ABSTRACT
International politics tends to oscillate between two poles, the power-political and the idealist or legalist, with the former dominating whenever serious issues arise. Power-politics, on the most generous view, has been at best a kind of braking mechanism in the development of inter-state relations, whose main directions and drives have been dictated by war or the threat of war. It requires little argument, however, to show that, whatever justification power-politics as thus conceived may have had in the past, its raison dtre has been undercut in the nuclear age. Thomas Hobbes was impelled by similar intellectual motives when he described relations between states as subscribing to the state of nature, i.e., a war of all against all. More recently, in his early short work Power Politics, Martin Wight underlined this view with a literary incisiveness surpassing that of either of these past masters. Great Powers tend to decrease in number and to increase in size.
