In 1959, C. P. Snow announced that ‘the whole of intellectual life in Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups’. The members of the two groups have drifted so far apart that they can no longer understand each other. The context for Snow's lament was his own career as chemist, novelist, Cambridge Fellow and public servant; his targets were the ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘physical scientists’ of his acquaintance. Snow generalized. Each group constitutes a culture unto itself— the cultures of art and science.

Leading intellectuals in Snow's time overwhelmingly agreed that science and art are rival cultures. The two groups, so labelled, are centred in the arts and sciences in a few grand universities, the two cultures spreading out to the higher reaches of modern society. Snow neglected to point out that large universities and many specialized institutions of higher education devote a great deal of attention to the practical arts and applied science— law, medicine, pastoral service, business management, advertising, public administration, engineering, training in warfare. While he might have argued that these vocational activities are also subject to a cultural split, he simply ignored this possibility. In short, the art– science binary discounts a great deal of what goes on in ‘the whole of intellectual life’, and does so in a way that reeks of elitism and snobbery.

The field of International Relations offers a conspicuous instance of the cultural phenomenon to which Snow gave a name. The so-called great debate taking place in the 1960s effectively pitted art against science in terms that recall Snow's thesis and all its resonances. Theory stands in for high culture, practice is shown off the stage. Would-be scholars (like me) immediately understood the status implications of choosing theory over practice, and science over art. No one talked about art, science or scholarship in any form as craft, or gave much attention to craft in any vocational practice— then or since.

Granting the term culture such affective and normative resonances is only possible because it has been emptied of content. When we do talk about culture, we make it residual, ephemeral, unaccountable, as such rarely applied to ourselves as scholars and to the field. Craft is more specific. It is skill in making, building, using, maintaining, adjusting, taking apart; it is about work, purpose, standards, tools.