International Relations Meets Critical Theory

This chapter provides an account of the reception of critical theory in international relations in the early 1980s. It is structured around detailed studies of four pioneering international relations theorists: R. B. J. Walker, Richard K. Ashley, Andrew Linklater, and R. W. Cox. In their different ways these international relations scholars helped fashion the critical persona on the basis of a modified philosophical reflexivity inherited from German idealism and historical materialism, and their Frankfurt School heirs. The end result of this reception was to refigure the theorist as a critical intellectual, capable of achieving higher levels of ethical comportment on the basis of Enlightenment self-reflection, and deeper insight into the latent forces of political transformation on the basis of dialectical-philosophical history.