Anarchy Is What States Make of It

Abstract

ANARCHY AND POWER POLITICS . . . Classical realists such as Thomas Hobbes, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau attributed egoism and power politics primarily to human nature, whereas structural realists or neorealists emphasize anarchy. The difference stems in part from different interpretations of anarchy’s causal powers. Kenneth Waltz’s work is important for both. In Man, the State, and War, he defines anarchy as a condition of possibility for or “permissive” cause of war, arguing that “wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them.”1 It is the human nature or domestic politics of predator states, however, that provide the initial impetus or “efficient” cause of conflict which forces other states to respond in kind. Waltz is not entirely consistent about this, since he slips without justification from the permissive causal claim that in anarchy war is always possible to the active causal claim that “war may at any moment occur.”2 But despite Waltz’s concluding call for third-image theory, the efficient causes that initialize anarchic systems are from the first and second images. This is reversed in Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, in which first-and second-image theories are spurned as “reductionist,” and the logic of anarchy seems by itself to constitute self-help and power politics as necessary features of world politics.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.