The study of international political economy is beset with complexity: the complexity of the empirical referent and the variety of intellectual perspectives. The complexity of contemporary international economic relations was discussed in the first of these two papers. This paper is devoted to a critical review of the major established perspectives on the global political economy and a discussion of some of the bases upon which it might be possible to construct a synthetic, and hopefully more satisfactory, approach.

Despite the proliferation in recent years of scholarly journals, university and college departments and research institutes dealing with peace studies, it would be difficult to conclude that this area of academic enquiry is as yet firmly established in the wider field of International Relations. It may well be, as one sympathetic writer noted recently, that peace research is ‘alive, vigorous, rapidly maturing and producing a good deal of work conforming to the tenets of social science’. At the same time it remains a fairly new field and one which, over the years, has suffered, and continues to suffer, from internal disputes, particularly about substance and values. In some respects these debates and controversies are a sign of intellectual vigour. It must also be said, however, that in the past the ‘lack of agreed focus and definition ideological divisions, competing disciplinary biasses, ambiguities of priorities and purposes’, have led to ‘an unhealthy confusion and mystification of issues’ which has helped to prevent its wider acceptance within the academic field.

In limited degree, of course, industry and warfare have been connected from the earliest times. Weapons are what make human muscles formidable; and from the dawn of civilization it took specialized craftsmen to make weapons out of metal In the course of time the amount of metal used by warriors tended to increase; and the size of armies may also have grown greater—though with such ups and downs that no very definite growth pattern here emerges before the wars of the French Revolution.

Alan James makes a noble effort to rescue me from my puzzlement concerning Martin Wight, but I confess myself still confused. As he implies, probably the root of the matter lies in differences of temperament and experience. This being the case, it then becomes the task of the academic to pursue the argument back to the basic point at which one party asserts one set of premisses and the other another, but neither side can offer further justification of these premisses, or at least not in terms which would be acceptable to the other. This I shall endeavour to do at the end of this note. Where Alan James's article is particularly helpful is that it makes it a little clearer that Wight was a part of an intellectual tradition and that this sort of ‘private pacifism’ may be less uncommon than I had supposed, partly, presumably, becauseit is private. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it rests on, at best, a curious set of premisses; but about this later. There are some initial points to make.

John Vasquez, in a recent number of the Review, attempts to document the two-part ‘claim that the Realist paradigm has dominated quantitative international relations and has to this time (1979) failed.to explain (state) behaviour adequately’. He labels this the ‘colour it Morgenthau thesis’.

Many readers will have long known Professor Michael Walzer's remarkable book Just and Unjust Wars. The most interesting thing I can do is to discuss the way it has been received in some centres of the study of international relations in Britain. Professor Hedley Bull, Professor W. B. Gallic and Mr David Watt have reviewed it with Important differences but all to the same ultimate effect. Oxford, Cambridge and the Metropolis conclude that It Is a shallow book, lacking In philosophical depth.

Since the publication of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Keohane and Nye's call for a new paradigm in world politics, there has been increasing attention within the field as to what paradigm or paradigms dominate it and how they can be assessed. ‘Colouring it Morgenthau9 attempted to answer both those questions and in the process to develop measures for Kuhn's concepts that would permit some of his propositions to be tested. It is significant that although the original ‘Colour it Morgenthau’ thesis has been criticized, and various counter-views put forth, none of these have ever attempted to test their positions with data in a manner that would permit falsification, or even put forward a research design that would indicate how paradigm evaluations might be conducted. If criticism is to advance knowledge, then it is important that critics present not only counter-views but counter-research or, minimally, a research design that would allow their points to be tested.