Abstract
Martin Wight established a famous dichotomy between, on the one hand, the tradition of political theory that since Plato and Aristotle has sought to establish the conditions by which mankind might progress to some ideal of the “good life” within the state and, on the other hand, international theory, which focusing on relations between states, that amounts to little more than a depressing account of the eternal recurrence of war and the balance of power.1 Whereas students of domestic politics assume the presence of some sort of governmental system in which law and institutions override the naked struggle for power, students of international politics presume that government in any meaningful sense is absent and those laws and institutions that do exist are always vulnerable to the machinations of power politics.2 Although Wight was personally attuned to the tragic nature of international politics, this dichotomy has served to legitimize International Relations as an academic discipline in so far as study of the anarchic relations between states has become its sole preserve. Yet, as Justin Rosenberg observes, this disciplinary identity is secure only as long as the idea of the sovereign state retains its legitimacy: “the same absolute character of the sovereignty of the modern state that is the foundation of order within national boundaries simultaneously dictates the persistence of an external condition of anarchy among states.”3
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Notes
Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory,” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17–34.
Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), pp. 101 and 102.
Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of The Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), p. 142.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , tr. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1929), p. 80.
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Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 15.
Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” reprinted in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 129–77, at p. 138.
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 198.
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 14.
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© 2010 Jeremy Larkins
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Larkins, J. (2010). International Relations, Political Theory, and the Territorial State. In: From Hierarchy to Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101555_2
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