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Part Two of the book begins with a discussion of realist and English School of International Relations approaches to writing international history, in which the author argues that the appreciation of history that underpinned early English School thinking was reminiscent of that which also framed ‘traditional classical’ realist approaches to the subject. The author refutes D. C. Copeland's (2003) structuralist critique of the English School and argues that the School's early thinkers may provide a teleological account of agent‐led historical change that could enable traditional realists to regain ground lost to the structuralists in the past few decades. Focusing on the conceptions of history of two distinguished members of the English School, E. H. Carr and Herbert Butterfield (although their views are in some respects diametrically opposed), he argues that both implicitly accepted different renditions of a teleological view of history. He advances a case for treating human actions as directed to the agent's – both individual and collective – goals and purposes, an idea that scientific empiricism would be obliged to reject but which may unite the English School and traditional political realism. In addition, he suggests that the mix of English School and political realism provided by Carr and Butterfield offers an understanding of history that can challenge dominant neorealist and neoliberal accounts in two principal ways: first, in that it offers an account of history that focuses on the intentional actions of actors, and second, because it provides a convincing method for identifying the causes of historical change by focusing on the reasons for change.

This chapter examines the idea of cosmopolitan justice, or the application of egalitarian principles to relations between nations. Three primary challenges to this application are considered: the doctrine of state sovereignty in international law and political theory, which holds that the internal affairs of states ought to be the exclusive prerogative of national governments; the theory of political realism, which denies the existence of valid normative ideals within international relations, maintaining instead that the advancement of national interests are the only defensible aims in policy such as that affecting climate; and the anti-cosmopolitanism of Rawls and some of his allies, maintaining that principles of justice can only apply within some societies, denying that the aggregate global effects of anthropogenic climate change raise any distinctive problems for justice itself. The case for cosmopolitan justice (by Beitz and others) is examined, paying particular attention to its application to problems of global climate.

This final chapter points toward an alternative position that critically retrieves the realisms of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sharon Welch, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and finds a middle way between the idealistic realism about moral grounding found in Ruether and some early feminists, and the radically relative political realism of Welch and some other postmodern feminists. This alternative joins an appeal to human self‐transcendence and divine transcendence with an affirmation of human boundedness and divine presence. At the same time, it takes seriously, Ruether's turn to creation and Welch's turn to community. In this alternative model – a feminist Christian realism – the author hopes to maintain both substantive grounding for moral claims and critical judgment of them.

An examination is made of Sharon Welch's political realist position. Welch, in contrast to Ruether, locates moral norms and the divine in particular human communities, and all moral claims are radically relative to those particular contexts. Appeals to an experience or reality that transcends our interactions in communities are illusory justifications of our own relative positions, since only within community interaction can we transcend ourselves as we see the limitations of our understandings through the criticism of others. Welch is a political realist in the sense that she is suspicious of the power interests hidden behind truth claims, and she is cynical in her skepticism of any substantive grounding for moral claims. It is shown that each of these proposals undercuts a crucial aspect of feminist moral judgment and, thus, does not lessen, but rather unintentionally supports, further domination.

Stephen D. Krasner is conventionally regarded as a realist student of international political economy. But he is equally an institutional theorist, who has made major contributions to our understanding of international regimes and sovereignty as well as of the difference between control and authority in world politics. Krasner also shares much common ground with constructivists, because of his emphasis on the role of ideas and identity and his discussion of the role of social norms, as applied, or violated, by agents. His distinguished work on sovereignty emphasizes these themes. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Steve Krasner’s insightful perspective on world politics could be usefully focused on the important but under-theorized concept of persuasion. Progress in understanding persuasion is more likely to be made by combining concepts—as Krasner has done in such a distinguished fashion throughout his career—than by using only one perspective, realist, institutionalist, or constructivist. Indeed, Krasner’s work is a refutation of the view that these three approaches to world politics are mutually exclusive.

No theory gives state power a more central place than realism. Indeed, the term “power politics” is often synonymous with realism and realpolitik foreign policy, but making the concept of power tractable has been a challenge even for realists. No scholar better exemplifies the intellectual challenges of making realism a robust social scientific theory than Stephen Krasner. Throughout his career he has wrestled with realism’s promises and limitations. He reinvigorated concepts of relative state power in his analysis of foreign policy and international institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s came to question realism’s assumptions about unitary states and the fundamentals of state sovereignty. At the turn of the century, he was abandoning his neorealist colleagues and pointing out fundamental contradictions between realism’s ontology of fully sovereign autonomous states and realism’s assumption of anarchy in which states can further their interests by altering the domestic authority structures of other states. Yet, since leaving government, Krasner has returned to his realist roots, exploring new roles for state power. Krasner’s intellectual journey highlights not only the tensions in realist thinking but also the enduring utility and importance of a power-politics approach.

This chapter discusses the difficulties encountered in crossing cultural boundaries and in overcoming prejudices and discriminatory attitudes on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It next examines the difficulty of writing off political realism, which views conflict as inevitable and insoluble short of violence. The latter part of the chapter presents an analysis of a number of concepts that would counter-argue for the possibility of a hybrid of federation and confederation.

This chapter demonstrates that ideological antagonism regularly yielded to political realism or commercial pragmatism, which, of course, did not eliminate the antagonism but at least bracketed it. It argues that breaches existed in the wall of hostility, and that centuries of coexistence could not be reduced to an uninterrupted succession of violent acts and confrontations. Other temperaments, such as a taste for exoticism, intellectual curiosity, or philosophical speculation could more effectively break down the ideological barrier, but they undermined it only to a very limited degree during the period under consideration. Moreover, their consequences on the dominant ideology were uneven in their gravity. The ideology thus remained in the background but was never far off.

In the introduction, I set out the central issues at stake in the debate between realists and moralists in contemporary political theory and situate the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in these debates. In so doing, I touch on Berlin’s, Hampshire’s, and Williams’s shared concerns in moral and political philosophy, and explain why their work is in tension with the articulation with the ethics-first approach in political theory. I then detail the central argument of the work, and offer a brief summary of the central arguments of the chapters that follow.

In the conclusion, I draw out the wider implications that my examination of the work of Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams has for the debates about realism and moralism in contemporary political theory. First, I address three shortcomings and limitations of the body of work that I have focused on which those who are attracted to the central elements of Berlin’s, Hampshire’s, and Williams’s thought need to address going forward. Second, I argue that their work helps to illustrate the errors inherent in the view—endorsed by some realists and assumed by most of their moralist critics—that political realism requires us to assess politics in a way that is fully autonomous of moral or ethical considerations. Rather, I argue that Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams help us to realize that realists need to think realistically about what kinds of ethical claims about politics it makes sense for us to endorse in a disenchanted world. Finally, I explain how my reading of Berlin, Hampshire, and Williams undermines the common refrain that the contemporary realist current is solely negative or critical in orientation.

Dissatisfaction with the perceived failure of liberal and postmodern responses to trauma and difference has prompted a turn to more radical alternatives: political realism and messianic utopianism, which are the focus of this chapter. Political realism (Schmitt, Morgenthau) doggedly accepts the tragic inescapability of self-interest and conflict, promulgating a politics of the possible; messianic utopianism (Benjamin, Derrida, Žižek) supplements the tragedy of the present with an otherworldly hope, promulgating a politics of the impossible. This chapter argues that Rose's speculative philosophy sits between tragedy and utopia. She maintains that there is a danger that the work of the political is bypassed in both categories: both in tragic resignation, which eschews transformation and fosters conservative self-preservation or solipsistic withdrawal; and in utopian hope, which bypasses the present in hubris-filled attempts to ‘mend’ the brokenness of modernity. Instead, a speculative perspective asserts that we stay with the anxiety of living in a broken, fragile world, working through the existential and historical traumas this inevitably entails.

This chapter argues that a concern with the ethics of political action was central to Berlin’s thought; and that his well-known and deep-rooted opposition to ‘utopianism’ and naïve idealism was but one side of his own political outlook, which was also shaped by opposition to an amoral embrace of power politics often labelled ‘realism’. It reconstructs Berlin’s critiques of Hegel and Marx, and his polemics with his contemporary E. H. Carr, to reveal the centrality to his work of an opposition to both ‘realism’ and utopianism—and his intimation of affinities and links between these seemingly opposed tendencies. It also argues that Berlin exemplified a larger trend in liberal thinking, which sought to divest liberalism of an optimistic faith in progress and rationality, and embrace an attitude of scepticism rather than dogmatism, while retaining a commitment to a liberal moral impulse of respect for individual dignity and freedom.

One might be tempted to think that Williams’s skepticism about philosophical ethics vitiates the attempt to articulate any robust standards of political evaluation. This would be a mistake. Although Williams believes that normative political judgement cannot take the form of applying a set of antecedent moral theory to the political sphere, he develops a realist conception of legitimacy that survives his critique of morality and which he claims enables us to distinguish between better and worse regimes on distinctively political grounds. In this chapter, I articulate and defend this conception of legitimacy before explaining how this way of approaching questions of political value enables Williams to offer a defence of Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear. I conclude by focusing on Williams’s formulation of a critical theory test, arguing that while it can help us to impugn some such orders, in the final instance, it has less critical potential than Williams suggests.

This chapter examines two types of realist challenge to ideas for democratic renewal. The realist political scientists stress the role of irrational, group-based behaviour amongst the electorate, and the capture of democratic processes by powerful and wealthy elites. They see little scope of civic participation reversing the hollowing out of representative democracy and mainstream political parties. On the other hand, realist political theorists focus on practical advice and political action, rather than ideal theory; and are concerned with rhetoric and persuasion, as much as public reason. It is argued that the second type of realist challenge can help us better understand how to advance state-citizen cooperation through practical initiatives such as citizens assemblies, participation in local government, digital democracy, the opening up of political parties; and how these can be supported by applying realist theorists’ insights to the reforming of political institutions, harnessing passion in social activism, and the development of citizenship education.

This chapter examines a form of political realism whose intellectual standing improved under the administration of George W. Bush. Specifically, a strand of the authoritarian German jurist, Carl Schmitt’s version of political ‘decisionism’, which is said to correlate with the Bush administration’s claims about executive authority and state sovereignty. The chapter first sets out what many have described as the ‘decisionist’ basis of the Bush administration’s legal revisionism and its interpretation of the normative order more generally. It then discusses German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt’s rejection of both Schmitt’s ‘decisionism’ and liberal constitutional rationalism in favour of a different understanding of law.

This chapter investigates Michel de Montaigne’s treatment of the emergent discourse of reason of state. It shows that Montaigne neither affirms nor rejects reason of state; instead, he argues both for and against it without resolution. His purpose is to highlight the danger of following elite justifications for violence, given either in terms of political necessity or with moral reasons. Montaigne seeks to call into being a public with the capacity to resist elites’ stimulation of popular demand for intolerant policy and their promises to supply it. In doing so, Montaigne develops an original early theory of public opinion and its role in tolerance conflicts. The chapter engages with Bernard Williams’s conception of tolerance in terms of “political realism.”