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Left Behind: Neorealism’s Truncated Contextual Materialism and Republicanism

Anarchy and the balance of power are the two core ideas in Waltz’s neorealism, and he explicitly draws them from early modern political theory, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. Unfortunately, Waltz leaves behind a key variable in these early modern state-of-nature arguments: violence interdependence — the capacity of actors to harm one another (independent of distribution of power). This difference between the extreme insecurity of the state of nature and the tractable insecurity of the state of war derives from different degrees of violence interdependence. The variable is implicit but powerful in Hobbes, and explicit in Rousseau’s analysis of topographic fragmentation as a foundation for the European state system. As the effects of the industrial revolution made themselves felt, many theorists (the global geopoliticans, Carr and many liberals) continued to employ the variable Waltz dropped, and they generally argued that Europe had shifted from a state-of-war to a state-of-nature anarchy, thus posing the choice of catastrophe or integration. Herz and Morgenthau continue this argument in the nuclear era, reaching very different conclusions than Waltz. Similarly, the balance of power was conceived by early modern republican theorists as the counter to hierarchy, and this was transposed to the ‘system level’ via the device of referring to Europe as a whole as a ‘republic’ that was in part ‘by nature’. Other important republican power restraints (notably division, mixture and union) were dropped by Waltz but are developed by liberal globalist security theory.

Key Words: anarchy • balance of power • E. H. Carr • Thomas Hobbes • republic of Europe • republicanism • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • state of nature • violence interdependence • Kenneth Waltz

International Relations, Vol. 23, No. 3, 341-371 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0047117809340476


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