ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with the “classical realists” in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, who focused on the concerns of traditional diplomacy, including the interplay between morality and power, a problem that is central to this chapter. As IR scholars are by now aware, the “realist” in this appellation refers not to a phenomenological or empiricist concept of reality, but rather to a label taken on by scholars themselves to oppose the “idealism” or “utopianism” that they believed was rampant in attempts to change the world on the part of peace activists and international law experts. These scholars, including E.H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, Herbert Butterfi eld, and Martin Wight, among others, believed that academics had to work from a reality defi ned by the complex of relationships that confronted them rather than what they wanted to engineer for the common good. Classical realists, in other words, brought the thing called “security” to the forefront of international relations scholarship, even as they struggled with its meaning and implications. The complex of relationships that needed to be addressed, in their view, was constituted by moral as well as material meaning and
power. As a result, it had to be assessed and acted upon by scholarship and statesmanship informed by virtues of wisdom and prudence.
