"This book provides a critique of the understandings of the Cold War prevalent in International Relations (IR) thought and offers an alternative perspective founded on an historical-materialist approach to IR." "Rethinking Theory and History in the Cold War focuses on what we mean by 'politics' and 'international relations' and how such assumptions have come to determine our understanding of the Cold War. Using an historical-materialist method, the author criticizes conventional conceptions of international politics that tend to focus on the agency of and relations among states, and offers an alternative historical sociology of the Cold War through an analysis of the relationship between formal political authority and socio-economic production. Seen from this perspective, the state the modern conceptions of politics can be seen as products of a capitalist modernity, in which politics is based on the separation of the spheres of politics in the state and economics in civil society."--Jacket.