490 J.-A. PEMBERTON
both of which were published in the IIIC’s monthly bulletin, namely,
Coopération Intellectuelle.^214
In regard to Morgenthau’s charges of amorphousness and vagueness,
it is certainly true that members of the ISC tended to view international
relations as being much richer in content, both in terms of the actors
involved and the issues at stake, than Morgenthau would have thought
advisable for the sake of intellectual unity. Yet it would be unfair to dis-
miss the ISC’s approach as mere eclecticism: that it saw anything which
somehow transcended national boundaries as coming within its field of
vision. Certainly some made extravagant claims on behalf of the subject’s
reach. Zimmern, for example, could be quite promiscuous in this regard.
However, we must also recall the social matrix prism through which
many members of the ISC viewed their subject matter. Morgenthau’s
disdainful attitude towards the ISC was also apparent in an observation
he made in relation to Mantoux’s contribution to the ISC’s discussion of
university teaching of international relations in 1935: it was ‘typical in its
bias in favour of international law’.^215
To reiterate, members of the ISC well appreciated the centrality of
the struggle for power. However, they also thought that struggle should
and could be subordinated to the rule of law. This for many of them was
the lesson of the First World War, a lesson reinforced by the political cri-
ses of the 1930s as the conferences on Collective Security and Peaceful
Change well demonstrate. For Morgenthau, however, the experience of
the 1930s held out a different lesson. Morgenthau opposed to the ISC’s
tendency to conceive of international relations in terms of a milieu inter-
social or, at least, an international society, a conception of international
relations which insisted on ‘primacy of politics over all other interests,’
with politics being conceived as a ‘struggle for power among individ-
uals and groups’. In Morgenthau’s view at this point in time, interna-
tional relations should be studied before all else as international politics,
(^215) Morgenthau, ‘Area Studies and the Study of International Relations,’ 648–49.
(^214) Ibid., 648–49. Hans J. Morgenthau cited the following publications, albeit without
providing their full details, in order to illustrate the vague and eclectic nature of inter-
war international studies: ‘L’Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales:
Réunion tenue à Londres le 7 juin 1935,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 57–58 (1935):
483–503, and Antoni Deryng, ‘L’Enseignement universitaire des relations internationales,’
Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 68–69 (1936): 28–34.