International Relations and the Quest for the Authority of Knowledge.

This paper explores the systematic effort that the field began to make in the 1940s to develop a plausible theory of international politics. It is a quest that continues today. The crisis that the field experienced during the late 1930s and early 1940s had less to do with the alleged ?idealism? of the interwar period than with the failure to develop a distinct theory of international politics. In order to have greater influence on policy makers, the field, like other social sciences, sought the authority of knowledge in the academy. In the early 1940s, scholars became keenly aware that one of the problems with the field was that it lacked a theory and thus the long journey to construct a plausible theory commended. This paper reconstructs the early disciplinary history of the effort to create a theory of IR. In addition to reconstructing this substantive dimension of the field?s history, the paper seeks to further develop and defend a critical internal discursive historiography. The paper will highlight the advantages of this particular approach to chronicling the disciplinary history of international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]