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What Is ‘Historicism’?

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Abstract Over the course of its history, International Relations (IR) has meant very different things to people in different disciplines, national contexts, and time periods, often coming to label schools within various disciplines with specific and contested philosophies of history. Unsurprisingly, the field of IR, and by extension, International Political Sociology (IPS), has also imported some of this confusion regarding historicism and historical methods as it borrowed historiographical approaches and debates from other disciplines. This chapter breaks through this confusion by discussing some of the primary debates about historicism in some of the different fields and sub-fields studying the international. We first look at the historical turn in IR, then to history, and finally to the history of political thought.

Oxford University Press

Tarak Barkawi Duncan Bell Ayşe Zarakol

The Oxford Handbook of International Political Sociology

Title: What Is ‘Historicism’?

Description:

Abstract Over the course of its history, International Relations (IR) has meant very different things to people in different disciplines, national contexts, and time periods, often coming to label schools within various disciplines with specific and contested philosophies of history.

Unsurprisingly, the field of IR, and by extension, International Political Sociology (IPS), has also imported some of this confusion regarding historicism and historical methods as it borrowed historiographical approaches and debates from other disciplines.

This chapter breaks through this confusion by discussing some of the primary debates about historicism in some of the different fields and sub-fields studying the international.

We first look at the historical turn in IR, then to history, and finally to the history of political thought.

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