Portrait of the realist as a historian: On anti-whiggism in the history of international relations

The new history of international relations

In recent years, the call for a more ‘historical’ understanding of the disciplines has been heard across a number of fields, but it has nowhere been heeded as much as in political science. Long confined to glorifications of the behavioral paradigm or to the mourning of a defunct age when political science and political theory were hardly distinct, the histories of political science have registered a momentous change, characterized by a greater independence vis-a-vis disciplinary agendas. ¹ Indigenous histories and grand narratives of progress or decline have been replaced by the careful reconstruction of arguments in context. The waning hegemony of the behavioral agenda also explained the revived interest in history. Political science has thus ‘become much more hospitable to history and historical investigation than behavioralism ever was’ (Farr et al., 1995: 4–5). This new historiography has been more self-reflective, methodologically sophisticated, literate in the history and epistemology of science, and more aware of the transnational dimensions of intellectual life. ²

International relations (IR) did not remain aloof from these developments. If anything, the discipline has been central to this ‘historical turn’ and witnessed the development of an important subfield dedicated to a new history of the field, against the mythology of the ‘great debates’ (Bell, 2009; Elman and Fendius Elman, 2001; Little, 1999; Roberts, 2006). Realism, Morgenthau, the English School, and interwar thinkers, among other topics, have been reconsidered in ways that challenged the self-image of the discipline. ³ The turn toward history in IR was also the result of a renewed interest in the ‘history of international thought’ that has brought into sharper focus the terms under which international politics have been discussed and their historical transformation. ⁴

While the new history of IR is a diverse field, its practitioners nonetheless share important assumptions. These can be illustrated in reference to one of the first books challenging the conventional history of the discipline, Brian Schmidt’s (1998) The Political Discourse of Anarchy. In it, Schmidt did not present IR as the succession of abstract doctrines (idealism, realism, neorealism, etc.), but as a set of contextualized arguments about international politics: the evolution of the discipline, he contended, was nothing else than the transformation of the terms under which certain political arguments were conducted. It was ‘the history of a conversation’ (Schmidt, 1998: 37). Much of the new IR history has thus understood itself as an extension to the study of international politics of the approach advocated by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and other historians of the ‘Cambridge school,’ if not in all its prescriptions, at least in its warnings against the risks of retrospective rationalization. ⁵ Schmidt’s (2013) reinterpretation was thus framed as a reaction against ‘whig’ historiography or ‘presentism,’ an aspect that he has emphasized in his more recent writings. Since, the rejection of whig history has been the default position of most revisionist histories of IR that draw inspiration from the history of political concepts.

What are the implications of this revisionist historiography for the discipline as a whole? It is often suggested that it can broaden the horizon of IR scholars and ‘reconnect the field … to wider traditions of political thought from which it has often become estranged’ (Williams, 2012: ix). While I wholeheartedly agree, it is also hard to say what these traditions are or how far they extend, and I fear that the relation of the new history of IR to contemporary agendas still eludes us. Clarifying this relationship is what I shall attempt to do in this article.

By definition, the relation of any ‘anti-whig’ research program to present agendas is notoriously difficult to tease out. It is indeed a feature of the critique of presentism to conceal its relation to current agendas by enforcing a strict separation between past and present. ⁶ A first hint, however, comes from the hardly concealed bias of the new disciplinary history in favor of classical postwar realism. As Michael Williams (2013) has observed, disciplinary history has been one of the main causes of the ‘revival of this realist sensibility’ (p. 657), and, indeed, one would look in vain for a comparable interest in the historical development of liberal internationalism or constructivism. ⁷ Even neorealism does not seem to warrant the same interest, at least so far. Many among the historians of the discipline have favored mid-century realism as a subject of historical exploration. ⁸ But this collective penchant has come at a price: in their desire to showcase the complexity of the original realist vision against its subsequent impoverishment as neorealism (to say nothing of the garbled understanding of realism by its critics), some historians of IR have come close to endorsing it. ⁹ One of the remarkable features of the ‘revisionist’ history of IR is indeed that it has contributed to the ideological whitewashing of realism by papering over its conflicted relationship to liberalism. For sure, much has been gained in the current reappraisal of realism by historians of the discipline, but some things have been quietly left alone, especially when they seemed to threaten the historical re-enchantment of realism. In any event, the causes behind elective affinities between revisionist disciplinary history and realism have not been probed, and IR historians have yet to reflect upon their own relationship to their predilect subject matter.

My argument is that the revisionist history of IR is itself situated in the direct lineage of political realism. It is not just that anti-whig history has occasionally claimed this label for itself (John Dunn once described the project of the Cambridge school as a ‘realist’ one ¹⁰ ): wittingly or not, most historians of international thought share with realists fundamental assumptions about history, and in particular a rejection of rationalist philosophies of history. Realism, in other words, cannot easily be detached from — and maybe even defined by — a historicist outlook inherited from the 19th century.

There is nothing very novel about my claim that realism and historicism were originally joined at the hip: David Armitage (2004) suggested as much when he wrote that history and IR were ‘separated by a common language’ (p. 98) and Nicholas Rengger (2007) has pointed out the ‘anti-Pelagian’ inflections of this language. In the 19th century, it was Ranke who thought of Europe in terms of ‘balance of power’ and ‘great power’ politics, and emphasized the permanence of traditional forces and the individuality of nations against the rationalistic tendencies and the philosophy of history of the Enlightenment. Later, it was Meinecke who suggested that the development of raison d’état, by emphasizing the unique historical individuality of states against the natural law tradition, had fostered the rise of the modern historicist outlook in opposition to the French Revolution. In the United States, his student Felix Gilbert could still point at these affinities between historicism and realism. ¹¹

If my argument is correct, it carries major consequences for the status of history in the discipline and for the identity of realism. First, it implies that the distinction between an anti-whig vision of history and political realism, if it exists at all, is one that is internal to the realist tradition. It is not grounded on substantive differences, only on the fact that IR theory has severed the relationship between realism and history in its attempt to mimic science after World War II (WWII). But this also suggests that an entire swath of the realist tradition has been lost in the process and that what goes on by the name of ‘realism’ in IR theory is necessarily a partial and, thus, flawed rendition. To put it differently and more provocatively, IR as a discipline is premised on a structural misrepresentation of realism.

If so, a closer look at the anti-whig tradition in history may help us recover a more accurate image of realism and open new possibilities for the study of international politics. At a general level, it suggests that the divide between theory and history, recently explored in this journal by George Lawson (2012), is not warranted intellectually. Realism is not the positivistic, de-historicized vision that its critics denunciate, but a form of historical thinking that should not be confused with its ‘neo’ version, which was indeed a distillate of previous realist thought obtained after the complete evaporation of its historical content in cybernetic circuitry. ¹² This also suggests that there are intrinsic limits to the predictive claims of IR theory, despite its reliance on the rationalistic assumptions that eventually came to dominate realism.

On the positive side, however, recovering this historicist substratum opens up the possibility of more fruitful engagements with historical approaches to IR, and of overcoming disciplinary divides that have been paralyzing and unproductive, such as that between realism and constructivism. The common origins of realism and certain forms of conceptual history that I outline in this article suggest that there are potentially important convergences between these research programs. By the same token, we should reconsider the way IR is taught and make room in the classical canon for international historians such as Herbert Butterfield, Arnold Toynbee, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, or Felix Gilbert. Realism can thus inoculate itself against the tendency to hypostatize ‘power,’ ‘anarchy,’ ‘state,’ or ‘balance’ as historically transcendent entities, and re-engage with a capacity to think politics in all its contingent and emerging manifestations, in particular, its conceptual manifestations, while leaving beyond neorealism’s impossible project of freezing historical time into an artificial set of lifeless ontological assumptions. ¹³ This, however, implies confronting squarely and with lucidity its ideological origins and its problematic relationship to liberalism, as a first step toward escaping the hold these origins still have over practitioners and historians alike.

Recovering the ties between realism and historicism requires going back to the influential argument first articulated by Herbert Butterfield in 1931 and understanding its ideological fungibility in the postwar context: initially confined to historiography, it doubled up as an understanding of history and politics associated with Christian realism in the late 1940s. I then suggest that this ideological orientation was the basis upon which were built the new approaches to political and international thought that emerged in Europe in the 1950s and today inform disciplinary history, in particular, the Cambridge school and German Begriffsgeschichte. Finally, I consider the consequences of this genealogy for current debates about realism and liberalism. So far, disciplinary history has sought to present realism as a ‘richer’ tradition than its stylized version, usually by providing a more subtle reading of the classics. ¹⁴ But it has yet to recognize its own implication in this tradition in order to fully challenge the conventional image of realism. Realism is first and foremost a vision of history addressing the problem of political agency and rationality once history is no longer expected to resolve differences into a higher unity expressing the rational nature of the historical process. In this account, realism is a modern phenomenon, which has its roots in the historiography that emerges in Germany in the 19th century as a counterpoint to the Enlightenment. In the 1950s, while IR theory was still in its infancy, the awareness of this lineage was still vivid and it informed the diagnosis of the international situation. It is this complex genealogy that today comes full circle by inspiring a revisionist history of IR that often ends up peddling a sophisticated historical apologetics for realism.

Anti-whiggism and the disciplines

It is well known that the expression ‘whig interpretation of history’ has been coined by the British historian Herbert Butterfield (1959) in a 1931 pamphlet that criticized the liberal historiography represented by Lord Acton, in whom ‘the whig historian reached his highest consciousness’ (p. 109). Extolling the march of liberty through the ages, interpreting the Reformation as a battle between good and evil, seeing history as the progress of the world toward self-government, the whig historian ‘stands on the summit of the 20th century, and organizes his scheme of history from the point of view of his own day.’ The result of this complacency is the tendency ‘to praise revolutions provided they have been successful’ and understand the past as a mere prelude to the present (Butterfield, 1959: 13, v). Thus arranged, history becomes ‘something like the mind of God, making ultimate judgments upon the things which are happening in time’ and the historian takes the role of its mouthpiece, as he distillates moral verdicts (Butterfield, 1959: 113–114). But in organizing his material according to such assumptions, he also produces ‘a gigantic optical illusion’ (Butterfield, 1959: 29).

Although Butterfield’s (1959) polemical charge was aimed at the triumphalist interpretation of the Reformation by liberal historians, it had a wider significance: the whig fallacy was ‘not merely the property of whigs’ because it provided any historian with a tool for abridging and simplifying historical complexity; it referred to ‘a certain organisation of historical knowledge’ that was of some consequence for the professional practice of historians in general (pp. 30, 36). Butterfield vehemently opposed the ‘moralization’ of history and detected behind the judicial functions of the historian a worrying Enlightenment leftover, that is, a philosophy of history. ¹⁵ Against this, his remedy consisted in prescribing a heavy dose of German historicism.

Beyond the immediate intent of Butterfield’s little book, the condemnation of the whig interpretation of history had a felicitous career, not least because of Butterfield’s influence in the development of the history of science in Britain. ¹⁶ It has been deployed as a weapon in the struggles between intellectual historians and the self-serving histories generated from within academic disciplines, and Butterfield has become a household name among disciplinary historians. Tracing its use in historiographical debates can help outline the functions of anti-whiggism in the history of the social sciences from Butterfield to current debates about IR history. As I mentioned, the critique of whig history was at the center of Schmidt’s argument about IR. It was already inspiring a new approach to the history of political thought in the 1970s, and the impact of Skinner and Pocock’s work on the self-understanding of professional political scientists was apparent by the end of the decade (Collini et al., 1983; Dryzek and Leonard, 1988; Gunnell, 1982). It also influenced disciplinary history in general (Graham et al., 1983: xv–xx). More recently, Dorothy Ross and Ted Porter mentioned Butterfield in their introduction to the volume on The Modern Social Sciences in the Cambridge History of Science, as they commended the emergence since the 1960s of a new history ‘viewing science through the lens of historicism’ and critical of complacent narratives of epistemic progress.

Porter and Ross (2003) referred in particular to a seminal article published in 1965 by anthropologist George Stocking in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, in which he denounced the ‘whig interpretation of science’ (p. 5). Better known today as a historian of anthropology, Stocking claims to be the first to have coined the term ‘presentism’ in reference to the tendency among historians to let disciplinary agendas define their approach of the past. His 1965 op-ed was a critique of a previous editorial statement published in the second issue of the journal by the psychologist Robert Watson, which Stocking (2010) found ‘somewhat ahistorical’ and too much tilted toward current concerns (p. 89). His denunciation of ‘presentism’ made ample use of Butterfield. Summing up Butterfield’s definition of whig history, he criticized a practice of disciplinary history that ‘assumes in advance the progressive character of historical change’ and which he took as an example of a more general tendency plaguing discipline history (Stocking, 1965: 212).

Since the term was minted by Stocking, ‘presentism’ has been inextricably bound with Butterfield’s ideas. ¹⁷ It gave the status and the legitimacy of a methodological concept to what was essentially a polemical weapon against liberal historiography, thus extending its reach across a variety of fields. While Stocking trusted historians to avoid the pitfalls of whig history, he also feared that behavioral scientists interested in the history of their discipline would expect it to be somehow related to, if not supportive of, its present state. He suggested that ‘there is a sort of implicit whiggish presentism virtually built into the history of science and by extension, the history of the social sciences.’ Instead, Stocking defended an alternative approach that he called ‘historicism’ and which he loosely defined, quoting Butterfield, as ‘the understanding of the past for its own sake.’ He gave a more specific content to this rather vague expression by referring to the work of his Berkeley colleague, the historian Joseph Levenson, for whom ‘a thought includes what its thinker eliminates.’ What Stocking found in Levenson roughly at the time when the first methodological writings of Dunn or Skinner were being published was the notion that the stuff of the history of science is a set of arguments and, more importantly, that history takes the form of a battle. Levenson himself traced this notion to Collingwood and the principle that an idea was essentially ‘a denial of alternatives’ (Stocking, 1965: 212, 213). In an autobiographical sketch published much later, Stocking (2010) defined his own brand of ‘historicism’ by saying that it privileged ‘the perspectives of [the historian’s] past subjects, the problems they addressed, and the texts and contexts in which they addressed them’ (p. 145). Such formulations, indeed, are very close to those of the exponents of the Cambridge School, who are not interested in Truth or Reason as transhistorical benchmarks, but rather in ‘rationality’ as an endogenous property of past ideological formations. It is telling that when Quentin Skinner (1965, 2001) gave a retrospective account of his historical method, he described it as ‘Collingwoodian,’ and that he also contributed to popularizing Butterfield’s attack against whig history. And before Stocking made a polemical use of Butterfield in the history of scientific disciplines, it seems that it was Peter Laslett who first called upon his predecessor to question certain types of anachronism (Jardine, 2003: 127). Last but not least, Butterfield was Pocock’s mentor while Pocock was working on his dissertation, later published as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Pocock, 1987).

By the mid-1960s to early 1970s, therefore, a new approach to the history of academic disciplines was congealing in different contexts. The Cambridge School was certainly one of them, but one could also mention the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, created in 1965. It would certainly be overstated to talk about a coherent method, but it certainly is the case that congruent historiographical reflections shared the same historicist mood, claimed the same inspiration — Butterfield or Collingwood — and understood political or disciplinary arguments in similar ways. This suggests a complex anti-whig lineage running from Butterfield to contemporary disciplinary history.

The second life of anti-whig historiography

Once this lineage is outlined, the project of writing a critical history of IR emphasizing actual debates over abstract ‘paradigms’ takes a very different hue, and it becomes difficult to disentangle the historical method from its subject matter. Indeed, Herbert Butterfield was not only the patron saint of anti-whiggery, he was also an important figure in the early institutionalization of IR theory, and he was widely regarded as an international thinker in his own right (Delahunty, 2009; Hall, 2002; Schweizer and Sharp, 2007). He was a regular commentator on international affairs, and a key participant in the Rockefeller network of scholars involved in the making of academic IR in the 1950s. He was close to Kenneth Thompson, the program officer in charge of the program in Legal and Political Philosophy under which IR theory was nurtured, who recognized in Butterfield a fellow Christian Realist and later contributed to establish his reputation as an international theorist (Thompson, 1980). In 1954, Butterfield published Christianity, Diplomacy and War, a book that straddled history and IR. And in 1959, after much hesitation, he accepted Thompson’s offer to head a British Committee on International Relations supported by Rockefeller funds, which would rapidly emerge as a distinct ‘English School’ of IR. ¹⁸ Last but not least, Butterfield was recognized as a card-carrying realist by his fellows. ¹⁹

The critique of whig history thus had a second life, politically laden and intricately associated with the ideological make-up of realism. Although it was not initially explicit, it also contained a Christian element that would come to the fore in the late 1940s, weaving together historiographical and political considerations. Butterfield’s critique of the whig interpretation was an academic expression of what the conservative historian Maurice Cowling has called ‘the anti-liberal theological movement of the twenties,’ a movement characterized by the ‘rejection of rationalism, humanitarianism, and liberal innocence.’ ²⁰ Recovering the operation of God through history meant in the first place discarding narratives of human progress. Although he failed to articulate a synthetic exposition of his historical vision, Butterfield was driven in his work by a providentialist view of history that made him distrustful of liberal optimism and scientific hubris, and by a form of cultural pessimism that led him to deplore the materialism and spiritual vacuity of modern society. ²¹ While he never identified with the Right (nor, for that matter, with the Left), in the 1930s, his intellectual trajectory led him in the orbit of the neo-traditionalist, anti-liberal, and often pro-fascist circles of Corpus Christi College (Steber, 2007: 278–280). He did not quite advocate in favor of Germany — although he came dangerously close to doing so — but his political quietism led him to adopt a conciliatory stance vis-a-vis Nazi Germany that cast a dark shadow over his intellectual legacy. ²²

By the late 1940s, Butterfield was identifying proper historical thinking with Christian belief: the Christian notion that all men were sinners implied that it was wrong to look in history for instances of individual or national righteousness. Christian historical consciousness was a natural antidote to whig history; it carried a vision of history as a glorious tapestry, a collective work made by many hands, all contributing to a design none of which could claim to have known in advance. ²³ For the same reason, this Christian sense of history had immediate political implications, and Butterfield thought that ‘historical thinking could play a part in removing the intellectual blinkers that hampered international amicability.’ ²⁴ By removing the sense of self-righteousness, the Christian approach to history and politics allowed for the equal respectability of national interests. In fact, Butterfield believed that European 18th-century diplomacy concentrated in a secularized form the wisdom of the Christian tradition and thus made possible the urbanity that allegedly characterized the international politics in pre-revolutionary Europe. The Christian understanding of history that gained momentum after 1945 was indeed the foundation of a number of core realist arguments. ²⁵

The critique of whig history thus appears to be a particular aspect of a complex ideological formation associated with political realism. This does not mean that anti-whig historians are necessarily fervent realists. Yet, this initial connection casts a particular light on the Cambridge School and on the revisionist historiography of IR that claims its methodological legacy. Traces of a realist understanding of the connection between history and politics are still perceptible today, despite the divergent paths that IR and history have taken. The title of James Tully’s 1988 essay on Quentin Skinner — ‘The pen is a mighty sword’ — is a good metaphor for thinking through this relationship. It suggests that the kind of problems tackled by the historian of political concepts bear a direct relationship to the problems of international politics. Once the past is seen as a ‘foreign country,’ once the concepts used by men and women of the past to make sense of their world are apprehended as foreign dialects (Skinner (1988) talks about ‘alien systems of belief’ (p. 286)), the problems of conceptual historiography are not unlike those arising in IR.

It should come as no surprise, then, that agonistic and war-related metaphors are pervasive in the methodological writings of the historians of political concepts, who are prompt to equate the conduct of political arguments with the conduct of war. For Terence Ball, ‘the history of political concepts … cannot … be narrated apart from the political conflicts in which they figure. Political concepts are weapons of war’ (Ball, 1998: 82). In a recent ‘Retrospect,’ Quentin Skinner (2002b) writes that ‘Koselleck and [himself] both assume that we need to treat our normative concepts less as statements about the world than as tools and weapons of ideological debate’ (p. 177). He even suggests that he may have been influenced by ‘Foucault’s Nietzschean contention that “the history which bears and determines us has the form of a war”’ — a very powerful statement coming from somebody who until then had consistently (and in my view unfairly) considered Foucault the representative of a postmodern attack against the notion of agency and intentionality that he intended to defend in his work as a historian. ²⁶

In the German context of Begriffsgeschichte, too, this equivalence between an agonistic concept of the political and conceptual history often comes to the fore. It finds its antecedents in Carl Schmitt — according to Koselleck, a pioneer of conceptual history in the 1930s, along with the historian Otto Brunner and the philosopher Erich Rothacker. ²⁷ What made a concept ‘political’ for Schmitt was its relation to a concrete situation in which distinctions between human groups are made. A political concept was a notion that could only be made sense of in relation to actual divisions having an existential intensity. A concept was thus always oriented against another concept: ‘All political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning’ (Schmitt and Schwab, 2007: 30). To be political, therefore, a concept must have a counter-concept, since they are always aimed against something — an intuition that would be developed later by Koselleck (2004). Social and political concepts are thus considered ‘both as factors and as indicators of the historical movement’ (Brunner et al., 1972: xiv).

These agonistic or polemical metaphors point at a specific understanding of the historical process, suspicious of any attempt at salvaging from the clamor of the battles that make up history moral or political vocabularies that pretend to be immune from its vicissitudes. Political or moral visions are necessarily partial and limited, and must be resituated in the only contexts within which they can be said to have some validity. In this tradition, moral judgments are always curtailed by geographical or cultural distance (Ginzburg, 2011: 194–209). The distance that separates us from ‘others’ is irreducible and cannot be canceled through a higher-order synthesis, a political language harboring a universal norm of justice, or a reference to the meaning of history. For the anti-whig historian, there is no transhistorical meta-language into which one could ‘translate’ the languages of the past, no grand canvass buried under the tumult of history and taking the form of progress. The entanglement of political concepts, including universalistic concepts, with the societies within which they are both meaningful and efficacious means that the issue the historian faces is not ‘what separate national traditions may have contributed to the history of political thought, but whether there could be a shared narrative account of it which can be considered, in any meaningful sense, “the same” discourse of politics’ (Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk, 2001: 3).

The Cambridge historians of political thought have drawn upon a philosophy of language that reflects a realist vision of intersubjectivity. More than Austin or Wittgenstein, Quine’s (1960) theorem of the indeterminacy of translation is a key element in this tradition, and, at any rate, it was at the forefront of John Dunn’s (1980) reflection on the challenges raised by a history of political thought interpreting thought as action. By assuming that it was impossible to stipulate unambiguous translation criteria between distinct languages, Quine’s thesis was providing Dunn with a philosophical justification of anti-whig positions that underscored the incommensurability of historical time and the plural nature of experience. It also allowed historians of ideas to impugn the pretense of the social sciences to bridge this distance through a neutral and ahistorical set of concepts. But Quine’s thesis applied across space as much as it did across time, as a result of which its significance for history immediately extended to politics. John Dunn (1980) did not fail to grasp this implication: ‘in the very long run for the inhabitants of very different societies speaking very different languages there simply cannot be empirically validated translation theories with unique authority’ (p. 97). In other words, it is not only across historical eras, but also across political spaces, that tertium non datur. As Dunn suggests, the indeterminacy argument is formally equivalent with the core problem of IR theory: how is it possible to achieve order and peaceful coexistence in the absence of a ‘unique authority?’ How can everybody be on the same page if there is no central and authoritative version of what is on that ‘page?’ In fact, a closer scrutiny of the way in which this problem was framed by postwar realists suggests that for them, too, it was a problem of conceptual indeterminacy and translation of the language that claimed to have ‘unique authority’ in codifying meanings that were supposedly the same for all, i.e. international law. As Morgenthau (1948) wrote:

We find that documents, such as the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, present … a problem which in this form is alien to domestic law. We are referring to the problem of ascertaining the meaning of the particular provisions of these documents. … In the international field, it is the subjects of the law themselves which not only legislate for themselves, but are also the supreme authority for interpreting and giving concrete meaning to their own legislative enactments. (pp. 216–217)

If human beings are, to quote Butterfield, ‘locked in a world of partial visions,’ then the historian is confronted in his own practice with problems of interpretation and of order-creation that are not unlike those plaguing international politics. It is not surprising that, as one of the historians who formulated these problems early on, Butterfield was led into the orbit of postwar IR theory and realism: he could only find a congenial philosophy in a doctrine that did not recognize in international law a ‘universal’ language speaking for humanity as a whole, repudiated any version of politics availing itself of the meaning of history and pretending to fulfill its telos, and rejected the notion of a universal morality that would be valid beyond the limited sphere of specific moral communities.

Begriffsgeschichtlicher Realismus: Butterfield, Koselleck, and German conceptual history

The entanglement between realism and historicism appears even more clearly in the case of the German Begriffsgeschichte. Arguably, this research program has been less influential in the English-speaking world than its Cambridge counterpart, although it did influence disciplinary history to some extent. ²⁸ Its importance, however, resides in its historical connection with postwar realism. Like the Cambridge school, Begriffsgeschichte represented a major methodological innovation, yet one that was also built upon conservative prewar foundations (Habermas, 1960; Kocka, 1990). It was originally born from an attack against liberal historiography that not only echoed the anti-whig reaction of the 1930s represented by Butterfield, but was in dialogue with it. While these two research programs seem to have developed independently from each other, they were rooted in a shared diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity. ²⁹

Begriffsgeschichte originated as ‘a radical conservative critique of … the bourgeois-liberal Rechstaat’ (Van Melton Horn, 2011: 124). In the postwar years, modern ‘social history’ emerged in Germany in the continuity of Volksgeschichte, around the work of a largely unreformed group of historians. ³⁰ The nationalistic ‘folk history’ it succeeded had mobilized sociology, demography, linguistics, and folklore to study the German nation in its concreteness and often served the imperialistic claims of the state to incorporate outlying German communities. Postwar social history offered a more acceptable and modernized version of this program, enriched by its borrowings from the social sciences. In this context, conceptual history was an attempt at recovering the frames through which historical change was experienced and challenged the abstract categories that 19th-century historians had laid over the concrete social structures of German communities. ³¹ Postwar Begriffsgeschichte thus found its antecedents in prewar critiques of liberal historiography, such as Otto Brunner’s (1984) study of the European medieval social formation, Land und Herrschaft, first published in 1939. Brunner suggested that the 19th century introduced ‘a radical break with the past, a break that was not just social, economic, or political, but also cognitive’: liberal ideologies had generated a set of conceptual disjunctions — public–private, economic–political, state–society — that were unknown in older social formations and yet informed the historiography of medieval Europe. Modern concepts such as ‘State’ or ‘Constitution’ misrepresented medieval formations in which rights and powers were tied to a concrete order. ³² Liberal historians of the late 19th century thus projected the categories of their time onto the medieval past and missed the organic character of medieval society (a charge that closely echoed the one Butterfield was leveling at the same time). If Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft was a polemic against the tendency to view medieval political formations through the lens of liberal and national concepts, his project was more ambitious: by emphasizing the abyss separating past and present, Brunner was also suggesting that the national state that emerged out of the 18th-century revolutions was the negation of Old Europe, and he brought into salience the contingent nature of the bourgeois-liberal order. In line with the nationalistic Volksgeschichte of the interwar period, he saw bourgeois society as a historical parenthesis that was being superseded by a National Socialist regime erasing the distinctions between state and Volk (Kocka, 1990: 134).

The ideological antecedents of Begriffsgeschichte also appear in the place of pride that Koselleck attributed to Carl Schmitt as a pioneer of conceptual history. To members of a generation diffident of ideologies and official histories written by victorious powers, Schmitt offered a self-serving and apologetic vision of history from the point of view of the vanquished. ³³ The relationship between Koselleck and Schmitt lasted from 1953 until the latter’s death in 1985. Beyond personal relations, however, Schmitt’s influence extended to some key aspects of German conceptual history. He was closely involved in the last stages of Koselleck’s (2000) dissertation Critique and Crisis, of which he read several iterations. The entire Begriffsgeschichte project built upon Schmittian insights about the function of political concepts, as Habermas (1960) immediately recognized at the time. In particular, it rested on the assumption that historical concepts have a polemical function and that a neutral terminology allowing for the detached perspective of a historically transcendent observer simply does not exist (Mehring, 2011: 159). Koselleck (2004) turned this intuition into a methodological principle in his work on the semantics of ‘counterconcepts,’ which mobilized a vision of politics that owed much to Schmitt’s vision of the political as an existential decision based upon a friend–foe distinction (p. 155). ³⁴

The critique of liberalism upon which Begriffsgeschichte was premised was not a separate development from the anti-whig argument that Butterfield was articulating at the time, but part of the same intellectual movement. Butterfield’s conception of the work of the historian was in fact imbued with German historicism — he had a particular admiration for Ranke, and anti-Hegelian historians in general. ³⁵ His interest in German historiography and in contemporary German politics also ensured that he found an audience in Germany, where his apologetic reading of the Nazi catastrophe shored up his reputation among conservative historians: long before Ernst Nolte, it is Butterfield who first claimed that Nazism was a defensive reaction against the threat coming from the East. ³⁶ Bolshevik utopianism was the real evil, and Germany was a bulwark of European civilization against the most fanatical and extreme expression of secular modernity. It comes as no surprise, then, that his Christian critique of a rationalist modernity gone awry gained him much appreciation among German historians, and, in particular, a warm review of Christianity, Diplomacy, and War (1953) by none other than Koselleck (1955). Butterfield’s critique of the notion of ‘righteous war’ and other moral simplifications of history allowed the anti-whig charge to percolate into a context where its apologetic functions contributed to easing into the postwar era important anti-liberal strands of political culture (Steber, 2007: 303–304). Koselleck immediately recognized a critique of the Enlightenment congenial to his own project, which analyzed the European predicament after 1945 as the result of the global extension of utopian ideologies born out of 18th-century revolutionary thought. What Butterfield brought to it was a distinctively Christian-realist zest, a ‘Christological historical ontology’ that foregrounded original sin and a defective human nature in order to pre-empt the possibility of articulating politics to an absolute morality. Far from being a realm of emancipation and autonomy, politics operated for him within limits set by theology. By severing this tie, the Enlightenment had set politics on a catastrophic course: ‘theological errors,’ as Koselleck (1955) succinctly summed up, ‘reveal themselves as political mistakes’ (p. 592). Only by dispelling the fallacies of rationalist philosophies could one close the long historical parenthesis opened by the French revolution and establish on Christian foundations an international postwar order. Koselleck (2000) would contribute to this project with Critique and Crisis, which analyzed the rise of Enlightenment ideologies in Europe between the absolutist period and the French Revolution. For him, the absolutist state had put an end to religious strife by creating a moral sphere that was separate from politics, and in which soon a critical reason would develop that was defined by its ‘irrelation to reality [sic].’ Experiencing any concrete determination as a limitation of its reign and denying any legitimacy to tradition, this enlightened reason ‘negate[d] historical factuality’ and expressed itself in utopian and universalistic ideologies. Because its program was the suppression of politics and the reign of Reason, it became unable to outline a political path toward its goals and had to task a messianic history with their realization. It thus ‘sundered past and present,’ creating a new experience of politics and time reflected in rationalist philosophies of history (Koselleck, 2000: 10). What Koselleck diagnosed was the pathology known as ‘idealism’ in IR.

Uprooted from its historical soil, the abstract political lexicon that emerged from this transformation would project itself far into the 20th century and beyond Europe, engulfing the limitations that were initially the conditions of possibility of critical reason and resulting in intolerance, terror, and totalitarianism in the name of the highest ideals. From the outset, Begriffsgeschichte was a reaction against idealism, whose task was to analyze the long-term ideological effects of the ‘temporalization’ of social and political concepts and to historicize the emergence of a new political vocabulary that had taken upon itself the eschatological charge of the religion it was displacing. For the conceptual historians as for the realists, the crisis of the 20th century was the direct outcome of the utopian tendencies of the Enlightenment.

From history to international affairs: The realist counter-Enlightenment

In a 1960 review, Habermas (1960) had no hesitation in calling ‘realist’ Koselleck’s attack on the philosophies of history and Enlightenment rationalism (p. 476). Critique and Crisis and its corollary, Begriffsgeschichte, were, in fact, a critique of utopia and ‘idealism.’ Similarly, Butterfield’s attack on the whig interpretation of history cannot be separated from his Christian-realist reading of international problems. The same historical critique of the Enlightenment can be found in Morgenthau’s (1946) Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, or, indeed, in the early discussions of IR theory. ³⁷ Koselleck saw Begriffsgeschichte as an antidote to the depoliticization caused by the rise of universalistic ideologies and in particular of internationalism. ³⁸ Conversely, Morgenthau (1946) turned into a Begriffshistoriker to denounce the rise of (a)political concepts that were no longer tied to a concrete situation:

While nonliberal political concepts, such as ‘Roman Empire’, ‘new order’, ‘living space’, ‘encirclement’, ‘national security’, ‘haves vs. have-nots’, and the like, show an immediately recognizable relationship to concrete political aims; liberal concepts, such as ‘collective security’, ‘democracy’, ‘national self-determination’, ‘justice’, ‘peace’, are abstract generalities which may be applied to any political situation but which are not peculiar to any particular one. (p. 72)

The distinction between history and international thought was not yet institutionalized, and historical thinking acted as a powerful antidote against any form of abstract idealism. This has important consequences for disciplinary history. As Skinner (2002a) once observed, ‘an historian of ideas will unavoidably be set, in approaching any given writer, by some sense of the defining characteristics of the discipline to which the given writer may be said to have contributed’ (p. 43): in writing the history of IR, even a revisionist history, we remain unaware that the postwar discussion of international problems stretched much further than the disciplinary boundaries of IR, which were still being negotiated. It is only their subsequent consolidation that prevents us from seeing that Morgenthau’s (1948) Politics among Nations had much more in common with such books as Butterfield’s (1949) Christianity and History, Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, and Koselleck’s (2000) Critique and Crisis than with an abstract IR ‘canon’ designed retrospectively for teaching purposes. This means that a serious attempt at understanding realism must start by recontextualizing it beyond IR, in particular, in relation to historiography, lest one remains trapped in the optical illusions created retrospectively by disciplinary history.

The previous overview of the connections between anti-whig historiography and international thought sheds light on the defining characteristics of postwar realism. First, the conventional presentation of realism, often reduced to a formulaic statement about the nature of international politics, simply misses its connection with history. Historiographical debates were crucial in articulating the realist vision of history as a complex process, the direction of which remained inscrutable, and which could not be determined, let alone steered, by an omniscient and rational historical agent. Butterfield’s (2007) critique of the whig interpretation was meant to emphasize the limits of human agency in history and to defend a Christian-realist providentialism in which ‘history-making … goes on over [men’s] heads’ (p. 13). Looking for immediate causes, the whig historian telescopes a complex process into a ‘simple progression’ traceable to a single cause. ³⁹ But what is a reductionist fallacy in the historian’s work becomes much more dangerous in politics, where it takes the form of a claim to fulfill the telos of history or, as Morgenthau had it, the ‘moral law of the universe.’

In retrospect, what defines realism is the rejection of the rationalist philosophies of history that stand behind idealism and moral righteousness. The first postwar realist manifesto, in that sense, was Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, and it was a refutation of the belief that history expressed ‘reason’s march to victory’ (Morgenthau, 1946: 38). When Reinhold Niebuhr (1986) inveighed against the social sciences and their pretense to deliver compelling judgments and conclusions, he was in fact attacking the idea of a ‘historical science’ that assumed the presence of ‘normative structures in history analogous to the norms in nature’ (p. 212). Raymond Aron (1991) truly became a realist during his years in Germany, when he abandoned his commitment to a Durkheimian science of society and discovered Weber and Schmitt, which led him to defend in 1938 a dissertation titled Introduction to the Philosophy of History, in which he developed a historicist critique of rationalism. Such examples could be multiplied. The realist critique of the ‘crusading spirit’ and ‘moral universalism’ flowed directly from this rejection of rationalist conceptions of history. These affinities with a conservative historiography are reflected in the role historians played in the initial development of IR theory. They were not only major intellectual contributors to the realist vision, but they were often given key institutional positions from which they promoted the fledgling discipline: Arnold Toynbee and Herbert Butterfield in England, Felix Gilbert in the United States, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle in France, to name but a few, bear witness to this cozy relationship.

Second, a better understanding of the affinities between realism and anti-whig historiography put us in a better position to qualify the place of realism within the postwar cultural landscape. Recently, several historians of IR have suggested that realism should be brought back into the fold of liberalism, rather than considered as its antithesis. Vibeke Schou Tjalve has thus argued that thinkers such as Morgenthau and Niebuhr sought to re-enchant liberalism by injecting it with a ‘republican’ spirit. William Scheuerman has pointed out that classical realists remained committed to various ideas of social or even global reform, thus displaying various shades of liberalism. More recently, Michael Williams (2013) has identified a postwar ‘IR Enlightenment’ in which realism was primarily an attempt at saving liberalism from itself: the postwar realists, Williams suggests, sought to promote a ‘revived, confident … form of liberal realism’ (p. 655). The problem with these arguments is not that they are wrong — Williams is right when he identifies the complex blending of realism and liberalism after 1945 — but that they remain underspecified: while they deploy all the nuances and historical complexity of ‘realism,’ they do not historicize ‘liberalism’ in the same way. In particular, they assume that postwar liberalism was not much else than a continuation of the liberal tradition, simply pruned by the wisdom gained through the preceding decades of crisis. However, being a liberal after 1945 had a very different meaning from what it meant in 1914 or today. With any faith in progress and reason shattered by a 30-year crisis culminating in wartime horror, liberalism was in shambles after 1945, and its reconstruction was characterized by an opening toward anti-utopian themes that were fundamentally alien to the liberal tradition. Liberalism had become, in the words of Judith Shklar, ‘defensive and conservative’ by shedding its previous belief in the Enlightenment. The postwar era ‘was faced not with the mere end of the Enlightenment but with the prevalence of theories that arose in opposition to it,’ realism in primis. ⁴⁰ In other words, it is not so much that postwar realism was liberal as the reverse: liberalism itself was being emptied of its content, and realism, like a hermit crab, crawled into its empty shell to inhabit it while remaining an alien organism.

A better way of understanding this process is to turn to Shklar’s analysis of this crisis in After Utopia. Shklar herself was a disheartened liberal, and she saw postwar liberalism essentially as ‘conservative liberalism’: it was an attempt at upholding some liberal values, yet it saw their full realization as a utopian, self-defeating, and ultimately dangerous project. It was premised on the rejection of rationalism and of the belief in progress, and the acceptance of the inherent limitations of reform projects. It also valued positively the limiting force of tradition, against the unchecked deployment of rationalist visions. It was, in Shklar’s luminous reconstruction, a modernization of both the Christian critique of secular modernity and Romantic historicism, which now immunized liberalism against ‘utopian’ tendencies or rationalist zeal. Thus, ‘armed with the intellectual heritage of liberalism, conservative liberalism … joined the ancient enemies of the Enlightenment’ in the most unlikely alliance. ⁴¹ Realism was one of the most conspicuous expressions of this conservative inflection of liberalism because, as this article suggests, it was located precisely at the confluence of Christian doctrine and German historicism. It inherited from them an understanding of history that was central to its conception of politics. The realists analyzed the international situation through the prism of the critical diagnosis of modernity typical of these counter-Enlightenment doctrines, and they subscribed to the belief that ‘European society has been deteriorating steadily since the French Revolution.’ ⁴² They saw in the postwar situation the culmination of a historical sequence inaugurated by the French Revolution and the ideas of the Enlightenment: ‘The paramount problem for the contemporary study of international relations,’ Niebuhr announced in 1954 at the founding conference of IR theory, was ‘to supplant the illusions which we have inherited from the French Enlightenment … with the wisdom of Edmund Burke.’ ⁴³ It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the Enlightenment had become the main ideological foil for postwar realists: Morgenthau, for instance, adopted the classical counter-revolutionary view of the Enlightenment as an assault on the throne and the altar that, by undermining the Christian foundations of the ancient régime, was directly responsible for ‘the decline of the cosmopolitan aristocratic society and of the restraining influence of its morality upon international politics,’ and for the diffusion of secular nationalism. ⁴⁴ The critique of the Enlightenment provided nothing short of a rationale for promoting IR theory, as Kenneth Thompson made clear during initial meetings. It was also explicit in the writings of Kennan, Butterfield, and others. ⁴⁵ The Enlightenment was indeed the fons et origo of all the tragedies of the 20th century: even totalitarianism, which some saw as the defeat of Reason, was considered to be the climax of a rationalistic liberal culture, a ‘facile heresy of the self-educated in a scientific age’ according to Butterfield. ⁴⁶

The notion of a ‘realist Enlightenment’ thus stands in contradiction with the historical record and with the pronouncements of the realists themselves. The postwar years were an age of ideological restoration, and the realists extended to international affairs a theme that was diffuse in conservative thought. Under the form of IR theory, realism brought the counter-Enlightenment tradition into the social sciences and provided it with a protected academic enclave, where its debt to Christian and historicist traditions was rapidly effaced. What makes it so difficult to pronounce upon the ideological meaning of realism is that this critique of the Enlightenment was no longer external to liberalism, but was now internal to it, as Shklar clearly saw. In this new situation, everybody could be a liberal of sorts — from disillusioned liberals like Berlin or Talmon, to conservatives like Oakeshot or Koselleck, traditionalists like Voegelin, or even reactionaries like Schmitt, and, indeed, the realists, who spanned all these nuances. The vexing question of whether realism was liberal or illiberal thus becomes moot when one replaces it in this historical context.

What is more relevant is to acknowledge realism’s relation to a specific historiographical tradition that emerged as a counterpoint to the French Revolution, and to understand that the realist vision of politics is fundamentally premised on both a historical interpretation of modernity and a concept of history emphasizing the inscrutability of time and the individuality of historical formations that cannot be subsumed under unifying rationalistic schemes. After WWII, this tradition was embodied in a Christian-conservative historical vision, but also in more academic forms of historicism that informed the burgeoning history of concepts, as well as in IR’s critique of the social sciences. The anti-whig argument provided a powerful and fungible notion that was capable of weaving together these different strands of ideology.

Conclusion

The paradox of the ‘revisionist’ history of IR is that it conceals as much as it reveals. In its zeal to redeem realism from the deficient pigeonholes in which the discipline (and realism’s critics) has enclosed it, it has put a happy face on a doctrine that entertains a very ambivalent relationship to liberalism. More importantly, it has obscured its own relationship to the realist conception of history.

The way in which we describe and explain the evolution of social and political knowledge involves far-reaching and usually unarticulated assumptions about history, progress, and reason. What is at stake in disciplinary history, therefore, goes much beyond the confines of what is arguably a relatively minor genre. The traditional history of science or the history of the disciplines has long been the last citadel of an Enlightenment-style philosophy of history. Even when the belief in the march of progress had subsided almost everywhere else, the hope placed in the gradual accumulation of knowledge and in the progress of human reason survived within the accounts of the development of the sciences, including the social sciences. What then passed for disciplinary history was often what Foucault has called an ‘epistemological extrapolation,’ a history of incremental approximation of truth and progressive dispelling of the darkness of ignorance — a history, indeed, of enlightenment. ⁴⁷ Disciplinary history, therefore, could not remain untouched by the realist and historicist challenge against rationalism.

In this context, one can see why the history of IR constitutes a very specific case, located at the intersection of several trends. As a discipline that was premised upon a critique of history as progress, it could only extend this critique to the idea of scientific progress and transform its own disciplinary history. And as a political discipline, it was particularly receptive to the history of political concepts, which came out of conservative postwar historicism as the standard-bearer of anti-whiggism. It was only a question of time before the history of IR was rewritten in a fiercely anti-whiggish way that, unbeknownst to both its historians and its practitioners, reconnected the discipline to its origins. The paradox of the current historiography of IR is thus that it is both anti-whig and ‘presentist,’ since it is not disconnected from current disciplinary agendas. Far from being a gratuitous exploration of classical realism or even a rehabilitation of it, it is one of its most direct and genuine expressions.