included a ‘fine grain realism’, bringing in unit-level factors, and an ‘elaborated
structural realism’, adding elements of system-structure hoping to produce a better
systemic account of micro-macro linkages.^28 Others in the wider realist family
developed an approach that Gideon Rose called ‘neo-classical realism’.^29 This new
neo- attempted to construct a bridge between systemic dynamics (survival, distri-
butions of power, military considerations) and unit-level variables (the perceptions
of relevant decision-makers and opinion-formers within states). Like other post-
Theory of International Politics realist revisionisms, neo-classical realism sprinkled
additives into the Waltzian mix, hoping to strengthen it by making it more realistic:
but they missed the point. For Waltz the purpose of his theory was not to replicate
reality, but to explain it.^30 Paradoxically, those given to mixing additives to structural
realism in the hope of making it more realistic had the effect of diluting its theoretical
power. ‘Art’, Picasso said, ‘is a lie to bring us nearer to the truth.’ Theory, for Waltz,
is a similar conceit.
Waltz always knew that his realism does not tell us all we want to know about
world politics. In addition to eschewing structural determinism, he accepts that there
are different sorts of theories with different uses, though his own preferences have
always been made obvious. In this regard it is fascinating to recall Robert Cox’s
well-known distinction between ‘critical theory’ and ‘problem-solving theory’ – a
distinction that has shaped the work of many students of International Politics for a
quarter of a century.^31 Discussing the matter in the mid-1980s, Waltz expressed no
fundamental problem with Cox’s categorisation.^32 He called it a ‘nice distinction’,
adding: ‘I have no quarrel with Cox’s concern with counter and latent structures,
with historical inquiry, and with speculation about possible futures.’ But he
underlined that this is not what he himself did, and left nobody in any doubt about
the type of theory he thought most theoretically sound and most relevant for living
globally. Critical theorists, he said, ‘would transcend the world as it is; meanwhile
we have to live in it’.
Every chapter below pays some due to the continuing relevance of realism’s
agendas to living in the world ‘as it is’, but to a greater or lesser extent they depart
from the idea that the world as it isis as realism in its various guises pictures it.^33
What is also questioned is the usefulness of the prescriptions that supposedly derive
from realism. Various chapters, for example, discuss different elements in realism as
part of the problem: Sørensen argues that statehood produces critically ‘unlike units’
with different security dilemmas; Lebow and Valentino emphasise that psychological
factors (misperception and miscalculation) can have more traction in explaining
behaviour than those posited by power transition theory; Beyer points to the
inadequacy of any analysis from a structural realist perspective that ignores the
insights from constructivism about change; and Clark emphasises the need for a
more complex view of power (namely one harnessed to ‘legitimate social purpose’)
rather than structural realism’s habitual concern with material capabilities. As the
book proceeds, a ‘world’ perspective on the ‘international’ becomes more explicit,
and this is seen at its fullest in the chapters by Linklater, and by Buzan and Little;
here, the international becomes one structure – albeit a very powerful one – among
Realism redux 11