ABSTRACT
Political realism is often understood as a relatively homogeneous and internally harmonious tradition predicated upon certain essential suppositions and concepts. The writings of Michael Leifer on order and power serve as a compelling reminder that antinomies animate the realist tradition in ways that many realists either downplay or simply ignore. Recent scholarship on Machiavelli suggests that this venerated thinker often amounts to little more than a caricature in the hands of realists. Leifer's reflections on regional order and the balance-of-power acknowledge, if only implicitly, the importance of language in Southeast Asian security studies as a way of coming to terms with the intersubjective understandings of the traditional community of statesmen.
