Did the Realist-Idealist Great Debate Really Happen? a Revisionist History of International Relations

Abstract

In the history of international relations, no single idea has been more influential than the notion that there was a `great debate' in the 1920s and 1930s between the advocates of idealism and the champions of realism. In reality, there was never a single `great debate' but rather a multiplicity of discussions which revolved around at least three big questions: does capitalism lead to war; what are the most effective ways of dealing with totalitarian state aggression; and (in the US), is retreat from entangling alliances a reasonable response to a world turned upside down by war and economic depression? Throughout this, the academic study of IR remained strongly liberal and internationalist in orientation. However, liberalism was never seriously challenged by an apolitical realism, but instead by socialist critics - at least in Britain - and isolationists in the United States. Ultimately, the persistence of the notion that there was a real debate between idealism and realism, which the latter apparently won, says less about the actual discussions of the time, and more about the marginalisation of liberal and normative thinking in the IR mainstream in the post-war period.