Abstract:
Stefano Guzzini's study offers an understanding of the evolution of the realist tradition within International Relations and International Political Economy. It sees the realist tradition not as a school of thought with a static set of fixed principles, but as a repeatedly failed attempt to turn the rules of European diplomacy into the laws of a US social science. Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy concentrates on the evolution of a leading school of thought, its critiques and its institutional environment. As such it will provide an invaluable basis to anyone studying international relations theory.
Table of Contents:
-- 1. Assumptions of a historical sociology of realism
-- 2. Classical realism: Carr, Morgenthau and the crisis of collective security
-- 3. evolution of realist core concepts during the second debate
-- 4. Realism and the US policy of containment
-- 5. turning point of the Cuban missile crisis: crisis management and the expanding research agenda
-- 6. Epilogue: Soviet theories of International Relations
-- 7. policy of detente: Kissinger and the limits of concert diplomacy
-- 8. International Relations in disarray: the inter-paradigm debate
-- 9. Systemic neorealism: Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics
-- 10. International Political Economy as an attempt to update realism: the end of the Bretton-Woods system and hegemonic stability theory
-- 11. International Political Economy at the convergence of realism and structuralism
-- 12. Realism gets lost: the epistemological turn of the 1980s and 1990s
-- 13. Realism at a crossroads.