In the history of international relations, no single idea has been more influential than the notion that there was a `great debate' in the 1920s and 1930s between the advocates of idealism and the champions of realism. In reality, there was never a single `great debate' but rather a multiplicity of discussions which revolved around at least three big questions: does capitalism lead to war; what are the most effective ways of dealing with totalitarian state aggression; and (in the US), is retreat from entangling alliances a reasonable response to a world turned upside down by war and economic depression? Throughout this, the academic study of IR remained strongly liberal and internationalist in orientation. However, liberalism was never seriously challenged by an apolitical realism, but instead by socialist critics - at least in Britain - and isolationists in the United States. Ultimately, the persistence of the notion that there was a real debate between idealism and realism, which the latter apparently won, says less about the actual discussions of the time, and more about the marginalisation of liberal and normative thinking in the IR mainstream in the post-war period.

The history of interdisciplinarity in international relations (IR) is not a simple narrative. Initially a transdisciplinary meeting place for scholars from many disciplines, IR developed after the 1940s into a closed subdiscipline of political science, and only after 1980 did it once again engage with other disciplines in a sustained way. This article traces these 'three ages' of IR, and concludes with a case study of the emerging historiography within IR.

International Relations (IR) textbooks often make reference to an idealist paradigm in interwar IR. This article argues that an idealist paradigm did not exist, and that interwar references to idealism or utopianism are contradictory and have little to do with defining a paradigm. Not only is there no idealist paradigm in IR at this time, but authors from the interwar period that have since been dismissed as idealists rarely share the attributes assigned to idealism or utopianism by later writers. If IR scholars are serious about understanding the history of their discipline then they will have to stop applying misleading and anachronistic terms like idealism.

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Before 1950, International Relations (IR) was a thoroughly interdisciplinary field. Geographers played a key role in the early development of IR, although they are now little known within the discipline that they helped to found. This article explores the pioneering work of three geographers in IR—Isaiah Bowman, Halford J. Mackinder and Derwent Whittlesey—and sets out to reclaim a lost chapter in the history of IR that questions the tendency to reduce IR to a conflict between realism and idealism.