The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations

Contemporary International Relations is as much a conversation between the living and the dead as it is among the living. Its debates are thoroughly rooted in and shaped by the thought of many bygone minds, both ancient and modern. With this in mind, The Return of the Theorists presents forty imagined dialogues with foundational theorists. They run the gamut from Homer and Confucius to Hedley Bull and Jean Bethke Elshtain, and span almost three millennia of human history, comprising representatives of a variety of cultures. The interviewers consist of more than forty international relations scholars and political theorists. They too cut across cultures, continents and almost three generations, and each is an expert on the work of the thinker invited. The Return of the Theorists will be of interest to anyone who has tried to enter the mind of bygone thinkers in political thought and International Relations.

"Certainly not a possession for all time" –
Thucydides

"As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with international relations theory." – Karl Marx

"This volume nicely demonstrates that our whole social environment is filled with forces that really exist only in our own minds."
– Durkheim

"The contributors offer yet more evidence that thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler." –
Nietzsche

"Crime, punishment – and The Return of the Theorists. (Read chapter 37.)" –
Michel Foucault

*As readers have surely recognized, these endorsements are fictional