ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses defends realism in the study of international politics. It aims to begin rescuing realism from the self-styled ‘Realists of International Relations’. The rationale for analytically distinguishing between the dimensions of international theory inheres in the meaning of realism as being adequate in one understands of and relationship to ‘reality’. Thus before one can debate the criteria of adequacy to be employed in understanding international political phenomena, one must begin by explicating the latter as the dependent variable. Political realism, if the term is to retain any connection with ordinary language and thus serve its dual function as a descriptive and commendatory attribute of thought about international politics, must be explicated in synthetic. Theory is either correct or incorrect, depending on how it analyses what happens in politics, but perhaps it is permissible to call a correct analysis a realistic one’.
