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Quick thoughts on this excellent article from an IR/social science perspective https://tnsr.org/2020/04/recentering-the-united-states-in-the-historiography-of-american-foreign-relations/
Bessner and Logevall provide an interesting take on a discipline that still gets short-shrift by political scientists (though there are exceptions). But I can’t help think that IR scholars are, finally, moving on the same terrain that historians have occupied for some time
They want historians to uncover how US policymakers make decisions about establishing and maintaining global hegemony. Focusing on international/transnational processes distracted us from the use of power and the domestic ideas/contexts that made it possible.
When reading this, I thought about what kind of scholarship the authors want to see. I imagine that Wertheim’s new book below will fit the bill. If history is moving in this direction, it’s a good thing of us all https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248663
But I also wonder about how this engages polisci/IR. It feels like two ships passing in the night. If anything, the study of hegemony in IR is doing precisely what Bessner/Logevall want to get some distance from.
For example, the new hegemonic order literature focuses on how the rules and arrangements offered by a hegemon are contested and challenged over time by subordinate actors. Studying US policymakers is key here, but so studying those who resist them https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604981
Analyzing hegemony in this way requires evaluating US policymakers and their adversaries in the context of international/transnational processes, including the web of social relations in which all these actors are embedded https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354066199005003002?casa_token=iC1CH2twkN4AAAAA:EZUew9fshlkc4e3yu3vDPxsR9CvEXoLLpiXkdDtxljuv0lf97Y89cKdPvnCvvbBGXNr2S1QscRO4
These relationships, both interpersonal and macrostructural, constitute formal institutions and define how actors understand their preferences and potential coalition members (all the causal factors that mainstream polisci has taken for granted)
. @llchristyll develops this idea by highlighting global historical sociology and the work of Lawson/Go. We should study how hegemony emerges from various struggles, yet how contention plays out is shaped by the contingent evolution of global relations https://twitter.com/llchristyll/status/1250887492011790336?s=20
It’s well and good that Bessner and Logevall want to re-emphasize domestic actors and institutions, but we can’t lose sight of how transnational processes make possible their very corporate insistence and define the boundary between “domestic” and “international”
One way forward: examine how scholars of American Political Development make contingent generalizations about US institutions, then explore theoretical overlap between APD and relationalism in IR (I imagine Orren and Skowronek have something to say here) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/search-for-american-political-development/1F35D43E32953367B44383BE42E8ACB9
This way, we can examine how US institutions emerge over time in the context of transnational social processes, and in turn, build theoretical explanations about policymakers’ foreign policy choices within those historically specific contexts
None of this is meant to suggest that Bessner/Logevall are wrong. But it’s worth noting that both history and polisci/IR appear to be circling each other, treading over the other’s well worn paths. There are meeting points here that have yet to be discovered
