In the beginning: The International Relations enlightenment and the ends of International Relations theory

Introduction

Writing about endings is both provocative and attractive. The idea of something ending often unsettles and disturbs, particularly when it involves questions of politics or the status of a body of knowledge and the future of a profession — such as International Relations (IR). ¹ Yet the idea of endings is also attractive, not least because it allows us to re-examine settled assumptions, convictions, and commitments; to ask where we are and where we are going, but also how we got here. The question of endings is thus simultaneously a question of beginnings, and wondering if something is at an end inevitably raises the puzzle of when and how ‘it’ began.

If this is the case, then any discussion of the ‘end of IR theory’ must inevitably ask: when did IR theory begin? ² Here, of course, there is no shortage of answers, with names including Sun Tzu, Augustine, and Machiavelli, and dates ranging from 1648, and 1789, to 1919 marking only a few of the candidates jostling for pride of place. This article seeks to provide a rather different view. The beginnings of IR theory, I suggest, do not lie in the timeless wisdom of classical thinkers; nor do they lie in the origins of the modern state and states-system, or the carnage and aftermath of World War I — although all of these play a role. Instead, these beginnings can be found in the United States in the wake of World War II, and center on the activities of a group of post-war thinkers whom we now often call classical realists. In Nicolas Guilhot’s apt phrase and revealing analysis, these thinkers sought self-consciously to ‘invent’ IR theory as a distinct enterprise (Guilhot, 2011). The new beginning advocated by this disparate group was not an attempt to found the discipline of IR upon securely ‘scientific’ foundations, nor simply to teach it yet again the conservative verities of realpolitik — myths that continue to bedevil our understanding of the issues involved. On the contrary, as Guilhot shows, this act of beginning conceived of IR as a bulwark standing against the emerging hegemony of American political ‘science.’ Most importantly for the case I want to make here, this opposition was not simply methodological: it was deeply and self-consciously political. Indeed, as I shall try to show, the goal of the ‘realist gambit’ (Guilhot, 2008) was not, as is often assumed, the destruction of liberalism, but its salvation. The core issue in the ‘invention of IR theory’ — its historical origins as well as its end or goal in a substantive or normative sense — was not the assertion of realism in opposition to liberalism: it was, in fact, the defense of a particular kind of liberalism.

In their foundations, aspirations, and historical misrecognition, these origins bears a striking resemblance to a wider movement in post-war American political studies that Ira Katznelson (2003) has sought to recapture under the label of the ‘political studies enlightenment.’ Indeed, the affinities are so strong that it is revealing to see the beginnings of IR theory as an ‘International Relations enlightenment’ analogous to the post-war political studies enlightenment traced by Katznelson. As IR has over the decades moved ever further away from these origins and closer toward political science, particularly in the United States, this story of its beginnings and ends has become so misunderstood as to have almost disappeared from histories of the field and accounts of its theoretical orientations and alternatives. This historical forgetting constitutes one of the most debilitating errors of IR theory today, and overcoming it has significant implications for how we think about the past and future development of the field. In particular, it throws open not only our understanding of the place of realism in IR, but also our vision of liberalism. For while the ‘liberal realism’ of the IR enlightenment has been largely overlooked, the liberalism that defines large parts of the field today is precisely the form of liberal rationalism that the IR enlightenment opposed — not in order to destroy liberalism as an intellectual and political project, but to save it. In the beginning, these ends or goals defined IR theory as a substantive political project.

The political studies enlightenment and the IR enlightenment

What was the ‘political studies enlightenment’? In Katznelson’s reconstruction, it can be brought into focus by recognizing how a diverse group of thinkers across the spectrum of post-war American political science:

whose biography had placed them perilously close to Europe’s abyss joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance to defend liberality and systematic thought while insisting the tradition of Enlightenment required a new realism, a good deal of repair, and much fortification. Constituting a distinctive approach (though not a school, since they were not bound together self-consciously), these historians and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had become radically insufficient. ³

In this group, Katznelson places individuals as varied as Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstaeder, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, David Truman, and Hannah Arendt. Profoundly shaken by the desolation of the previous half-century ⁴ and its apparent refutation of Enlightenment promises of progress, peace, and the reign of reason, the thinkers of the political studies enlightenment ‘sought to account for the sources of modern barbarism’ by looking deeply into the limits of the Enlightenment itself. Declaring the need for a new realism that could address the devastation that left a century and a half of increasing rationalism within the Enlightenment tradition at wits,’ end, they:

insisted on critical adjustments geared to shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore full sight to an Enlightenment that, in the face of disaster and loss of self-assurance, had become color-blind. Confronting their period’s dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. (Katznelson, 2003: 2)

Far from simply rejecting the Enlightenment in the face of the barbarism and desolation, the political studies enlightenment held that to understand the calamities of the period, it was necessary not to treat them as simple irrationality erupting inexplicably into the otherwise placid, progressive, and rational world of the Enlightenment, but to see instead how they were specifically modern, arising in important aspects from the Enlightenment itself, and representing key weaknesses within it. Multiple themes were, of course, at work across such a wide range of thinkers and orientations, but four related aspects are particularly worth highlighting: the need to engage the question of ‘radical evil’ in modernity; the increasing role and dominance of instrumental reason, technology, and technical rationality; the rise of ‘mass society’ and mass politics, and the accompanying crisis of classical liberalism and its vision of democracy; and the rise of extreme nationalism and anti-liberal politics as an at least partial consequence of liberal modernity, not as its simple antithesis.

The goal of the political studies enlightenment was to grasp these dynamics philosophically, historically, and sociologically, and to understand how they might be countered in pursuit of suitably chastened but nonetheless recognizable Enlightenment values and principles. In Katznelson’s rendering, by ‘affiliating disciplined study with normative purpose,’ the political studies enlightenment ‘sought to secure a realistic version of Enlightenment and enlarge its span of sensibility as the best, perhaps the only, humane option on offer after the disillusioning revelation that its ramparts had crumbled under pressure’ (2003: 2).

Importantly, in this context, the United States became the focus of the political studies enlightenment for reasons that went well beyond its status as the dominant liberal power at an uncertain and dangerous time. In a discussion of the seemingly divergent thinking of Karl Polanyi and Hannah Arendt, for instance, Katznelson finds a unifying theme:

At the heart of The Great Transformation and The Origins of Totalitarianism lay the ruins of the great majority of European states based on a liberal creed.… Yet just across the Atlantic, the United States — stable, liberal, enlightened — offered, or seemed to offer, the most inviting of alternatives. … For the political studies enlightenment at large, the United States stood tall as the great historical counterfactual, thus soliciting close scrutiny of its political tradition, fresh accounts of its liberal regime, and focused inquiry about the singular personality of its liberal state. (2003: 106)

These thinkers, and particularly the two mentioned above, were by no means naive about the problems and challenges confronting American society and politics, but these needed in their view to be balanced against its value and potential for a reconstructed liberal politics. In short, the focus of the political studies enlightenment was on the politics and destiny of liberalism and enlightenment in the wake of ‘desolation,’ and its focus on the United States was driven by these wider concerns.

The invention of IR theory

Katznelson’s account of the political studies enlightenment does not include any scholars in the nascent field of International Relations. However, his characterization of the political studies enlightenment captures to great effect the concerns of a number of the most prominent thinkers in post-war IR, including Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Neibuhr, and John Herz. ⁵ Indeed, a look at these key post-war realists reveals a set of concerns so similar that this group might well be viewed as part of an analagous ‘IR enlightenment.’ As a wide body of recent research under the somewhat ambiguous label of ‘classical’ realism has made clear, ⁶ post-war realism was not concerned with defeating a facile ‘idealism,’ ⁷ nor was it a simple continuation of the tradition of realpolitik concerned with teaching its verities to a naively liberal America. Instead, it was engaged in the much more substantial task of assessing the consequences of political modernity, and in discerning the intellectual and social dimensions of liberalism it found deeply and disastrously insufficient. As Duncan Bell has emphasized, putting the history of IR in this light changes quite substantially our understanding of its origins from those which trace it to 1648. In his words, ‘In the “Westphalian” narrative, the focal point is the emergence of the sovereign state. What we might call the modernist narrative emphasizes elements only seen in fateful combination during the long twentieth century (and beyond) … it was during this period that “realism” as a self-conscious body of political thought emerged’ (Bell, 2009a: 5).

In a similar but more specific formulation, Nicolas Guilhot has compellingly argued that a (and perhaps the) key intellectual and political context for the ‘invention of IR theory’ lay in the defense by these thinkers of a particular vision of politics against the rising currents of American social science. This group, which Guilhot illuminates through the device of a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation conference on IR theory, included luminaries such as Paul Nitze, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, and Hans Morgenthau, who were united by their resentment toward:

the methodological imperialism of the behavioural revolution. They considered the promise of an empirical science of politics an illusion: for them, politics was not entirely rational and could not be comprehended by scientific rationalism.… For these scholars, the development of a behavioural science of politics amounted to nothing less than the suppression — or, to use Morgenthau’s term, the ‘repudiation’ of politics. (Guilhot, 2011: 129)

In this view, ‘the theory of international relations was developed by this … group as a way to secure a space for its alternative vision of politics and scholarship. It initially emerged as a normative statement on what political science should be, not as a discourse of specialization’ and, as a consequence, ‘IR theory is thus better understood as a case of intellectual irredentism, resisting its own integration into American social science’ (Guilhot, 2011: 129–130).

Crucial to this irredentism, I want to suggest, was the desire to move beyond both 19th-century visions of ‘classical’ liberalism and its 20th-century ‘progressive’ forms, as well as their empiricist or pragmatist epistemologies and models of political understanding, in order to provide a more substantial philosophical and sociological foundation for a renewed and reformed liberal politics. This battle was waged by the IR enlightenment on numerous fronts and in different ways by different thinkers, including challenges to the idea: that morality could directly take the place of politics; that utilitarian understandings of interest could escape the logic of power and provide a pristinely rational basis for cooperation and political order within and between states; that a neutral, hierarchical system of international law could resolve fundamental international ‘tensions’; ⁸ or that complete liberal toleration and pluralism could provide the basis for a viable liberal order.

Within this wider frame, oft-disparaged classical realist concerns take on a different hue. Consider, for instance, the question of evil. There is no doubt that to speak of ‘evil’ sounds suspiciously pre-modern. And then as now, its place in realist thought was seen by many as pointing to crude forms of biological determinism or assumptions about ‘human nature’ that were anathema to proper social science, as well as to most forms of liberalism (Donnelly, 2000; Freyburg-Annan, 2004). Yet the vision of evil at work in the most thoughtful parts of the political studies and IR enlightenments had little to do with such assumptions. ⁹ For a thinker as subtle as Arendt, for instance, crude arguments about human nature held little sway. Yet she insisted that a cogent grasp of evil — and particularly of modernity’s capacity for ‘radical evil’ — was essential; as she famously wrote to Karl Jaspers in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, ‘evil has proven more radical than expected’ (Arendt and Jaspers, 1992: 166). Radical evil was that which could not be reduced to utter ruthlessness or self-interest, and utilitarian logics were at best partial (and often deeply misleading) tools for comprehending the desolation that political modernity was capable of producing. ¹⁰

While by no means identical with Arendt’s thinking, the engagements of the IR enlightenment with evil evince a similar depth of concerns. Hans Morgenthau’s connections to Arendt are well documented, and her influence on parts of his thinking are not difficult to discern. Moreover, his early and substantial engagement with Carl Schmitt made him all too aware of the importance of the concept of evil in sophisticated debates over political theology in Weimar Germany and beyond. ¹¹ Similarly, although Niebuhr’s conception of evil is more overtly theological, it too operated in the context of philosophically complex and politically engaged debates that were far removed from unidimensional caricatures about human nature to which it has since often been reduced. ¹² More important for the case I am putting forward here, however, is the fact that the critique of liberalism that both Morgenthau and Niebuhr developed through an engagement with evil was not designed to support a conservative politics, whether in its ‘reactionary modernist’ form or in the neo-traditionalism of a figure such as T.S. Eliot. In fact, they viewed this engagement as vital precisely in order that conservatism was not seen as the only option in the face of an untenable liberalism. ¹³ As Niebuhr in particular was at considerable pains to stress, only a liberal politics shorn of its ‘utopian’ elements — both epistemic and political — could avoid this conclusion and thus be suitably equipped to advance a renewed liberal politics. As he put it in one particularly powerful call for a ‘realistic liberalism’:

There is, in short, no reason why the errors of the Enlightenment should continue to bedevil ‘progressive’ political movements, and why ‘liberalism’ should be identified with illusions about human nature and history. Sometimes the foes of liberalism insist that the illusions are inherent in the policy. There are even some belated liberals who darkly insinuate that a realist who professes to be a liberal in social policy must be a crypto-conservative who has yet to reveal his true colors. These confusions could be eliminated if the clear evidences of history were presented to prove that the ‘liberal’ illusions are not necessary for democracy, and might actually have a baneful influence upon its life. (Niebuhr, 1955a) ¹⁴

Although he differed in key respects from Niebuhr on the politics of the Cold War, Herz demonstrates a similar set of concerns. In the face of the failure of classical liberal ‘idealism,’ which, for him, included the neo-classical economics of Hayek and von Mises (Herz, 1951: 43–128), he worried about a correspondingly one-sided victory of a realist power politics and cautioned that the ‘Adoption of this point of view would mean the ultimate ethical victory of the “Machiavellian”, power-political, fascist, and related values over those of liberalism, humanitarianism, pacifism, etc.’ (Herz, 1964: 131). In light of this unacceptable alternative, Herz called explicitly for the development of a ‘Realist Liberalism’ (Herz, 1964: 132) as a kind of ‘second liberalism’ (Herz, 1951: 146) which could learn from the failure of its predecessors. ¹⁵

These issues were not simply philosophic concerns: they were seen as vital in political judgment and debate, and in assessing the implications for politics and state policy, including foreign policy, posed by the rise of mass politics. ¹⁶ The thinkers of the IR enlightenment did not take the state as a rational actor for granted. They were instead deeply concerned with the nature of state action under conditions of political modernity. In the context of the first half of the 20th century, this question was inescapable for those trying to understand how mass politics seemed implicated in extreme forms of mass violence and in the instability of liberal polities rather than generating liberal peace.

These concerns were reflected in assessments of how liberal modernity had produced conditions for new forms of particularly violent nationalism that differed in vital ways from the liberal nationalism of the 19th century. For Morgenthau, the particularly destructive and unlimited nature of modern nationalism was directly connected to its location within liberal modernity both in relation to modern subjectivity and to modern (liberal, capitalist, bureaucratic) social and state structures. In terms of subjectivity, the ‘empty’ or wholly skeptical versions of 20th-century liberalism had left individuals in an anomic social condition without meaning. As sociology and political economy, 19th-century liberalism consistently failed to understand its role in forms of domination domestically and internationally, as well as its place in the social production of anomie and alienation. Nationalistic universalism in general, and fascism in particular, Morgenthau argued (and Neibuhr and Herz concurred), were products of liberal modernity, not its simple opposites. The nation of the ‘new nationalism,’ he argued, had dissolved the tension between morality and power by subsuming both under its own universalizing desire and meeting — however destructively — the needs of its members for meaning and security in the world that liberal modernity had produced. As a result, the ‘nation, deeming itself intellectually and morally self-sufficient, threatens civilization and the human race with extinction.’ Nationalism by itself, he argued, is no solution to the problem of political order and justice, as the fate of post-Versailles liberalism all too clearly showed: ‘How different that world is from the world our fathers thought they lived in! Nationalism, they thought, meant of necessity freedom, civilization and justice; we know now that it can also mean slavery, barbarism and death’ (Morgenthau, 1962: 194).

Like the political studies enlightenment, these IR theorists were interested in the changing nature of the state and in state–society relations. In particular, they sought to theorize and foster a liberal realist culture that could build upon the virtues of the Enlightenment without succumbing to its potential darkness. To this end, Herz engaged with the question of culture in mass politics, seeking to confront the conservative charge (as potent then as now) that liberalism could not provide a cultural and ‘esthetic’ basis for a robust liberal polity (1964: 147–153). Morgenthau, in turn, took on the question of the Purpose of American Politics (1966) in notably Arendt-influenced tones, in a searching enquiry into the pitfalls and potential of American liberal democracy.

Niebuhr, most directly of all, engaged in influential attempts to construct a position that Eyal Naveh (2002) has nicely captured as ‘non-utopian liberalism,’ and even sought to develop a dramaturgical understanding of the self to provide it with a more robust set of theoretical foundations (Niebuhr, 1955b). His consistent and often vitriolic attacks on the progressive liberalism and pragmatism to which he had once been attracted were not instruments in the service of reactionary conservatism. His realism sought to provide an alternative to both. With its belief in a harmony of interests, liberal rationalism could not grasp domination and conflict domestically or internationally. As liberal pluralism domestically, it could not grasp the weakness of liberal states in the face of modern forms of alienation, domination, and dislocation, and the non-liberal political actors and challenges (both domestic and international) that arose from these dynamics. ¹⁷ These issues were, again, of utmost concern in an era of mass politics. Unable to grasp the power of non-liberal political programs, and to see their connections to economic and social developments, Enlightenment liberalism was weak to the point of the destruction of Enlightenment and liberal values altogether. The analogous engagement of realists such as Morgenthau (2012 [1932]) and Herz (1980) with the key figure of Carl Schmitt was not in order to advocate his vision of politics as an existential divide between friend and enemy, it was to take on what they saw as the most formidable opponent of liberal politics in order to grasp its weaknesses, to bolster its defenses, and to foster its reform. ¹⁸

Whether in the form of Morgenthau’s assault on ‘scientific man,’ Neibuhr’s warnings to (and about) the ‘Children of Light,’ or Herz’s overt attempt to develop a ‘realist liberalism’ in response to the demonstrated inadequacies of classical liberalism and the unproductive dichotomy of political realism and political idealism, the argument was never simply about the perils of naivete in the face of power politics. It was also and always about how Enlightenment modernity had created its own perils; how if liberalism remained unaware of these dynamics, it was unlikely to be capable of confronting them; and how a liberalism capable of doing so might be constructed, drawing particularly on a refashioned understanding of the intellectual, cultural, and material resources (and deficiencies) of the United States (Tjalve, 2008).

Seen in this light, IR was an ‘American social science’ in a much deeper sense than is usually captured by Stanley Hoffman’s famous characterization of it as ‘applied Enlightenment’ (1977: 219). It did not emerge solely in the context of a struggle over American foreign policy, or even as part of a contest over the nature of social science. It was also, crucially, part of a struggle over the legacy of the Enlightenment and the nature and future of American liberalism, including that country’s self-understanding, and the implications of that self-understanding for American politics and its place and actions in the world. The IR enlightenment’s appraisal of America was crucial to its political project: it was the nature of American liberal-democracy that was crucial — and not only for America, but for liberalism’s future itself.

IR, then, at least in the form of the ‘Realist gambit’ of the IR enlightenment, was about creating a theory and an intellectual breathing space where these issues and analyses could be taken seriously and from which it might have influence. Recognizing this has implications not only for thinking about the ‘beginnings’ of the field, but also for the stories that are told about its development. Consider in this light the device of the ‘great debates’ that exercises a continuing hold on renditions of the origins and evolution of the field. As recent scholarship into this issue has shown, the question of whether there ever really was an interwar ‘first great debate’ between Idealists and Realists is open to serious question. Indeed, as Brian Schmidt (2012) has recently argued, to the extent that such a debate existed, it did so largely in the retroactive accounts of post-war realist thinkers rather than in the 1920s or 1930s. ¹⁹

In fact, the first two ‘debates’ — between realism and utopianism, and science versus traditionalism — were in reality two sides of the same debate, at the center of which was the IR enlightenment’s attempt to defend its specific vision of liberal politics. As the focal point — and often key protagonists — in both these debates, the IR enlightenment sought to insulate liberal politics and its form of liberal realism from the dangers of rationalist liberalism in the guise of facile pluralism (the first debate) or naive scientism and rationalism (the second debate). ²⁰ The claims of political ‘science’ not only confronted the intractability of human agency, they also overlooked the ways that scientific thinking replayed the naivete of interwar liberal politics and blithely ignored the role of scientific neutrality and rationality in the process of desolation of World War II, issues that continued to haunt the world in an era of increasing destructive capability and nuclear weapons. ²¹ Morgenthau’s decision to address these issues by returning in his last book (1972) to critiques of instrumentality that he had first developed more than three decades earlier testifies to this concern. Even more systematic and substantial is Herz’s engagement with the question of technology in areas that we now tend to remember, if at all, in light of nuclear weapons, but which extended to the wider issues of technology and mass politics that were seen as central to the fate of liberalism. ²² What are often in IR treated as two separate ‘debates’ were thus in fact two connected battles waged from within the same position — and in important ways at the same historical juncture — as the IR enlightenment sought to defend its desolated form of enlightenment in both these directions.

Like the political studies enlightenment, the goal of thinkers such as Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Herz was that: ‘After their encounter with desolation without requital they treated analytical learning as a pathway to knowledge about how humankind might secure the benefits of Enlightenment without staggering into unreason. In these ways, they sought to create a new knowledge base for a more capable political liberalism,’ and to create a ‘political studies that could repel anti-liberal predators and help guarantee battered but cherished values’ (Katznelson, 2003: 4, 3). In Bell’s apt characterization, they sought to create an international political theory that could use a critique of the limitations of the Enlightenment and rationalist liberalism to construct a self-critical ‘liberal realism’ which shared realpolitik’s concern with order but did so ‘to defend the conditions necessary for the flourishing of liberal states in a brutally competitive world’ (2009a: 16).

Finally, like the political studies enlightenment, the IR enlightenment saw the future of the United States as a key issue. This was not simply an engagement driven by America’s emergence as a world power, by geopolitics, or an uncritical nationalism. It reflected a complex belief that the United States was central to any hope for the future of a liberal politics in its political meaning as well as its geopolitical power. America needed to provide a non-rationalist liberal alternative with both intellectual and political power — and the discipline of IR needed to support this enterprise. To this end, the IR enlightenment did not turn to realpolitik, or to traditional conservatism or elitism. They did not seek simply to teach ‘European’ truths about power politics to naive Americans. They also sought to understand and explain the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism, to clarify their relationship to international politics and to the United States’ place in the world, and to use the United States as the basis for a revived, confident, and yet chastened and prudent form of liberal realism (Tjalve and Williams, forthcoming).

The return of liberal realism?

It is difficult to think about the end of something, or even to use the device of ‘the end’ for thinking about our current position, without having some sense of what ‘it’ was and is. My goal in reconstructing the liberal realism of the IR enlightenment is not necessarily to defend it, but rather to urge that we cannot know what its strengths and weaknesses are until we have a clearer and more complete grasp of what it was. The implications of engaging this history seem to me considerable, and although they cut across issues far too extensive to be treated in detail here, I would like to touch in particular on their significance for the future of liberalism in IR.

Taking seriously the IR enlightenment challenges fundamentally the basic divide between realism and liberalism that continues to dominate narratives of the origins of the field and discussions of its alternatives. These paradigmatic divisions have allowed both realism and liberalism in their rationalist forms to develop as parallel tracks that rarely intersect substantively, except when one or the other uses their shared underlying rationalist assumptions to attempt to subsume one within the other. ²³ Putting the IR enlightenment front and center directly challenges this structure. The issues which dominated these forms of ‘classical’ realism were central to liberalism, and in the eyes of many of the key figures in post-war IR, no serious account of liberal politics could avoid dealing with them. The liberal realism of the IR enlightenment saw itself as doing more than rejecting facile forms of liberalism — it saw itself as trying to save a form of liberalism by looking hard at the legacy of desolation and trying to address it. The historical forgetting of these concerns has too often allowed a denuded liberalism in IR to continue blithely on, as if none of the desolation had ever happened, or as if it had little or nothing to do with liberalism itself. At the same time, it allows large parts of contemporary realism to operate without a serious engagement with either its own historical relationship to liberalism, or with the revival of powerful currents of liberal thought that remain politically vital. ²⁴ Putting the IR enlightenment back into disciplinary history puts this issue back on the contemporary agenda as well.

The fate of the IR enlightenment also helps us explain what Chris Reus-Smit once insightfully called ‘the strange death of liberal international theory’ (2001). In conducting this post-mortem, Reus-Smit was not, of course, reflecting on the death of liberal institutionalism in IR. Instead, he wondered what had become of the rich tradition of liberal thinking about world politics that once existed, and how liberal IR today had become reduced to a pale shadow of its historical self, largely denuded of its political edge. As he put it, ‘The “new liberalism” abandons the political in two ways: it expels normative reflection and argument from the realm of legitimate social scientific inquiry; and it embraces a rationalist conception of human agency that reduces all political action to strategic interaction’ (Reus-Smit, 2001: 574).

The absence of the liberal realism of the IR enlightenment has been a crucial enabling factor in the ascendance of this restricted form of liberalism. The relationship between realism and liberalism, for example, became cast as opposing ‘logics’ within essentially the same rationalist vision of explanation and enquiry, even if the two remained opposed — often rather confusingly — in disciplinary rhetoric; but the engagement between realism and liberalism lost virtually all of the political content and context of the post-war era. Reducing realism to a categorical (and often crude) opponent of liberalism by writing the IR enlightenment out of the discipline’s history has allowed rationalist liberalism to insulate itself from some of its most substantial and sophisticated theoretical and historical critics, while at the same time allowing liberal-institutionalism to position itself as the sole liberal alternative to a narrowly realist power politics. Recovering the liberal realism of the IR enlightenment may thus, perhaps ironically, provide support for a wider, revivified liberalism in IR or at least a more productive critical engagement with it.

Finally, as IR moved ever closer toward rationalist political science, it became blind to the issues of the IR enlightenment in precisely the ways that the latter’s advocates feared it would. ²⁵ IR lost its previous skepticism toward social ‘science’ and became in many ways a standard-bearer for precisely the kinds of political knowledge that the IR enlightenment had been at pains to reject and which they sought to construct the field of IR in opposition toward. ²⁶ Indeed, if one wished to be particularly provocative, it is possible to say that from this perspective, what is often taken as the defining moment in the invention of IR theory — the publication of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics — actually marked the culmination of a move away from the field’s beginnings and represents the ‘end’ of IR theory as conceived by the IR enlightenment. From that point onward, the irredentist analytic and political concerns of its earlier beginnings were almost fully eclipsed. The concerns of the IR enlightenment, with its complex sociological and philosophical enquiries into liberal modernity, its engagement with the nature of the modern state, and its concern with mass politics, almost disappeared as IR was re-subsumed within the conventions of American social science that the proponents of post-war liberal realism had opposed and sought to avoid.

And so it seemed likely to stay; yet recent years have perhaps surprisingly seen clear signs of a revival of this realist sensibility from within IR and — intriguingly, but less well recognized — from outside it. The first revival came from two often, but not necessarily, related sources: disciplinary history (including that of realism) and the upsurge in interest in non-rationalist theory. ²⁷ For the first, the goal has been to replace the shibboleths that for so long (and still) passed as accounts of the history of the field with properly historical accounts of its development, concerns, and context. The goal was to tell the story of IR not as a continuous narrative of an undifferentiated realism, or of the social-scientific triumph of rationalism, but to uncover the real concerns of these thinkers and to use serious disciplinary history to rescue them from disciplinary hagiography. However, this interest was never purely ‘historical’ — it was often part of the wider methodenstreit that emerged in the mid-1980s, and was an important part of the methodological critique of rationalism as IR’s theoretical foundation. Here, resuscitating classical realism, and arguing that it has not reached its ‘end,’ has become a means of attempting to widen the debate over the future of the field. ²⁸

A second source of revival emerges from developments in political theory. While numerous analyses of ‘classical’ realism in IR have traced its gradual marginalization in the field at the hands of rationalist political science, it is less often noted how a second dimension of this estrangement from political studies occurred as political theory — an area with which realism was once quite closely identified — became increasingly normative. ²⁹ Whether this took the form of abstract normative enquiries under the influence of rights theorists such as Rawls, or the ‘deliberative’ turn of much democratic theory, the increasingly abstract and ideal forms that came to dominate political theory provided little ground for engaging with the concerns of the IR enlightenment, and were often cast in (largely misrecognized) opposition to its very principles. ³⁰

There are intriguing signs that this may now in some ways be changing with the development of a revived realism in political theory. ³¹ As William Galston has argued, this diffuse yet identifiable new realism has emerged in reaction to the ‘high liberalism’ of figures such as Rawls and Dworkin, and is united by the view that ‘high liberalism represents a desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics’ (Galston, 2010: 386). ³² In his view, this realism is defined by three generally — though not universally — shared principles. First, that political life is inescapably pluralistic, with little possibility of agreement on what it means to ‘live well’ - a problem that cannot be resolved in Rawlsian terms by ‘shifting focus from the good to the right’ because ‘agreement on justice is not to be expected either.’ In consequence, realists believe that ‘the agreement needed to launch and sustain politics lies on another plane entirely,’ one in which ‘individuals must agree that the core challenge of politics is to overcome anarchy without embracing tyranny. For if we do agree on this, we can create an arena of contestation over the terms of a common life that contains conflict short of war’ (Galston, 2010: 391).

Second, much ‘realist’ political theory stresses that politics is an autonomous domain, one that ‘requires the exercise of judgment, which is undetermined by any principles — economic, legal, moral — one may accept’ (Galston, 2010: 391), and follows the identifiably Machiavellian injunction that ‘many reasons that are legitimate within their own sphere would be inappropriate as bases of political judgement … political morality is not the same as individual morality and may often contradict it’ (Galston, 2010: 392). This realism is thus ‘resolutely anti-utopian,’ stressing that morality must not only take into account the feasibility of principles under existing political circumstances, but must operate in frank acknowledgment that not all actors will agree with given moral principles or act according to them. Realist political theory thus tends to prioritize avoiding the worst rather than pursuing the ideal, and it assumes neither virtuous action nor full compliance.

Finally, Galston argues that realism’s treating politics outside the confines of narrowly moral or dialogical categories has important implications for political conflict. Drawing particularly on Bernard Williams, he claims that ‘treating our adversaries “as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers — whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth”’ (Galston, 2010: 397; the quote is from Williams B, 2005: 13). ³³

These principles may sound strangely reminiscent of classical realism, and so they are; for although it has little engagement with IR, the new realism in political theory in many ways harkens back to the principles of the political studies enlightenment, and thus to those of its IR ‘counterpart’ as well. Indeed, William Scheuerman (2012) has gone so far as to argue that the realism of post-war thinkers in IR is in many ways superior to that of their contemporary namesakes in political theory. Be this as it may, there is little doubt that these developments tie the realism of the IR enlightenment directly back into concerns of political theory from which it has too long been excluded. It may well be that the possibility of reconnecting the IR enlightenment to wider currents in contemporary political theory and analysis has rarely been more propitious.

Conclusion: Between past and future

As with the idea of an end to something, the idea of beginnings is fraught with perils. As Edward Said argued in an astute treatment, beginnings can easily be cast as a quest for origins, points (like many views of endings) that are final and defining, and that provide a ‘divine, mythical and privileged’ position that effectively closes down discussion and reflection through the declaration of clear beginnings and ends (1985: xiii). However, this is not the only way to think about beginnings. The question of beginnings can also act as a spur to reflection on where one is, and where one is going. In this more creative sense, Said notes, the idea of beginnings is not an arbitrary, sometimes authoritarian, and ultimately futile quest for absolute origins or terminations, but an opportunity to rethink one’s current position by asking the question of where one began. Beginnings and endings, in this sense, are, in Said’s words, an invitation to a ‘constant re-experiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose force is neither to give rise to authority nor to promote orthodoxy but to stimulate self-conscious and situated activity’ (1985: xiv). While there is, therefore, little doubt that the very idea of endings is in many ways suspect, bringing with it claims of origin and notions of teleology or evolution that inevitably turn out to be arbitrary or biased (declarations of ‘the end,’ of course, almost inevitably come hand in hand with attacks upon the ‘illusion of the end’), the more substantial attraction of thinking about endings lies in its capacity to reopen assumptions about beginnings and to disrupt existing accounts of developments and trajectories and their associated orthodoxies. It is in this more open, positive, and reflective sense that I have tried to use the idea of ‘the end of IR theory’ here.

Recovering the liberal realism of the IR enlightenment runs against the grain of many, perhaps most, prevailing understandings of the intellectual evolution of the field, as well as its current categorical and conceptual divides. Like any account of beginnings, its value lies in what — hopefully — it reveals, not in its ability to resolve a question of origins once and for all. Amongst a range of historical and theoretical issues, what I most hope it reveals is that taking the ‘origins’ of the field seriously requires understanding that in the very effort to establish IR as an autonomous sphere of enquiry, ‘the battle over method was also a battle over politics’ (Guilhot, 2011). Equally, however, the implications of this recognition are by no means clear. For Guilhot, for instance, ‘implicit in this (realist) vision of politics was the idea that policy making should not be the preserve of rationalist experts, but of men of judgment … aware that the truths of international politics could not be easily accepted by the public of democratic polities. The nascent discipline ensured the permanence of an elitist and conservative tradition that deeply shaped its politics’ (2011: 129–130). ³⁴ A similar concern has been raised from a different direction by Ian Hall (2011) who in an astute survey of recent attempts to re-engage classical realism raises the provocative question of whether the renewed interest in older forms of realism, with their dark metaphysics and connections to controversial figures such as Carl Schmitt, amounts to the revival (and perhaps even the ‘triumph’) of anti-liberalism in parts of IR theory that its proponents, perhaps ironically, may not appreciate or anticipate.

These are important challenges, and they raise issues that go to the heart of taking seriously the political entailments of IR theory. Yet, as I hope to have shown, an appreciation of the IR enlightenment takes the issue in importantly different directions, and raises concerns well beyond the return to a conservative realism. ³⁵ The critique of rationalist (and other variations) of liberalism pursued by the IR enlightenment was not undertaken in support of a relatively traditional conservatism. Here, I think, it differs importantly from other thinkers with which it is often identified, such as Kennan, Nitze, and Lippman. Although there were no doubt affinities between these figures, and with many elements of conservative (and other) forms of thought, the IR Enlightenment was not straightforwardly anti-liberal, and its critique was designed neither wholly to repudiate Enlightenment principles nor to destroy liberal values. In its origins, IR was constituted not by straightforward opposition to liberalism, but by complex controversies over what liberalism was — and between conflicting visions of liberalism and what they demanded politically. The strand of realism that I have traced here in (and as) the IR enlightenment stands not only in negative relation to liberal rationalism, but in positive relation to the recognizably non-rationalist liberalism that characterized key members of Katznelson’s political studies enlightenment, as well as later thinkers such as Judith Shklar. ³⁶ Here, the IR enlightenment needs to be reconnected to the substantial reconsideration now under way of what used to be disparagingly dismissed as ‘Cold War liberalism’ (Muller, 2008).

None of this implies, of course, that either the IR enlightenment or the wider political studies enlightenment of which I have suggested it was a part had all the answers. However, just as a more serious engagement with these forms of thinking has been taking place in political theory, a similar engagement could only benefit IR, marking an end to its decades-long alienation from political theory, and providing links to wider movements in political science outside rationalist liberalism. Moreover, at a time when the appeal of classical realism seems to be gaining appeal in many quarters, it is useful to be as clear as possible about what this post-war realism was, its limitations, and how it differs from other potential versions of realism and their implications. ³⁷ While the thinkers of the IR enlightenment were deeply aware of older traditions of thought, and of their own connections to them, they were equally conscious of the fact that they confronted a political modernity that rendered straightforward appeal to older ideas deeply problematic.

These issues may well take on renewed importance today, when speculation about the fate of liberal states in a rapidly changing global order has once again become commonplace. We must in this setting again reassess the nature of liberal politics. Crusades or despair, uncritical valorization or reckless denunciation, comfortable naiveté and irresponsible panic have all been part of the dynamics of liberal responses to its dilemmas. At times, the IR enlightenment showed itself susceptible to the worst of them as well. But at other times, it sought something more substantial. If IR cannot rise to these challenges, then it may well be facing an end (at least in a political, if not an institutional, sense) and it would deserve to do so. But this is not a foregone conclusion, and the IR enlightenment may yet help show us how it might be otherwise.