ABSTRACT
Had the French writer Albert Grosser been right in dubbing IR a US speciality, it would have been appropriate to begin our study at about the time of the birth of ‘the first new nation.’ 1 But that is really only coincidence. To be sure, the war of independence began in 1776, but that was also the year of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and shortly after that came the first use of the term ‘international’ by Jeremy Bentham. 2 As William T.R. Fox has put it, “the word is symbolically important because it registers the norm-expectation that the interstate system is becoming and ought to be an inter-nation-state system.” 3
