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What's the matter with realism?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Justin Rosenberg
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Extract

International relations, as an academic discipline, is not known for its strength in the area of theory. It has no immediate equivalent to the rich contrasts of perspective generated in sociology by the legacy of Max Weber, Marx and Durkheim—a lack so felt that Martin Wight once wrote a paper called ‘Why is there no International Theory?’ His own answer was, in part, that there is nothing further to theorize after the discovery of the repetitive mechanisms of the balance of power. This was a sad conclusion for such an acute and creative mind to reach. But it does illustrate a central feature of IR theory. For the balance of power, it can be argued, is the limit of any Realist theory of international relations. And Wight's conclusion was perhaps more an index of the dominance of a Realist orthodoxy than a relection of the inherent properties of ‘the international’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 1990 , pp. 285 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1990

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References

1 Wight, Martin, ‘Why is there no International Theory?’, in Butterfield, and Wight, (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London 1966).Google Scholar

2 The Twenty years' Crisis (2nd edn. 1946; rpt. London, 1984), p. 65Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition.

3 Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, Daedalus (Summer 1977).Google Scholar

4 Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations (6th edn, New York 1985), p. 11. All subsequent references are to this edition.Google Scholar

5 Kennedy, Paul ,The Realities Behind Diplomacy (London 1981), p. 257.Google Scholar

6 (London, 1939), p. 14n.

7 I do not of course mean by this to suggest that Morgenthau was simply a eulogist of the power of American state. On the contrary, he was an energetic, if idiosyncratic, critic of US foreign policy at several key points of its postwar development. (See Smith, M. J., Realist Thought From Weber To Kissinger, (Louisiana, 1986), pp. 147–158.) The problem was the impossibility of establishing that his own prescriptions were any more Realist than the policies he criticized.Google Scholar

8 This article does not give consideration to Waltz's later Theory of International Politics. This is due to constraints of space but not wholly so: insofar as Waltz in 1979 was still exercising the same problematic as in 1959 albeit at a slightly higher level of abstraction, the same fundamental criticisms apply. In this respect I would certainly maintain that Theory of International Politics (Reading, 1979) is not a theoretical advance on Man, the State & War (New York, 1959Google Scholar). The latter however achieved the status of a classic text within international relations and is widely used in the teaching the discipline.

9 Waltz, Kenneth, Man, the State & War (New York, 1959), p. 201Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition.

10 Cf. Keohane, (ed.), Neorealism and it Critics (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

11 Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge 1985), p. 26.Google Scholar

12 Jenkins, Brian and Minnerup, Gunther, Citizens and Comrades, (London, 1984), pp. 146–147.Google Scholar

13 Wight, Martin. Power Politics (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 92n.Google Scholar

14 A phrase coined by Halliday, Fred, ‘State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda’, Millenium (Summer 1987).Google Scholar

15 The term ‘administrative power’ is taken from Giddens, , The Nation-State and Violence, 1985Google Scholar. It refers here to the control over the timing and spacing of human activities which the state is able to achieve by virtue of its activities of surveillance and regulation backed by its monopoly of the means of violence.

16 Coinage linked to and exchangeable with a fixed amount of bullion.

17 The last three quotations are from Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, pp. 154, 155 and 112Google Scholar respectively.

18 Quotations are from members of the Council on Foreign Relations, cited in Sklar, Holly (ed.), Trilateralism (Boston, 1989), pp. 146 and 149.Google Scholar