From "Doing History" to Thinking Historically:Historical Consciousness across History and International Relations

Abstract

Although most attempts to foster interdisciplinary dialogue are located outside mainstream IR, this article seeks to problematize how the two dominant paradigms of IR theory, realism and liberalism, think historically. The argument proceeds by examining how the disciplines consider what historical knowledge is useful for i.e. how they think historically or are historically conscious. This constitutes a shift away from the dominant dialogue over how to "do history" in IR. Historical consciousness is defined as the understanding of the temporality of historical experience or how past, present and future are thought to be connected. The analysis is set up to explore the extent to which both disciplines share a similar historical consciousness beyond merely treating history as instructive. To do so the article first examines the canon of European historiography to identify three genres of historical consciousness: history as teacher, history as narrative, history as representation. This survey of pre-positivist historiography serves to show the complexity of historical reflection within that discipline, something against which variance within IR theory can also be compared. Disciplinary comparison reveals that three genres of historical consciousness are present in liberalism and realism: lessons of history, revenge of history, and amongst progressive realists a speculative escape from history genre. Whereas the former spans both "isms" in IR, realism is shown to have a more complex understanding of temporality, thereby providing another conceptual starting point for distinguishing between these two "traditions. Moreover, these differences between genres of historical consciousness used within realism capture the split between realists that lies not in the origin of anarchy itself but in how realists think historically. What emerges, therefore, by comparing how disciplines think historically rather than "do" history, is the equally purposive or even political use of the historical knowledge they produce.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117815608233
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Aston Centre for Europe
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Politics, History and International Relations
Additional Information: © Sage 2015. The final publication is available via Sage at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047117815608233
Uncontrolled Keywords: disciplinary dialogue,historical consciousness,historiography,IR theory,temporality
Publication ISSN: 1741-2862
Last Modified: 11 Mar 2024 08:18
Date Deposited: 19 Mar 2018 14:30
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://journals ... 047117815608233 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2015-12
Authors: Glencross, Andrew (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-8320-9181)

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