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ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE

INTERDEPENDENCE

Daniel Deudney

The reign of neorealism

Across a half-century, Kenneth Waltz has refined and extended the ‘thought’ of
earlier writers, most notably Hobbes and Rousseau, into the ‘theory’ of neorealism.^1
His lucidly formulated arguments about how anarchy shapes the politics of
international systems have dominated Realist international theorizing, and made
Waltz the clear successor to Hans Morgenthau as the leading American realist in the
last third of the twentieth century. Waltz’s reformulation of earlier insights has been
extremely intellectually productive, by framing and stimulating a large body of
insightful neorealist ‘routine science’ on topics such as polarity, balancing, alliances,
the security dilemma, relative and absolute gains, and grand strategy. It also has
evoked a wide array of attacks from virtually every quarter, with neoliberal institu-
tionalists, constructivists, Marxists, and other realists all generating elaborate criti-
cisms, alternatives, and amendments.^2 Contemporary international theory is vastly
more diverse than ever before, but a conceptual mapping of much of it would look
something like a hub with spokes, with neorealism sitting at the centre and various
rivals and critics significantly defining themselves in relation to neorealism.
Waltz says a great many insightful things about a great many important topics,
but it is clear that anarchy is at the centre of his theory. Reflecting the centrality of
arguments about anarchy, both in Waltz and recent realist theory more generally,
this cluster of his argument has come to be known as the anarchy problématique. It
is anarchy which is the distinctive and determining attribute of the system level that
comprises the third image. For states in anarchy, security and the preservation of the
plural political order of the anarchic state-system depend on a favourable distribution
or balance of power, and the ability of states to maintain it.
Another great virtue of Waltz’s work (unlike most behavioural revolution system
theorizing) is that he explicitly builds on core concepts of early modern international