ABSTRACT
The school of realism used to unite diverging research methods within one discipline. Now, in a similar way, the increasing professionalization of International Relations, in particular in some parts of the US PhD industry, may serve to unite the discipline on methodological grounds. Yet the result has been the fragmentation of realism in different research programmes. As a coherent category, still available even as late as during the inter-paradigm debate, realism dropped out of the picture in the meta-theoretical divides of the last decade. Not that there are no more realists around: they abound, but as curious one-dimensional figures: as pure materialists in Waltzian International Relations and anti-Waltzian International Political Economy; as game-theoreticians with utilitarian assumptions about relative gains, as sceptical normative theorists mainly in the English school (but see also Nardin 1983), or as diplomatic historians with a link to the foreign policy establishment.
