ABSTRACT
Although it is one of the most important and most often-cited books in the history of the field of IR, no book has been as profoundly misunderstood in essential respects as Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979). There is perhaps no greater indicator of this than the fact that almost all of the debate sparked by Waltz’s book has involved a sustained effort to undo what he did in the book, and supplement his deliberately spare formulation of the structure of the international system in ways designed to fashion from Waltz’s account an instrument for making falsifiable point-predictions about the behavior of particular state actors. Scholars have added individual-level perceptual factors (Walt 1987), domestic-political factors (Snyder 1991; Schweller 1994; Sterling-Folker 2002), specific characterizations of the incentives facing individual states (Christensen and Snyder 1990; Brooks and Wohlforth 2001), and a whole variety of other things in order to produce theories of foreign policy: theories that would predict what states would do under specific circumstances (Elman 1996). This despite Waltz’s strong admonitions against doing any such thing, on the grounds that doing so would conflate theories of different domains and thus make it impossible to explain what was going on in any particular domain in anything other than an idiosyncratic fashion (Waltz 1979, 121-123).
