Totalitarianism and Realism:

MODERN REALISTS see themselves, and are seen, as exponents of a highly respectable intellectual tradition stretching back at least as far as Thucydides. Kenneth Waltz, in his famous book Man, The State and War, firmly placed the adherents of realism in a mainstream European political philosophy tradition. ¹ Similarly a recent intellectual biography of Hans Morgenthau, one of the founders of the realist school in the United States, argues that the roots of this "American" thinker's ideas can be found in the "continental heritage" of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Richelieu, and Bismarck. ² Discussions such as these tend to ignore or downplay the effects that peculiarly twentieth-century intellectual and political developments had on the development of realism as a theory of international relations. They recognize the impact of the rise of totalitarian regimes and the failure of appeasement in the 1930s, but they fail to acknowledge the intellectual debt realism owes to the totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that accompanied the rise of Nazism. Thus, rather than being seen as a new theory that grew up in response to specific events and that borrowed fundamental ideas from the ideology it sought to oppose, realism is mistakenly regarded as a theory reborn (redivivus) after the Second World War.