21st Century Realism: The Past Is in Our Present

Abstract

Fear of Enemies and Collective Action. By Ioannis D. Evrigenis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 232 pp., $85.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0521886208). The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. Edited by Louiza Odysseos, Fabio Petito. New York: Routledge, 2007. 258 pp., $41.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0415474771). Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Neibuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent. By Vibeke Schou Tjalve. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 174 pp., $74.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0230602175). “The past is never dead. It's not even the past”– Requiem for a Nun , by William Faulkner, 1951, act I, scene iii. A couple of years ago I wrote about what I termed “reflexive realism,” which I defined as “the attempt to restore classical realist principles of agency, prudence and the recognition of limitations as part of an attempt to provide a practical-ethical view of international politics” (Steele 2007: 273). At the time, however, I was not sure whether this recent trend in IR scholarship was more intellectual history or theory on its own accord. After reading these three impressive books, I would argue that whatever we term them, the recent vibrant re-engagements with realist theory are both, and exist in the space between intellectual history and theory. When one reads these accounts, we are re-reading the historical contexts in which various realist thinkers produced their work, but we recognize how their conditions speak to an unsettled present context, and thus also realize the leverage their wise lessons have upon our contemporary circumstances. All three of these books can be considered contributions to the development of realist thought in International Relations theory. All return to some of the seminal authors of the realist tradition of political thought, but with an eye toward resurrecting some critical elements found in the works of authors who were once considered to be the foundation for otherwise conventional concepts in realist IR theory (survival, fear, anarchy, etc.). And all three helpfully provide an ontology of the present by going into our past: the rereading of seminal texts to “decode” a past which speaks to our present in ways in which the traditional readings of those texts cannot (see also Lebow 2003). The books together provide IR scholars a dilemma, however. How are we …