The problem of reconciling historical data and scholarship with the concepts and assumptions of political science is a familiar and much-debated one. Whatever the abstract arguments about the exercise, it is a desirable one in the evolution of rigorous and comparative analyses, and one which demands attention in many areas of international studies. It is the aim of this review article to look at the problems entailed in the reconciliation of history and theory, through the particular example of the League of Nations and its experience.

When Philip Reynolds opened the first issue of the British Journal of International Studies with an examination of the “state of the art” in Great Britain,2 he omitted any mention of the Open University as a source of such studies. In the sense that Reynolds was seeking establishments with full-time students of International Studies, the omission was justified; in the sense that the Open University forms a seat of learning whose students are concerned with the study of International Relations, it was not. Indeed, it is possible that the Open University may have, at any one time, more students reading International Relations than any other single institution in the United Kingdom. These several hundreds of part-time students, pursuing the single course under review, are distributed rather unevenly across the face of Great Britain. They have varying access to library facilities; the greatly varying environment of their own homes in which to work; greatly varying amounts of contact with their tutors, either on a “face-to-face” basis or by letter or telephone. In short, the student for whom this course is designed is different – he represents, perhaps, the “new actor” in academic life in Great Britain. He is ignored at our – the traditional academics, – peril, for whilst we may be concerned with standards of academic excellence there are many in high places who now judge success by such criteria as staff-student ratios, cost effectiveness, and the like.

When Harold Wilson first became British prime minister in 1964 the possession of an independent nuclear capability had for some years been a major political issue which divided the political parties from each other and within themselves. But few of those who so boldly entered into polemics on the subject had any detailed knowledge of the origins and the development of the project over the previous quarter century. For until 1964 the subject had not been one evoking much serious academic enquiry. A decade later the position has been strikingly reversed. Wilson, with masterly sleight of hand, used the abortive Atlantic Nuclear Force (A.N.F.) scheme to kill simultaneously the Multilateral Nuclear Force (M.L.R) plan and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) with the result that nuclear weapons have not been a serious issue in any of the last four general elections; while during the same period there has been a flowering of academic interest, official and unofficial, to the point where it almost qualifies as a distinct new sub-branch of international studies.