ABSTRACT
In 1979 Kenneth Waltz published his Theory of International Politics, which has subsequently generated a substantial and often acrimonious debate, primarily among American scholars.1 (All page references in this and the next chapter refer to this book). Comparisons between Waltz and Morgenthau are often drawn, and the ungainly term ‘neorealism’ or ‘structural realism’ has been attributed to Waltz’s work to indicate a partial continuation with the so-called ‘classical realism’ of Morgenthau. For example, Banks notes that ‘the single most widely read contribution to neorealism has been the advanced text by Waltz, establishing him…as the paradigmatic successor to Morgenthau’.2 In the next chapter, I will argue that Waltz is better understood and characterized in terms of his complacent idealism, as opposed to the nostalgic idealism of Morgenthau. For whereas Morgenthau reifies the past, Waltz reifies the present. Like his paradigmatic predecessor, Waltz presents international politics as a realm of necessity and power politics. ‘Among states, the state of nature is a state of war’ (p. 102). Unlike Morgenthau, however, Waltz claims to deduce the nature of international politics exclusively from certain structural properties of the anarchical environment within which states coexist, rather than from any assumptions about man, or powermaximization premises about states. Unlike Morgenthau, Waltz is also far more committed to a purely instrumental view of the relationship between theory and practice, which, as I will show, is dependent upon and merely conceals his politically idealistic presuppositions about the subject-matter to be explained. There is a
close, if unarticulated, link between Waltz’s positivistic interpretation of theory as a mode of discourse, and his ontological conceptualization of international politics in what Ruggie calls ‘ultra-Durkheimian’ terms.3 In Waltz’s eyes, the social facticity of the international political structure, as a pre-given, albeit unobservable determinant of state behaviour and outcomes arising from states’ interaction within this structure, requires what he calls a systemic approach as opposed to one which is analytic or reductionist (i.e. examining the attributes and interactions of two variables while others are kept constant). As Waltz rightly points out, ‘one must adopt an approach that is appropriate to the subjectmatter’ (p. 13). Unfortunately, his is not.
