Review of International Studies (2007), 33, 3–24 CopyrightBritish International Studies Associationdoi:10.1017/S0260210507007371IntroductionStill critical after all these years? The past,present and future of Critical Theory inInternational RelationsNICHOLAS RENGGER AND BEN THIRKELL-WHITE*Twenty-five years ago, theoretical reflection on International Relations (IR) wasdominated by three broad discourses. In the United States the behavioural revolutionof the 1950s and 1960s had helped to create a field that was heavily influenced byvarious assumptions allegedly derived from the natural sciences. Of course, varietyexisted within the behaviourist camp. Some preferred the heavily quantitativeapproach that had become especially influential in the 1960s, while others wereexploring the burgeoning literature of rational and public choice, derived from thegame theoretic approaches pioneered at the RAND corporation. Perhaps the mostinfluential theoretical voice of the late 1970s, Kenneth Waltz, chose neither; instead hedeveloped his Theory of International Politics around an austere conception of parsi-mony and systems derived from his reading in contemporary philosophy of science.1These positivist methods were adopted not just in the United States but also inEurope, Asia and the UK. But in Britain a second, older approach, more influencedby history, law and by philosophy was still widely admired. The ‘classical approach’to international theory had yet to formally emerge into the ‘English School’ but manyof its texts had been written and it was certainly a force to be reckoned with.2* The authors would like to thank all the contributors to this special issue, including our two referees.We would also like to thank Kate Schick for comments on drafts and broader discussion of thesubject matter.1Discussions of the development and character of so-called ‘positivist’ IR are something of a drug onthe market. Many of them, of course, treat IR and political science as virtually interchangeable. Fordiscussions of the rise of ‘positivist’ political science, see: Bernard Crick, The American Science ofPolitics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1960). Klaus Knorr andJames Rosenau (eds.), Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1969) highlight the emergence of what might be termed ‘classical’ behaviouralistapproaches. The growing diversity of the field can be seen in K. J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline(London; Allen and Unwin, 1985) and the debates between positivism and its critics traced ably inthe introduction to Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory;Positivism, and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Waltz’s move from atraditional to a much more scientific mode of theory is found, of course, in Theory of InternationalPolitics (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979).2The exhaustive (and exhausting) history of the ‘English School’ is given in Bruno Vigezzi, TheBritish Committee for the Theory of International Politics 1954–1985: The Rediscovery of History(Milan: Bocconi, 2005), though good accounts of the structure and types of argument typical of itcan also be found in Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, The English School of InternationalRelations: A Contemporary Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).3Relatedly, there were voices within the realist tradition, elsewhere, drawing on oldertraditions of thinking about international relations. Most notably of these wasHans Morgenthau, whose first (and most powerful) English language book was aconcerted reaction against the ‘scientific’ approaches dominant in his adoptedhomeland.3The third approach,4often neglected in overviews of the discipline, was to drawon some form of Marxism. Much of this literature, though plainly relevant tointernational relations in the world, came from outside ‘International Relations’ asan academic subject. World Systems analysis, for example, was largely done indepartments of sociology or history rather than in departments of political science orinternational relations.5Much the same is true of the peace research of JohanGaltung and his colleagues.6Into this rather static world, in 1981, two articles were published that announcedthe arrival in International Relations of forms of theory long familiar outside it.These essays were Robert Cox’s ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’ publishedin the LSE journal Millennium and Richard Ashley’s ‘Political Realism and HumanInterests’ in International Studies Quarterly.7Both these essays deployed variants ofFrankfurt School critical theory to analyse the problematic of modern internationalrelations. They were joined the following year by perhaps the single most influentialbook-length treatment of International Relations from a similar trajectory, AndrewLinklater’s Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations.8If theseworks could be seen as the breach in the dyke, the torrent soon became a flood astheoretical ideas from many other areas of contemporary social theory began to bedeployed in the context of international relations: feminism, Neo-Gramscianism,post-structuralism, post-colonialism; the list grew exponentially.Twenty-five years on, International Relations theory looks very different. Arobust, analytical and still heavily ‘scientific’ US academy now has strong elementsof critical theory of various sorts lodged within it. The so-called ‘constructivist turn’,which is so influential in contemporary IR theory, draws very heavily on aspects ofthe critical turn that preceded it.9In the UK and Europe, it is probably fair to saythat various forms of ‘critical theory’, alongside the now relaunched (and very3This was Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946),though this was a view Morgenthau retained. See, for example, Truth and Power: Essays of aDecade (New York: Praeger, 1970).4It is worth adding that there have been many ways of cutting up the evolution of IR theory: ‘GreatDebates’ (such as Realism versus Idealism), Traditions (like Wight’s Realism, rationalism andrevolutionism); and Paradigms, such as the alleged ‘inter-paradigm debate much discussed by someBritish IR scholars in the 1970s and 80s. We do not take a view on these readings, rather we aresimply situating the emergence of critical