development, see the chapters by Deudney and Brown). His work has sought to
bring the discipline more self-consciously into the developing social sciences as
understood in the United States (the chapters by Foley and Williams give contem-
porary context). Again, even if one disagrees with Waltz’s own understandings of
theory, of social science, and of how to do theory, one cannot say much about the
international in world or global politics without engaging with his ideas.
In trying to comprehend Waltz’s still ongoing career as a whole, one can see
changes and developments – contradictions even. It would be a surprise if it were
otherwise in a career of six decades plus. But Waltz’s responses to changes in the
world and to developments in the discipline serve as a warning against dogmatic
schoolism. One response to schoolism’s obsessive labelling is to categorise ideas
rather than people as far as possible; particular sets of ideas can have a coherence
which few scholars can match through long careers.^15 Waltz is always labelled a
‘realist’, and accepts the label – though not with the tribal intensity of some. But to
accept the label of realist these days raises almost as many questions as it settles, and
Waltz has had an influential role in this. One consequence of Waltzian theory’s
intervention in realism’s tree-of-life was to stimulate the growth of new branches.
Now it is difficult to know what, if anything, constitutes authentic realism. But
disciplinary evolution could have been so different. Onuf suggests in his chapter that
if Waltz had situated his intervention – as was possible – in the ideas of ‘updated
constructivism’, the field would look ‘very different today’. So, who today are the
real realists? Where, indeed, does Waltz himself fit in? The discipline’s pre-eminent
(modern) theorist has been variously described not only as a realist, but also (in
alphabetical order) as an instrumentalist, a normative theorist, an optimist, a
Popperian, a positivist, a pragmatist, a proto-constructivist, a scientific realist, a
structural realist, and an unreflective philosophical realist. What exactly, these days,
is a Waltzian?
Structural realism offers a powerful picture
Whatever one’s ultimate take on Waltzian theorising, all serious students of
‘international politics’ or ‘world politics’ (the distinction is discussed later) need to
understand structural realism’s powerful picture of how the international system
works. Before elaborating this, it is critical in reading anything about Waltzian
structural realism to keep a particular mental footnote in mind: Waltz is not a
structural determinist. He could not have been clearer on the matter: in Theory of
International Politics he told readers: ‘Structure... does not by any means explain
everything. I say this again because the charge of structural determinism is easy to
make.’^16 He has continued to defend himself against the charge, writing later:
‘Structures never tell us all that we want to know. Instead they tell us a small number
of big and important things.’^17 His is not a theory of everything about ‘international’
let alone ‘world’ politics.
The reasons for engaging with structural realism’s account of ‘a small number of
big and important things’ are multiple: the theory was discipline-changing when it
6 Realism redux