Confessions of a Sociolator

Abstract

Following recent critiques of ‘the social’ in international theory, this text revisits a contribution the author made to ‘the social turn’ in 1994. While C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination appears to survive the recent critiques, the passage of time has nonetheless revealed a quite different weakness in the author’s use of it: namely, its neglect of ‘the international’ as an object of theory. This neglect, which is indeed common to almost all ‘social theory’, is now being corrected in the growing literature on ‘uneven and combined development’.