‘Misreadings’ in IR: Reassessing Morgenthau, Ideology Critique, and the Reification Problem

Abstract

Mainstream IR teaches not only that Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes had established a realist tradition in international political thought, but, too, that Hans J. Morgenthau plays a role as a distinctive precursor of neo-realism. These identifications are not only supposed to ensure the positions of neo-realism by referencing ‘heroic figures’ of the discipline (in a wider sense), but they serve for the deduction and explanation of central neo-realist theorems. I will argue that Waltz and the emerging neo-realist mainstream misread Morgenthau and not only constructed a long-standing ‘realist’ tradition by ‘rewriting history’ (according to Kahler, 1997, p. 23), but further to this posited an immediate ‘realist’ — neo-realist unity by declaring neo-realism to be the scientific successor of realist thought amounted and represented in Morgenthau (see foremost Waltz, 1990). This section identifies the statement of a ‘realist’ — neo-realist unity as a misreading of Morgenthau by the IR mainstream and attempts to reassess the work of Morgenthau and identify this misreading as one contemporary example of the same types of misreadings discussed in Parts I and II with regard to the history of international political thought. The reassessment of Morgenthau in the light of Waltzian and IR mainstream constructions holds that, contrary to the assumption that both Morgenthau’s ‘realism’ and neo-realism could be understood as grand theories, they are deeply rooted in the historical context of twentieth-century inter-national politics.