The books which are the subject of this article1 lie squarely (if a little uneasily on the part of Northedge) in the so-called ‘classical‘ tradition of scholarship in International Relations. This tradition eschews both the attempt to explain international politics by aping the methodology of the natural sciences and any interest in saying something of general import about the process of foreign policy formulation. Rather, it finds its “less ephemeral centre” in the rules and institutions which are shared by states and approaches the study of these rules and institutions in a manner at once philosophical and historical. Furthermore, against the cardboard lances of the ‘transnationalists’ it clutches a sturdy shield to the state, insisting that the state has been in the recent past and will remain for the foreseeable future, the principal “centre of initiative” in world politics. In short, this tradition consists in an overriding concern with the political theory and institutional history of the ‘states-system’.