This book considers eleven key thinkers on American foreign policy during the inter-war period. All put forward systematic proposals for the direction, aims and instruments of American foreign policy; all were listened to, in varying degrees, by the policy makers of the day; all were influential in policy terms, as well as setting the terms of contemporary debate. The focus of the volume is the progressive agenda as it was formulated by Herbert Croly and The New Republic in the run-up to the First World War. An interest in the inter-war period has been sparked by America's part in international politics since 9/11. The neo-conservative ideology behind recent US foreign policy, its democratic idealism backed with force, is likened to a new-Wilsonianism. However, the progressives were more wary of the use of force than contemporary neo-conservatives. The unique focus of this volume and its contextual, Skinnerian approach provides a more nuanced understanding of US foreign policy debates of the long Progressive era than we presently have and provides an important intellectual background to current debates.

Molly Cochran is Reader in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in the areas of normative IR theory, gender and IR, and American pragmatism. She has written two books, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (1999) and an edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to John Dewey (2010). Cornelia Navari is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham U.K. and Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of Buckingham.  She is the author of Internationalism and the State in the 20th Century (2000) and Public Intellectuals and International Affairs (2012), and the editor of Theorising International Society: English School Methods (2009), Ethical Reasoning in International Affairs (2013) and with Daniel Green, Guide to the English School in international Studies (2014).