The historical development of 'culture' in IR : word and concepts

Abstract

'Culture' is often considered to have been a neglected subject in the discipline of International Relations (IR). This thesis, however, tells a very different disciplinary story; one that reveals the idea of culture to be deeply embedded in the discipline's history. From the League of Nations era, through the Cold War, to the post-Cold War period, the word 'culture' is easily located in the work the discipline's scholars have produced. A contextual methodology is employed to recover the conceptual meaning that a number of authors have attached to the word 'culture' in their work. These authors include Norman Angell, Alfred Zimmern, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Samuel Huntington. What is clear is that these scholars have not understood the term 'culture' in the same way. In short, they have operated with alternative culture concepts; to demonstrate this point a number of distinctions are drawn.

Two concepts of culture are identified; the Arnoldian and Boasian concepts, following the humanism of Matthew Arnold and the scientific and anthropological approach of Franz Boas, respectively. It is noted that IR scholars have been uniquely placed to choose between two levels of application for their idea of culture - the international and the parochial. Depending on the type of concept a scholar has employed and the level at which that concept has been thought appropriately articulated, has served to generate a rich and varied place for the word 'culture' in IR. Within this framework, an epistemic transformation is plainly discernible in the discipline. The texts reveal a theoretical shift from the Arnoldian concept to the Boasian and from the international to the parochial level of analysis. A further distinction is drawn within the Boasian idea of culture between the essentialist and anti-essentialist configurations of the concept; this indicates that, currently, an essentialist version of the anthropological concept obscures other forms of cultural thinking.

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