ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a summary of Robert Berki’s conceptual analysis, supplementing his arguments with illustrations drawn from the discipline of International Relations, which provides a framework of analysis or set of criteria for examining and contrasting the writers to be discussed in subsequent chapters. It summarizes Berki’s analysis of the two dimensions of realism, namely, description and prescription. The chapter explores the main characteristics of idealism, which may take two main forms, nostalgia, and imagination. The appropriate epistemological stance consistent with a reality characterized by these ontological properties is a positivistic one. Philosophical realism, in contrast, is the thesis that there is an objective reality independent of our minds, and that what philosophical idealists call reality is only appearance, or representations of what really exists. Political realism, then, both descriptively and prescriptively, eschews any posited dichotomy between necessity and freedom as autonomous referents for political reality and the basis for action and its evaluation.
