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The English School and British Historians

The English school is often seen as an important point of contact between the study of history and the study of international relations. This largely derives from the belief that the school remained committed to historical (and normative) questions at a time when the International Relations discipline in America was becoming increasingly devoted to the development of general ‘scientific’ theories rather than seeking to account for the distinctive individuality and discontinuous evolution of the modern international system. While the ‘scientists’ were, according to Hedley Bull, ‘cutting themselves off from history and philosophy’,1 the members of the English school were always interested in telling the story of how the modern international system had originated and changed over time, in understanding its individual character in comparison with other ways of organising international politics, and in asking whether it provided for a just world order. They were trying, as Bull rather cosily put it, ‘to warm the coals of an older tradition of historical and political reflection during the long, dark winter of the “social scientific” ascendancy’.2 However, rather than contrast the English school with political scientists in the United States, in this article I will compare their work with that of historians in the United Kingdom during the period when the school was developing its account of modern international society, from the 1950s to the 1980s (roughly the lifetime of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics). My reason for adopting this focus is that the distinction between the ‘traditionalist’ English school