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Continuity and Change in International Systems

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Richard N.Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics: International Systems in Perspective, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1963, 314 pp. $6.00.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

George Liska
George Liska
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Extract

The comparative analysis of past and present systems as an approach to the study of international politics has been subjected to its first major test. It can be said at once that the effort is a most creditable one. The approach promises to become increasingly attractive with time. Much of the theoretical writing that uses the data of international politics is becoming the preserve of specialists in abstract theory. And the student committed primarily to international politics and to theory only insofar as it helps order and apprehend significant problems of international politics here and now is quite naturally attracted to the historical perspective. History can be used to illuminate the evolving structural features of contemporary relations and it provides some relief from the politics of the Cold War, which are becoming progressively routinized.

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Type
Review Articles
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World Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , October 1963, pp. 118 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1963

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References

1 Politics and Culture in International History (Princeton 1960)Google Scholar. See Modelski's, George review of the book, “Comparative International Systems,” World Politics, XIV (July 1962), 662–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Hoffmann, “International Systems and International Law,” ibid., XIV (October 1961), 205–37, and “International Relations: The Long Road to Theory,” ibid., XI (April 1959), 346–77. Also Hoffmann, , Contemporary Theory in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960)Google Scholar.

3 See Modelski, George, “Agraria and Industria: Two Models of the International System,” World Politics, XIV (October 1961), 118–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The liberal-conservative polarization within the “truncated Concert” of the 1830–1848 period becomes less pronounced and less ideologically determined when the policies of the so-called “liberal Powers,” France and Britain, are examined a bit more closely, and notice is taken of the vain efforts of Louis-Philippe to restore the conservative alliance with Austria for the sake of both France and his dubiously legitimate dynasty. One may doubt, moreover, the extent to which conservative Prussian and Austrian governments were “forced” into the struggle for preponderance in Germany by the demonstration of liberal strength in 1848, to the undoing of the “ancient alliance” between them. There may be some truth in a less ideologically oriented interpretation, to wit, that Prussia and Austria resumed an ancient rivalry over primacy in Central Europe once the defeat of the liberal revolutions in 1849 released them from the bonds of semi-dependence on their Russian protector.