In recent years we have heard a lot about the sins of academic international relations: how the field's early days were wrapped up in projects of hegemonic dominance, colonial management, and xenophobic racism; how subsequent scholarly generations failed to acknowledge that past and were consequently unable to overcome it; and how those legacies keep the field from genuinely acknowledging the diversity of international theory. Many of these charges are leveled broadly and somewhat vaguely, and so, regardless of their accuracy or insight, are often dismissed or ignored by contemporary IR scholars whose research does not specifically deal with colonialism or racism. Careful historical work and close textual readings of the sort offered in all three of these books provide, if not a complete reply to those scholars who do not think that IR's past shapes its present and future, then at least the beginnings of a more compelling answer.

Getting some clarity regarding the legacies of the past in the present has to begin with getting a clear view of that past, and the volume assembled by Nicolas Guilhot does a remarkable job of bringing into focus one key moment in the disciplinary history of IR: the efforts by the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1950s to constitute a definite field of international relations, separate from but parallel to other academic fields, which could provide the intellectual substance needed to properly train policy personnel for the U.S. State Department. The Invention of International Relations Theory contains engaging chapters by contemporary IR scholars and historians, all of whom are engaging with the transcript of a 1954 conference on “theory” to which many of the luminaries of IR scholarship and practice—among them Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Nitze, and Arnold Wolfers—were invited. The transcript itself is reproduced in the volume as an appendix, which helps both to ground the individual contributions and to invite the reader into the conversation.

Across the individual chapters, and from a reading of the documentary appendix, a central theme emerges: the tension between international relations as a scholarly field dedicated to the increase of knowledge about world politics, and international relations as a practical field dedicated to providing a sound basis on which to place foreign policy, particularly U.S. foreign policy. This tension, as Ole Wæver points out in his chapter, is provisionally resolved by the conference participants through an otherwise-puzzling compromise: Despite their intellectual roots in a more philosophical tradition of theorizing, the participants gravitate toward a notion of IR theory that emphasizes general behavioral regularities (pp. 119–21). In part, this was because of a sense that behavioral regularities were the kind of knowledge that policymakers would find useful, but it was also part of what Guilhot refers to as “the realist gambit”: a tactical use of the notion of general laws in order to simultaneously communicate insights to policymakers and to fend off behaviorism, which “promoted a unified conception of the social sciences under the experimental method and promised unlimited scientific progress” (p. 150). The IR scholars and practitioners at the 1954 conference, despite their differences, were all broadly skeptical about the role of reason in reforming and improving world politics, but were caught in a trap produced by the dominance of progressivist ideas in U.S. political culture: The role and authority of scholars to advise politicians was intimately linked to their “scientific” status, and so if these historical and philosophical pessimists wanted to command an audience, they too needed to speak the language of general laws.

Although this realist gambit largely failed to steer IR away from scientific behaviorism, it had major implications for the development of the field. The fact that the foundations of the field were marked by an absence of a sharp debate between contrasting viewpoints about the meaning and epistemic status of theoretical statements, and instead characterized by a vague consensus around the notion of “general laws,” colors subsequent discussions about methodological issues over the next several decades. Indeed, the other two books under review here labor under the burden of an inadequate methodological vocabulary, which raises unnecessary difficulties for their arguments.

John M. Hobson's tour de force concerning the Eurocentric character of international theory begins with traditional imperialist discourse in the early nineteenth century and its anti-imperialist liberal development opponent (which actually has its origins in mid-eighteenth-century discussions), and ends with contemporary discussions of democracy promotion and the fate of the Western liberal order. Hobson takes great care in distinguishing Eurocentrism from racism or imperialism, arguing that there are forms of imperialist Eurocentrism that emphasize social institutions rather than biological characteristics, as well as forms of Eurocentrism that eschew imperialism either because of a belief that societies left alone will spontaneously develop (the institutionalist variant) or because of a desire to preserve their own purity (the racist variant). In these four variants, Eurocentrism emerges from Hobson's account as a form of hasty generalization of elements of the European experience, whether marked in institutional or in racial terms, to encompass humanity as a whole. Because the European way is taken to represent something categorically superior, Hobson claims, international theory spends its time “defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics” (The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p. 344), rather than confronting global diversity directly.

Hobson's charge, however, is too broad. Although he does very effectively document the variety of ways in which numerous European thinkers have been seemingly incapable of conceptualizing the rest of the world without judging that world to be somehow inferior to Europe, calling all of those ways “Eurocentrism” (and eliding the historical and conceptual differences between “Europe” and “the West,” something Hobson does throughout the book) obscures important distinctions not captured in the distinctions between imperialist/anti-imperialist and institutionalist/racist Eurocentrisms. For one thing, the racist discourses that Hobson analyzes, whether they promote imperial intervention to defend against or to actually eliminate supposedly inferior others (pp. 108–10), or oppose imperialism in favor of a defensive alliance against the nonwhite peoples of the earth (p. 315), begin from a place of fundamental difference among human groups in ways that the institutionalist discourses do not. The two varieties of Eurocentric institutionalism that Hobson identifies—imperialism understood as a “civilizing mission” to deliver institutions to others, and anti-imperialism understood as a belief that intervention would prevent societies from developing along the same lines as European societies already had—do not presume fundamental differences among human groups, but only accidental and historical differences.

Hence, racist Eurocentrism can only mean a preference for distinctively European ways of doing things as contrasted with others, while institutionalist Eurocentrism can only mean that European institutions are universally valid while other ways are provincial and partial. The former is comparative; the latter denies the validity of any comparison. This, in turn, matters a lot to Hobson's overall conclusions, because with such a broad conception of Eurocentrism there is not a lot of room to conceptualize what a non-Eurocentric variant of international theory would look like. If the central problem of institutionalist Eurocentrism is that it falsely conflates “Western values with the universal” (p. 299), the same cannot be said of theories that comparatively evaluate the European way versus other ways; and if the normative preference for European ways is itself Eurocentric, it is unclear what the notion of Eurocentrism adds beyond notions like “chauvinism” and “provincialism.” The root problem here is a lack of clarity about just what it means for a theory or a theorist to privilege something.

The problem is compounded by Hobson's slippage from Eurocentrism as a feature of international theory to Eurocentrism as characteristic of particular empirical claims. In order to extend his story into a time after World War II in which both explicit racism and formal imperialism are disappearing from the theoretical discourse, Hobson categorizes theories as affected by a “subliminal Eurocentrism” manifest in a history in which “the West is held to be the pioneering agent or subject of world politics while the East is portrayed as a passive object of the diktat of the Western great powers” (p. 186). But this is less Eurocentrism than a false or misleading empirical claim. If this has anything to do with Eurocentrism, it is that the specific kind of bad empirics mentioned here are generated by Eurocentric international theory—but if Hobson wanted to sustain that case, he would actually have to make it. Instead, he critiques contemporary theorists for not incorporating enough non-Western agency into their accounts, which may be true but which does not have much to do with any kind of hasty generalization of the European experience.

Hobson is on stronger grounds criticizing Ken Waltz and Hedley Bull for building accounts of international politics that are “generated from the experience of one small continent” (p. 211). Here, his argument parallels that of Pierre Lizée, who critiques the “language of universals” that invests international theory with the belief that it must operate with concepts applicable always and everywhere (A Whole New World, pp. 7–8). For Lizée, however, the problem is not just that international theory hastily generalizes from the European experience; the problem is that international theorists have misunderstood the nature of theoretical universals, and presumed that it was possible to speak of international politics in general without first looking at the ways that “the broad categories that frame the study of different forms of international politics around the world … are built” by concrete political struggles over what is really universal (p. 204).

Lizée and Hobson diagnose similar problems in contemporary international theory, but Lizée at least proposes a solution—to look for new universals on which to ground international theory—even though it is a deeply problematic one inasmuch as he slips from “theoretical universal” to “empirical generalization” quite quickly. For example, criticizing arguments about the impact of democracy on world politics, Lizée points out that “democracy is not always the same,” and hence we need “a broader—a more truly encompassing and thus universal—understanding of the nature of human identity” to move forward (p. 178). The slippage here is from “broader” to “universal,” even though we might broaden the experiences that were incorporated into a particular piece of international theory without ever touching or even approximating something with universal validity.

Nor do we necessarily need to, and if Hobson is correct, then we should perhaps be actively avoiding the temptation to declare any international-theoretical claim “universal.” The temptation to do so is directly generated by the fact that IR for decades has only understood one kind of theoretical statement: the “general law,” meaning a statement with general empirical applicability, covering as wide a range of cases as possible. The problem is that even if—as a matter of grammar—international theory might be expressed in general statements, it does not follow that those theoretical propositions are intended to be, or are properly evaluated as, empirical generalizations. This is the point that was not made clearly enough in the early days of the IR field, when those who might have made it strategically chose the language of the behaviorists instead of arguing for the distinctiveness of theoretical and empirical claims. Perhaps the cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what “theory” means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.