Second, Rousseau points to material context as the basic cause of the relatively
equal size of the major states, and thus attributes the balance of power (in the sense
of a rough equality in size) to the material context. Rousseau emphasizes that the
number of states and their rough balance make it practically impossible for
an ‘ambitious prince’ to subdue the whole of Europe. Material context explains
why Europe is a plural order with parts in rough equality. Here too, Rousseau is
not breaking new ground, but merely repeating the conventional wisdom of
Enlightenment political science as expounded by Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws,
and echoed by numerous other writers.^15 Third, and last in importance, Europe
remains plural and anarchic because of the prevalence of balancing practices: states
are vigilant about the capacities and intentions of other states; they are prepared to
enter into countervailing alliances; and they are similar in military ‘discipline’.^16 Of
Rousseau’s three arguments, it is this set of balancing practices (or behaviours) that
is most fully incorporated in Waltz’s theory. The role of societal processes such as
emulation and socialization is acknowledged by Waltz, but his treatment of them
is, as many critics have pointed out, a bit thin and at odds with what has come to
be called his ‘rationalist’ and ‘individualist’ ‘ontological assumptions’. Waltz is also
seen as having an excessively materialist ontology of conceptual primitives, but
compared to Rousseau what is notable is the incomplete and attenuated character
of his materialism.
Violence interdependence in realist theory in the industrial
era
The next step in seeing the previous centrality of the variable of violence inter-
dependence that Waltz leaves behind in narrowing the anarchy-interdependence
problématique into the anarchy problématique is an examination of its role in the
arguments of theorists of the period when the industrial revolution was making itself
felt in world politics. The argument about violence and interdependence and
anarchy found in Hobbes, Rousseau, and Montesquieu did not stop with them, but
rather flourished in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as theorists
grappled with the seismic shifts in violence interdependence brought about by the
industrial revolution and its radical transformation of the material context as a factor
in human affairs, particularly world politics and the interstate system. Writing before
the industrial revolution, Hobbes and Rousseau did not incorporate technology
as a dynamic variable in their understanding the material context. By the late
nineteenth century, however, the combined impact of the industrial technologies
of the railroad, the steamship, telegraphy, and chemical high-explosives was widely
viewed as creating a new material environment with far-reaching implications not
only for the balance or distribution of power among states, but also for the viability
and scope of anarchic state-systems.
The most extensive body of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
international theory was the highly materialistic arguments of figures, spanning the
political spectrum, most notably Friedrich Ratzel, John Seeley, Alfred Thayer
24 Anarchy and violence interdependence