ABSTRACT
The study of international relations goes back to Thucydides and can be traced through Niccolo Machiavelli, Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx, to name just a few. A world of cooperative institutions and peaceful states, they thought, was bound to advance nations in prosperity and safety. A generation later, as the Cold War emerged after World War II, the main question was not that of realism versus idealism; it was that of how far from the institutionalists of the interwar period a theorist chose to go. Significant discussion of international ethics was also stirred by events in US foreign policy. In 1994, the US International Studies Association for the first time established an International Ethics section. It is their version of realism, closely associated with the classic realism of Morgenthau and Kennan rather than the bare structural analysis of Kenneth Waltz.
