John Hobson, George Lawson and Justin Rosenberg

Historical sociology
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Historical Sociology
John M. Hobson
University of Sheffield
j.m.hobson@sheffield.ac.uk
George Lawson
London School of Economics
g.lawson@lse.ac.uk
Justin Rosenberg
University of Sussex
j.p.rosenberg@sussex.ac.uk
Word count: 10,568

Emerging in the 1980s, maturing in the 1990s and taking-off in the 2000s, historical
sociology has become a major feature of contemporary International Relations (IR) theory.
However, the origins of historical sociology run much deeper than this. Indeed, historical
sociology can be seen as at least two centuries old an attempt by economists, philosophers
of history and nascent sociologists to provide a historically sensitive, yet generally applicable,
account of the emergence of industrial capitalism, the rational bureaucratic state, novel forms
of warfare and other core features of the modern world (introductions to the field include
Abrams 1982; Skocpol ed. 1984; Smith 1991; Delanty & Isin eds. 2003; Mahoney &
Rueschemeyer 2003). Although the place of historical sociology within Sociology suffered
from that disciplines diversion into abstract theorizing and its turf-wars with cognate rivals,
historical sociology experienced something of a renaissance during the late 1970s and early
1980s, around the time that a wave of self-consciously historical sociological work began to
appear in IR. Over the past twenty years, historical sociology in International Relations
(HSIR) has contributed to a number of debates ranging from examination of the origins of the

modern states-system (Rosenberg 1994; Spruyt 1994; Teschke 2003) to unraveling the core
features and relative novelty of the contemporary historical period (Shaw 2000; Buzan &
Little 2000; Rosenberg 2005). However, as it has developed, so HSIR has become
increasingly catholic in its tastes, often presenting itself as a loose approach representing
almost any work which contains either historical or sociological sensibilities (Lawson 2007).
In short, even as substantial gains have been made, there has been a concomitant watering
down of the underlying approach itself. Paradoxically, therefore, just as HSIR has become
increasingly seen by the IR scholarly community, so its core rationale has become less
manifestly heard. If the specific challenge and promise of HSIR is to be sustained, its core
intellectual identity requires clearer formulation.
This formulation can be approached by building upon C. Wright Mills (1959) famous
description of the sociological imagination. Classical sociologists, Mills argued,
constructed their analyses at the intersection of three dimensions of the human world:
structure, history and biography. The principle of social structure was concerned with the
fact of the social world itself and the perception that human behavior is always involved in,
and shaped by, particular patterns of social relationships the fabric of society. History added
the perception that these social structures are always specific to given times and places, that
they vary enormously from one period or setting to another, and that they are themselves
subject to change over time. Finally, biography connected these larger-scale phenomena of
structure and change to the experiences of individuals revealing how their lives were
shaped by broader social and historical processes and how their agency, in turn, effected
these processes. By triangulating these three registers, Mills concluded, classical social
analysis had produced an idiom of understanding so rich and compelling that it provided the
common denominator for the modern social sciences, and perhaps the humanities too.

As a branch of historical sociology, HSIR is fundamentally concerned with

operationalizing Mills vision of classical social analysis in the field of International
Relations. In doing so, however, it also modifies Mills original formula: in effect, the
triangulation of structure-history-biography becomes instead structure-history-international.
The purpose of this modification is not, of course, to expunge the dimension of human
agency (which can, in fact, be studied from all three angles); it is rather to adjust the focus of
the sociological imagination in line with the subject matter of IR. And what results from
the new triangulation is the intellectual agenda of HSIR itself. By contrast with traditional
realist claims for the autonomy (Bull 1977) and enduring sameness (Waltz 1979) of
international relations, this agenda includes questions such as: how international relations are
connected both in general terms and in particular historical cases to the basic patterning of
the human world (structure); how international relations have varied across space and
changed across historical time (history); and finally, though this question has only recently
emerged in the field, the consequences of the interactive multiplicity of social orders for our
conceptions of social structure and historical process (international).
With this in mind, this essay introduces the origins, development and prospects of
HSIR in three parts. The first section locates the origins of the approach within the wider
field of historical studies in IR. These origins, it is argued, are associated with a specific
understanding of the relationship between structure, history and the international based on the
construction of big-picture narratives alongside sensitivity to contingency, particularity and
detail. Having identified the foundations of the approach, the second section chronicles two
waves of scholarship within HSIR. The first, associated with the work of scholars like Theda
Skocpol (1979), Michael Mann (1986), Charles Tilly (1990) and Anthony Giddens (1985),
developed largely outside IR. Although these scholars produced important work, their impact

was limited by an association with a quasi- or proto-realist approach to international theory,

one which significantly impeded their theoretical and empirical reach (Jarvis 1989; Hobden
1998). Partly as a response to this shortcoming, a second wave of scholarship emerged within
IR, engendering insights into issues as varied as the co-constitutive relationship between the
international realm and state-society relations in processes of radical change (Halliday 1999;
Lawson 2005), examination of the social logic of international financial orders (Seabrooke
2006), as well as exploration of the international dimensions of modernity itself (Rosenberg
1994; Teschke 2003). This second-wave of scholarship included works influenced by such
Marxisant writers as Perry Anderson (1974a, 1974b), Immanuel Wallerstein (1983) and
Robert Brenner (1977, 1986), as well as John Ruggies (1986) Durkheimean analyses of
international historical change. Having grown significantly during these two waves, HSIR
can today be seen as a burgeoning, vibrant field of enquiry.
In the final section of the essay, we outline the parameters of a third wave of HSIR
scholarship, which we label International Historical Sociology (IHS). In terms of the
triangulation of structure, history and the international, the second wave of HSIR
concentrated largely on the implications of the first two for the third: it sought to reconnect
the international to historically specific social structures and to explore its varied form over
time. By contrast, IHS seeks to complete Mills triangulation. Conceiving the international as
the simultaneously differentiated and interactive dynamics of historical development, it
examines the substantive and methodological implications of the international for our
conceptualizations of social structure and historical process, thereby advancing the distinctive
contribution of IR to the social sciences as a whole. This move, we suggest, contains the
potential for a historical sociological enterprise which can tackle issues of core concern to
both IR and Sociology, serving as the common denominator for research in both.

What is History in International Relations?

Historical sociology is as much a part of world history and comparative politics as it is a subsection of Sociology or International Relations. Historical sociology, therefore, has
necessarily porous borders it is the prototypical open society. For HSIR, this is especially
important. In its broadest sense, historical sociology aims to unravel the complexity that lies
behind the interaction between social action and social structures (understood as relatively
fixed configurations of social relations). Hence, for advocates of HSIR, international factors
are juxtaposed, conjoined and interrelated with domestic processes with the aim of finding
patterns that explain important historical processes including the general and regional crises
that provoke wars, processes of state formation, varieties of capitalist development, forms of
imperialism and so on (Hobson 2002; Lawson 2006).
It is generally assumed that HSIR represents a reaction to IR theorys ahistorical
tendencies, best captured by Waltzian neo-realism and Keohane-inspired neoliberal
institutionalism. As is well known, both of these approaches work within an assumption of
anarchy as containing a transhistorical logic. In this sense, the strength of third-image
approaches, it is supposed, lies in the assumption of a continuous structural context to
international relations (anarchy) which, in turn, generates a number of derivative logics a
self-help system, the need for states to prioritize survival, a recurring security dilemma and
the mechanism of the balance of power. Because anarchy stands as a constant structural
condition, so the international sphere appears as a continuous, almost static, holding pen for
actual existing international relations. In turn, this means that IR scholarship is or should
be primarily concerned with mapping the ceaseless struggle for survival (as in neorealism)
or the conditions for cooperation (as in neoliberalism) which take place within a timeless and
spaceless anarchical system.

It is also commonly assumed that historical sensitivity is something that has become a
core feature of IR scholarship only relatively recently. But, in fact, a concern with
temporality has long been a feature of international studies. On both sides of the Atlantic,
leading figures in the discipline such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, Martin
Wight and Stanley Hoffman have employed history as a means of illuminating their research.
Indeed, Wight (1966) made searching through international history the sine qua non of
international theory, the best that could be hoped for in a discipline without a core
problematique of its own. For their part, both Morgenthau and Carr saw the international
realm as one of fundamental discontinuity, even if they accepted the importance of unit-level
attributes such as aristocratic rule and citizenship rights to changes in the make-up of the
international system itself (Hobson 2000). In this sense, the emergence since the end of the
Cold War of historically-sensitive paradigms such as constructivism (e.g. Finnemore 1996,
2003), neo-classical realism (e.g. Schweller 2006) and the English School (e.g. Buzan &
Little 2000) should be seen less as a breakthrough than as a return to business as usual
(Hobden 2002). Likewise, HSIR should be considered less as a new approach than as an
older, more classical sensibility one concerned with timeliness rather than timelessness,
with dynamics of change as well as processes of continuity, and with recognizing the
contingency of events alongside the identification of deep-lying structural patterns. In short,
HSIR is concerned with the same issues, dynamics and concerns as those which motivated
classical social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The neo-neo debate, therefore, can be seen as a disruption both to IRs historical norm
and to HSIRs longer-term sensibilities. But this is only the first step in a more substantial
argument. After all, there are major differences between the ways in which figures such as
Carr, Morgenthau, Waltz and others approach history. It is important, therefore, to pose a

first-order if rarely considered question: what is history in IR? A first cut at this
question is possible via the help of two metaphors: history as scripture and history as
butterfly. On the one hand, there lies a significant section of the IR community which views
history as some kind of scripture in which timeless lessons and inviolate rules can be
removed from their socio-temporal context and applied to ill-fitting situations: the lessons of
appeasement become a shorthand for the necessity of confronting dictatorial regimes across
time and place; the US retreat from Vietnam is invoked to halt talk of withdrawal in Iraq; the
Reagan years are employed to support the idea that ultimate victory in the war on terror
rests on the deployment of overwhelming US military force married to the promotion by
force if necessary of democratic ideals around the world. This view of history as scripture
is a form of macro-historical approach typified in IR by neorealism. As we argue below, such
a tendency promotes a selection bias in which history is reduced to a role, however well
disguised, in which it is little more than the pre-determined site for the empirical verification
of abstract claims. Although history as a point of data collection is often present in these
accounts, historicism an understanding of the contingent, disruptive, constitutive impact of
local events, particularities and discontinuities is absent. As such, history as scripture can
be seen as a curiously ahistoricist position.
If the macro approach shuns historicism, a second, equally prominent, tendency in IR
scholarship does the reverse, seeing history as the if only realm of uncertainty (Versailles
less punitive, Bin Laden assassinated before 9/11, Pearl Harbor never taken place): a
butterfly of contingent hiccups upon which IR theorists provide ill-fitting maps maps
which reveal merely the distortions of scholars ideological prisms. Despite the sense in
which this history as butterfly approach seeks to foster a kind of pure history, it is also
inadequate in that it fetishizes the particular and the exceptional, failing to see how historical

events, dramas and processes are part of broader interrelations, sequences and plots which
provide a shape however difficult to discern within historical development. Indeed, the
result of the if only school of history is a reduction of the past to a pick and mix candy
store which is raided only in order to satisfy the tastes of the researcher. As such, where the
history as scripture approach is historical without being historicist, in some ways, the
history as butterfly approach is historicist without being historical, focusing on
deconstruction without attempting to reconstruct meaningful causal narratives.
The existence of these two generic tendencies history as scripture and as butterfly
is forged by the working practices of IR scholarship itself. Most mainstream approaches
adopt a form of history as scripture, using history in order to code findings, mine data or as
a source of post factum explanations (Isacoff 2002; Kornprobst 2007). Most post-positivist
approaches particularly postmodernism assume a form of the latter, using history as a
means to disrupt prevalent power-knowledge nexuses (e.g. Ashley 1986; Walker 1993;
Vaughan-Williams 2005). But few IR scholars have spent sufficient time asking what it is we
mean when we talk about history (Hobson & Lawson 2008). As a result, both positivists and
post-positivists have generated an artificial divide in which second-order noise has
substituted for first-order enquiry. HSIR by contrast, carves out a novel space between these
positions, paying attention to micro-developments that are often governed by contingency but
taking care to place these within broader patterns of historical development.
Figure 1 represents a deeper cut into this issue. The figure discerns four ideal-typical
modes of history in IR history without historicism, historicist historical sociology,
radical historicism and traditional history each of which adopts a particular position on
the scripture-butterfly spectrum. At the far left of Figure 1 lies a version of the history as
scripture approach one we label history without historicism. This is an approach adopted

by most mainstream IR theories, including neorealists such as Robert Gilpin (1981), John
Mearsheimer (2003), and Colin and Miriam Elman (2001, 2008), who have sought to
historically fill-in the Waltzian frame, as well as Robert Keohane (1984), Lisa Martin
(1993) and others who have applied historical analysis to a neoliberal institutionalist research
program. As noted above, these approaches seek to establish general propositions across time
and place, universal truths which reduce history to little more than a means to test hypothesis
and resolve anomalies. As such, this stands as a view of history as the eternal under-laborer
a source of data to be mined as theoretical abstractions demand.

Fig. 1: What is History in IR?

At the other end of the history in IR spectrum on the far right of Figure 1 can be
found radical historicists. These scholars practice a history as butterfly approach in that
knowledge is seen as contained within tightly bound spatio-temporal contexts themselves the
products of particular power-knowledge nexuses. This mode of research argues that texts are
reflective of a singular cultural and intellectual milieu (Greenblatt 1982). As such, this form
9

of research is akin to a kind of deep contextualism, one which finds its clearest expression in
the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and which has been carried into IR by
scholars like Nick Vaughan-Williams (2005; cf. Finney 2001). For these researchers, there is
no single historical truth or historical record available for discovery, but rather multiple,
indeed an undecidable infinity, of possible historical truths.
Moving in from the outer limits of Figure 1, we find a third mode of conducting
historical research in IR a space occupied by traditional historians. At first glance, it may
appear odd to place traditional historians (many of whom are positivists) so close to radical
historiographers (who are anything but positivists). In our representation, however, rather
than being diametrically opposed, these positions contain much in common. First, like radical
historicists, traditional historians reject the application of a priori theoretical templates to the
study of history. Indeed, theoretically-informed approaches are derided as make-believe
versions of the true historical record in which theoretically-informed scholars select the
facts in advance without holding them to objective scrutiny. Second, both of these
apparently antithetical modes of analysis exhibit incredulity to grand narratives, seeing such
endeavors as ahistorical in that they eschew immersion in particular historical material in
favor of grander, historically unsustainable claims. In this sense, both approaches seek to
trace how one-thing-followed-another in an unfolding of events that is deemed to be so
contingent as to be unreplicable. Indeed, both traditional and critical historians agree that
such approaches hover somewhere between shoddy scholarship and dangerous ideological
contortion. As such, despite their epistemological differences, traditional historians and
radical historicists converge around a tendency to particularism and in a shared resistance to
theoretically-inspired narratives.

10

The final mode of history in IR historicist historical sociology occupies a central

place in our diagram, overlapping with the other three modes of analysis and, indeed, with the
work of those historians themselves who consider their primary identity as situated outside
the traditional conception of history (e.g. Carr 1967; Gaddis 1996; Roberts 2006). This
viewpoint considers the macro history as scripture conception favored by most mainstream
IR scholarship as inadequate because it irons out historical discontinuities by creating
isomorphic transhistorical categories. By taking a static picture of the geopolitical structure of
world politics (the anarchical states-system), differences between political units and
international systems are occluded, important social structural forces (such as capitalism,
patriarchy and racism) are ignored, and agency is reduced to the unit-level musings of
statesmen, financiers and generals. In this way, mainstream IR truncates the study of world
politics by introducing a levels of analysis parlor game which reifies social processes and
social facts states, the market, sovereignty as timeless analytical (and ultimately as
ontological) entities. As a result, much IR theory becomes home to what we might call a
continuist mystique in which the past is ransacked in order to explain the present. Thus, the
contest between Athens and Sparta is transplanted to the Cold War in order to elucidate the
stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union; all wars, whether they be guerrilla
insurgencies or total conflicts, are explicable by the basic fact or permissive context of
anarchy; and all political units city-states, nomadic tribes, empires, nation-states and
transnational alliances are functionally undifferentiated. The result is a gigantic optical
illusion which generates an isomorphic homology of social facts (Hobson 2002).
Historicist historical sociology is equally critical of the position employed by
traditional historians and radical historicists: the history as butterfly approach which
fetishizes particular events but which fails to see history as a social process in which

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historical events forms part of broader patterns of continuity and change. By stressing
contingency, accident and particularity, there is a possibility that bigger commonalities are
missed. At the very least, this runs the risk of producing a shopping list of causes that
includes all sorts of weak or insignificant factors in a vain attempt to provide a complete
explanation. Worse still, such an approach can collapse into arbitrariness, incoherence, adhocery, and ultimately, into negativity, becoming description rather than theory. That the
world is complex does not mean that it is unknowable. And even if analysis begins with the
inexorable facts of contingency, complexity and multicausality, it is still possible to
determine a certain significance to the sequence within which events are conjoined. In other
words, accepting the contingency of events does not preclude these being placed in broader
analytical narratives, nor abandoning the attempt to evaluate rival truth claims regarding the
causal rhythms that punctuate world historical processes (Abbott 1995; Sewell 2005; Tilly
2006). Rather, the generation of causal narratives provides a means of telling meaningful
stories explanations which generate a degree of causal determinacy to the production,
reproduction, reform and transformation of social relations.
Historicist historical sociology, therefore, stands both within and beyond each of the
other three modes of conducting historical research in IR. Epistemologically, historicist
historical sociology stands between the mainstream macro approach at one extreme and the
micro approach of deconstructionist radical historicism and traditional history at the other.
Contra radical historicists, historicist historical sociologists accept that history is knowable
but, pace traditional historians, they insist that history is produced within a certain time and
place, and subject to the interpretations of its practitioners. Echoing the macro-historical
approach, historicist historical sociology explores general patterns of causation and
development, rejecting the postmodern propensity for reconstructionist refusal. But

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following traditional history, it also places emphasis on historical discontinuities, rejecting

timeless and spaceless claims to transhistorical truth. In short, historical sociology embraces
the nuances, subtleties and complexities of world politics, while retaining an overarching goal
of finding meaningful flows, patterns and trends within world history itself.

Two Waves of HSIR

This foregrounding of HSIR in broader analytical, conceptual and methodological debates is
an important one, not least because HSIR is rarely problematized within IR. The usual
procedure is to pronounce or dismiss IR as ahistorical and asociological and then to proceed
in advocating HSIR as an antidote. But as we have argued, mainstream IR is insufficient not
because it is ahistorical, which it is not, but because it is ahistoricist. Given this, the
fundamental purpose of HSIR is to inject historicist insights into IR, thereby countering the
ahistoricism of the history as scripture position while avoiding the dangers posed by the
extreme historicism of the history as butterfly approaches. In other words, between the
Scylla of pure historicism in which the big picture is drowned in a sea of micro-particularities
and the Charybdis of macro approaches which swallow discrepancies within their grand
schemas, lies an approach sensitive to both rich detail and broader patterns of historical
development. In this sense, HSIR occupies a position at the crossroads of history, Sociology
and IR. From history comes insight into the importance of events, contingencies and local
particularities; from Sociology understanding of how relatively fixed configurations of social
relations (structures) impact on these micro-processes; and from IR comes realization of the
central role played by the international in this dynamic.

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The First Wave of HSIR

By the late 1980s and 1990s, a small number of IR scholars drew explicitly on historical
sociological insights in order to counter the direction that the discipline was taking under the
auspices of the neo-neo debate. Various scholars saw Weberian historical sociology (WHS)
as providing a useful means of developing such an alternative (Halliday 1987; Jarvis, 1989;
Hobson 1997; Hobden 1998; cf. Yalva 1991). At this point, prominent Weberian scholars
such as Theda Skocpol (1979), Raymond Aron (1986), Michael Mann (1986), Charles Tilly
(1990) and Anthony Giddens (1985) began to appear regularly in the footnotes of leading IR
publications. The initial link between these historical sociologists and IR theory lay in the
fact that they sought to combine developments in the international realm with domestic or
national social processes. The promise of WHS rested on four key claims. First, WHS
placed significant ontological weighting on the domestic sources of state power even if,
paradoxically, the goal was to reveal the autonomous powers of the state (see especially
Evans et al eds. 1985; Mann 1988: Ch. 1; Hobson 1997). Second, bringing state-society
relations back in was coupled with a focus on the interaction between the national and
international realms. Here, special emphasis was placed on revealing how pressures
emanating from the international state system came to reshape national societies for
example, where states could not marshal sufficient resources to remain competitive militarily,
so defeat in warfare could facilitate social revolution (Skocpol 1979). Third, WHS seemed to
contain the capacity to overcome the mainstream emphasis on a materialist ontology
Manns (1986) emphasis on the potentially transcendent power of ideology was seen as one
example of this. Fourth, these writers emphasized the importance of international
discontinuity in contrast to neo-neo structural stasis. Taken as a whole, these four insights
amounted to the promise of WHS for IR.

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It would, however, be a mistake to equate first-wave HSIR merely with neo-Weberian

historical sociology. After all, some of the first scholars who imported historical sociology
into IR were quasi-constructivist (John Ruggie), Marxist (Robert Cox) and poststructuralist
(Richard Ashley). And many of the most important influences on these scholars, and on the
general development of historical sociology, drew on strands of social theory which went
well beyond the Weberian tradition (e.g. Moore 1967; Braudel 1972; Anderson 1974a,
1974b; Wallerstein 1983). Ruggie (1986) played a seminal role in establishing the transition
from feudal heteronomy to modern sovereignty as a core problematique for IR scholarship,
helping to forge a series of engagements into how the modern international states system
came into being (Spruyt 1994; Rosenberg 1994; Reus-Smit 1999, Teschke 2003). Robert
Coxs (1986) early work was no less influential, acting as a conduit to a range of neoGramscian HSIR (Halperin 2004; Murphy 2005; Morton 2007; Gill 2008). Poststructuralist
writings also emerged following Ashleys (1986) influential intervention, many of which
utilized historical sociological insights even if they did not always directly associate
themselves with this label (e.g. Campbell 1992; Weber 1995; Bartelson 1995). Last, but by
no means least, some scholars combined these approaches to powerful effect, perhaps most
evident in the work of the critical scholar Andrew Linklater (1990, 1998).
However, while a good deal of first-wave HSIR scholarship was not directly inspired
by neo-Weberian historical sociology, there lingered a general perception that the Weberianinspired insights of Tilly, Mann and Skocpol et al marked the core of this genre. And
increasingly, IR scholars came to view the neo-Weberian wing of first-wave HSIR as
fundamentally flawed in how it approached the international realm (e.g., Fuat Keyman 1997:
Ch. 3; Spruyt 1994; Hobden 1998; Hobson 2000: Ch. 6; Teschke 2003; Lawson et al. 2006).
Critique centered on the ways in which many first-wave neo-Weberians tended to

15

conceptualize the international realm as one of anarchic geopolitical competition between

states and, above all, on how national processes tended to be informed by a geopolitical logic
derived, in turn, from the timeless presence of international anarchy. In this sense, the first
wave can be said to have largely failed in terms of delivering the original promise of HSIR.
And, as such, realizing this promise became the task for subsequent scholars working within
the next stage of HSIR.

The Second Wave of HSIR

In contrast to first-wave HSIR, later scholars moved away from examining the specific
interconnections between international geopolitics and domestic social change. A further
difference that marked the second wave from the first was that it was driven principally by IR
scholars working within IR. This is significant in that it allowed HSIR to develop an
indigenous rationale, identity and research community (e.g. www.historical-sociology.org).
To some extent, second-wave HSIR can be said to derive from two core critiques of
mainstream IR: chronofetishism and tempocentrism (Hobson 2002: 6-15). Chronofetishism is
a form of ahistoricism in which the present is thought to be explainable by looking only at
present causal variables. But examining only the present leads to various illusions, the first of
which is the reification illusion in which the present is sealed off from the past, rendering it
as a static, self-constituting autonomous entity, thereby obscuring its socio-temporal context.
Second, it leads to the naturalization illusion in which the present is effectively naturalized
on the basis that it emerged spontaneously in accordance with natural human
imperatives, obscuring important historical processes that constitute the present. This can, in

16

turn, often lead to a third problem the immutability illusion where the present is
eternalized to the extent that it is deemed to be resistant to change.
If chronofetishism leads to a sealing off of the present so that it appears as
autonomous, natural, spontaneous and immutable, the second prevalent form of ahistoricism
within IR tempocentrism extrapolates this reified present backwards through time so
that discontinuities between epochs are smoothed over or flattened altogether. In this way,
international history appears to be marked, or is regulated by, a regular tempo that beats
according to the rhythm of the present system. This is an inverted form of path dependency
which renders previous epochs and international systems as homologous to the current
international order. Thus we are told that ancient imperialism is equivalent to that found in
Europe between 1492 and the twentieth century (Waltz 1979); or that European feudal
heteronomy is equivalent in its modus operandi to that of the modern international system
(Fischer 1992). Likewise, this approach induces tempocentric statements such as: the classic
history of Thucydides is as meaningful a guide to the behavior of states today as when it was
written in the fifth century BC (Gilpin 1981: 7); or that balance of power politics in much
the form that we know it has been practiced over the millennia by many different types of
political units, from ancient China and India, to the Greek and Italian city states, and unto our
own day (Waltz 1986: 341). In this way, terms such as sovereignty, balance of power and
anarchy are employed without due regard for time and space specificity; instead they take on
stable, fixed meanings. And above all, it is precisely the attempt to (re)present all major
actors as isomorphic, and therefore commensurable through time and space, that enables most
mainstream accounts to see the centrality of anarchy as the timeless governing principle of
international politics.
The antidote that second-wave HSIR scholars provide is not so much a reversion to

17

extreme particularity (as in traditional history) but an historicist approach which is able to
construct a narrative while simultaneously being open to issues of contingency, unintended
consequences and the importance of context. Utilizing this approach, second-wave scholars
have looked to transcend the tempocentrism of mainstream IR and some first wave HSIR by
examining the differing contexts that inform the conduct of actual existing international
relations (e.g. Rosenberg 1994; Buzan & Little 2000; Bisley 2004; Barkawi 2005; Colas
2007). In the process, they are able to show how contemporary world politics is historically
double-edged: having one foot in the past but also being, in certain respects, singular.
As with the first wave of HSIR, the second wave draws upon a variety of theoretical
schools. Marxists have examined the ways in which class relations generate diverse forms of
international relations across time and place, exploring how these engender distinct forms of
international order (e.g. Rosenberg 1994; Cutler 2002; Teschke 2003, Lacher 2006).
Constructivist and critical theorists have not only problematized the sovereign state
(Biersteker & Weber 1996; Philpott 2001) but have also shown how the changing moral
purpose of the state generates particular international institutional environments (Reus-Smit
1999, 2002), discrete forms of national identity (Hall, R.B. 1999) and different relations
between states more generally (Weber 1995; Linklater 1998, 2002). English School writers
have focused on the changing norms, practices and institutions that underpin international
society (Gong 1984; Keene 2002; Buzan, 2004; Suzuki 2009), as well as on the ways in
which international systems oscillate between hierarchy and anarchy (Watson 1992; Kaufman
et al. eds. 2007). Neo-Weberians have demonstrated how varying state-society relations have
promoted distinct trade regimes (Hobson 1997) and have studied the ways in which forms of
radical change have both constituted, and been constituted by, their broader relationship with
the international realm (Halliday 1999; Lawson 2005). In this vein, cognate work is being

18

undertaken in relational HSIR (Jackson & Nexon 1999) and in critiques of IRs
Eurocentrism (e.g. Hobson 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Shilliam 2006).
In its first two waves, therefore, historical sociology appeared as a broad movement
capable of incorporating a wide number of paradigms and explaining a number of important
issues. Although proponents share an understanding of the centrality of discontinuity,
contingency and particularity in international processes, they also have a common concern in
examining how social structures shape international events. As such, historical sociology can
be said to offer a double punch: a focus on the rich detail of historical international relations
alongside an emphasis on causal explanations wherever these are located, specifying how
patterns, configurations and sets of social relations combine in particular contexts in order to
generate certain outcomes. Thus, historical sociologists seek not just to provide historical
analysis; they also aim to generate powerful theoretical explanations.

Towards International Historical Sociology

To date, therefore, HSIR has sought to reveal not just the different forms that international
systems have taken in the past but also the ways in which the modern system cannot be
treated as an ontological given. Historical sociologists in IR are unanimous in asserting that
rethinking the constitutive properties and dynamics of the contemporary system can be
successfully achieved only by applying what amounts to a more sensitive non-tempocentric
historical sociological lens. At the same time, by tracing the historical sociological origins of
the present international order, HSIR scholars are able to reveal some of the continuities
between the past and the present, thereby dispensing with the dangers of chronofetishism.

19

However, while second-wave scholarship has succeeded in placing HSIR on IRs

agenda, there are two problems with the approach as currently constituted. First, second-wave
HSIR has become both unwieldy and heterogeneous, making its distinctive contribution to
the discipline hard to identify (Lawson 2007). Indeed, all too often, HSIR boils down to little
more than a commitment to inject historical sociological insights into IR without necessarily
explaining why IR scholarship should take notice of such research. Paradoxically, therefore,
just as books and articles in HSIR have begun to proliferate, many IR scholars have become
increasingly puzzled by the sub-field. Indeed many, if not most, IR scholars would be hardpressed to summarize what the specific contribution of HSIR is to the discipline. Thus a
failure to drop anchor sufficiently within IR coincides with an equally important inability to
situate research within a core that can be considered as distinctively HSIR.
The second need to reorient HSIR stems from a more intellectual challenge: the
failure shared by both classical social theorists and IR scholars to theorize the international.
As a discipline, IR appears to have a semi-permeable membrane which allows ideas from
other disciplines in, but blocks substantive traffic out (Buzan & Little 2001). As Buzan and
Little argue (2001: 20), when the question is posed: what have other disciplines learned
from IR, the cupboard is, if not quite bare, then certainly not well stocked. Indeed, much of
the time, IR scholarship has engaged less in fruitful interchange with other disciplines than
served as canon-fodder for raiding parties from outside. Indeed, these looting and pillaging
raids (Mann 1995: 555) conjure up an image more akin to intellectual asset stripping than to
a fertile trans-disciplinary relationship (Lawson 2008). One of the main benefits of IHS is
precisely its capacity to help define a core trans-disciplinary intellectual agenda for IR which
would leave it relatively immune to these border raids. It also provides a chance to exorcize a
specter that has haunted both IR and classical social theory. Kenneth Waltz (1986: 340) once

20

famously stated that [s]omeone may one day fashion a unified theory of internal and external
politics ... [Nevertheless] students of international politics will do well to concentrate on separate
theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them. Our
third-wave approach that we label international historical sociology, we believe, provides a
means of crafting just such an approach.
The categorical separation of domestic and international spheres of enquiry, as cited by
Waltz, appears at first to be a problem internal to IR. In fact, however, it can be traced back to
deficiencies in the conceptualization of historical development inherited from the very works of
classical social analysis celebrated by C. Wright Mills (Rosenberg 2006). In a tradition which
extends from Montesquieu to Comte, Marx, Spencer, Durkheim, Weber and Tnnies, classical
theorists generated commanding accounts of internal development and change. And they used
their awareness of the historical diversity of forms of society to construct penetrating methods of
comparative analysis too. Much harder to find in this tradition, however, is any organized
attempt to introduce the effects of inter-societal co-existence and interaction into the basic
conception of development. The consequence is that the international has been externalized
from the object domain of social theory and its effects have been subsequently treated as
intervening variables or, as in Barrington Moores (1967: 214) phrase, fortuitous
circumstances. On the one hand, these effects including wars which interrupt internal
development; social/cultural/technological transmissions which accelerate or redirect it; or
patterns of integration which extend its enabling conditions far beyond any single societal unit of
analysis are so great that they have been invoked by some writers (e.g. Nisbet 1969) as a
refutation of the very possibility of theorizing social development. On the other hand, one
particular group of these effects political-military relations has been formalized into an antisociological international theory most obvious in Waltzian neorealism and its derivatives.

21

If this diagnosis is correct, it would explain both the problems of domestic analogy
fallacy and reductionism which sociological approaches have encountered in IR and the
intellectual paucity (Wight 1966) of the way in which Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, Kenneth
Waltz and others have identified the specificity of the international by directly counterpoising
its properties to those of domestic societies Sociologys traditional object of analysis. It would
also point to the necessary form of any solution to the impasse which historical sociology has
reached in this field. Such a solution would have to involve a reformulated concept of historical
development which, by incorporating the interactive multiplicity of societies, would bring intersocietal relations and effects within the compass of a social theory. This need not trigger a shift
from theory to thick description which Waltz rightly warns against. If we define the
international as that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the co-existence
within it of more than one society (Rosenberg 2006), the phenomena we pin-point will be
highly specific, and though international, they will be apprehended for the intrinsically
sociological phenomena they are.
One historical sociological approach which deploys this revised concept of development
(and the sociological conception of the international which it enables) is the theory of uneven
and combined development first employed by Leon Trotsky (1980/1932). In recent
elaborations, this theory traces the very existence of the international to two features intrinsic to
social development. On the one hand, it holds, human development is at any given moment
expressed in a multiplicity of differing societies: considered as a whole, it is inherently uneven.
On the other hand, because these same societies co-exist concretely in space and time, they
affect each other. Their individual development thus has both reproductive logics arising from
their inner form and interactive logics arising from their co-existence with others: it is
combined development. First formulated by Trotsky to construct an inter-societal explanation

22

for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, this theory has more recently been taken up within IR, and
has been utilized to provide an analysis of global social change in the 1990s (Rosenberg
2005), the long-term genesis of the Iranian Revolution (Matin 2007), the development of
nationalism (Dufour 2007), the intellectual trajectory of nineteenth and early twentieth century
German social thought (Shilliam 2009), the historical origins of the First World War
(Rosenberg 2010), the nature of relations between sub-Saharan African states and external donor
institutions (Brown 2009), and last but not least, the role of interaction in the (late prehistoric)
formation of the first known states (Rosenberg 2009).
A second strand of IHS is now emerging which can be primarily identified as global
dialogic, or non-Eurocentric. Although this approach shares much in common with the theory
of uneven and combined development, it begins in different form, most notably as a critique of
the Eurocentrism of social theory, IR theory and much second-wave HSIR (Hobson 2007a,
2007b). The limitations of Eurocentric accounts are seen to emerge, at root, from the
shortcomings of endogenous models of development and political/social change. Much social
theory, historical sociology and IR theory, it is argued, develops accounts that privilege the West
as the progenitor of the international system and holds that the most significant developments in
world politics emerge in the West. Moreover, these accounts are premised on the notion that the
superiority of the West is derived from its endogenous, innate, pristine character. In this story,
little-to-no progressive role is accorded to the East, which is deemed to be incapable of
development and is represented either as the passive victim or beneficiary of Western
imperialism and modes of development.
The proposed antidote to Eurocentrism lies in a global approach which grants agency
and ontological weighting to both West and East. More specifically, it is possible to envisage an
approach to historical development which traces the influences of the East on the rise of the

23

West (e.g. Hobson 2004). This begins by singling out the various resource portfolios (ideas,
institutions, technologies) that were invented in the East, before turning to analyze how these
were transmitted to the West. Such an approach places its emphasis on dialogues of
civilizations, since it is through these dialogical transfers that development was enabled in the
West. However, the next stage of the argument seeks to produce a sociological explanation of
the initiatives that Europeans undertook to assimilate these Eastern resource portfolios and to
adapt them in order to make the breakthrough to industrial modernity, enquiring also into the
imperial exploitative processes that, in turn, enabled Western industrialization. This mode of
research also enquires into how West-East dialogues and transmissions impacted on the East.
This again entails an analysis of Western imperialism, although it also seeks to reveal Eastern
inputs into the reproduction of empire and the channels of Eastern resistance agency that led
to the overthrow of empire.
It might be inferred from this brief discussion that such an approach is capable of
producing only a third image or outside-in approach and would, therefore, fail to satisfy the
desire to fashion an approach that unites domestic and inter-societal processes. But a key part of
this approach examines precisely the domestic formations of societies and civilizations in order
to determine how they refract incoming influences to particular ends as well as examining the
social processes that refashion these influences in certain directions. Global dialogic IHS,
therefore, shares a fundamental interest in processes of uneven and combined development. And
while it focuses on global transmissions that shape civilizations and societies across the globe, it
also accounts for domestic processes. In fact, taking up this point of departure requires us to
recognize how civilizations and societies shape each other in promiscuous ways, resulting in
hybrid social formations that can be differentiated across time and space.
The third variant of IHS Eventful IHS shares a desire to theorize and explore

24

empirically the intersection between interactivity and multiplicity/difference. However, unlike

the other two modes of IHS, this approach concentrates neither on inter-societal relations nor on
inter-civilizational dynamics but on inter-social relations as these generate particular pathways
of historical development. In fact, this form of research what we could more broadly call
nomothetic history or relational process tracing rejects the use of entities such as
society and civilization in favor of a concentration on how historical events enable social
formations to emerge, reproduce, reform, transform and break down. For example, following
some social network theory (e.g. Tilly 2005), it is possible to examine the formation,
transformation and breakdown of networks of shared interests, identity and meaning as these
are generated from both inside practices and outside interactions. In this way, radical
political actors such as armed militants may become moderate via dynamics which arise
from reaction to events both within their networks and via exchanges with external actors
(e.g. Krebs & Chawdhury in press). Comparable accounts illustrate how inside and
outside rhetorical strategies used to frame certain events both enable and close down
certain policy avenues (e.g. Jackson 2006; Jackson & Krebs 2007), how network
entrepreneurs working within and between networks enable breakthroughs in apparently
indivisible conflicts (e.g. Goddard 2006), and how transnational religious networks can
mobilize around certain events in order to disrupt modes of rule (e.g. Nexon 2009).
This third form of IHS, therefore, rejects a number of taken-for-granted binaries in the
social sciences, not least amongst them structure and agency. Where a focus on the former
has a tendency to reify relatively fixed patterns of social relations as actual existing things,
over-emphasis on the latter has an equally problematic tendency to imagine a pre-existing,
non-social individual whose motivations, interests and preferences come pre-packaged
without recourse to broader social practices (Jackson & Nexon 1999). Rejection of these

25

positions leads this approach toward a meso-level of research occupied by a number of likeminded research agendas. For example, historical institutionalists (e.g. Thelen 2004;
Pierson 2004; Lawson 2006) examine how the formation of common rules, norms and
practices at once based on both internal sameness and external difference within
certain fields yields patterns of continuity and change which, in turn, constitute particular
path dependencies. And some organizational sociologists (e.g. Clegg 1989) explore the ways
in which members articulate their interests, position themselves strategically and fix their
relationships both in internal circuits and vis--vis others. As these practices, norms and
procedures are reproduced, space opens up for new connections to be institutionalized.
Although they are inhibited by processes of rule making, supervision and regulation,
structures of rule are not wholly constraining they are also enabling and generative, open to
negotiation and resistance. As such, organizations represent tangible empirical sites by which
to study the interplay of social action and social change as this is carried through via
sociological dynamics which are themselves generated by the immediacy of both interactivity
and multiplicity.
One of the strengths of Eventful IHS is its capacity to accommodate patterns of
both continuity and change. After all, it is clear that, much of the time, social orders regulate
processes of social, political and economic exchange fairly smoothly, both internally and in
their exchanges with others. To be sure, these regularities do, from time to time, break-down
(for example via elite contestation, resistance from below and/or external conflict) and,
equally clearly, this process is dynamic (following a logic of what Michael Mann calls
interstitial emergence). As such, change is a constant feature of social life. But at the same
time, there is often a relative stability to how exchanges governing areas such as trade,
diplomacy and security are conducted. In other words, social relations are produced and

26

reproduced in a frequently sticky, if always contingent, process. The result is what Norbert
Elias (2000) called a figurational approach to causation, focusing on how historically specific
outcomes are the results of processes which are themselves drawn from the complex
intersection of events, networks, institutions and organizations. By focusing on events which
take place within periods of rapid change such as organic crises, revolutions and wars
(what Michael Mann (1986), following Ernest Gellner, calls neo-episodic moments), it is
possible to expose this sociological dynamic and examine how social orders are produced,
reproduced, disrupted and transformed. In this way, insight into the origins and development
of historical processes are generated without requiring analytical shorthands such as society
or civilization and, potentially, their reification into objects in their own right. In short,
Eventful IHS seeks to occupy the messy eclectic centre of social (and historical) theory,
seeing this vantage point as the best means of combining analytical rigor, conceptual
sophistication and empirical reach. Importantly, it is guided not by prefigured analytical
boundaries, but by empirical puzzles regarding how certain practices come into being, how
they change and, indeed, how they break down.

For A Rich Parsimony

Over the last thirty years, IR has been contained within a view of proper theory which
privileges parsimony over complexity. For Kenneth Waltz, as for many IR theorists, second
image factors were to be omitted lest their inclusion lead toward analysis which requires
knowledge of each state-society nexus, thereby moving us from a parsimonious to a complex
ontology. Making this move, Waltz argued, would render it impossible to identify the law-like
patterns of the international that many IR theorists equate with the mark of scientific status and

27

theoretical validity. And fundamental to his claim is the associated belief that, as one moves
away from such an approach, we simultaneously move away from theory building toward thick
description.
Our reply is that it is possible to combine domestic level processes with the
international in such a way that we can generate a rich parsimony one that is able to
provide a succinct definition of the international, albeit one that develops and changes over time,
while also situating the domestic realm within its core area of concern. In this way we hope to
affect a balance between parsimony and complexity while also combining theoretical strength
and empirical richness. As such, historical sociology can be said to contain two major
contributions to contemporary IR. First, it forms part of a broader turn (see also Wight 2007;
Jackson in press) toward a non-positivist social science, taking its place amongst other
approaches which accept the value-laden status of knowledge claims, but which refuse to
give up on the possibility of explaining processes of continuity and change in international
politics. Second, historical sociology is bound up with the desire not just to develop metatheory or generate methodological breakthroughs, but to contribute to important empirical
issues. In this sense, historical sociology like both classical social theory and recent cognate
work in the field (e.g. Adams et al 2005; Calhoun 2003; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003)
is intended to differentiate between open doors and brick walls, forming part of a move away
from questions about how can we know toward those concerned with what we can know.
In this light, the contribution of a third stage in historical sociology which links IR
formatively to other social sciences has the potential to enrich a number of important debates
in the discipline (Halliday 2002).
Our fundamental argument in this essay is simple by insisting on the autonomy of the
international sphere, IR has developed two, linked problems. First, the discipline denies itself the

28

possibility of intelligibly conceiving its subject matter as part of the wider social world. Second,
once segregated in this way, the enormous implications that IR generates, here understood as the
basic significance of inter-societal multiplicity and interaction for conceptualizing the social
world, cannot be formulated, perpetuating the weak standing of IR within the social sciences as
a whole. In its short history to date, HSIR has gone a long way toward addressing the first of
these problems. The second remains to be overcome and it is the reason why HSIR must
ultimately go beyond itself, why it must complete the triangulation set out so elegantly by C.
Wright Mills some fifty years ago, and why it should now aspire to creating a genuinely
international historical sociology.

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Online Resources
Historical sociology and IR working group. At http://www.historical-sociology.org/. This site
contains news about events held by the group. There are also links to related sites of interest,
reports from workshops, and a range of online resources.
The Journal of Historical Sociology. At http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0952-

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1909. The Journal of Historical Sociology is a useful port of call for work in the field,
although it is not geared towards work conducted in IR.
Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. At
http://www2.asanet.org/sectionchs/. This wide ranging site includes much of interest
including lists of - and links to - relevant publications, online newsletters, details of events
and more.
Justin Rosenberg's hompeage. At http://www.justinrosenberg.org/. This site - hosted by a
well known historical sociologist at the University of Sussex - is particularly strong on
teaching resources, containing details of courses in historical sociology and world politics.
The site also contains downloadable versions of Rosenberg's many essays on historical
sociology.
Marxists Internet Archive. At http://www.marxists.org/. A remarkable collection of Marxist
writing including virtually everything written by Marx and Engels, Trotsky, C.L.R. James
and others.
Max Weber. At http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm. The first
port of call for students and faculty interested in the work of Max Weber. Contains original
works, essays on Weberian thought and links to further resources.
Dead Sociologists Index. At http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/DSS/#weber. An indispensable
guide to the work of classical social theorists including Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Comte.
The site contains in-depth biographies, summaries of key ideas and links to original works.

Keywords
History, historical development, Historical sociology, International Relations theory,
Sociology
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Mini-bios
John Hobson is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, and co-director of the universitys Political Economy Research Centre. His most
recent books are: The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (CUP, 2004); and Everyday
Politics of the World Economy (CUP, 2007 co-edited with Leonard Seabrooke). He is
currently finishing two books: J.A. Hobson, The Struggle for the International Mind (coedited with Colin Tyler), and Defending the Western Interest.

George Lawson is Lecturer in International Relations at LSE, having previously taught at

Goldsmiths, University of London. He is convenor of the British International Studies
Associations working group on historical sociology and International Relations
(www.historical-sociology.org) and author of Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic,
South Africa and Chile (London, 2005).

Justin Rosenberg is Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is the

author of Empire of Civil Society (Verso, 1994) and The Follies of Globalisation Theory
(Verso, 2000). His work on uneven and combined development has appeared in a number
of journals including European Journal of International Relations, International Politics and
the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

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