... [it] forges between the world and domestic pictures’.^15 Within this perspective,
an internal pluralism appeared to be a natural condition. But an external pluralism
was deeply problematic both in conceptual and political terms. For a historian of
American liberalism, Hartz remained significantly sceptical over whether the
American liberal mind could ever transcend its own limited horizons – that is,
whether it could ‘ever understand peoples elsewhere’ and even whether it could
‘ever understand itself’.^16
Hartz, Waltz and the cautionary tale of Woodrow Wilson
These selfsame issues of liberalism – its principles, outlooks and organizing logics –
feature strongly in Man, the State and War. It is true that Waltz’s approach is different
in so far as he approaches them in the main from the perspective of international
relations theory. Nevertheless, he undertakes a close critical examination of various
liberal ideas and how they have developed from an initial position of constraining
the state towards a set of more expansive claims over the responsibility to ensure
that key freedoms are secured and protected through state activity. In his review of
the limitations of the second image, taken either in isolation or in combination
with the first image, Waltz surveys the international aspirations and assumptions of
liberal thinkers who have seen it as their responsibility not merely to reaffirm liberal
values by virtue of extending their applicability to the international realm, but to
authenticate the possibility of a future world order of peaceful harmony through the
imprimatur of liberal principles. His analysis is largely set against a nineteenth-
century backdrop of liberal themes relating to optimistic notions of social develop-
ment and historical progress based upon decentralization, freedom of contract,
individual rights, free trade, representative government, transcendent harmonies of
interest and the transformative energies of emancipation.
In tracing the various iterations of liberalism in this era and their different
approaches to the issue of security and the international order, Waltz settles upon
much the same duality that Hartz uses to portray the strains within contemporary
liberalism – namely those that are prompted by, and exhibited in, the issue of a liberal
construction of international relations. This is not to claim that Waltz was taking his
cue directly from Hartz. But it is noteworthy that both have very similar reservations
over the record and prospectus of American liberalism when its focus becomes
directed to the international sphere. Within both their respective expositions, Waltz
and Hartz showcase the figure of Woodrow Wilson to depict the deep fault lines
within liberalism in respect to the place of war in the processes of international
politics.
Hartz discusses the advent of Wilsonianism as a twentieth-century liberal hybrid
that was at one and the same time both innovative and traditional in composition
as well as being both visceral and abstract in spirit. Wilson had attempted to draw
on American experience and liberal principles to forge a new international concert
of interests and supranational institutionalism, whilst depending upon nineteenth-
century axioms of national self-determination, contractual agreements and free trade.
Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment 41