Notes
1 See note 1 in the Preface.
2 According to John J. Mearsheimer, it had already become so in the UK: see his ‘E.H. Carr
versus Idealism: the battle rages on’, International Relations, Vol.19 (2), 2005, pp. 139–52.
3 I will use the terms ‘international politics’ and ‘International Relations’ (IR)
interchangeably, though the latter can be understood as somewhat wider. The label
‘world politics’ is more comprehensive still, and the difference will be outlined later. In
each case, the terms will be capitalised when referring to the relevant academic discipline,
but in lower case when referring to political practice. I will call these overlapping
enterprises a ‘discipline’, in the sense of their being ‘a distinct branch of learning’ as
broadly understood in Europe since the Late Middle Ages. The contemporary social
science use of the term is too dogmatically disciplining.
4 When International Politics was established as a university discipline, in 1919, the man
who has claim to be its inventor, David Davies, advocated that its syllabus should include
the study of law, politics, ethics, economics, other civilisations, and international
organisations. See Ken Booth, ‘75 years on: rewriting the subject’s past – reinventing its
future’, pp. 328-39 in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International
Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
5 Julie Bindel, ‘Mary Daly: obituary’, Guardian,27 January 2010.
6 Waltz made a distinction between them, identifying ‘realist thought’ as a tradition imbued
with normative concerns, while ‘realist theory’ was (supposedly) free of such concerns.
See Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory, 1990’ in Kenneth N.
Waltz, Realism and International Politics(New York: Routledge, 2008). For convenience,
I will refer to this invaluable collection of Waltz’s key articles/chapters rather than the
originals; the date in the titles of these reprints signifies the year of their first publication.
7 See the back cover of Waltz, Realism and International Politics.
8 The key reference is Richard Ashley, ‘The poverty of Neorealism’, International
Organization,Vol. 38, 1984, pp. 225–86.
9 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 28.
10 Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 238.
11 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979),
p. 154.
12 Readers will notice that some contributors prefer the term ‘structural realism’, while
others prefer ‘neorealism’. Occasionally the terms are used interchangeably. My own
preference is for structural realism, as it gets to the descriptive heart of the theory, rather
than its supposed genealogy.
13 Waltz, Theory of International Politics,p. 6.
14 Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: a response to my critics, 1986’ in
Waltz, Realism and International Politics,p. 51.
15 This is the approach in Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler, The Security Dilemma: Fear,
Cooperation and Trust in World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 10–11.
16 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 174.
17 Waltz, ‘Reflections’, p. 43.
18 A sense of this group can be gained from Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International
Thought: Major Twentieth-Century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980), andMichael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to
Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
19 I started using this term in the mid-1980s and adopted it for E.H. Carr in ‘Security in
anarchy: Utopian Realism in theory and practice’, International Affairs,Vol.67 (3), pp.
527–45. For similarly motivated readings of radical realists, see my ‘Morgenthau’s realisms
and transatlantic truths’ pp. 99–128 in Christian Hacke, Gottfried-Karl Kindermann and
KaiM. Schellhorn (eds), The Heritage, Challenge, and Future of Realism (Gottingen: Bonn
University Press, 2005); and ‘Navigating the “AbsoluteNovum”: John H. Herz’s ‘Political
Realism and Political Idealism’, International Relations, Vol. 22 (4), 2008, pp. 510–26.
Realism redux 13