Political realism and the realist ‘Tradition’

Abstract

Appeals to a ‘tradition’ stretching back to Thucydides have been central to the recent emergence of realism in political theory. This article asks what work these appeals to tradition are doing and whether they are consistent with contemporary political realism’s contextualist commitments. I argue that they are not and that realists also have independent epistemic reasons to attend to contextualist worries. Ultimately, I make the case for an account of the realist tradition that is at once consistent with moderate contextualist commitments and that preserves the classificatory and analytical value of tradition-building.

Keywords:

• Political realism
• tradition
• contextualism
• history of political thought
• International Relations thought

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Acknowledgements

This paper was greatly improved in response to comments from Burke Hendrix, Terry Nardin, Philip Pettit, Andy Sabl, Rahul Sagar, Matt Sleat, other participants at a 2015 workshop on realism at National University of Singapore, and an anonymous reviewer.

Notes

1. McQueen (in press) stresses the second observation and argues that the classical IR theorists belong in the political realist ‘tradition’ on conceptual grounds.

2. This conceptualization builds on Williams (2005, pp. 1–17), Geuss (2008, pp. 1–18), Galston (2010, pp. 385–387), Mantena (2012, p. 455), Rossi and Sleat (2014, pp. 689–691). McQueen (2016a) offers this conceptualization and McQueen (in press) examines these commitments in more detail.

3. I owe this conception of a ‘distinctive family’ to Joshua Cohen.

4. For this reason, it would be extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for an approach being ‘realist.’ Drawing on the social science literature on concept formation (which takes its bearings from Wittgenstein), we might instead use the family resemblance approach (Goertz, 2005, p. 7; see also Bell, 2009, p. 3).

5. For instance, realism would rule out a ‘republicanism’ whose institutional proposals depended on severe and virtuous civic self-abnegation or agreement about the common good, but not one that stressed institutional checks and contestation (Pettit, 2015).

6. For various ways of carving up the intellectual space, see: Donelan (1993), Wight (1991), Nardin (1992), Boucher (1998). For a critical analysis of the place of tradition in IR, see Jeffrey (2005).

7. The discussion below draws on Bell’s (2009, p. 6) notion of an ‘expansive tradition’ as well as his description of the problems of abstraction, selectiveness, and self-understanding.

8. Resisting an account of realism as kind of non-ideal critique of ideal theory (Valentini, 2012), Sleat argues: ‘If we think about the canon of realist thinkers in political theory … then it is not easy to see exactly how they count as realists if by “realism” we mean a concern for the implementation of ideals in practice or the need to engage in more fact-sensitive normative theorizing.’ While non-ideal critiques of ideal theory still operate well within the ambit of liberal theory, no ‘canonical’ realists, ‘apart from Hume (and possibly Hobbes under certain interpretations), can plausibly be thought of as liberal theorists … Realism stands to liberalism as a fundamentally different conception of politics – one which has very distinct notions regarding the purpose and limits of politics, as well as the appropriate ambitions of political theory’ (Sleat, 2014, pp. 4–5). These kinds of appeals to a ‘realist tradition’ seem to assume precisely what is in question – the content and coherence of ‘realism’ itself.

9. This kind of boundary work is analogous to the attempts of some within the liberal tradition to distinguish classical liberalism (or libertarianism) from social liberalism (Bell, 2014).

10. For another argument in this vein, though one that proceeds along more conceptual lines, see McQueen (in press).

11. For an attempt to carve out a more modest version of the Collingwoodian claim about perennial problems, see: Rawls (2007, pp. 103–104).

12. One might argue that ‘analytical tradition’ involves oxymoron, since tradition simply entails a social process of actual transmission (Condren, 1997, p. 48). Granting the point for argument’s sake, one might simply substitute a different term.

13. Compare Bell’s (2014, p. 688) claim that Locke lacked access the ‘range of concepts and arguments’ that would have made it possible for him to be, in any interesting sense, a ‘liberal.’

14. Bell’s original definition is: ‘the liberal tradition is constituted by the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space’ (2014, pp. 689–690). For reasons I lack time to discuss here, I do not find Bell’s discussion of a ‘summative’ tradition fully appropriate for current purposes. I have therefore substituted ‘range’ for Bell’s ‘sum’ as well.

15. On the first point, realist arguments and concepts have a robust presence among scholars of International Relations and policy-makers in China (Wang, 2009; Schneider, 2014; Lynch, 2015, pp. 155–238). On the second point, Morgenthau, for instance, repeatedly invokes the classical Indian thinker Kautilya’s arguments in a realist vein in Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau, 1954).