This chapter explores the question of innovation as a prelude to reconstruction of theories of structural change and world order. A central goal is to integrate ‘social’ and ‘international’ theory, to transcend their limitations and to generate a theory that can help to illuminate and explain the present global transformation. This mandates ‘critical innovation’. Such innovation involves exploration of sources as well as potential for theoretical development. With these aims in mind, the chapter makes the following arguments:

1. 1 Critical innovation mandates ongoing questioning of and challenges to orthodoxy and the construction of an alternative problématique, one that is not only ‘international’ but also ‘global’.

2. 2 Critical innovation requires a historical perspective, drawing upon the imaginations of historians and critical theorists of the past. This can help to illuminate the dialectic between the long-lasting social and mental patterns of the longue durée and the forces of transformation. In this way, for example, Fernand Braudel's work helps to outline the limits of innovation and the weight of continuity in world orders.

3. 3 Our ability to innovate can be improved by a comparative historical method. By making comparisons, for example, between the transformations in world order of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the longer time frame of modernity, we can better assess the novelties of contemporary metamorphoses. We can then ask, ‘what aspects of present-day change are contingent, and which are structural?’

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