This comprehensive textbook charts the development of international relations as an academic discipline, from its foundations to the present day. The book first examines how great thinkers of the past considered relations between political and social units. It then looks at the emergence of the discipline which sought to explain the state system that had appeared in the seventeenth century. International relations "then" studies the conceptual worlds of eighteenth and nineteenth century theorists and practitioners. There follows the first of the great debates in the field, that between idealism and realism, which ended up with a consensus for the latter. The second part of the book looks at contemporary theory - how realism was challenged and then resurged - how world society and structuralist approaches are now well-established, and how what has been an Anglo-American discipline is poised now to become a genuinely global field.
- ISBN10 0044451016
- ISBN13 9780044451013
- Publish Date 22 August 1991
- Publish Status Permanently Withdrawn
- Out of Print 9 September 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 320
- Language English