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² Hobson, John M. and Lawson, George, ‘What is history in International Relations?’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 37:2 (2008), p. 417CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Ibid., p. 434.

⁴ Ibid., p. 417.

⁵ Ibid., p. 434.

⁶ ‘Totalitarian’ Richard Ashley once described neorealism as being, and not because it opted for the nomothetic end of the spectrum: Ashley, Richard K., ‘The poverty of neorealism’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 290Google Scholar.

⁷ These absences are equally marked in a subsequent amplification of the argument. See Lawson, George, ‘The eternal divide? History and International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:2 (2010), pp. 203–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ See, inter alia: Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, and Infancy and History: the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 2007); Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of violence’, in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.1, 1913–26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 236–252Google Scholar, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977), and ‘Theses on the concept of history’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.4, 1938–40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 389–400.

⁹ Agamben, Giorgio, The Signature of all Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 81–111Google Scholar. For a discussion of philosophical archaeology, see Watkin, William, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 29–48Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Teschke, Benno, The Myth of 1648 Class: Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), p. 14Google Scholar.

¹¹ Adorno, ‘Progress’, p. 144. In a contemporaneous lecture series, Adorno added to these remarks: ‘[W]hat I mean by this global subject of mankind is not simply an all-embracing terrestrial organization, but a human race that possesses genuine control of its own destiny right down to the concrete details, and is thus able to fend off the unseeing blows of nature. On the contrary, the mania for organization, be it for an enlarged League of Nations or for some other global organization of all mankind, might easily fall into the category of things that prevent us from achieving what all men long for, instead of promoting that cause.’ Adorno, Theodor W., History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–5 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. 143Google Scholar. Only through a transformation in the nature of humanity’s socio-political existence, not merely its supplementation by international institutions or organisations, could a global subject come into existence.

¹² Adorno, , ‘Progress’, p. 145Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 144.

¹⁵ The non-progressive quality of the international is thereby revealed as the real substance of progress: ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’ Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 320Google Scholar.

¹⁶ As argued by both E. H. Carr and John Herz in the attempt to produce a convincing blend of Realism and utopianism. See Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis: an Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar and Herz, John, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Wight, Martin, ‘Why is there no international theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of International Relations (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966)Google Scholar. For this failure, Wight blamed the ‘intellectual prejudice’ (p. 20) in favour of the state and the belief in progress.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 26.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., p. 33.

²² Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979)Google Scholar.

²³ Ibid., p. 71.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 66.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 66.

²⁷ Such criticisms started, relatively gently, with John Ruggie (see Ruggie, John Gerard, ‘Continuity and transformation in the world polity: Toward a neorealist synthesis’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 131–157Google Scholar) and quickly became more strongly worded (see, for example, Hall, Rodney Bruce and Kratochwil, Friedrich V., ‘Medieval tales: Neorealist “science” and the abuse of history’, International Organization, 47:3 (1993), pp. 479–491CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) Schroeder’s, Paul interventions were particularly emphatic: Paul Schroeder, ‘Historical reality vs neorealist theory’, International Security, 19:1 (1994), pp. 108–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elman, Colin, Elman, Miriam Fendius, Schroeder, and Paul, , ‘History vs neo-realism: A second look’, International Security, 20:1 (1995), pp. 182–195CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This line of attack has not yet exhausted itself: see May, Ernest R., Rosecrance, Richard, and Steiner, Zara (eds), History and Neorealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the most recent contribution. The vulnerability of Waltzian Realism on this score arguably reflects the transition from first-generation American Realism, with its roots in a German pre-World War Two intellectual context, to a new generation acculturated to very different intellectual mores. Waltz’s basic premise is a problem from the philosophy of history, but from that he attempted to construct a causal-explanatory, quasi-scientific theory of international behaviour. What is an important problem in the one field is far too insubstantial as a basis for explanation in the other. Hence the theory’s persisting power amidst continual confusion about exactly what and how much it is supposed to be able to explain.

²⁸ Cox, Robert, ‘Social forces and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 214Google Scholar.

²⁹ In which Cox included Hans Morgenthau as well as Waltz.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 209.

³¹ Ashley, ‘The poverty of neorealism’, p. 289, emphasis in original.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid., pp. 290–2, emphases in original.

³⁴ Rosenberg, Justin, The Empire of Civil Society: a Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), p. 30Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 160

³⁶ Ibid., p. 37.

³⁷ Teschke, , Myth of 1648, p. 274Google Scholar.

³⁸ Hobson, John M., ‘What’s at stake in “bringing historical sociology back into International Relations”? Transcending “chronofetishism” and “tempocentrism” in International Relations’, in Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds), Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 5Google Scholar, emphases in original.

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 6–15.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 12.

⁴¹ Representative is John Hobson’s complaint that in ahistorical IR ‘discontinuous ruptures and differences between historical epochs and states systems are smoothed over and consequently obscured’. Hobson, ‘What’s at stake’, p. 9, emphases in original. Many of these critics are of course closely associated with historical sociology in IR.

⁴² Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 4.

⁴³ Schiffman, Zachary Sayre, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 2Google Scholar, emphases in original. Priority in time, of itself, ‘does not constitute the past as an intellectual construct’ (p. 71).

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 2.

⁴⁵ Fasolt, Limits of History, p. 6.

⁴⁶ Schiffman, Birth of the Past, Part One.

⁴⁷ Wilcox, Donald J., The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

⁴⁸ It may not have been the modern one, but the ancient historians did nevertheless themselves represent a crucial temporal division, that between history and myth: ‘Thucydides declares in the book’s opening pages that he intends to eliminate any traces of muthos from his account (pejoratively calling it muthôdes, a sort of poetic exaggeration, as alluring as it is empty).’ Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 32Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Schiffman, , Birth of the Past, p. 71Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 22. The sense of anachronism would only begin to emerge in the Renaissance.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 18.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 21.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 72.

⁵⁵ Illustrating the contrast between ancient and modern relations to the past, Schiffman notes that ‘this power [of the past in the present in antiquity] is altogether different from the modern one of a revered past, embodied in (say) the Constitution of the United States – yellowed with age and poured over by legal scholars with the aim of determining the “original” intent of the Founding Fathers. Livy felt the weight imposed by his patres—and the obligation it entailed—all the more heavily because they were still very much with him. Though they were dead, they had not departed; they had passed … but not into the past.’ Ibid., p. 74.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 6.

⁵⁷ Ibid., Parts Two and Three; see also, Wilcox, Measure of Times Past, chs 4, 5, and 6.

⁵⁸ Schiffman, Birth of the Past, Part Four.

⁵⁹ Wilcox, Measure of Times Past, ch. 2.

⁶⁰ Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, ch. 14.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 263.

⁶² Ibid., p. 232.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 236.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 22.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 240.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 242.

⁶⁷ Hartog, , Regimes of Historicity, p. 105Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Hartog, François, ‘The modern régime of historicity in the face of two world wars’, in Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage (eds), Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013), p. 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis added.

⁶⁹ Koselleck, , Futures Past, p. 266Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Fasolt, , Limits of History, p. xviGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. xvii.

⁷² Ibid., emphasis in original.

⁷³ Hartog, , Regimes of Historicity, esp. pp. 15–19Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 105.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Koselleck, , Futures Past, p. 22Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Fasolt, , The Limits of History, p. 17Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 16.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 18.

⁸¹ As Fasolt notes, the unselfconscious ease with which historians have, until recently, applied this division ‘not merely to the history of Europe or to their own profession, but to the history of the entire world, merely confirms the one-sided nature of the victory’ of history over premodernity. Ibid., p. 20. For a powerfully voiced critique of the way in which periodisation through the medieval–modern break in time is founded on the violence of sovereign authority but has nevertheless ultimately been naturalised even by as probing a thinker as Koselleck, see Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: how Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a defence of Koselleck on this point, see Jordheim, Helge, ‘Against periodization: Koselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), pp. 151–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸³ Ibid., p. 19. To be clear: history is not political in the sense of addressing itself to political matters or promoting a partisan cause within the field of politics; it is political in that it underpins the modern form of political being as a whole.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 7.

⁸⁵ The ‘break’ with the past discussed here cannot be dated punctually, any more than can the coming into being of the sovereign state and the states-system, or the advent of capitalism. The work of early-modern humanists, stressed by Fasolt, can be placed at the beginning of a long process, the importance of Montesquieu’s relational conception, to which Schiffman draws attention, perhaps just after the mid-point, and the French Revolution, central to the accounts of both Koselleck and Hartog, at the end, as the definitive culmination that announced completed rupture.

⁸⁶ Ibid. The basic principle that a sovereign authority (for instance, the UK parliament) cannot be bound by the actions of its predecessors illustrates how freedom in time is fundamental to sovereignty.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), p. 15Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Fasolt, , Limits of History, p. 7Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ For postcolonial attempts to resist the world-historical power of European time and history, see Nandy, Ashis, ‘History’s forgotten doubles’, History and Theory, 34:2 (1995), pp. 44–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For studies of time and history in the imperial encounter, see Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking up Time, Part 4.

⁹¹ Schmitt, Carl, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁹² Ibid., p. 78.

⁹³ Ibid., p. 75.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 74 (Schmitt here approvingly quotes Jost Trier).

⁹⁵ Fasolt, , The Limits of History, p. 12Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 2.

⁹⁷ Fasolt, , The Limits of History, pp. 235–236Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 38.

⁹⁹ Lorenz, and Bevernage, , Breaking up Time, p. 9Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 13.

¹⁰¹ Fasolt, , The Limits of History, p. 13Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Ibid., p. 5.

¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 6. To these might be added a third, the principle of historical distance, closely bound up with the difference between past and present and with historical perspective. On this subject, see the Special Issue ‘Historical distance: Reflections on a metaphor’, History and Theory, 50:4 (December 2011) and Phillips, Mark Salber, Caine, Barbara, and Adeney Thomas, Julia (eds), Rethinking Historical Distance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Concerning the recent ‘memory boom’, Lorenz and Bevernage point to the role of historians in carrying out ‘a kind of “border patrol” of the relationship between past and present’, ensuring that, for the sake of freedom in the present, the line not be breached: Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking up Time, pp. 19–26. As they note, the matter is put precisely by the historian Gabrielle Spiegel: memory ‘cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography’. Spiegel, Gabrielle, ‘Memory and history: Liturgical time and historical time’, History and Theory, 41:2 (2002), pp. 149–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ref. p. 149.

¹⁰⁵ Wilcox, , Measure of Times Past, pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ An insistently stated theme of Walker, R. B. J., After the Globe, before the World (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ Hartog, , Regimes of Historicity, pp. 97–204Google Scholar. Hartog suggests that 1989 should be regarded as the end of the modern regime of historicity in that it marks the final vanishing of the mirage of the future that had always captivated modernity. It would probably be more accurate to say that 1989 was a landmark moment in the revealing of the limits of that regime, as no new regime has yet come into existence. A symptomatic reading might suggest that the anger and hostility that neorealism met with in the history controversy was so intense because Waltz reminded the critics of something they did not wish to know – the waning of the modern regime of historicity and its political subject.