On the Costs of Realism

Abstract

Political Realism dominated the discipline of international relations throughout the 1950s. There were occasional complaints that it went too far or that it did not properly value some things which should be properly valued, but there was very little fundamental disagreement with its interpretation of what international politics was all about. Even the liberal Left joined the chorus, perhaps out of guilt for opposing rearmament against Hitler in the 1930s or perhaps for fear of being branded naive again in the face of a new threat. Realism is, of course, no longer in style in academic circles. It has been under continuous attack for something over a decade-and the worst sort of attack, for it has simply been ignored as an anachronistic remnant of the discipline's early years. Its staying power, albeit in a less formal and coherent fashion, however, has been much greater and more persistent outside academia. This is not especially surprising, since there is normally a gap between the period when a doctrine is articulated in intellectual circles and accepted by men working in the field-and, of course, a gap between the period when it is rejected by the theorist and by the practitioner. The inconsistencies and the anomalies which trouble the theorist, and which make him more receptive to new doctrines, always appear less salient to men working on daily problems: the erosion of the