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C H A P T E R T H R E E CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY THE MAJOR APPROACHES to international relations theory that emerged in the twentieth century developed directly out of the thought of the political philosophers described in the previous chapter. Michael W. Doyle divides this thought into three strands that have shaped international relations theory in the twentieth century: realism, liberalism, and socialism (or Marxism). Doyle associates Machiavelli and Hobbes (along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau) with realism; Locke, commercial pacifists like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, and Kant with liberalism; and Marx with socialism.1 In the twentieth century, each of these strands developed more systematic approaches to understanding international relations, including the origins of war. CLASSICAL REALISM Proponents of the school of international relations theory known as realism tend to think of states as self-interested seekers of power and are relatively pessimistic about the possibilities of overcoming conflict among states. Realism developed in the middle of the twentieth century, in part as a reaction against forms of liberalism, described later in this chapter, that were inspired by Locke, Kant, and the utilitarians. It drew on a tradition going back to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides and looked to modern thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes for inspiration. Liberals such as United States President Woodrow Wilson and the writers Norman Angell, Alfred Zimmern, and G. Lowe Dickinson were generally confident in the possibility of bringing about peace through education and believed that history was inevitably progressing toward peace, manifested in the creation of the League of Nations.2 In contrast, the first generation of realists , sometimes called the classical realists, argued that human nature is flawed and therefore not perfectible, and that politics inevitably involves a struggle for power. International politics is characterized by conflict, and although that conflict can be moderated, it can never be pacified.3 The events leading up to the Second World War and the inability of liberal leaders and institutions to prevent that war, and then the beginning of the cold war, greatly increased the 53 54 Chapter Three plausibility of realism, to such an extent that today, “Realism is widely regarded as the most influential theoretical tradition in International Relations, even by its harshest critics.”4 Government figures such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger were influential realists, but two of the most important realist thinkers were Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau. Reinhold Niebuhr The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) developed a Christian realism that was rooted in his account of human nature. According to Michael Joseph Smith, “Niebuhr without question [was] the most profound thinker of the modern realist school.”5 The movement known as Christian realism began with the publication of Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society in 1932. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Christian realism had become a major force in Christian theology, dominating the thinking of the Protestant ecumenical group the World Council of Churches, but it also had an important influence on the field of international relations theory.6 The fact that Niebuhr’s was a Christian realism was something of an exception to the general trend of modern political thought to explain politics in nonreligious terms; nonetheless, Niebuhr’s thought still exhibits many of the same characteristics as that of other modern thinkers. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr writes that the defining characteristic of human nature is our self-awareness of our finitude. The human mind rebels against this finitude, transforming the natural desire for self-preservation into a desire to make one’s finite perspective universal by imposing it on others.7 This extension of desire applies to groups as well as individuals: “Every group, as every individual, has expansive desires which are rooted in the instinct of survival and soon extend beyond it. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.”8 Niebuhr at times refers to the attempt to make a particular and partial point of view universal as “idolatry,” and elsewhere calls it “original sin.”9 Human persons vary greatly in time and culture, but this underlying aspect of human nature is universal.10 Niebuhr argues that because of this universal desire for self-aggrandizement, politics is primarily a struggle for power. The tendency to make one’s partial point of view universal leads individuals and groups to confuse their own political interests with moral ideals, leading to hypocrisy and self-deception, so that even the most virtuous political actions...

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