Editorial

Extract

It is not simply because an inter-disciplinary journal is such a rarity that a retiring editor of the Review looks back on an unusual experience. In the variety of responses to the challenge of studying international relations two opposing general tendencies constantly assert themselves. One is the tendency to see international problems wholly in terms familiar to long established disciplines; the other is to define international relations so particularly as to exclude contributions from traditional modes of understanding. The existence of the Review suggests that its own correct and humane function is to moderate both these tendencies, without thereby depleting the ambition to create new styles of discourse or the determination to maintain the vigour of the old. Among its more demanding readership the Review may even stimulate efforts to transcend them. Selecting, commissioning and preparing material for publication with such aims in mind certainly tests the categories of the editor's own thinking to an unusual degree. For this experience he ought to be, and in the present case certainly is, duly grateful.