67 Mearsheimer’s chapter in this volume (‘Reckless States and Realism’) illustrates this
contrast very accurately.
68 The extended version of this chapter discusses TIP’s two diagrams as well as a graphic
depiction of Waltz’s structure that I have previously developed – and why none of these
answer the demand.
69 Waltz, ‘Reflections’, p. 329.
70 Waltz, TIP, pp. 7–8, 13–17, 123–8.
71 Waltz, TIP, p. 123.
72 Waltz, ‘Neorealism’, p. 3. Except for the first sentence, the same passage is found on p.
56 in ‘International politics is not foreign policy’, Security Studies, 6 (1996), pp. 54–57.
73 Interview by Wæver and Hansen, ‘Teori, Praksis’ (recording 00:29:10–00:30:23); cf. also
‘International politics is not foreign policy’, p. 56.
74 Waltz, ‘Neorealism’, p. 6.
75 Waltz, ‘Neorealism’, p. 2; ‘International politics is not foreign policy’, p. 57.
76 Waltz, ‘Evaluating Theories’, p. 916.
77 Cf. Mearsheimer, Tragedy.
78 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World(Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp 1–216; Gideon Rose, ‘Neoclassical realism and
theories of foreign policy’, World Politics, 51 (1), 1998, pp. 144–72; Brian Rathbun, ‘A rose
by any other name: neoclassical realism as the logical and necessary extension of structural
realism’, Security Studies, 17 (2), 2008, pp. 294–321; Colin Elman, ‘Horses for courses: why
not neorealist theories of foreign policy, Security Studies, 6 (1), 1996, pp. 7–53.
79 Keohane, Neorealism and its Critics.
80 Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 6.
81 In Lakatosian terms, this is obviously a case of avoiding ‘naive falsificationism’ and instead
using seeming anomalies for further theory development. However, despite having
written about the relationship between Lakatos and neoclassical realism (Randall L.
Schweller, ‘The progressiveness of neoclassical realism’, in Elman and Elman, Progress,
pp. 31–48), in Unanswered Threats, Schweller does not even consider the possibility that
structural realism as such could be under pressure.
82 These days mainstream IR seems to be moving towards middle-range theory, developing
ad hoc explanatory models for specific purposes (and calling them a theory). Only it
happens in slightly different ways for (late-)neorealists and others. Non-neorealists
generally make specific theories for an isolated question, implicitly assuming that the
background system is ‘passive’. The descendants of Waltz, in contrast, retain an
understanding of an ‘active’ system, and get an unsettled dualism of systemic and unit-
level theory.
83 For example, Stephen van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science(New
York: Cornell University Press, 1997), especially pp. 7–9.
84 Ole Wæver, ‘Figures of international thought: introducing persons instead of paradigms’,
in Neumann and Wæver, Masters in the Making, pp. 1–38; Wæver, ‘Rise and fall’; Wæver,
‘Still a discipline’.
85 Richard K. Ashley, ‘The poverty of neorealism’, in Keohane, Neorealism and its Critics,
pp. 255–300.
86 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics,1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
87 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998).
88 Waltz, ‘Evaluating theories’, p. 913. Cf. Ole Wæver, ‘The speech act of realism: the move
that made IR’, in Nicolas Guilhot (ed.), The Rise of International Relations Theory,
1945–1955(Columbia University Press, 2011).
89 Cf. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); Ole Wæver, ‘The sociology of a not so international discipline’,
International Organization,52 (4), 1998, pp. 687–727.
Waltz’s theory of theory 87