For this, our third editors selection, Richard Devetak has selected key Review of International Studies (RIS) articles that foreground the intersection of intellectual history and international relations.

RIS has a strong record in excavating the history of international thought; that record has grown even stronger in recent years. Some of the intellectual history articles have revisited thinkers who may be canonical in political theory or history but have often been neglected by International Relations (IR) scholars. Samuel Pufendorf, Edmund Burke, and J. S. Mill, for example, may have been familiar to historians of political thought when David Boucher, R. J. Vincent, and Beate Jahn published their articles, but they and their contexts were not well understood in IR. Duncan Bell’s and Halvard Leira’s contextualised studies respectively of John Robert Seeley and Justus Lipsius recovered two thinkers who were extremely influential in their own times but who have remained largely unknown to IR scholars. The so-called First Great Debate has become a staple of disciplinary narratives of IR, but Peter Wilson’s article demolished the myth that there was anything like a debate that took place between realists and idealists. Patricia Owens’ article historicizes the social, showing how a concept that has become central to so much IR theory today is inextricably associated with attacks on the political. The article that was most important in my own intellectual formation was the one by J. L. Holzgrefe on the origins of modern international relations theory. He demonstrated how intellectual history could make an argument about the transition from the medieval to the modern system by tracing intellectual transformations in the fields of diplomatic theory, treaty-making, and the laws of nature and nations. In their different ways these articles have demonstrated the powerful insight to be gained by further developing our knowledge of past thinking.

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