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2005 34: 57Millennium - Journal of International StudiesRenée Jeffery

Tradition as Invention: The `Traditions Tradition' and the History of Ideas in International Relations

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Tradition as Invention: The‘Traditions Tradition’ and the Historyof Ideas in International Relations

Renée Jeffery

Although they have been a central feature of the disciplinary historyof International Relations, little attention has been paid to thehistorical and epistemological implications of designating certainsets of writers and their ideas as belonging to particular ‘traditions ofthought’. In light of this, this article is concerned with the theoreticalconceptualisation of the term ‘tradition’, its historical connotations,and its specific application to the history of IR scholarship. Relyingheavily on Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history, it argues notonly that traditions are inherently ‘invented’ phenomena but that thepurposes for which they are invented – that is, whether they arehistorical or practical in orientation – is central to the analysis of theircontents. Having established a theoretical understanding of‘tradition’, the article discusses the works of John G. Gunnell andBrian C. Schmidt as providing a number of useful ways in whichtraditions, thus conceived, might be analysed before demonstratinghow this might be done in IR scholarship using the works of MartinWight and Hedley Bull as a pertinent example. In doing so, the articlealso seeks to make a more general claim about the need for greaterhistorical awareness in contemporary IR scholarship.

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The history of International Relations (IR) in the twentieth century isconventionally told as a chronology of ‘great debates’ waged between thecontending theoretical traditions and paradigms into which thediscipline is alleged to be divided. Indeed, as Ian Clark (and many others)has noted, this propensity for dividing the discipline into ‘oftenconflicting traditions’ and for the subsequent taxonomic classification ofits component theories has become one of the ‘hallmarks’ of

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I would like to thank Nick Rengger, Ian Hall, Andrew Linklater and, inparticular, the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments andcriticisms. An earlier version of this article was presented at the InternationalStudies Association Conference in Montreal in March 2004.

© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2005. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.34 No.1, pp. 57-84

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contemporary IR scholarship.1 Although many proponents of what mightbe termed the ‘traditions tradition’ of IR acknowledge the limitations ofwhat they see as, at heart, a pedagogical exercise, the ongoingramifications of this practice remain in need of critical consideration. Thecentral aim of this article is thus to challenge the use of ‘tradition’ in IRscholarship. Although a number of writers have, in recent years, soughtto catalogue the range of ways in which ‘tradition’ has been used in IR,2

this article seeks to delve further into the historical relationships bothimplicit and explicit in the designation of a set of ideas or thinkers as atradition. Relying heavily on the thought of Michael Oakeshott, itpresents a particular philosophical understanding of tradition, illustratesthe historical implications of conceiving tradition in this manner, anddemonstrates how such an engagement with the use of this term mightbe useful in coming to a better understanding of the categories we use toexplain the history of thinking about international relations.

The pervasiveness of ‘tradition’ in IR is plain to see. For much ofthe twentieth century IR was characterised in terms of the so-called ‘firstgreat debate’ waged between realism and idealism, the two dominanttraditions of the inter-war period identified in E. H. Carr’s seminalwork, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939.3 In the works of Martin Wight,IR is divided into ‘at least three’ traditions – realism, rationalism andrevolutionism – while Michael Donelan, citing ‘inflation’, lists five:natural law, realism, fideism, rationalism and historicism.4 Greater still,Nardin and Mapel’s Traditions of International Ethics lists twelve, whileDavid Boucher divides political theories of international relations into

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1. Ian Clark, ‘Traditions of Thought and Classical Theories of InternationalRelations’, in Classical Theories of International Relations, eds. Ian Clark and Iver B.Neumann (London: Macmillan, 1996), 1.

2. For example, see Tim Dunne, ‘Mythology or Methodology? Traditions inInternational Theory’, Review of International Studies 19, no.2 (1993): 305-318;Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts, ‘Introduction: Grotian Thought inInternational Relations’, in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, eds. HedleyBull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1-64; David S. Yost, ‘Wight and the “Three Traditions”: Political philosophy and theTheory of International Relations’, International Affairs 70, no. 2 (1994): 263-290;and James Der Derian, ‘Introducing Philosophical Traditions in InternationalRelations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1988): 189-193.

3. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study ofInternational Relations, ed. Michael Cox (London: Palgrave, 2001); and PeterWilson, ‘The Myth of the “First Great Debate”’, Review of International Studies 24(1998): 49-58.

4. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, eds. Gabriele Wightand Brian Porter (London: Leicester University Press, 1991); and MichaelDonelan, Elements of International Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 2.



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three traditions; empirical realism, universal moral order and historicalreason.5 Similarly, Stephen Krasner identifies three traditions of regimetheory: the structuralist or realist, modified structuralist or modifiedrealist, and the Grotian.6

On a separate front, IR scholarship has also been somewhatobsessed with the construction of what is perceived to be the tradition ofIR theory in the form of a canon of great or ‘classic’ works. Addressingthe lack of a self-evident set of works indicative of the intellectual historyof the discipline, Martin Wight famously argued that IR does not have aset of ‘classics’ approximating the canon of works in political theory butis ‘scattered, unsystematic and ... largely repellant and intractable inform’.7 In response to this realisation, IR has dedicated a great deal ofenergy to the construction of its own canon of ‘classic’ works – largelypoached from the field of political theory. In the main, the result of thishas been the establishment of a list of ‘usual suspects’ stretching fromGreek antiquity to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example,presenting a fairly orthodox line-up, Michael Donelan’s ‘1st XI’ includesAristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, AdamSmith, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, with Kant as the team captain.8

However, Howard Williams’ collection substitutes Montesquieu, Smith,and Locke for Plato, Aquinas, and Clausewitz, highlighting the fact thatprecisely who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ is a matter of opinion determinedin large part by what are perceived to be the specific aims of constructingsuch a tradition in the first place.9

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5. Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and David Boucher, PoliticalTheories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).

6. Stephen Krasner, ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes asIntervening Variables’, International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982):185-206.Following the infusion and general misappropriation of Thomas Kuhn’s seminalwork on the role of paradigms in scientific research, the ‘traditions’ have, insome quarters, become ‘paradigms’. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of ScientificRevolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Michael Banks,‘The Inter-Paradigm Debate’, in International Relations: A Handbook of CurrentTheory, eds. Margot Light and A. J. R. Groom (London: Francis Pinter, 1985).

7. Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, in DiplomaticInvestigations: Essays on the Theory of World Politics, eds. Herbert Butterfield andMartin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 20.

8. Michael Donelan, ‘The Political Theorists and International Theory’, in TheReason of States, ed. Michael Donelan (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), 75.

9. Howard Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Milton Keynes:Open University Press, 1992). Recognising this, and a range of other problemsinherent to the discipline – though conceding IR’s value as an ‘educational



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However, this ‘traditions tradition’, as it might be heuristically titled, hasrecently attracted a significant amount of critical attention, not least ofwhich has transpired from many of the most prominent proponents of thisapproach themselves. In particular, Ian Clark has identified three specificsets of criticisms leveled at the employment of ‘traditions’ in IR, be it ascategorical devices or in a canonical sense. The first set of criticisms wasmost famously articulated by Martin Wight and focuses on the degree towhich ‘the quest for traditions inculcates a fetish for categorisation for itsown sake’ and, in particular, the manner in which the ‘history of thoughtbecomes subordinate to discovering the pigeon-hole in which anyparticular writer most appropriately belongs’.10 The second set ofcriticisms, by theorists such as Rob Walker, ‘condemns’ the division of IRinto theoretical traditions ‘for encouraging intellectual conservatism andfor closing down the agenda’.11 As Walker argues, terms such as‘rationalism’ and ‘reflectivism’ and their predecessors, realism andidealism, ‘have served primarily to close off serious discussion in amanner that has helped to insulate the discipline of international debateever since’.12 Finally, and most seriously, the third set of criticisms makesthe fundamental claim that the very ‘construction of traditions of thoughtis itself an essentially illegitimate scholarly procedure because it makesuntenable assumptions about the nature of political language’.13 Inparticular, historians of ideas such as Quentin Skinner argue that theconstruction of traditions is based on the false assumption that a set ofperennial problems can be identified in political philosophy and that such‘traditions’ create a false sense of coherence both within and between theworks of their members.14 Whilst acknowledging the importantcontributions to the philosophy of history made by writers such as Wight,Skinner, and Walker, in this article I offer an alternative approach to the

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device’ – Brown, Nardin and Rengger’s volume, International Relations in PoliticalThought, provides a far more broadly based set of thinkers, which includes anumber of less well-known figures such as Cornelius Bynershoek, EusebiusPamphili and Samuel Rachel. Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger,eds., International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to theFirst World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2-3.

10. Clark, ‘Traditions of Thought’, 7; and Wight, International Theory, 259.11. Clark, ‘Traditions of Thought’, 8.12. R. B. J. Walker, ‘History and Structure in the Theory of International

Relations’, in International Theory: Critical Investigations, ed. James Der Derian(London: Macmillan, 1995), 315, and Inside/Outside: International Relations asPolitical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27.

13. Clark, ‘Traditions of Thought ’, 8.14. Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’,

History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 8 (1969): 3-53.



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use and analysis of traditions in IR that is derived from the thought of theBritish scholar Michael Oakeshott. Regarded by many as ‘one of the mostinfluential students of the history of ideas in the English-speakingworld,’15 Oakeshott’s discussions, not only of the philosophy of history ingeneral, but the particular construction of intellectual and other traditionsremain some of the most potent considerations of the subject on offer. Hisworks thus provide the basis for my exploration of the manner in whichtraditions of thought operate in IR scholarship.

The starting point of my argument is the observation that despitethe range of well-founded criticisms discussed above, perhaps the mostfundamental problem with the ‘traditions tradition’ of IR is theindiscriminate use of the term ‘tradition’ itself. In particular, myargument is driven by the recognition that in very many instances setsof thinkers and ideas are designated as ‘traditions’ without anyconsideration whatsoever of what a tradition actually constitutes. Forexample, of the theorists named above only two, Nardin and Wight,explicitly discuss the concept of tradition before applying it to IR.Boucher simply begins his discussion of the three traditions of politicaltheory in international relations with the assertion that traditions are, asOakeshott supposes, ‘ideal characterisations’, while Donelan andKrasner do not consider the term at all.16

What is more, in those instances in which ‘tradition’ is explicitlyconceptualised, there is little consensus as to precisely what is meant bythe term. Thus, for Nardin, tradition is stringently defined as both ‘theprocess of handing down’ from generation to generation, and ‘the thinghanded down, the belief or custom transmitted from one generation toanother’.17 Wight, on the other hand, entertains a vague notion oftradition somewhat akin to a paradigm according to which sets of ideasare defined by their ‘logical inter-relation’.18 I will discuss the definitionof ‘tradition’ further in the next section, however, it is important to noteat the outset that ‘tradition’ is a loaded term. Whether employed toindicate a pattern of historical transmission or a vaguely coherent set ofideas, the term ‘tradition’ has a particular and potent set of connotationsattached to it. As Conal Condren has pointed out, ‘[t]o designatesomething a tradition … is to make a putatively historical claim about

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15. King, ‘Introduction’ to The History of Ideas: An Introduction to Method, ed.Preston King (London and Canberra: Croom Hem, 1983), 4.

16. Boucher, Political Theories, 29.17. Terry Nardin, ‘Ethical Traditions in International Affairs’, in Traditions of

International Ethics, 6.18. Martin Wight, ‘An Anatomy of International Thought’, Review of

International Studies 13 (1987): 226.



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socialized processes of transmission or communal activity’, whether thisis done intentionally or otherwise.19 It is, in short, to imbue an assumedpattern of historical transmission with a sense of authority that is notnecessarily deserved. With this in mind, this article also makes the casefor far greater historical awareness in IR scholarship for, as I argue in theconclusion, the ideas that underpin the use of historical devices such astraditions are central to the way in which we view the field of IR.


In a conventional sense, the term ‘tradition’ is understood simply torefer to ‘an indefinite series of repetitions of an action, which on eachoccasion is performed on the assumption that it has been performedbefore’.20 Despite a degree of consensus as to what is broadly meant bythe term tradition, however, its substantive content remains a matter ofsome contention. In particular, in addition to the specificallyepistemological criticisms associated with the construction of traditionsraised above, two problems emerge. The first pertains to the idea thattraditions are ‘invented’ rather than given phenomena; the secondderives from the vastly different ways of conceiving precisely what atradition constitutes.

According to Martin Krygier, a tradition is defined in terms ofinheritance and is comprised of three central elements:

pastness: the contents of every tradition have or are believed by itsparticipants to have originated some considerable time in the past.Secondly is authoritative presence: though derived from a real orbelieved-to-be-real past, a traditional practice, doctrine or belief hasnot, as it were, stayed there. Its traditionality consists in its presentauthority and significance for the lives, thoughts or activities ofparticipants in the tradition. Third, a tradition is not merely the pastmade present. It must have been, or be thought to have been, passeddown over intervening generations, deliberately or otherwise; notmerely unearthed from a past discontinuous with the present.21

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19. Conal Condren, ‘Political Theory and the Problem of Anachronism’, inPolitical Theory: Tradition and Diversity, ed. Andrew Vincent (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48.

20. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions andTheir Understanding’, in Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to ProfessorMichael Oakeshott on the Occasion of his Retirement, eds. Preston King and B. C.Parekh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 212.

21. Martin Krygier, ‘The Traditionality of Statutes’, Ratio Juris 1, no. 1 (1988): 21.



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Significantly then, according to this conceptualisation, a tradition needsonly be believed to be ‘an ancient and continuously practicedinheritance’, rather than actually having been practiced for somesubstantial period of time.22 Indeed, in an earlier article, ‘Law asTradition’, Krygier writes that ‘[e]very tradition is composed of elementsdrawn from the real or imagined past’.23 Similarly, he also argues that, bydefinition, ‘[t]raditions depend on real or imagined continuities betweenpast and present’.24 However, admitting that imagination and inventionplay such a role is particularly contentious.

In Eric Hobsbawm’s view, however, the fact that ‘“[t]raditions”which appear or claim to be old are quite recent in origin and sometimesinvented’ is not an impediment to their classification as traditions. On thecontrary, Hobsbawm’s definition of ‘invented traditions’ sounds verymuch like a definition one would expect for ‘traditions’ as such: ‘practices,normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritualnature, which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour byrepetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’’.25

However, he continues, ‘insofar as there is such reference to a historic past,the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it islargely factitious’.26 Critically then, in characterising ‘invented’ traditions assuch, Hobsbawm is not suggesting that all traditions are ‘invented’, butmerely that those that are remain defined as ‘traditions’ despite theirinvented status. This distinction is particularly apparent with his continualreferences to traditions and ‘invented traditions’ as separate entities. It isalso important to note that Hobsbawm uses the term ‘invented’ here tomean ‘fabricated’ for, as we will see in the following section, this is not theonly sense in which the term ‘invented’ may be conceived.

Focusing specifically on traditions of thought, Alasdair MacIntyredefines a ‘tradition of enquiry’ as being

more than a coherent movement of thought. It is such a movement inthe course of which those engaging in that movement become awareof it and of its direction and in self-aware fashion attempt to engagein its debates and to carry its enquiries forward.27

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22. Nardin, ‘Ethical Traditions’, 7.23. Martin Krygier, ‘Law as Tradition’, Law and Philosophy 5 (1986): 240.24. Ibid., 250. Emphasis in original.25. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of

Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983), 1.

26. Ibid., 2.27. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth,

1988), 326.



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According to this perspective, traditions are not retrospectivelyconstructed ‘inventions’ but self-conscious patterns of thought. AsMacIntyre writes, a tradition necessarily has a ‘contingent historicalstarting point in some situation in which some set of established beliefsand belief-presupposing practices, perhaps relatively recentlyestablished, perhaps of long-standing, were put into question’ and fromtheir establishment in thought, move through a series of stages of formalinstitution as traditions.28 As does Krygier, MacIntyre contends thattraditions are not only marked by a pattern of ‘reference from thepresent to the past’, but are also necessarily constituted by ‘a certaincontinuity of directness’. However, unlike Krygier’s definition in whichtraditions are granted authority in accordance with their present status,for MacIntyre the authority of tradition is derived from the past. Thus,belief in the tradition as a whole is understood in terms of the‘superiority of the formulations of [each stage’s] predecessor, and thatpredecessor in turn is justified by a further reference backwards’’.29

As instruments linking the past and present in the history of ideasthen, following Preston King’s assessment, questions regarding theinvented nature of traditions and the status invented traditions areafforded on one level centre around the more fundamental question ofwhether we can be said to ‘know’ the past, or whether all knowledge ispresent knowledge. At one extreme is the claim that all knowledge ispast knowledge. Proponents of this perspective argue that ‘given thatvery few of our ideas are our ideas, and that even the novelties we deviseare pieced together from the readymade components of communal life itbecomes difficult to conclude that there can be a present which is notpast’.30 At the other extreme is the claim that all knowledge is presentknowledge. According to this understanding, ‘if the ideas which wehypothesize to belong to the past, are now actually being thought in thepresent, then the hypothesis must appear baseless, since all we havedemonstrable evidence for, is present thinking’.31 For proponents of thisperspective, traditions, like all forms of thinking, are constructions of thepresent. However, this perspective is confronted by an apparentparadox, known as the past/present paradox:

The problem is, that if history is only to do with the past, and we canonly comprehend it in the present, indeed only by making it a part ofthe present, how can we ever really know it as past – as it was (or

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28. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia,Genealogy and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), 116.

29. Ibid.30. Preston King, introduction to The History of Ideas, 3. Emphasis his.31. Ibid.



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‘is’)? It would seem that, if we genuinely know history in the present,then it can no longer be past; that if we only apprehend it as presentthinking, we cannot seize it as genuine history; that if we know itonly by present excogitation, then perhaps it is not really the pastthat we are excogitating at all.32

Of course this scheme is drawn to its logical extremes here and very few,if any, philosophers of history actually follow either view to the letter.For example, as we shall see shortly, despite generally adhering to the‘all knowledge is present knowledge’ perspective, Oakeshott retains atleast one entire category of knowledge (practical knowledge) that relieson the past for its understanding. For Oakeshott, what is moresignificant in this context is precisely how the past is conceived in thepresent and, as such, it is to his works that we now turn.

History and Tradition in Oakeshott’s Thought

For Oakeshott, the term ‘history’ is an ‘ambiguous’ one that can bedefined in ‘at least two different senses’.33 In the first sense, it is conceivedas ‘the notional grand total of all that has ever happened in the lives ofhuman beings, or for a passage of somehow related occurrencesdistinguished in this grand total by being specific in terms of a place anda time and a substantive identity’. In the second sense, the senseOakeshott is primarily concerned with, history ‘stands for a certaininquiry into, and a certain sort of understanding of, some such passage ofoccurrences; the engagement and the conclusions of an historian’.34

History is, in this sense, a particular type of knowledge, or ‘mode ofexperience’. In his 1933 work, Experience and its Modes, Oakeshottidentified three such ‘modes’: history, science and practice; later addingpoetry, or aesthetics, to his scheme.35 These modes are not merely‘attitude[s]’ or ‘point[s] of view’ but are wholly independent entities thateach provide ‘an autonomous manner of understanding, specifiable interms of exact conditions, which is logically incapable of denying orconfirming the conclusions of any other mode of understanding, orindeed of making any relevant utterance in respect of it’.36

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32. Preston King, ‘Thinking Past a Problem’, in Thinking Past a Problem: Essayson the History of Ideas, (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 25-6.

33. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, in On History and OtherEssays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 1.

34. Ibid.35. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1933/1966), 109.36. Ibid., 75.



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The ‘practical’ mode of understanding, or ‘practical response’, asOakeshott terms it in his later work ‘The Activity of Being an Historian’,is that in which we ‘may recognize what is happening in respect of itsrelation to ourselves, our fortunes and activities’.37 Alternatively, the‘scientific attitude’ is one in which ‘we are concerned, not withhappenings in their relation to ourselves and to the habitableness of theworld, but in respect of their independence of ourselves’.38 By way ofcontrast, what distinguishes the historian from the scientist, the poet andthe practitioner is that while each of these three ‘modes of experience’fundamentally conceives experience as a present phenomenon, ‘historyonly perceives experience as past’.39 Herein lies what was describedabove as the past/present paradox in Oakeshott’s work.

The past/present paradox, in Oakeshott’s terms, ‘is not merely thatthe past must survive into the present in order to become the historicalpast; [but that] the past must be present before it is historical’.40More simply,in order to be constructed or reconstructed as the historical past, the pastmust exist in the present and therefore be present and not past. Thus, thehistorical past is ‘not past at all’ but is rather ‘nothing other, nothing moreand nothing less, than what the evidence obliges us to believe – a presentworld of ideas’.41 According to Oakeshott’s conceptualisation then, ‘[w]hatwe call ‘past events’ are ... the product of understanding presentoccurrences as evidence for happenings that have already taken place’.42

These present occurrences may take the general form of survivals, that is,things that have survived from the past to exist in the present.43 What this

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37. Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Activity of Being an Historian’, in Rationalism inPolitics and Other Essays (London: Methuen & Co., 1962), 143.

38. Ibid., 144-5.39. Preston King, ‘Michael Oakeshott and Historical Particularism’, in Thinking

Past a Problem, 93. Indeed, as Luke O’Sullivan writes, in his early works Oakeshottwent so far as to suppose that ‘the historian could never reach “the past as it was”’.However, by Experience and Its Modes he had ‘dismissed scepticism about thepossibility of historical knowledge as such’ although maintained the idea thathistorical knowledge is ‘ultimately less satisfactory than philosophy’. LukeO’Sullivan, introduction to What is History? And Other Essays, by MichaelOakeshott, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 7.

40. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 109. 41. Ibid. Contrary to this, Preston King argues that the past/present paradox

in Oakeshott is not a paradox at all. See King, Thinking Past a Problem, 111.42. Oakeshott, ‘Activity’, 146.43. ‘Survivals’ is a term that Oakeshott uses in ‘Present, Future and Past’ to

denote ‘artefacts (perhaps recognized as models to be copied), recordedanecdotes or episodes of bygone human fortune, alleged reports of persons’ andso on. ‘Present, Future and Past’, 18.



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implies then is that ‘the past’ does not exist in the sense in which is itusually conceived, but is rather ‘a construction we make for ourselves outof the events which take place before our eyes’.44 As a construction, orinvention, of present thinking the past may thus exist in a variety of forms.

The two different notions of ‘past’ that Oakeshott focuses on arewhat he terms the ‘practical’ and the ‘historical’ past. The ‘practical past’is ‘composed of artifacts and utterances alleged to have survived fromthe past and recognised in terms of their worth to us in our currentpractical engagement’.45 ‘The practical man’, he writes, ‘reads the pastbackwards. He is interested in and recognizes only those past eventswhich he can relate to the present activities’.46 Further elucidating whatis meant by the ‘practical past’, Oakeshott writes:

Wherever the past is merely that which preceded the present, thatfrom which the present has grown, wherever the significance of thepast lies in the fact that it has been influential in deciding the presentand future fortunes of man, whenever the present is sought in thepast, and whenever the past is regarded as merely a refuge from thepresent – the past involved is a practical, and not an historical past.47

In contrast to the ‘practical past’, the ‘historical past’ ‘is a past which hasnot survived’,48 it is a past that can only be inferred by piecing togetherfragments of evidence. However, these pieces of evidence, Oakeshottwrites, may come to us with ‘little in the way of a significant context’,appearing rather as a ‘mystery surrounded by mystery’.49 Survivals, hewrites, ‘speak to us artlessly, in parables or in riddles; their voices maybe clear, ambiguous or discrepant’.50 As such the ‘meaning’ or‘interpretation’ of such pieces of evidence is an exercise in inference anda ‘product of judgement’.51 In direct criticism of E. H. Carr’sunderstanding of the activity of the historian then, Oakeshott arguesthat the historian is not simply ‘a collector of facts’.52

The preceding discussion suggests two important points. First,even ‘historical history’– that is, history that is concerned with ‘the pastfor the sake of the past’ – must necessarily belong to ‘the historian’s

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44. Oakeshott, ‘Activity’, 146.45. Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, 38.46. Oakeshott, ‘Activity’, 153.47. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 103.48. Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, 33.49. Oakeshott, ‘Historical Events’, in On History, 53.50. Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, 18.51. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 108.52. Michael Oakeshott, ‘What is History?’, in What is History, 320.



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present world of experience’.53 Secondly, it also follows that the role ofthe historian in endeavouring to understand the historical past istherefore not ‘that of recalling, or of re-enacting the past’, but of creatingit ‘by a process of translation’.54 This, of course, is in marked contrast to R.G. Collingwood’s conception of history. Unlike Oakeshott, whomaintains that ‘history is an autonomous activity disengaged from theconsiderations of practical life’,55 Collingwood, on the other hand, arguesthat ‘the past concerns the historian only so far as it has led to thepresent’.56 Thus he writes:

If the function of history was to inform people about the past, wherethe past was understood as a dead past, it could do very littletowards helping them to act; but if its function was to inform themabout the present, in so far as the past, its ostensible subject-matter,was encapsulated in the present and constituted a part of it not atonce obvious to the untrained eye, then history stood in the closestpossible relation to practical life.57

Although Collingwood is not a ‘presentist’ as such, his primary concernis to bring the past, a real and living past, into the present. Thus historydoes not for him entail creation via a process of translation but ratherconsists in re-enactment, the process of ‘getting inside other people’sheads, looking at their situation through their eyes’ and thereby bringingthe past into the present.58

Sharing some degree of motivation with Collingwood, foremostamongst Oakeshott’s aims is to rescue history from the obsessions of thepresent. However, contrary to Collingwood the designation of ‘livinghistory’ is, in Oakeshott’s view, ‘a piece of obscene necromancy’.59 AsOakeshott recognises in his later work On History, however, thiscontempt for ‘practical history’ is not intended to imply that ‘anhistorical past is the only past, or that it is the only significant past, oreven that it is the only past to be found in alleged pieces of historical

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53. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 108, 106.54. Oakeshott, ‘Activity’, 164. My emphasis.55. David Boucher, ‘Human Conduct, History and Social Science in the Works

of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott’, New Literary History 24, no. 3(1993): 697.

56. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Limits of Historical Knowledge’, in Essays in thePhilosophy of History, ed. William Debbins (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,1965), 102. Emphasis his.

57. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Historical Logic of Question and Answer’, inHistory of Ideas, 151-152.

58. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 58.59. Oakeshott, ‘Activity’, 166.



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writing’.60 Rather, as Timothy Fuller explains, what he means to suggestis that:

When historians adopt the historical mode of examining the past ...they seek to set aside preoccupation with practical matters. Ashuman beings, they do not, of course, cease to have practicalconcerns. Thus, achieving the historian’s perspective requires aneffort and represents a consciously considered accomplishment.61

Indeed, as we will see shortly, Oakeshott is similarly ‘not disdainful ofpractice’ itself – in fact he promotes ‘traditionalist practice as theauthentic ground for political conduct’62 – however, his point is that thelimits of practice must be acknowledged, as must those of tradition.

In ‘Rationalism in Politics’, Oakeshott identifies two different typesof knowledge involved in any human activity. The first is termed‘technical knowledge’ and simply refers to the techniques involved inevery practical activity, for example in every art and science.63 Thesecond type of knowledge Oakeshott terms ‘practical knowledge’,knowledge that ‘exists only in use, is not reflective and (unliketechnique) cannot be formulated in rules’.64 Practical knowledge, hecontends, is traditional knowledge and its ‘normal expression is acustomary or traditional way of doing things, or, simply, in practice’.65

In this sense then, traditions are unintentionally invented. Whenconsidered as traditions of behaviour, they are ‘tricky thing[s] to get toknow’, they are ‘flimsy and elusive’ and ‘may even appear to beessentially unintelligible’.66 Traditions of behaviour, as forms of practicalknowledge, ‘can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted andacquired’.67 As Oakeshott explains in ‘Political Education’;

[P]olitical education is not merely a matter of coming to understanda tradition, it is learning how to participate in a conversation: it is atonce an initiation into an inheritance in which we have a life interest,and the exploration of its intimations. There will always remainsomething of a mystery about how a tradition of political behaviour

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60. Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, 37.61. Timothy Fuller, foreword to On History, xii.62. Thomas Smith, ‘Michael Oakeshott on History, Practice and Political

Theory’, History of Political Thought 17, no. 4 (1996): 607.63. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, in Rationalism in Politics, 7.64. Ibid., 8.65. Ibid., 10.66. Oakeshott, ‘Political Education’, in Rationalism in Politics, 128.67. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, 11.



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is learned, and perhaps the only certainty is that there is no point atwhich learning it can properly be said to begin.68

However, at the same time, tradition may also be conceived as inventedin the sense of it being deliberately constructed or ‘fabricated’. This,Oakeshott contends, occurs when traditions of behaviour give ‘place toideologies’ thereby converting ‘habits of behaviour, adaptable and neverquite fixed or finished, into comparatively rigid systems of abstractideas’.69

However, it will be apparent that Oakeshott is concerned with therealm of practice here; a realm that cannot, by definition, have anybearing on the historical past. More to the point, it seems that thetheoretical discussion of tradition in Oakeshott’s work is limited to an‘applied’ rather than abstract theoretical form. Indeed, particularly in hislater works, Oakeshott avoids the use of ‘tradition’ with regard to thetheoretical analysis of politics for, as we will see shortly, he came torealise that tradition could not readily be divorced from practicalconsiderations. Even in Rationalism in Politics, first published in the1960s, ‘tradition’ is almost exclusively used in the context of practice.Certainly by the publication of On Human Conduct in the 1970s, the term‘tradition’ had been generally replaced in Oakeshott’s writings by‘practice’. As Oakeshott writes, ‘[a] practice may be identified as a set ofconsiderations, manners, uses, observances, customs, standards, canons,maxims, principles, rules, and offices specifying useful procedures ordevoting obligations or duties which relate to human actions andutterances’.70 Highlighting its proximity to traditions, Oakeshott arguesthat practice most commonly emerges ‘as a continuously invented andalways unfinished by-product of performances related to theachievement of imagined and wished-for satisfactions other than that ofhaving a procedure, and it becomes recognizable when it has acquired acertain degree of definition and authority or acknowledged utility’.71

So what, then, does Oakeshott make of traditions of thought? Theretrospective construction of traditions of thought is, as Oakeshottmakes clear in his Lectures on the History of Political Thought, a dangerousenterprise. In particular Oakeshott argues against the identification of

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68. Oakeshott, ‘Political Education’, 129.69. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, 21. See also Oakeshott’s discussion of

Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future on understanding traditions of politicalactivity ‘in terms of analogy of fabrication’. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Between Pastand Future’, in What is History, 316-17.

70. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1975), 55.

71. Ibid., 55-56.



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what is known as ‘the history of political thought’ presented in the formof a ‘continuous history of European political thought’.72 Thus, despitehighlighting the ‘importance of studying the classic texts of political orlegal philosophy, [he] has no intention of compiling a list of ‘Greats’’.73

However, Oakeshott’s account of European political history appears todo just that, focusing on the works of the ‘usual suspects’ such as Plato,Aristotle, Hobbes and Montesquieu74 and tracing the conception of themodern European state from Marsilius of Padua to Hegel. As ThomasSmith points out, ‘[a]ccording to the precepts of Oakeshott’s historicalmode, however, this is practice: it is a backward-looking search fororigins, a developmental narrative whose purpose, stated at the outset,is to derive the moral relationships that ground the civil constitution ofmodern European states’.75

This would seem to suggest that Oakeshott’s works do not includeanything particularly useful for us in our quest to better understand theuse of traditions in the history of IR. It would seem that his most cogentdiscussions of tradition are barred from consideration in the historicalframe by virtue of their practical nature and, moreover that evenOakeshott himself proves unable to uphold the distinction betweenhistorical and practical engagement. Not only does he breach theprinciples of his own historical method but ends up constructing a‘canon’ of thinkers comparable to those orthodox versions discussedabove. Practice, his later abandonment of the term ‘tradition’ wouldseem to imply, creeps in to all inquiry, even if only in a minimalhermeneutical sense.76

I will return to these problems in the concluding section of thisarticle. However, what I want to highlight here are two elements ofOakeshott’s thinking that are of particular use to our endeavour here.First, Oakeshott’s conceptualisation of the past in terms of its ‘practical’and ‘historical’ variants constitutes a particularly useful frameworkaccording to which the construction of traditions of thought might be

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72. Michael Oakeshott, Lectures on the History of Political Thought, eds. TerryNardin and Luke O’Sullivan, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, forthcoming 2006), 2.An excerpt of this work is available on the Michael Oakeshott Association[website, https://www.michael-oakeshott-association.org] (9 July 2005).

73. Ian Tregenza, ‘The Life of Hobbes in the Writings of Michael Oakeshott’,History of Political Thought 18, no. 3 (1997): 535.

74. Luke O’Sullivan, ‘Michael Oakeshott on European Political History’,History of Political Thought 21, no. 1 (2000): 150.

75. Ibid., 611.76. What I mean here is that even when applying the principles of historical

inquiry strictly, it is logically impossible to entirely discount the contribution ofthe interpreter to the interpretation of ideas and texts.



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analysed. For, as Oakeshott readily acknowledges, an awful lot ofscholarship that masquerades as being ‘historical’ in form is actually‘practical’ and thus not history at all.77 As we will see in the followingsection, this distinction has been put to good use in recent scholarship,particularly in the work of Brian C. Schmidt on traditions in IR.Secondly, Oakeshott’s understanding of tradition also helps us to clarifythe extent of their invented nature. All tradition is ‘invented’ in the sensethat it is a function of present thinking. Just as there is no one past ‘outthere’ waiting to be uncovered by historians, there is no sense in whichtraditions of thought can be said to really exist in the past. However,some traditions, including traditions of thought, are also ‘invented’ in asimilar manner to ‘practical knowledge’ discussed above. That is, suchtraditions are not invented in an explicit or self-conscious manner butrather evolve somewhat organically. Finally, what Oakeshott’sdiscussion of the relationship between traditions of behaviour andideology highlights is the manner in which implicit behaviouraltraditions can become reformulated as fabricated traditions.

Approaching Tradition in International Relations

Perhaps one of the most rigourous sets of philosophically derivedcriticisms leveled at the use of traditions of thought appears in the worksof John G. Gunnell. Although Gunnell is primarily concerned with the‘historical self-image’ of American political science, his argumentsresonate in IR.78 Like Oakeshott’s criticism of what is often viewed as ‘thehistory of political thought’, Gunnell specifically attacks what he termsthe ‘myth of the tradition’; that is, the notion that a grand tradition ofpolitical thought which defines the history of the field can be identified.For Gunnell, this ‘so-called tradition’ is actually ‘an image conjured upin academic discourse and projected backward to create a virtualhistory’.79 It is, in an explicitly Oakeshottian sense, an example of‘practical history’ according to which the essential relevance of the‘grand tradition’ is derived from the idea that it explains the ‘modernpolitical condition’.80 Thus, as Gunnell writes,

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77. Oakeshott, ‘Present, Future and Past’, 37.78. John G. Gunnell, ‘The Historiography of American Political Science’, in The

Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey, eds. David Easton, JohnGunnell and Luigi Graziano (London: Routledge, 1990), 14.

79. John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science andPolitic, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 155.

80. John G. Gunnell, ‘Interpretation and the History of Political Theory:Apology and Epistemology’, American Political Science Review 70, no. 2 (1982): 326.



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The ‘tradition’ is a retrospective analytical construction whichproduces a rationalized version of the past. It is virtual traditioncalculated to evoke a particular image of our collective public psycheand the political condition of our age, if not the human conditionitself. It professes to tell us who we are and how we have arrived atour present situation.81

Within this tradition, Gunnell argues, texts are interpreted, not asindependent entities, but in terms of the overall meaning ascribed to thetradition.82 Thus, ‘the tradition of political thought’ is, in Gunnell’s view,a mythical one, the central assumption of which claims that texts ‘fromPlato to Marx, that have been awarded classic status by historians ofpolitical theory represent an actual (or self-constituted) historicaltradition or inherited pattern of thought that in some significant respectexplains contemporary politics’.83 Gunnell’s criticisms of the ‘myth of thetradition’ in political science have been explicitly applied to thediscipline of IR in the work of Brian Schmidt.

Schmidt’s disciplinary history of IR begins from the premise that‘most conventional accounts of the development of the field ofinternational relations contain two historiographical assumptions thathave led to a serious misrepresentation of the actual history of thefield’.84 The first of these assumptions is of relevance to this subject andpertains to the general assumption that the history of IR can be‘explained in terms of a classical tradition of which modern academicpractitioners are the heirs’.85 Both IR and its constituent theoreticaltraditions are assumed to be ‘epic’ in proportions, beginning with the‘classic’ works of the ancient Greeks and extending in a more or lessunbroken pattern of thought to the present. As Alastair Murray haspointed out, the realist tradition in particular has suffered fromcontinual attempts to ‘construct a ‘realist’ grand narrative in whichhistorical figures with some affiliation to this mode of thought are linedup in a surreal identity parade of ‘the usual suspects’’.86 In a similar vein,Steven Forde notes that ‘classical realism’

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81. John G. Gunnell, ‘The Myth of the Tradition’ in History of Ideas, 249.82. John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time: Plato and the Origins of

Political Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), ix.83. Ibid.84. Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of

International Relations, (Albany, NY: SNY Press, 1998), 15.85. Ibid. The second assumption is that ‘events in the realm of international

politics have fundamentally structured the development of internationalrelations as an academic field of study’.

86. Alastair J. H. Murray, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics andCosmopolitan Ethics (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 3.



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is a tradition that begins with Thucydides and extends throughMachiavelli to the early social contract theorists Hobbes, Spinoza andRousseau. Though this tradition has been immensely powerful, it is tosome extent an artificial construct – these thinkers did not by and largethink of themselves as adherents to a tradition, but as innovators.87

In order to overcome this problem, Murray suggests that the ideas ofMachiavelli and Hobbes are ‘better conceived of as distinct traditions ofthought in their own right’ and the label ‘realist’ reserved for its modernproponents.88 However, this leaves the problem of how to approach those‘traditions’ that have, until now, been retrospectively and sometimesanachronistically constructed but which have an undeniable impactupon the field. It is here that Oakeshott’s philosophy of history isparticularly instructive.

Just as Oakeshott conceives of the past as either ‘practical’ or‘historical’, Brian Schmidt classifies traditions as either ‘analytical’ or‘historical’. What Schmidt terms an historical tradition may exist as ‘apre-constituted and self-constituted pattern of conventional practicethrough which ideas are conveyed within a recognizably establishedand specified discursive framework’.89 In a similar manner to ‘historicalpast’ then, historical traditions, despite also being constructed in thepresent, utilise the past for the sake of the past, rather than for thepurposes of the present. Conversely, analytical traditions are‘retrospectively created construct[s] determined by present criteria andconcerns’.90 In a manner similar to Hobsbawm’s understanding of an‘invented tradition’, analytical traditions may be either deliberately orinadvertently constructed for presentist purposes rather than with theintention of actually reconstructing the past.91 Of course, one might pointout that Schmidt mixes here what Oakeshott’s maintains are two distinct‘modes of experience’, applying historical categories to ‘pattern[s] ofconventional practice’. However, as Thomas Smith, Preston King andothers have pointed out, not only are Oakeshott’s modes of experienceconceived a little too rigidly, but ‘science, practice and poetry all have anhistorical dimension’.92 Of course Oakeshott, whilst conceding that eachmode of experience has a past, argues that the pasts of practice, scienceand poetry are of a fundamentally different nature to that of historicalexperience. That, however, is a debate for another day.

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87. Steven Forde, ‘Classical Realism’, in Traditions of International Ethics, 62.88. Murray, Reconstructing Realism, 3.89. Schmidt, Discourse of Anarchy, 25.90. Ibid.91. Ibid., 31.92. Smith, ‘Oakeshott on History’, 608; and King, Thinking Past a Problem, 99.



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In criticising the use of traditions in the history of IR, Schmidt argues thatthe ‘distinguishing feature’ of the ‘traditions approach’ has been the‘tendency to view an analytical tradition as an actual historical one’.93

Explicitly deriving his argument from Gunnell’s notion of the ‘myth ofthe tradition’, he contends that at the core of the tradition of IR ‘is thereification of an analytical construct. It is the representation of what is infact a retrospectively and externally demarcated tradition as an actual orself-constituted tradition’.94 As will be seen in the following section, thishas certainly been the case with the transmission of the three traditions ofinternational theory from one of the most prominent proponents of the‘traditions approach’ in IR, Martin Wight, to his protégé, Hedley Bull.

Tradition in Wight and Bull

Wight employed a particular notion of ‘tradition’ as the primary meansof classification in constructing his famous triumvirate schematisation ofinternational theory. This specific understanding of tradition can begleaned from two main sources: first, from his explicit, though brief,discussions of the concept itself; and secondly, from the application ofhis theoretical understanding of tradition to the particular traditions heconstructs. Wight’s theoretical notion of tradition is based on thepremise that ‘political ideas do not change much’ over time.95 Applied tothe field of international theory, Wight maintains that ‘[i]f one surveysthe most illustrious writers who have treated of international theorysince Machiavelli, and the principle ideas of this field which have beenin circulation, it is strikingly plain that they fall into three groups, andthe ideas into three traditions’.96 As is made particularly apparent in‘Western Values in International Relations’, the three groups – or, asWight refers to them, ‘inter-related political conditions’ – are centeredaround three different approaches to the concept of ‘internationalsociety’, and correspond to the three traditions of realism, rationalismand revolutionism. Thus, at the outset it is clear that Wight’s centralconcern here is a ‘presentist’ one – namely, the modern notion ofinternational society; which, of course, was not in existence when theexemplars of his three traditions, Hobbes, Grotius and Kant wrote – andthat his traditions are primarily analytical in form.

As Jens Bartelson quite rightly points out, Wight’s notion of‘tradition’ is less concerned with the apparent passage through time ofan idea or set of ideas, than with their apparent coherence within a given

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93. Schmidt, Discourse of Anarchy, 25.94. Gunnell quoted in Schmidt, ibid.95. Wight, International Theory, 5.96. Ibid., 7.



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set of retrospectively determined parameters.97 Indeed, that Wightintended his three traditions to be considered ‘patterns of thought’ ismade clear in the characterisation of rationalism he outlines in ‘WesternValues in International Relations’:

This pattern is persistent and recurrent. Sometimes eclipsed anddistorted it has constantly reappeared and reasserted its authority, sothat it may even seem something like a consensus of Westerndiplomatic opinion.98

In a similar vein, Wight also mentions that ‘there are other patterns ofideas in international history for which persistence, recurrence andcoherence can be claimed’, thus emphasising the central importance ofcoherence to his schematisation of international theory.99

Although some sense of continuity akin to that of the notion ofinheritance central to Krygier’s definition of tradition discussed abovecan be discerned in Wight’s characterisation of the rationalist tradition –notable in its description as originating ‘with the Greeks and especiallythe Stoics’, owing its ‘upkeep’ to the Catholic Church and following apath of transmission that takes in the ‘Protestants, humanists andRationalists’ of the modern world – when it comes to the construction ofthe revolutionist tradition, the element of continuity is almost entirelyabsent.100 Thus, the ‘Revolutionist ancestry of ideas and continuity ofthought is ambiguous or uncertain ... Here continuity is least important;there is rather a series of disconnected illustrations of the same politico-philosophical truths’. The revolutionist tradition, unlike realism andrationalism, is consequently characterised as ‘less a stream than a seriesof waves’.101 However, that it is nonetheless termed a ‘tradition’ inWight’s assessment is testimony to the loose manner in which heunderstood the term. This loose conception of ‘tradition’ is alsoparticularly evident in Wight’s discussion of the parameters of theRationalist tradition, complete with its bounding ‘swamps’ and ‘cragsand precipices’ of realism and revolutionism respectively.102

For Wight then, the three traditions of international theory arebroad, overlapping and vaguely demarcated categories according to

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97. Jens Bartelson, ‘Short Circuits: Society and Tradition in InternationalRelations Theory’, Review of International Studies 22 (1996): 347.

98. Martin Wight, ‘Western Values in International Relations’, in DiplomaticInvestigations, 90-91.

99. Ibid., 91.100. Wight, International Theory, 14.101. Ibid., 12.102. Ibid., 14-15.



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which both individual theorists and their common ideas can beclassified. That they are fundamentally analytical in character is madeclear by the extent to which the parameters of the traditions rather thanthe members therein dictate who is a ‘member’ and who is not. Thus, notonly does Wight entertain a theoretically analytical understanding of theterm tradition but the gathering together of his three sets of writers is aretrospective exercise according to which the boundaries separating thetraditions are determined by a set of present concerns. It also followsfrom this that the ‘past’ that Wight constructs here is, in an Oakeshottiansense, primarily a ‘practical’ one designed to illustrate howcontemporary international theory came to be.

However, the question arises here as to whether or not Wight is anymore ‘analytical’ that Oakeshott. It would seem that in many respects heis not. Indeed, both thinkers, despite efforts to the contrary, end uppresenting fairly orthodox ‘canons’ of important political thinkers(although Wight also includes a number of diplomats and statesmen inhis list) and both seek to organise sets of ideas as traditions of thought.Wight divides international theory into ‘at least three’ traditions andOakeshott conceives of two traditions of political thought (thoseconcerned with civil and enterprise associations respectively). And, to befair, neither thinker makes any sort of claim that these are the onlypossible traditions of thought.

However, what distinguishes Wight from Oakeshott is that theformer is engaged in the practice of theorising whilst the latter isengaged in historical enquiry. Theorising, the organisation of knowledgeinto a system that explains or contributes to our understanding ofcertain phenomena is, by definition, a ‘presentist’ ‘practical’ endeavour.This is not to say that it is not possible to theorise about history. Ratherit suggests that theories do not actually exist in and of themselves but areinvented by the collection and presentation of particular sets of ideasaround a particular subject. And yet, central to Wight’s theorising is thepresentation, albeit a highly schematised one, of certain patterns in thehistory of international political thought. Where Wight – or a least hisinterpreters; including Bull, to be discussed shortly – falls into trouble iswith the assumption and subsequent portrayal of these practicalschemes as actual ‘historical history’. That is, the problem lies in largepart with what Schmidt identified above as the tendency to viewanalytical traditions as actual historical traditions.

This is not to say that Wight does not appreciate the inherentdangers of categorisation. As mentioned earlier, addressing this veryissue, he writes that



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all of this is merely classification and schematising. In all politicaland historical studies the purpose of building pigeon-holes is toreassure oneself that the raw material does not fit into them ... Thegreatest political writers in international theory almost all straddlethe frontiers dividing two of the traditions and most of these writerstranscend their own systems.103

However, Wight cannot be absolved of all blame here, as his recognitionof the limitations of classification does little to ameliorate the impact ofhis loose use of the term tradition. In particular, Wight’s inconsistentconceptualisation of tradition – at times approximating that of Krygierdiscussed above (realism and rationalism), and at others resemblingsomething akin to a paradigm (revolutionism) – has certainlycontributed to the entanglement of the historical and analytical variantsof his traditions. Thus, although ‘tradition’ is sometimes held in Wight’swork to mean a pattern of thought continuous over time and sometimesa series of ‘disconnected illustrations’ that do not really resemble‘tradition’ of any sort, they are all bundled together under the title of ‘thethree traditions’.

It is with the work of Hedley Bull that we see not only the absoluteequation of realism, rationalism and revolutionism withMachiavellianism, Grotianism and Kantianism, thereby firmlyassociating the origins of each tradition with a particular thinker, but thesolidification of the boundaries separating Wight’s three traditions.104

This pattern of association is particularly pronounced with regard to the‘Grotian tradition’ of IR. Indeed, although Bull goes to some lengths todistinguish between the ideas of Grotius and the contents of the Grotiantradition – writing that ‘the positions of Grotius and of the twentiethcentury neo-Grotians are quite distinct’ – he ends up conflating the twoentities nonetheless.105 This is in marked contrast to Wight whomaintained that while all ‘Grotians are Rationalists’ the converse doesnot apply, Grotianism being a category of international legal scholarshipthat can be classified under the broader banner of the rationalisttradition.106 In this vein, Edward Keene has noted that Wight ‘twistedhimself into knots trying to explain how Grotians were similar to

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103. Ibid., 259.104. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd

ed. (London: Macmillan, 1995), 23.105. Hedley Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’, in

Diplomatic Investigations, 66. See also, Benedict Kingsbury, ‘Grotius, Law andMoral Scepticism: Theory and Practice in the Thought of Hedley Bull’, inClassical Theories, 42.

106. Wight, International Theory, 14.



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rationalists, while at the same time retaining a sense of the differencesbetween the two traditions’.107 Moreover, that the Grotian tradition is notabsolutely equated with Grotius himself is made more obvious byWight’s belief that ‘Grotianism emerged with Vitoria’, a theorist whodied almost forty years before Grotius was born.108

Bull’s conflation of Hugo Grotius with the ‘Grotian’ tradition canbe attributed to his understanding of tradition in two main ways. First,Bull’s attempt to draw a set of meaningful comparisons betweenGrotius’ works and the ideas of the twentieth century members of theGrotian tradition is, from the outset, critically limited. Thus, as Schmidtand Gunnell’s argue, the meaning of ‘classic texts’, such as Grotius’ DeJure Belli ac Pacis, ‘is often already prefigured by reference to the traditionin which they are placed’.109 What is more, Bull’s understanding ofGrotius appears to be directed in particular by the works of Corneliusvan Vollenhoven, Lassa Oppenheim and Hersch Lauterpacht, all ofwhom were instrumental in the development of the ‘Grotian tradition’of international law in the twentieth century and all of whom Bullconsidered members of a wider ‘Grotian tradition’. Thus, Bull’sunderstanding of Grotius as an intellectual entity separable from the‘Grotian tradition’ (what he would call the neo-Grotians), is in factsituated wholly within what he constitutes as the tradition itself. It istherefore not at all surprising that Bull is able to draw a set of‘remarkable’ resemblances between the two sets of ideas.110

Secondly, and with regard to the theoretical notion of traditionapparent in Wight’s three traditions of international theory, Bull writesthat ‘Wight himself was the first to warn against the danger of reifyingthe concepts he had suggested’. Revealingly, he continues, ‘theMachiavellian, Grotian and Kantian traditions were merely paradigms’,and ‘not even Machiavelli, for example, was in the strict sense aMachiavellian’.111 Thus, Bull seems to acknowledge Wight’s insistencethat the ‘three traditions were only to be taken as paradigms’, and even

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107. Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Orderin World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34.

108. Wight, International Theory, 162.109. Brian C. Schmidt, ‘The Historiography of Academic International

Relations’, Review of International Studies 20, no.4 (1994): 359.110. A. Claire Cutler has made an argument similar to Bull’s. However, like

Bull, Cutler’s interpretation of Grotius has been prefigured by her reliance on anumber of writers who are members of the ‘Grotian tradition’. A. Claire Culter,‘The “Grotian Tradition” in International Relations’, Review of InternationalStudies 17, no.1 (1991): 41-65.

111. Hedley Bull, ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’,introduction to International Theory, xiii.



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then not ‘too seriously’.112 Bull’s apparent understanding of the dangersinherent in the practice of categorisation is also reflected in a number ofother works published around the same time. Thus, in ‘The Theory ofInternational Politics 1919-1969’ he argues that ‘[i]t is not possible todivide the theoretical works of the last half century into neat categoriesor schools that are logically exhaustive and exclusive of one another’.113

However, the pivotal point in Bull’s thinking is revealed in his criticismof Wight’s view and the subsequent claim that ‘one has to take [the threetraditions] seriously or not at all’.114 Indeed, this contention may be seenas being largely responsible for the solidification of what Bull recognisedhad been in Wight’s view three vaguely defined traditions.

On a more fundamental level however, Bull’s argument andcontiguous conceptualisation of the Grotian tradition reveals the extentto which he viewed Wight’s analytical traditions as actual historical oneswith solidly demarcated boundaries and an explicitly discernible path oftransmission. In particular, as Bartelson notes, ‘Bull criticised Wight forgiving in to the temptation of coherence’ with the following argument:115

Much that has been said about International Relations in the pastcannot be related significantly to these traditions at all. Wight was, Ibelieve, too ambitious in attributing to the Machiavellians, theGrotians and the Kantians distinctive views not only about war,peace, diplomacy, intervention and other matters of InternationalRelations, but about human psychology, about irony and tragedy,about methodology and epistemology. There is a point at which thedebate Wight is describing ceases to be one that has actually takenplace, and becomes one that he has invented; at this point his workis not an exercise in the history of ideas, so much as the exposition ofan imaginary philosophical conversation.116

This last sentence is particularly telling. As mentioned earlier, whatWight was self-consciously engaged in with the construction of his threetraditions was the schematisation and theorisation of internationalthought; that is, invention, in a explicitly practical sense. That the threetraditions were grounded in the history of international thought inWight’s view does not change the fact that he was constructing, or at the

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112. Ibid., xviii.113. Hedley Bull, ‘The Theory of International Politics 1919-1969’, in The

Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919-1969, ed. Brian Porter (London:Oxford University Press, 1972), 33.

114. Bull, ‘Martin Wight’, xviii.115. Bartelson, ‘Short Circuits’, 347.116. Bull, ‘Martin Wight’, xviii.



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117. Bartelson, ‘Short Circuits’, 347.

very least restating, what were three retrospectively devised traditionsof thought.

Despite his criticisms of Wight however, Bull similarly ‘invents’ aGrotian tradition, only his pays more attention to the element ofcontinuity than the element of coherence. Also unable to resist thetemptation of locating ‘the origin of the Grotian tradition in the works ofGrotius himself’, Bull constructs a singular pattern of thoughttransmitted from Grotius to the twentieth century derived from Wight’srationalist tradition.117 What is particularly problematic about this is thatby doing so, Bull anachronistically attributes to Grotius a range ofconcepts (such as the modern notion of international society and thedoctrine of humanitarian intervention) characteristic of twentiethcentury variants of the Grotian tradition but of which Grotius himselfhad little understanding.

Conclusion

Whether employed as a taxonomic device or to designate a self-consciously perpetuated pattern of transmission, the term ‘tradition’often brings with it a range of historical and epistemologicalconnotations. Whether intentionally or not, to designate something aspart of a ‘tradition’ implies an inherent connection to the past and, inmost instances, involves a certain sets of assumptions about the originsof such tradition. ‘Traditions’ demarcate who and what is ‘in’ and, indoing so, create associations between both thinkers and their ideas.However, a range of serious epistemological problems are associatedwith the indiscriminate use of the term in the framing of disciplinaryhistories, particularly, as we have seen, in IR. In particular, asdemonstrated by the transmission of ideas from Wight to Bull, thetendency to view analytical traditions as actual historical ones is veryreal and can result in both the prefiguring of a writer’s work and/or theestablishment of anachronistic sets of relationships.

In order to overcome the plethora of problems surrounding the useof the term ‘tradition’ in IR then, it seems that we have two main optionsavailable to us. The first – favoured by Oakeshott himself – is somewhatdefeatist and entails the abandonment of the term ‘tradition’ itself.However, this is problematic for a range of reasons. First, as suchrenunciation is more likely to occur on an individual than a disciplinarylevel, doing so will inevitably result in individual isolation from whatwill, in all likelihood, be a mode of scholarship that continues to attractfollowers. Secondly, as Oakeshott’s use of the term ‘practice’ indicates,



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ceasing to use the term ‘tradition’ does not preclude the construction oftradition-like patterns of thought under a different title. Indeed, theabandonment of ‘tradition’ in favour of ‘practice’ in Oakeshott’s laterworks is rendered somewhat irrelevant by the proximity of hisdefinitions of practice and tradition. Finally, the abandonment of‘tradition’ leaves the critical question of what we are to do with thosetraditions that are already in existence and will continue to beconstructed in IR. Are we to simply ignore them? The on-goingattraction of ‘tradition’ is easy to see. Traditions are a ‘practicalconvenience’.118 Drawing together a range of at times disparate concepts,they constitute ‘a way of imposing order upon’ what often appears to bea ‘complex and protean reality’.119 Thus, what is important in trying toovercome the range of problems associated with the use of traditions inIR is recognition that a more thorough consideration of precisely what itmeans to designate a set of thinkers or ideas a tradition needs to beincorporated into contemporary scholarship.

It seems then that the way in which we can overcome many of theproblems associated with the use of traditions in IR is by fighting thebattle from within. This does not mean simply identifying a range oftypes of tradition employed in the discipline, as Tim Dunne, andBenedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts have usefully done, butconsidering their historical and epistemological ramifications. Onewriter who has done just this is Terry Nardin whose volume with DavidMapel begins with a theoretical discussion of tradition that is explicitlyreliant on Krygier, and implicitly upon Oakeshott. In a manner similar tothis article, Nardin presents traditions as ‘invented’ phenomenaalthough he does not explain the philosophical reasons for thischaracterisation in any detail.120 So far so good. However, as NicholasRengger has recently pointed out, ‘by suggesting that common moralityis itself a tradition’, Nardin seems to contradict his own definition ofwhat a tradition entails.121 Indeed, Nardin’s tradition of commonmorality inadvertently strays worryingly close to the notion of the‘grand tradition’ he hopes to eradicate. However, Nardin is in goodcompany here. As mentioned earlier, despite Oakeshott’s own hostilityto the canonisation of the history of political thought and his earnestdesire to restore ‘historical history’ from the grasp of presentism,Oakeshott not only ends up effectively constructing his own canon of

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118. Walker, Inside/Outside, 27.119. Dunne, ‘Mythology or Methodology?’, 308.120. Nardin, ‘Ethical Traditions’.121. Nicholas Rengger, ‘Eternal Return? Modes of Encountering Religion in

International Relations’, 32, no. 2 (2003): 335. My emphasis.



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important thinkers but came to recognise that it is almost impossible toprevent practical concerns from creeping their way in to all forms ofinquiry albeit in a minimal sense.

In light of the preceding discussion, I would therefore like toconclude by suggesting a number of ways in which we might at worstlimit and at best eradicate the indiscriminate and anachronistic use ofthe term ‘tradition’ in IR scholarship. The first general move required isrecognition of the fact that traditions are inherently ‘invented’phenomena. That is, they are functions of present thinking constructedby the retrospective association of antecedent ideas, whether previouslyassociated with one another, in the manner of an historical tradition, orotherwise. Thus, to reiterate an earlier point, it is the manner in whichtraditions of thought are invented that is important and about this wemust be explicit. This entails, secondly, not simply recognising that‘invention’ may entail an intentional fabrication of a pattern of thoughtor an organic evolution over time, but specifying which of these thingswe are referring to when we speak of a tradition of thought. Thirdly,overcoming the range of problems associated with the use of traditionsin IR also requires understanding, with Oakeshott, Gunnell andSchmidt, that ‘historical knowledge’ exists in both ‘practical’ and‘historical’ forms, each of which is defined by specific epistemologicalconstraints and each of which is utilised for distinctly different purposes.Of course, these prescriptions may, and indeed will, seem somewhatpedantic to many scholars of IR who continue to employ ‘tradition’ as auseful schematic or taxonomic device in the realms of both teaching andresearch. However, the effect of the ongoing failure to consider theepistemological ramifications of utilising traditions in recent, and in thecase of Wight and Bull, not so recent, disciplinary history is clear fromthe preceding discussions.

However, in closing I would also like to suggest one further, and farmore fundamental treatment for this state of affairs; namely, a renewedrecognition of the importance of historical self-awareness in the study ofinternational relations. At first glance, this pronouncement may seemslightly absurd; what could such self-understanding possibly tell usabout the way in which states interact, wars are fought, or politicaldecisions are made? Of course, the obvious answer is that it tells usnothing in and of itself. Rather, what historical self-awareness canprovide is a better understanding of what we are doing when weconceive and present ideas of relevance to IR in an historical manner. IRis a fundamentally historical field of inquiry. It is concerned withhistorical events and historical processes and – it is almost too obviousto state explicitly – without history there could not be a subject of studywe call IR.




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Both Oakeshott and Wight would undoubtedly approve of thissuggestion. Wight regularly ended his courses on international relationswith a reminder to his students that all theories of internationalrelations, whether explicitly or otherwise, are predicated on aphilosophy of history. Similarly, in his 1928 and 1948 essays entitled ‘ThePhilosophy of History’ Oakeshott presents a case for the general studyof the philosophy of history, whilst his 1962 essay, ‘The Study of ‘Politics’in a University,’ argues that the appropriate subject matter of ‘politics’ ishistory and philosophy and their connection.122 This is not to suggest thatwhat underpins scholarship in IR is what might be termed a ‘criticalphilosophy of history’, that is, a theory of the nature of history as adiscipline. Rather, it is to argue that, at least implicitly, ideas about howwe view the past and its relevance to the present are central to what weare doing when we are engaged in the study of international relations.

Renée Jeffery is Lecturer in International Relations at the School ofSocial Sciences, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

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