ABSTRACT
The upshot of the last chapter is that realism is the descriptive attribute of thought and action which presupposes that international politics has to be grasped as ‘dynamic [and] self-contradictory, with inexorable oppositions but also pointers to limited improvement’.1 Whether this is possible, and just how one might theorize about the subject on the basis of this premise is a task left to Chapter 8, in which I argue that Hedley Bull’s perspective on international order provides a starting point for conceptualizing international politics in a realistic manner. In contrast, idealism:
signifies an attempt to simplify political reality with a view to gaining a unitary, seemingly coherent picture; this endeavour involves the necessity of abstracting from political reality, and also the tendency to remain arrested in one’s own abstraction, reading this as the whole…but this cannot be done. The nature of reality can only be grasped dialectically, as a selfcontradiction in the subject-thereby, and only thereby, we escape self-contradiction in the explanation offered.2
