headed throughout. The criticisms one makes of his ‘levels of analysis’ show just
how indebted one is to his work in the first place. As a critical tool helping us to
weed out all sorts of nonsense, Waltz remains enormously relevant. Where he falters
- where we all falter – is in our constructive agenda, our arguments for how and
why the world might be different. Waltz reminds us that in that search it is
dangerous to oscillate between optimism and despair. A measured, tough-minded
realism of the sort he exemplifies does not foreclose change altogether; rather, it
persistently alerts us to how difficult it is. I count myself among the fortunate to
have been Ken Waltz’s student and I hope that at least a bit of the clarity and
cogency of his thought has rubbed off.
Notes
1 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis(New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959).
2 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War(New York: Basic Books, 1987).
3 To call such women ‘sex workers’, as ‘politically correct’ feminism dictates, is
preposterous, as it suggests this is just another job and thereby fails to get to the ethical
and human disaster and abuse of women that such sex trade involves.
4 Elshtain, Women and War.
5 Public Man, Private Womanwas published by Princeton University Press, 1981.
6 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and Politics: A Theoretical Analysis(University Microfilms:
Ann Arbor, MI, 1973), p. 5.
7 Elshtain, Women and Politics,pp.346–47.
8 Elshtain, Women and Politics, p. 316.
9 For a full discussion of such approaches see Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman.
10 Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (New York: Teacher College Press, 1985).
Reardon indicated she was not pessimistic, as behavioural science would win the day.
First, though, we had to resist cleaving the ‘total human potential and personality’ and
move to some sort of androgynous personality.
11 See, for example, the discussion by Rebecca Grant, ‘The sources of bias in International
Relations theory’, in R. Grant and K. Newland (eds), Gender and International Relations
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 8–26.
12 See my discussion of these once popular extreme formulations – how widely circulated
they are at present I cannot say – in Women and War, pp. 237–41. At the time in question
- the mid-1980s – they were inescapable in feminism and peace movement activities.
13 Waltz, Man, the State and War, pp. 4, 5.
14 See p. 20 for the following: ‘Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who in the last twenty-
five years has written as many words of wisdom on problems of international politics as
have any of the academic specialists in that subject, has criticized utopians, Liberal and
Marxist alike, with frequency and telling effect.’ I should note that in the world of
Niebuhr scholarship there is division on whether Niebuhr’s ‘take’ on St Augustine is
adequate or wanting in significant respects.
15 Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 41.
16 To be fair, Waltz could not possibly do full justice to all the thinkers he takes up briefly.
But Augustine carries much of the conceptual weight for first-image pessimism, so a
richer account of Augustine’s position would have been welcome. Otherwise, one winds
up tilting at windmills of one’s own creation, at least up to a point.
17 The quote from Freud reads: ‘So long as there are nations and empires, each prepared
callously to exterminate its rival, all alike must be equipped for war.’ See Waltz, Man, the
State and War, p. 187.
18 Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 4.
Woman, the state, and war 191