Waltz, Realism and Democracy
| Author | Michael C. Williams |
| Date | 01 September 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117809340490 |
| Published date | 01 September 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
328 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23(3)
Waltz, Realism and Democracy
Michael C. Williams
Abstract
Waltz is generally seen as one the most important advocates of a systemic theory of
international politics that stresses the importance of international anarchy and margin-
alizes domestic politics. Locating Waltz’s thinking against debates within realism in the
1950s, and drawing especially on his neglected Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics,
this article argues that Waltz’s thinking actually contains powerful domestic political
dimensions that centre on a defence of democratic foreign policymaking. Rather than
marginalizing domestic politics, Waltz’s theory – and his critique of classical realism – is
in part actually a subtle intervention in domestic politics.
Keywords: democracy, culture, Walter Lippmann, realism, Kenneth Waltz
Intellectual historians are fond of stressing the need for context in understanding a
particular text or thinker. By looking at context, they suggest, we can gain a clearer
sense of the issues that a particular thinker was trying to confront, and the otherwise
sometimes hidden debates in which they may have been engaged. In the case of
Kenneth Waltz and international relations (IR) such a contextual dimension has not
been totally absent. Though the lion’s share of commentary, debate and criticism
surrounding Waltz’s theory has focused on questions of conceptual cogency and
analytic rigour, these methodological debates have often explicitly located them-
selves within traditions of social theory and developments in the social sciences that
provide important background for Waltz’s thinking. Whether formulated in terms of
the infl uence of ‘positivist’ understandings of science in the evolution of the fi eld
of IR, or ‘rationalist’ or structural-functionalist forms of social theory in the social
sciences as a whole, Waltz’s thinking has often been implicitly or explicitly con-
textualized as part of these developments, albeit within the parameters of the debates
over method that have dominated discussions of his work as a whole.1
There are, of course, many good reasons for this focus, not least the powerful
status of Waltz’s methodological contributions to the study of world politics, and his
own tendency to formulate and defend his claims in terms of his own methodological
position; and there is equally little doubt that the most intelligent, incisive, and
productive debates surrounding Waltz’s thinking have taken place in these terms. In
this paper, however, I would like to suggest the value of taking a rather different path.
Instead of focusing primarily on Theory of International Politics, and locating Waltz
against the background of controversies over the nature of social science, it may be
revealing to shift the interpretive context to a much earlier time and an apparently very
different set of concerns and debates. This context lies in debates within American
© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:
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[DOI: 10.1177/0047117809340490]
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