ABSTRACT
For much of the 1990s, realism in international relations scholarship was possessed of a kind of intellectual split personality. The dominant forms of realism in the academy, essentially versions of the structural or neo-realism associated with Kenneth Waltz, were – as many of their rivals were – dominated by a methodological stance that one of those rivals, Robert Keohane, characterized quite accurately as ‘rationalist’ 2 – an offshoot of liberal progressivism in the academy, even if the conclusions in the context of neo-realism were certainly not that. At the same time, however, the work of an earlier generation of realists was becoming increasingly studied and – for many at least – reinterpreted, 3 and, though its conclusions were not dissimilar to those of the neo-realists, its assumptions and general philosophical orientation were greatly at odds with theirs.
