September 2021 was a turning-point in international relations. The shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan signified the end of the ‘war on terror’ era in US foreign policy. Under President Biden, the US is intensifying its interest in China and great power competition or, depending on one's politics, imperial rivalries. If it is the latter, then Ricardo Villanueva's new book is a timely addition to the IR literature.
Villanueva's basic contention is that the intellectual origins of the discipline owe considerably more of a debt to Marxist and socialist political thought than has been acknowledged. Building on the work of intellectual historians such as Peter Wilson, Lucian Ashworth, David Long and Brian Schmidt, Villanueva further undermines the ‘first debate’ origin story of the discipline. According to Marxism and the origins of International Relations, when the study of international affairs was crystallizing, our intellectual giants or benchmark thinkers were grappling with concepts such as historical materialism, class conflict and, most importantly, imperialism. Thus, the importance of political economy to IR's contested beginnings needs amplification.