphorism that
‘History without political science has no fruit; political science without history has no
root’ (Den Otter, 2007: 37; cf. Bryce, 1909). They focused on the evolution of ideas and
institutions – especially on those that developmental historicists believed had progressively banished falsehood and tyranny – and constructed narratives that aimed to demonstrate how such progress had come about. At the same time, they considered the research
they undertook to be scientific, in so far as they were committed to inductive empiricism,
and believed it properly consisted of the systematic analysis of historical artefacts.
The First World War plunged developmental historicism into crisis, undermining confidence in progress, in Western social institutions as the pinnacle of human achievement,
and in the nation-state as the best vehicle for the realisation of human liberty (Bevir,
2017: 5; cf. Blaas, 1978). It also fuelled doubts about the value of history and the historical profession, both of which had been put in the service of the nation-state during the
conflict, with historians enlisted in wartime as political advisors and propagandists.
Critiques of developmental historicism emerged (including Butterfield, 1931; Namier,
1929), opening the door to modernist approaches to studying the past and the social
sciences (Bentley, 2006; Ross, 1991).
Modernists followed Emile Durkheim’s call to treat ‘social facts as things’, akin to
natural phenomena (Hollis, 2002: 99). They set aside historical narratives as the best
means of explaining social life in favour of new typologies, schemes and measurements, dividing the world into discrete and discontinuous units that could be compared
and manipulated (Bevir, 2017). Modernists focused on processes, functions and systems, exploring the relationships between different elements of what developmental
historicists had treated as a social whole. To explain human behaviour, they turned away
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from the established canons of ethics and political theory, moving instead towards economics and psychology (see, for example, Wallas, 1908).
The rise of modernism did not mean an end to historical research. But it did mean that
narratives occupied a smaller place in political science and public policy, and even in
academic history. Many historians also adopted modernist topics and techniques, borrowing from economics, psychology, sociology and statistics (Saler, 2017). Social scientists increasingly shunned original historical research, relying instead on syntheses of
existing scholarship to provide the material they needed for their studies of contemporary politics. They used history more as a source of data and they used historical narratives less often as the means for explaining those data. Their theories and explanations
relied more on atomization, classification, statistical correlations, or identification of
functions within a system (see Bevir, 2017).
The crisis of developmental historian and the rise of modernism did not entail a complete end to historicism either. Before the First World War, some radical historicists like
Benedetto Croce (1921) had begun to reject developmentalism and progressivism, while
continuing to assert the ubiquity of change in social life and the necessity to interpret
political events and behaviour in their historical contexts. In the 1930s and 1940s in
Britain, the Oxford philosopher RG Collingwood (1946) and his Cambridge counterpart
Michael Oakeshott (1933) championed similar views. They argued that historians should
be sceptical of atomizing typologies, models and correlations of modernist social science, and aim instead accurately to represent change and contingency in historical narratives reconstructed by way of inductive studies of human life in past contexts. In this
way, historicism survived, but shorn of the link with developmentalism.4
The origins of the classical approach
The English school’s founders – especially Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight – were
deeply affected, both positively and negatively, by the crisis of developmental historicism. In the inter-war years, Butterfield played a major role in critiquing it (Bentley,
2011: 95–118; cf. Butterfield, 1931). Both scholars disliked its innate progressivism and
complained that its narratives were often moralistic. They deprecated its indulgent treatment of nationalism and its assumption that the nation-state was the best means to deliver
liberty (Hall, 2002: 735–736, 2006: 65–85). They did not, however, think that modernist
social science was preferable. In general, they worried that it too was implicitly progressivist, and argued that it was too narrowly utilitarian. In response, they developed
approaches to the study of IR that kept history at its core, retained a focus on ideas and
institutions, made use of elements of modernist empiricism in an attempt to hold progressivism and moralism at bay, and adopted elements of radical historicism. In this way, the
early English school laid the groundwork for what we call the ‘reluctant modernism’
that, we argue, emerged especially with Bull.
A science of statecraft?
Butterfield (1931) argued that developmental historicism produced bad history and
threatened to turn historians into propagandists. He urged historians to produce what he
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called ‘technical history’ instead, relying on inductive empiricism and purging themselves of present-minded prejudice by what he called ‘self-emptying’. He argued that
they should aim to construct neutral narratives of historical events that could be accepted
by all or most observers (Butterfield, 1944, 1951a: 133). He knew that this was an unattainable ideal, recognising that present-mindedness always crept in and that ‘imaginative
sympathy’ was needed to write good history (Butterfield, 1955: 170; cf. Bentley, 2011:
233–259). But he still thought that professional historians ought to strive to realise it –
and be seen to strive for it – if they were to avoid becoming and being perceived as political partisans (Bentley, 2011: 95–118).
Butterfield favoured a modernist historiography in which the rigorous application of
historical method might generate authoritative narratives, as opposed to what he saw as
prejudiced, often moralistic stories of developmental historicists. He was not, however,
enthusiastic about the modernist social sciences and their aspirations to inform policy.
With IR specifically in mind, he argued they often produced ‘dabblers in a journalistic
type of thinking’ who were too ‘direct’ in their ‘utilitarian intention’ (Butterfield, 1949:
2–3). He believed that history provided a better training for both scholars and practitioners. In his view, history was more ‘scientific’ than the social sciences, since it supposedly
inculcated a dispassionate, open-minded and methodical approach to evidence and
argument, and could nurture a more nuanced understanding of the human condition
(Butterfield, 1951b).
At the same time, he pursued a ‘science of statecraft’ underpinned by his preferred
approach to the past. From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, he explored a series of other
attempts to generate such a ‘science’, especially Machiavelli’s (Butterfield, 1940) and
Napoleon’s (Butterfield, 1939), and read widely in American IR, especially in classical
realism (see Hall, 2002: 727–734; cf. Butterfield, 1953, 1960; Coll, 1985). Butterfield
believed that what he called a ‘geometry’ of IR might be possible, but rejected the search
for covering laws (Butterfield, 1960: 51, 1975). Even if such things could be found, he
believed, human agents, endowed with free will, could (and would) defy social scientists’ expectations and break the ‘rules’.
Butterfield’s ‘geometry’ consisted instead of those explicit and tacit rules of conduct
that he thought ‘statesmen’ used to construct and maintain international order. Order
came into being, he argued, when ‘statesmen’ held the right beliefs about how IR ought
to be managed and behaved accordingly. His ‘science’ was a search for those right
beliefs, which he judged reached their highest point of sophistication in eighteenth-century European diplomacy. The theory and practice of that era, he argued, dedicated itself
to the essential tasks of upholding the ‘balance of power’ and keeping ideology and
moralism out of ‘international society’ (see Butterfield, 1966). For Butterfield, then, the
object of IR was to investigate such beliefs, explain the reasons why successful ‘statesmen’ adhered to them, and why they acted as they did. If that is what it did, IR might help
to inform policymakers, who could draw on the stock of wisdom thus generated. Despite
Butterfield’s modernist emphasis on method, in other words, his science of statecraft was
interpretivist, focused on explaining the actions of historically situated agents in terms of
the meanings those actions have for those performing them.
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IR as historical interpretation
Wight was more hostile to modernism than Butterfield, despite his doubts about developmental historicism. He disliked the confident nationalism of developmental historicists
and found their progressivism incompatible with his Christian faith, since it ran counter to
his conviction that secular history has no direction or meaning (Hall, 2006: 38–40, 53–
54). But he was also sceptical about modernist history, arguing it was epistemologically
naïve. Wight rejected the idea that ‘technical history’ was possible and satirised modernist
historians as bloodless ‘prophets of historiographical cybernetics’ (quoted in Hall, 2006:
46). He preferred the historicist interpretivism of Croce and Collingwood. He recognised
that historical facts do not exist independently of historians – they are made, not found,
and depend on prior knowledge acquired by socialisation about what constitutes them.
For that reason, he rejected ‘the old-fashioned positivist belief in “the facts” . . . as something separable from their interpretation’ (quoted in Hall, 2006: 51).
Wight spent much effort in the late 1940s and 1950s wrestling with the challenge of
how best to approach IR. His early foray, in the Chatham House pamphlet Power Politics,
produced a kind of taxonomy of international rules and conventions, laying out different
understandings of concepts like ‘great power’ or ‘alliances’ (Wight, 1946). When he
arrived at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1949, Wight was confronted by the
new approaches to the field being employed there and nearby. He was not wholly convinced, however, by the argument of CAW Manning (1962), that IR should be understood as ‘meta-diplomatics’ – a kind of Wittgensteinian game whose rules scholars
should focus on discerning (1962: x; 200–216; cf. Jackson, 2020).5 At the same time, he
was repelled by the principal alternative to Manning’s interpretivism – the modernist,
mechanistic, sociological approach, focused on the role and distribution of power,
favoured by Georg Schwarzenberger at University College, London (Hall, 2006: 90–91;
cf. Schwarzenberger, 1951).
Instead, Wight (1950) settled uncomfortably into the position that IR should involve
a blend of ‘contemporary history’ and something that he called the ‘Sociology of the
International Community’ – essentially the study of the norms, rules and institutions
particular to the practice of inter-state relations. The latter involved compromising
with the modernist social sciences, adopting the comparative method and borrowing
some concepts, like that of an ‘institution’, from anthropology and sociology.6 He did
not believe, however, that IR ought also to accept what he called the ‘pragmatic’
orientation of the social sciences, and welcomed the fact that his LSE students ‘did not
regard International Relations as being of any use’ (Wight, 1950). Wight’s teaching in
the 1950s, on both international institutions and later on theory, reflected both convictions: his lectures involved trans-historical comparisons of ideas and institutions, but
without prescription (Hall, 2006: 113–114; Wight, 1990).7
After a decade of contemplating the problem, Wight (1966b) decided that ‘Politics:
International Politics = Political Theory: Historical Interpretation’ (1966b: 33). He concluded that ‘[w]orks of international history . . . convey the nature of foreign policy and
the working of the state-system better than much recent theoretical writing based on the
new methodologies’. ‘It is not simply’, Wight (1966b) argued,
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. . . that historical literature is doing a different job from systems analysis. Historical literature
at the same time does the same job – the job of offering a coherent structure of hypotheses that
will provide a common explanation of phenomena; but it does the job with more judiciousness
and modesty, and with closer attention to the record of international experience. (1966b: 32)
Wight was not talking here about mere technical histories or neutral narratives, as
Butterfield envisaged them. The kind of history he had in mind was work that had some
kind of underlying ‘philosophy of history’ that gave the story ‘theoretical coherence’
(Wight, 1955: 284). It explains as well as describes, by reference to that underlying
philosophy. But the best history, he thought, was history with a moral, especially
history-as-tragic-drama, in which the narrative of events and theory that informed it
was underpinned by a deeper conception of the human predicament (see Chiaruzzi,
2016; cf. Hall, 2006: 59–60).
Wight’s own approach to IR was straightforward. Like Butterfield, he focused on
ideas, ranging across Western thought from the Greeks onwards in search of snippets
of ‘international theory’ in the reflections of practitioners or the thought of scholars
(see especially Wight, 1966a, 1966b, 1990, 2005). This project was underpinned by the
conviction that these beliefs and arguments informed the behaviour of practitioners,
positively and negatively, and that interpreting them helped explain their actions and
their own interpretations, sincere or otherwise, of those actions. For heuristic purposes –
especially for students – he used the comparative method to analyse the various elements
of these beliefs and arguments, but this by no means committed Wight to modernism
(Wight, 1990). Instead, like Butterfield, he remained concerned with interpreting the
meanings actions had for the – mainly diplomatic – actors who perform them.
Investigations and interpretations
This concern was clear in Diplomatic Investigations (Butterfield and Wight, 1966), a collection of essays originally presented at meetings of the British Committee on the Theory
of International Politics (BCTIP) that Butterfield chaired, and Wight later led. In its preface, they presented an oblique but clearly interpretivist manifesto about their preferred
approach to IR and to IR theory (Dunne and Hall, 2019).8 They began with the observation that the phrase ‘theory of international politics’ was ‘without wide currency or clear
meaning’ in Britain. Given this ambiguity, they took it ‘to cover enquiry into the nature of
the international states-system, the assumptions and idea of diplomacy, the principles of
foreign policy, the ethics of international relations and war’ – areas that they thought call
‘for new approaches and for academic treatment’ (Butterfield and Wight, 1966: 11). On
this basis, they drew contrasts between this understanding of the field and that evinced by
their American counterparts: ‘The British have probably been concerned more with the
historical than the contemporary, with the normative than the scientific, with the philosophical than the methodological, with principles than policy’ (Butterfield and Wight,
1966: 12). And they observed differences with between their approach and what they
perceived as its ‘antithesis’ – systems theory (Butterfield and Wight, 1966: 12).9
Butterfield and Wight went on to identify three ‘characteristics’ of approach taken in
the essays. The first they called their ‘frame of reference’, which was the ‘the diplomatic
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community itself, international society, the states-system’, not ‘the limits and uses of
international theory, nor the formulation of foreign policy-making’. The essays were
concerned with the ‘distinguishing marks’ of that community: ‘the way it functions, the
obligations of its members, its tested and established principles of political intercourse’.
The second was the absence of interest in ‘an all-embracing theoretical framework’ or
‘general theory’ – something which set the essays apart from systems theory, in particular. Instead, they took an ‘empirical and inductive’ approach, Butterfield and Wight
(1966) observed, and adopted a historical ‘point of view’, including a commitment to
exploring ‘classical’ thought they thought still relevant and useful (1966: 12). And the
last was their ‘pervading moral concern’, apparent in the appreciation that politics is the
realm of the ‘contingent and unforeseen’, in which ‘agonizing decisions have to be
made’. A key preoccupation was therefore clarifying the ‘principles of prudence and
moral obligation’ that practitioners themselves perceive, act upon, negotiate, and of
course transgress (Butterfield and Wight, 1966: 13).
Modernism and the classical approach
Tantalising though its preface was, Diplomatic Investigations did not offer a full
account of the preferred approach of the early English school, nor did it resolve the
differences between those of its various members (Dunne and Hall, 2019). Instead,
that task was performed by a junior member of the BCTIP, Hedley Bull. The same
year (Bull, 1966) the book was published, his account of the ‘classical approach’
appeared in World Politics. Unlike Butterfield or Wight, however, Bull had not been
trained as a historian, and partly as a result, his account reflected a different set of
assumptions and concerns. His early interests lay more with philosophy, thanks in
part to the charismatic Scottish philosopher, John Anderson, who had taught him at
the University of Sydney. Anderson imparted to Bull commitments to philosophical
realism and inductive empiricism that were at odds with Butterfield and Wight’s idealism and interpretivism, but which opened the door to some forms of modernist
social science (Jeffery, 2008).
Bull argued that the classical approach
derives from philosophy, history, and law, and that is characterized above all by explicit reliance
upon the exercise of judgment and by the assumptions that if we confine ourselves to strict
standards of verification and proof there is very little of significance that can be said about
international relations.
Instead, what ‘general propositions’ that can be made ‘must . . . derive from a scientifically imperfect process of perception or intuition’ and thus ‘cannot be accorded anything
more than the tentative and inconclusive status appropriate to their doubtful origin’ (Bull,
1966: 361).10 Intuition and judgement were necessary instruments, Bull (1966) maintained, because some of the ‘core questions’ of international theory were ‘at least in part
moral questions, which cannot by their nature be given any sort of objective answer, and
which can only be probed, clarified, reformulated, and tentatively answered from some
arbitrary standpoint, according to the method of philosophy’ (1966: 366).
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Bull argued that even ‘empirical questions’ were impossible to answer ‘scientifically’
by formulating testable hypotheses, because too much of importance would be left out of
the investigation. These included questions like ‘If we can speak of a society of sovereign states, does it presuppose a common culture or civilization?’ and ‘What is the place
of war in international society?’ – questions Bull (1966) asserted were ‘typical’ of international theory, but not testable in the manner of behaviouralism (1966: 367). To these
questions, ‘logical and rigorous’ answers could of course be found – and had been, by
thinkers like ‘Raymond Aron, Stanley Hoffmann, and Kenneth Waltz’ – but not in ways
behaviouralists preferred. Their work, Bull (1966) maintained, was scientific ‘in the
sense of being a coherent, precise, and orderly body of knowledge’, ‘consistent with the
philosophical foundations of modern science’, but it was also modest, recognising the
limits of what he took to be the dominant scientific approach (1966: 375).
Unfortunately, Bull spent more time dissecting the ‘scientific approach’ that he did
not like than he did defending his ‘classical’ alternative. But what he did say, and what
he wrote in a significant essay for Australian Outlook in 1972, made clear it was a form
of ‘reluctant modernism’. Although Bull’s classical approach was derived from ‘philosophy, history, and law’ it was not reducible to them, still less just to history, which
Butterfield and Wight suggested it might. Bull (1972) spelt this out in the later essay,
writing ‘I do not accept Martin Wight’s equation – Politics: International Politics =
Political Theory: Historical Interpretation’ (1972: 256). Confusingly, however, he still
described his preferred approach as being ‘historical’ and still argued that IR should be
‘studied historically’ (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000: 37).
For Bull, IR involved the study of the ‘states-system’ or ‘international society’, its
‘classic norms’ and practices. It did not, however, have its own ‘recognisable methods
and techniques’, unlike fields like ‘mathematics or history or philosophy or economics’.
Instead, it is a field of ‘contending approaches’, including a ‘historical’ one that was
characteristic of British IR (Bull, 1972: 255). ‘Historical study’, Bull (1972) argued,
‘was essential for four reasons’ – so that scholars ‘grasp’ the ‘singular nature’ of the
actors involved and that international politics is a ‘temporal sequence of events’; ‘because
the historical literature of International Relations constitutes an education in itself’;
because history ‘provides the cases against which empirical generalisations have to be
tested’; and because ‘theory itself has a history’ of which theorists should be aware
(1972: 256). But at the same time, Bull (1972) rejected the idea that IR ‘can or need be
studied only historically’, arguing that ‘theoretical inquiry’ in the field was a different
kind of activity, including the identification, formulation, and investigation of generalisations (1972: 257).
In this way, Bull maintained a kind of historicism, but shifted the focus of the English
school away from Butterfield and Wight’s concerns with interpreting the beliefs and
behaviour of ‘statesmen’ and the diplomatic community. His interest lay in the theorising
of what he thought of as the normative and regulatory structure of ‘international society’,
rather than in exploring the international thought of particular past and present practitioners, and in the modernist project of generating generalisations about international
society. He departed from Butterfield and Wight most clearly in positing that order in IR
could arise and could be maintained without the conscious management of ‘statesmen’
with a shared ‘diplomatic culture’. In The Anarchical Society, he argued that ‘all actual
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societies’ displayed order grounded in rules that appeared to be ‘universal’: rules concerning the use of violence, the enforcement of agreements, and the possession of property (Bull, 1995 [1977]: 5). International society – the society of states – was no different;
where there is an international system of independent political communities in which
there is a sufficient level of interaction, there are social rules (Bull 1995 [1977]: 8–9).
Order in societies arises given these conditions, on this account, out of the reasoned
responses of its members. It requires far less conscious management by practitioners
than Butterfield or Wight believed, fearing as they did that without it, disorder ensued,
since the members of a societies generally share ‘elementary or primary goals’ and a
perception of ‘common interests’ (Bull 1995 [1977]: 51).
Post-positivism and the new English school
In 1972, Bull observed that the brief but ferocious so-called ‘Second Debate’ over method
in which he had played a prominent role in the 1960s had now ‘died down, and inquirers
have returned to their proper preoccupations, which are with matters of substance rather
than methodology’ (1972: 259). He had a point: although a number of significant works
by English school adherents appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, including books by
Bull (1977) himself, Alan James (1986), Robert Purnell (1973) and John Vincent (1974),
few discussed their approach or methods in any detail, lacking – it seems – the pressure to
do so. Even when provoked by Roy E Jones (1981) famous call for the ‘closure’ of the
school on the grounds that its members ‘ignore scientific procedure’ and that their works
were unsystematic and by Michael Nicholson’s (1981) dissection of Wight’s thought, no
systematic defence of the school’s approach or methods was offered.11
Of course, the issue was not entirely neglected. In 1983, Hidemi Suganami provided
an important account of what he took to be the English school’s key commitments. He
observed what he called its ‘anthropological approach’ and its rejection of behaviouralism; its ‘reliance on [the] sociological methods’ of ‘ideal-type analysis, comparative case
study, and Verstehen’; and its focus on the ‘cluster of social rules, conventions, usages,
and practices’ held by practitioners of IR that shape their behaviour (Suganami 1983:
2363–2365). He also drew attention to Manning’s Wittgensteinian account of international society, with its argument that ‘shared diplomatic assumptions’ shape different
orders (Suganami 1983: 2371–2374; cf. Suganami, 2003: Jackson, 2020). In a similar
vein, Peter Wilson argued that the defining features of the English school – in which he
also included Manning – were its focus on the ideas, concepts, theories and beliefs
regarding IR held in ‘minds of statesmen’ and on the traditions of thought that underpin
different understandings of IR. It emphasised that international society was, Wilson
(1989) observed, a ‘notional society’ of ‘notional beings’, such as sovereign states, and
it sought what he called ‘interpretive understanding’ of these notions (1989: 53).
It was not until the revival of the English school in the 1990s, however, that significant
interrogation of these commitments took place. This debate was stimulated in part by the
agenda advanced by Barry Buzan, one of the advocates of the school’s resuscitation, which
some adherents found irksome, and in part by the contemporary ‘Fourth Debate’ in IR
between positivism and post-positivism, which focused more attention on philosophical
and methodological arguments (see Smith et al., 1996). For his part, Buzan (1993, 2001)
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envisaged a school that moved away from concentrating on what went on in the ‘minds of
statesmen’ and on ‘traditions of thought’ towards a different kind of theorising more in
keeping with the precepts and aspirations of modernism. This view was contested by some
post-positivists, for whom the English school’s scepticism about modernist approaches –
especially to behaviouralism – was a virtue, not a weakness. For them, the school held open
a space for interpretive approaches and normative theorising (see Hall, 2001).
In parallel, a flurry of works appeared that co-opted elements of early English school
thought to contemporary post-positivist theoretical agendas, returning to some of its core
concerns or taking inspiration from Bull’s mid-1960s stand against behaviouralism.12
There was a revival of interest in the history of international thought, stimulated in part by
the publication of Wight’s International Theory lectures from the late 1950s (Wight, 1990).
But rather than merely seeking to unearth old ideas compare them, and present them for
‘statesmen’ to consider, as Butterfield and Wight had done, the new historians aimed at
dispelling disciplinary myths, recovering lost alternatives to present theories (including the
English school – see Dunne, 1998), and questioning modernist understandings of knowledge-production (see, for example, especially Der Derian, 1995; cf. Bell, 2001). There was
also interest in the English school because of its overt normativity. Bull’s (1984) and RJ
Vincent’s (1974) work on intervention stimulated scholars working in international ethics,
especially concerning human rights and humanitarianism (e.g. Dunne and Wheeler, 1996).
Even post-Marxist critical theories, especially Andrew Linklater (1998), found the school
and its approach useful, if only as a foil (see Linklater, 1998).
Several different accounts of how the English school ought to approach IR evolved as a
result, some moving Bull’s reluctant modernist ‘classical approach’ towards a more interpretivist orientation and others towards a more enthusiastic embrace of modernist social
science. The first argues that the school should focus its attention on normative theory and
theorising, developing better accounts of the history of international thought and engaging
with international political theory, as it has evolved since the late 1970s, to inform
approaches to contemporary ethical challenges (see, for example, Dunne and Wheeler,
1996; Rengger, 1992). The second maintains that it ought to draw especially on social
constructivism to develop its account of international society (see, for example, Dunne,
1995; Reus-Smit, 2002), taking it beyond what they took to be the problematic quasifunctionalist conceptualisation that appeared particularly in Bull’s work.13 The third insists
that it ought to embrace methodological pluralism, using both positivist and post-positivist
approaches to analyse the international system and international society (Buzan, 1993;
Little, 1995, 2000). The fourth returns to international history, but uses concepts and
approaches drawn principally from modernist historical sociology to explore the evolution
and globalisation of international society (Buzan and Lawson, 2015; Buzan and Little,
2000; Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017). The revival of the school was accompanied, in other
words, by the emergence of as yet unresolved differences about its approach. To critics, in
turn, this reinforced the impression that it lacked a coherent position.
Conclusion
One promising way of extricating the English school from this situation would be to
conceive it less as a site for discussion about ‘international society’, and to make it more
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of a standard-bearer for an interpretive approach to IR. Such a move would be in keeping
with the preferences of the early school, as we have argued. But more importantly it
would also align it with a large and well-developed school of philosophy that has developed since the 1960s that is sceptical about naturalism and its application to the social
sciences, that has informed a large and growing body of research in political science and
public policy (Bevir and Blakely, 2018: 18–64). This is not, of course, a wholly new
argument – it has been made several times since the revival of the school in the 1990s,
notably by William Bain (2007), Tim Dunne (2005), Roger Epp (1998), Robert H
Jackson (1995, 1996, 2000, 2009) and Richard Shapcott (1994), among others. Moreover,
it is an approach implicit in the work of many prominent English school members,
including Ian Clark, who has focused on what he calls ‘the historical examination of the
operating principles’ of IR or the ‘ideology of international order’ (Clark, 1989: 1, 2005,
2011), RJ Vincent (1974, 1986) and James Mayall (1990).
Of course, taking the English school in this direction means committing it to certain
premises and removing some of the present ambiguity and confusion about foundational
assumptions. In particular, it involves a conscious and whole-hearted embrace of antinaturalism and historicism as philosophical premises – of the arguments that the social
sciences cannot be modelled on the natural sciences and that any ‘laws’ of social behaviour that can be established can also be set aside by informed, historically located agents
capable of foiling modernist social scientists’ expectations (Bevir and Blakely, 2018: 3).
It entails affirming the interpretivist ‘proposition’ that ‘the social world must be understood from within’ in the terms in which it is comprehended by those that inhabit it, ‘rather
than explained from without’ (Hollis, 2002: 16). It means defending the allied notions that
agents make IR, that their actions are not limited by structures and are shaped by their own
understandings of the meaning they have for them and others, and that explaining those
actions requires an account of their meanings to those who perform them.
In concrete terms, this would mean returning the English school to the study of agents
and to seeing ‘international society’ as a contingent construct that exists in the minds of
actors and observers, rather than some kind of structure, and using official documents and
statements, but also memoirs, biographies, interviews and other means of accessing the
interpretations that actors have of their actions. It would not imply a complete turning
away from interest in institutions, but it would involve affirming the early English school’s
position that they are also contingent mental constructs, socially generated and sustained,
reflecting the beliefs of engaged agents about their rules, usefulness and propriety. Not
does it imply a wholesale rejection of methods that have developed within naturalist social
science, including quantitative work, which can of course generate insights into the meanings of social behaviour (Bevir and Blakely, 2018: 96–103). Interpretivists tend to prefer
methods that allow researchers some insight into the beliefs of actors, but these can
include, for example, formal models, understood as heuristic tools.
Taking the school in an interpretivist direction would also open up new topics for
study and the possibility of greater dialogue with others for a school often seen as internally focused and self-referential. These include interpretivists working fruitfully elsewhere in the social sciences, notably in political science and public policy, where
extensive work has been done to explore how situated agents act and why they behave as
they do (see Hay, 2011). They also include scholars using similar approaches in IR,
Bevir and Hall
165
including social constructivists across the field (see, for example, Guzzini, 2000), practice theorists in diplomatic studies (see Pouliot, 2016), feminists working on the perceptions and self-perceptions of women practitioners (Stephenson, 2019), and interpretivists
in foreign policy analysis (see Oppermann and Spencer, 2016). In short, a deeper engagement with the English school’s interpretivist past would allow it not only to respond to
its critics with a clear account of its underlying commitments, but open significance new
avenues for research.
ORCID iD
Ian Hall
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0397-2011
Notes
1. We are, of course, not the first to claim that the English school has interpretivist concerns.
See, for example, Suganami (1983: 2365), Wilson (1989: 53–54), Dunne (1998: 7–9) as well
as Jackson (2020).
2. On interpretivism, see especially Bevir and Blakely (2019).
3. This phrase may recall the concept of ‘reactionary modernism’ (see Herf, 1986; Mirowski,
2011), which blended German romanticism and enthusiasm for modern technology. Our
reluctant modernism ran in parallel, combining a commitment to historicism with a begrudging respect for some modernist social science.
4. Developmental historicism also survived in a weakened form, especially in English popular
histories. See Stapledon (1994, 2005).
5. On Manning, see Long (2005) and Suganami (2001). On Manning and Wight, see Bull (1977).
6. This compromise was limited – Wight at the same time compared the social sciences to
astrology (see Chiaruzzi, 2016) – and involved the recognition that the comparative method
originated with Aristotle, not modernists (Wight, 1950). On his borrowing of a concept of
institution from anthropology and sociology, see Wight (1990: 140–141), where he cites
Morris Ginsberg and HP Fairchild’s Dictionary of Sociology.
7. Wight’s (1977) later studies of state-systems also used the comparative method.
8. Butterfield created the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (BCTIP)
in which much of the English school’s early work was done. It was initially funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation, and met, not always regularly, from 1959 to 1984. See especially
Dunne (1998) and Vigezzi (2005).
9. Butterfield and Wight did not cite proponents of this ‘antithesis’, but most likely they had
Morton Kaplan (1957) and John Burton (1965) in mind. Butterfield and Wight indicated that
the BCTIP intended to produce a second volume exploring these theoretical differences, but
it was never published.
10. For this reason, Navari (2009) rightly argues that Bull’s critique of modernism was epistemological, above all (2009: 2).
11. There were, of course, responses to other points made. See James (1982) and Grader (1988).
12. For a useful contemporary collection, see Fawn and Larkins (1996).
13. On the similarities with structural functionalism, see Navari (2009: 1–20).
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Author biographies
Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. He is also a
professor in the Graduate School, United Nations University (MERIT), and a Distinguished
Research professor at Swansea University. His most recent book is Interpretive Social Science: An
Anti-Naturalist Approach (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-authored with Jason Blakely.
Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He
is the Deputy Director (Research) of the Griffith Asia Institute, an academic fellow of the Australia
India Institute at the University of Melbourne, and the co-editor (with Sara E. Davies) of the
Australian Journal of International Affairs. His most recent book is Modi and the Reinvention of
Indian Foreign Policy (Bristol University Press, 2019).
Ian Hall