that it does not provide us with a promising guide for navigating human society
globally through the converging challenges of the decades ahead. Without knowing
realism, therefore, nothing much in world politics will make much sense, but
we need to know a good deal more than realism to picture more secure ways of
living globally. As human society globally comes face-to-face with this century’s
concatenation of predictable crises, Waltz’s theorising tells us with extraordinary
clarity about the international constraints confronting the construction of a more
harmonious world – a world forcommon humanity and forNature. Structural
realism does not – cannot – tell us how to construct that better world; it can only
advise political elites how to practise ‘the logic of anarchy’ in this one. We do indeed
have worlds inside us, but nobody will be able to construct a world politics where
the collective good triumphs over the bad and the ugly unless they conscientiously
engage with, challenge, and transcend the resistant ‘texture’ and inconvenient truth
of international politics.
Notes
1 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979)
p. 8.
2 The comparison below focuses on theorising not theories; this is not the place to discuss
whether structural realism is a ‘Darwinian’ theory of international politics, as for example
inBradley A. Thayer, ‘Bringing in Darwin: evolutionary theory, realism, and
international politics’, International Security, Vol.25 (2), 2000, pp. 124–51.
3 John Dupré, Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005) p. 16.
4 Ibid., p. 119.
5 Ibid.
6 Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A response to my critics,
1986’, in Kenneth N. Waltz, Realism and International Politics(New York: Routledge,
2008) p. 51.
7 Ibid.
8 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 118.
9 A sustained argument showing the contingency of international history is Richard Ned
Lebow, Forbidden Fruit:Counterfactuals and International Relations(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
10 Robert W. Cox, ‘Social forces, states, and world orders: beyond international relations
theory’, Millennium, Vol.10 (2), 1981, pp. 126–55 (quotation at p. 128).
11 I have tried to explain this at length in Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
12 This particular criticism is by Robert Jackson and Georg Sørensen, Introduction to
International Relations: Theories and Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Fourth
edition, 2010) p. 288.
13 The phrase was given by Bertolt Brecht to Galileo in Life of Galileo, ed. John Willett and
Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 2001) p. 42.
14 Adrian Desmond and James Moore in Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest
for Human Origins(London: Penguin Books, 2010) p. xvii.
15 George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) p. xviii.
16 Ibid. pp. 273–74.
17 Ibid. p. 272.
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