This innovative new Reader provides students, scholars, and practitioners with a comprehensive overview of essential works of critical theory and critical international relations (IR) theory, including the writings of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Linklater, and Honneth, among others.

Steven Roach frames each chapter showing the major tensions of four periods of the extension of critical theory into critical IR theory. This rich narrative, telling the story of how critical theory entered into international relations theory, seeks to deepen the reader's historical and sociological understanding of the emancipatory project of critical IR theory. Postmodernist and feminist texts are included to give context to the question of whether the discipline is in crisis or is working toward a cohesive and reflexive framework.