At the end of the Second World War, Arnold Toynbee sat down to complete the last volume of his magnus opus, A Study of History. What was his main conclusion? That the world had just entered the last phase of Western history—the ‘post-modern’ era, an age that would be marked by anxiety and despair. A Study of History has gone the way of all meta-historical studies. Toynbee himself is now less regarded than Oswald Spengler. But if he is remembered for nothing else, it might be for giving a name—post-modernity—to a concept with which we are still coming to terms.

R. B. J. Walker recently noted that far from its largely accepted status as an ‘essentially contested’ concept, state sovereignty is instead an essentially uncontested concept. This is a seemingly paradoxical comment for an international relations theorist to make in light of the recent revival of academic scrutiny concerning sovereign statehood. Rather than marking an inattention to recent trends in the sovereignty literature, Walker's statement is a commentary on the way sovereign statehood has been studied. Walker writes of sovereign statehood:

The school of thought known as Realism (with a large R) has been a central focus of debate in international theory. Nevertheless, its content and epistemological status (and therefore the criteria for its evaluation) remain elusive. In part this is due to the variety of contexts and debates within which Realism has been discussed in the field. In the 1930s and 1940s the debate was framed around a Realist-Idealist axis. In the 1970s Realism was contested by liberal analyses of the causes and consequences of an allegedly growing global interdependence. In the 1980s there emerged a three-cornered debate between competing Kuhnian ‘paradigms’, among which Realism dominated. Given that the meaning of Realism has been partly constructed by historically variable theoretical and political issues, its identity has also varied over time. If, however, one chooses to think about Realism outside of these various contexts within which it has been both defined and evaluated, it remains unclear how such diverse thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz can coherently be considered as part of a single tradition of thought. Sensitivity to their differences may be a virtue for the historian of ideas, but it runs the risk of undermining the point of the exercise! Despite these problems, which are only partially corrected by distinguishing between types of Realism (notably classical and ‘neo’ or ‘structural’ varieties), most scholars would agree with Alan James that Realism is a school whose members harbour shared assumptions about the primacy of states as international actors, the separation of domestic and international politics, and who describe the latter in terms of anarchy and a concomitant ubiquitous struggle for power and security.

The Financial Agreement signed between the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom on the 6th December 1945 (popularly known as the Washington Loan Agreement, and hereafter referred to as ‘the Agreement’) is widely interpreted as an agreement which imposed fundamental constraints on British external economic policy and is even seen as a benchmark in postwar international relations signalling the subordination of Britain to the level almost of a client state of the United States.

In the publisher's blurb George Liska's The Ways of Power is described as ‘the culmination of the life's work of one of the most distinguished scholars of international relations’. The same might be said of Turbulence in World Politics, except that I suspect that James Rosenau, still young in mind and spirit at 67, may yet have more to contribute. That two such outstanding scholars could write two such totally contrasting books, in method, in epistemology, in content, in focus (and in style) is a daunting indicator of the continuing lack of an agreed core in the study of international relations. The obvious point should be made at the outset that in so fundamental a contrast a reviewer's own predilections must affect his perception of what he reads, and my own bias towards Rosenau must therefore be explicitly stated.

Martin Wight once claimed there was no international political theory worthy of the name. In this I believe he was mistaken. But he also maintained, as Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts put it, that ‘the most fundamental question you can ask in international theory is, What is international society? Hedley Bull likewise drew a basic distinction, as several contributors to the volume edited by J. D. B. Miller and the late R. J. Vincent remind us, between the system of states and the society of states. Each of these volumes takes up Wight's question and explores Bull's distinction in various ways, most of them engaging and enlightening. For an overview of the main approaches and controversies in the study of normative international relations today one could scarcely do better than consult them.