Neoconservatives used to say that they abandoned liberalism because they were “mugged by reality.” [1]The line’s rhetorical punch was easy to grasp. Some political beliefs allow you to wander the world blissfully ignorant of its dangers. Sometimes, however, these dangers become impossible to ignore. They grab you, shake you out of your dreamworld, and force…
Tag: realism
State of the Field Essay: On the Unreality of Realism in International Relations
In 1939, E.H. Carr published The Twenty Years’ Crisis,[1] which argued that the world was divided into two camps: utopians and realists. Utopians like President Woodrow Wilson and his followers had made a mess of the world through their well-intentioned but naïve attempts at international cooperation. Realists were those, like Carr, who recognized that the…
Roundtable 11-2 on The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
John Mearsheimer has written a stinging indictment of post-Cold War policy as being founded on a form of liberalism that ignores the realities of nationalism and the limits of the power of even the strongest states. It is reviewed here by four scholars of differing political and intellectual orientations, all of whom agree that this…
Article Review 20 on “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment.”
In recent years, a number of leading security studies scholars including Christopher Layne, John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape, Barry Posen, and Stephen Walt have come out in favor of U.S. strategic retrenchment overseas.[1] The fact that this list of scholars reads like an honor roll of prominent academic realists makes the current trend all the more…
Roundtable 3-5 on The Invention of International Relations Theory; Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation and the 1954 Conference on Theory
Constructing a new, supposedly autonomous academic discipline is anything but a neutral exercise, one that never occurs in a social or intellectual vacuum, but is invariably the product of a highly specific time, place, and context. Nicolas Guilhot’s stimulating volume of essays uses the prism of a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation conference on the theory of…