In the late 1960s and early 1970s this ‘Great Debate’ over the national interest began to morph into the story of a ‘First Debate’. In this period scholars began to use the framework of a sequence of Great Debates as a history about the early years of IR.72 In 1972 William Olson referred to the debate as one of several instances of major change in the discipline. He listed four key debating divides: precision/eclecticism, realism/idealism, generalist/specialist and traditionalist/scientific behaviouralist.Despite the fact that the scholars who had coined the term ‘Great Debate’ in the 1950s had believed that their argument was an example of a long tradition of foreign policy debates, a number of authors in this period began to refer to new intellectual events as an analogue of an original ‘Great Debate’. Morton Kaplan’s seminal World Politics article heralded ‘The new great debate: Traditionalism vs. science in international relations’.This twenty-page piece did not deal explicitly with any old Great Debates, but when Kaplan’s article was reprinted in an edited volume three years later, Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau’s introductory chapter provided a more detailed comparison of IR’s Great Debates. They introduced the tradition versus science divide by contrasting it with realism versus idealism.