ABSTRACT
More than thirty years ago, at the peak of America’s international predominance, Alfred Grosser asked whether international relations was an “American specialty”; twenty years after he had asked that question, Stanley Hoffmann offered a firm answer—international relations is an American social science. 1 Hoffmann’s reply should be re-examined to assess whether American predominance in the field has been maintained or whether the relative position of the United States has eroded in the ideal as well as the material realms of international relations. By framing Stanley Hoffmann’s insightful account of the field with glances back to the prewar decades and forward to the post-Cold War era, the theoretical preponderance of the American superpower after 1945 may appear as unusual as its military and economic preponderance: perhaps the world is returning to a “normal” state of multiple theoretical centers and spatially separated perspectives on world politics.
