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Article: Intellectuals and international relations.(Foreign Affairs)
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- December 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN UNIVERSITIES the discipline of International Relations is a new activity. It is odd that this should be so, for study and debate about relations among states or empires goes back as far as the earliest written records of ancient societies. For instance it would be difficult to argue that Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is not a study of relations between states in peace and war. Confucius, too, was much concerned with relations among princes.
But the twentieth century has seen a proliferation of social studies of all kinds, and organised them into separate "disciplines", often devoted less to dispassionate study than to debating immediate ...