ABSTRACT
Any German-English thesaurus will confirm that the term Realpolitik —a word connoting practicality, expediency, and even sufficiency-is a euphemism for the less commonly rendered Machtpolitik, or power politics. That the two terms are more or less interchangeable in the language from which they derive ought to tell us something about our ways of understanding power and, more specifically, about the preference for dissimulating the use of force as a matter of pragmatic contingency, especially when the object of force is removed from immediate view.
