Revisiting S. Hoffmann's 1977 Question, “In What Sense Is the Study of International Relations an American Social Science?”
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As Stanley Hoffmann has convinced us in his 1977 article, it was in the United States in the wake of the Second World War that the study of international relations, IR as is now called, was established as an independent academic discipline. This article explains in what sense it has been an American social science and explores whether it still offers a useful analytical tool with which to better understand the multifaceted political reality of today's international relations.This article first goes back to the origins of IR and reviews its main features in the foundational work of Hans Morgenthau. His work stressed that perception matters in power politics among nations in that the outcome of diplomacy depends upon the perceived persuasiveness of threats and promises. In addition, it devoted attention to the relations between politics and law to explain how the status quo in international order had been maintained and challenged.And then this article examines the way in which IR has been Americanized since his time. In a nutshell, first, the influence of Thomas Schelling's work in the 1960s was profound and far-reaching in the entire field of IR. The intellectual hegemony of rationalism (or the analytical methods of rational choice) in the 1980s meant that the mainstream IR came to pay less and less attention to actors' perception and law. And second, it was totally ironical that the discipline of IR has recently retrieved the sociological discussion on perception, law, and norm, which it intentionally deleted in the process of importing rationalism from economics.This article concludes by emphasizing that the discipline of Americanized IR should expand its horizons: the study of diplomacy should be broadened to cover not only coercion for the purpose of either deterring a challenger from altering the status quo or compelling it to restore the status quo, but also reassurance for the purpose of achieving peaceful change; and the study of international order should highlight the way in which international and domestic orders have co-evolved in history.