moment, by normative impulses, and – yes – by individual genius and hard work.
Darwin’s biologising, whether he recognised it fully or not, was ‘forsomeone and
for some purpose’ – though ultimately the uses to which his theory were sometimes
put were not under his control, and would not have been to his liking.
Attempting to rescue Darwin from one particular negative reputation , that of
being the (‘Social Darwinian’) theorist of ‘dog eat dog’, George Levine has argued
that Darwin’s theorising, above all, can ‘put us in touch with the possibility of the
blending of reason and feeling, the potential humanity of science and [it] can put us
in touch as well with the wonders of the ordinary movements of nature’.^15 Through
Darwin, Levine finds inspiration in ‘the value of the natural world and the human
striving to understand it’. Levine believes that Darwin created ‘a sublime of the
ordinary that evoked awe and wonder and a sense of mystery’, through his language,
his ‘imaginative sympathy’, and his humility.^16 And here he was not discussing
Darwin and humans, but Darwin and ‘barnacles, sea-slugs, ants, worms and
vegetable mould’. What then, in this respect, was the ‘some purpose’ that Darwin’s
theory was for? To Levine, it was to provide the resources for ‘an enchanted
secularism – a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving
to understand it’. Despite Darwin’s ‘quite touching efforts to remain the
dispassionate observer’, in Levine’s opinion he could not divorce himself from his
passion for ‘the creatures whose history he was trying to understand’.^17 For Darwin,
even though he was not aware of it, science embraced the political (his ‘Sacred
Cause’) and the natural (the ‘sublime of the ordinary’).
Turning to the international, Cynthia Enloe’s influential observations for feminist
theorising at the end of the 1980s come to mind: ‘the personal is international’ and
‘the international is personal’.^18 This way of thinking resonates with Cox’s earlier point
about the normative interests of theory. Are we now then ready to contemplate a
normative Waltz? Is Waltzian theorising about international politics ‘forsomeone
and forsome purpose’? The image of Waltz as a positivist social scientist continues
to dominate the discipline, but several earlier chapters detected in Waltz’s work
more than a suggestion of the interplay of the personal and the international.^19
Michael Foley’s account of the political context in which Waltz wrote Man, the
State and Warpointed to the significance of the ‘misgivings’ in US society at the
time of the Cold War’s ‘emergent dynamics’, and in particular the crisis in liberal-
ism. In the book that emerged, Foley claims, Waltz offered ideas that ‘implicitly
addressed’ the issue of US engagement in the new bipolar international system, and
in ways that helped assuage the US ‘liberal predicament’. Michael Williams’ account
also interpreted Waltz’s writing from the 1950s through to the 1970s as engaging
with ongoing political issues in ways that have invariably been unappreciated
by students of IR. For Williams, Waltz’s work can be understood in part as a
contribution to a ‘highly charged’ debate in the United States about democracy and
foreign policy, the fate of modern societies, the future of Western civilisation, and
the survival of liberal democracy. He consequently interpreted Waltz’s classic books,
together with his lesser known Democracy and Foreign Policy(published in 1967), as
a ‘triptych defending democratic foreign policy-making’ and working through a
330 The inconvenient truth