Comparative International Politics (1982)

Chapter 1 has its origins as a response to Morton Kaplan’s System and Process in International Politics, in which he modelled several ‘types’ of international systems and stipulated ‘rules’ for each type. At the time, students of comparative politics adopted structural-functionalist conceptions of social systems and their functional requisites (rules by another name), and international theorists posited a succession of systems, consisting of numerous autonomous, interacting political systems, or states, from the Renaissance to the present. The anthropological literature on ‘primitive systems’ points in a different direction; defining culture in functional terms points up the material conditions in which any system functions. Comparing international system, however crudely, by reference to population density and climate zones suggests an alternative to Kaplan’s approach. Flirting with vulgar materialism for comparative purposes, this alternative was bound to fail—as would any rapprochement in the study of comparative politics and international relations.