Realism and the Kantian Tradition: A Revisionist Account

Abstract

In contemporary international political theory, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is typically juxtaposed to ‘Realism’, with many varieties of the former building on Kantian moral and political ideals, and the latter presumably rejecting Kant and his aspiration for far-reaching global reform. In agreement with a growing body of scholarship that seeks to challenge conventional views of Realism, this essay attends to the surprisingly complex views of the Kantian legacy (including Hans Kelsen, perhaps the most important neo-Kantian international thinker in the last century) within its ranks. Not all Realists have been unambiguously critical of Kant, and when in fact they have criticized him, they have done so for many different reasons. First-generation Realists (e.g. E. H. Carr, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frederick Schuman and Georg Schwarzenberger) offered an ambivalent reading of Kantianism consistent with their endorsement of the ultimate desirability of major alterations to the global status quo, whereas second-generation Realists (i.e. Henry Kissinger and Kenneth Waltz) tended to read Kant so as to transform him into a forerunner of their own anti-reformist and institutionally conservative versions of Realism. An examination of Realism’s rendezvous with Kantianism not only helps draw a more differentiated portrayal of Realism than is still found in much scholarship, but it also helps us understand how Realism dramatically changed within a relatively short space of time during the immediate postwar decades. It also points to some important potential starting points for a more fruitful exchange between Cosmopolitans and Realists.