One might be forgiven for thinking that there surely can’t be much more left to say about realism across the various terrains of analytical, historical, and contemporary political theory, where it has colonized and cannibalized so much recent discussion of whether there is, or is not, or could, or should be, a distinctive modality or even morality associated with the sphere of the political. Or, that there are any (or many) illustrative exponents of the various principles and practice of realism to be found, whose work has not been mined extensively already for such things. More particularly, one would surely wonder about whether there was much left to say about the evolution of realism in the development of twentieth-century German legal and political theory, both domestically and, more pointedly, in the writings of those émigrés to the United States who buttressed the discipline of political science and international relations (IR). So, Matthew Specter has set himself a demanding task, to try and convince political theorists and intellectual historians of international political thought, who will certainly ask, what more do we really need to know about the sources of Carl Schmitt’s spatial approach to political thinking, or of Hans Morgenthau’s seeming debts to Schmitt in his pioneering studies of international politics, or of postwar American political science in its turn to IR as a distinctive discipline? Surely there’s enough material on the library shelves already?

Well, with a slightly facetious opening like this, my review could only really go one of two ways, and I am happy to report that this book is a fulsome vindication of the position outlined by Specter, that the mutually constitutive development of those he terms Atlantic Realists, in Germany and the United States, has distinctive roots that most political theorists and historians of international thought have underplayed. Those roots suggest that the origins of realism are not to be found in ideas of Realpolitik, for good or ill, but in the later-nineteenth-century imperial concept of Weltpolitik. What we see in the intertwined teaching and research of the Atlantic Realists is, ultimately, a sharp sense of the purposes of studying politics in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the flourishing of Atlantic Realism comes in a time and place where the proximity between academic work and personality, and practical political deliberation and actual decision making, was much closer for a principally White male elite. But alongside such certainty of purpose and point to the study of the subject, which clearly stands in some tension with the concomitant specialization of modern political science generally, there was the cultivation of a certain comportment toward how one should do this work. Specter sees this through Bourdieu, as the cultivation of a certain habitus, wherein those with the sort of insider scoop, as it were, would teach others how to see the field of politics domestically and internationally, and to see it realistically. This meant not seeing it through the distorting lenses of liberalism or socialism, but rather applying to the terrain of politics and economics the sort of synthetic and spatial sensibilities that earlier figures associated with geopolitics had done. Indeed, it is the broad transition from geopolitics to IR theory realism, configured through the period from the 1890s up to the 1940s, that gives the book its main pivot. German Weltpolitik and American imperial expansion came together in theory and in practice, seeking take off from what used to be called something like “economic backwardness in historical perspective,” and structured the idea that politics is rooted in competitive comparison or emulation.

Therefore, where standard histories of realism signal the divisions between German Realpolitik and American IR discussions of realism, Specter sets out to show that the opposition is illusory, and that the history of international political thought, “the political theory that explicitly or implicitly subtends the academic discipline of IR, elite foreign policy discourse,” and so forth, can show why (p. 2). Figures like Max Weber and Alfred Mahan superintend the scene, the latter being “one of the most important craftsmen of the Atlantic realist sensibility” (p. 39). Along with Karl Haushofer and Friedrich Ratzel, through to Carl Schmitt, Wilhelm Grewe, and Hans Morgenthau, Specter paints a textual picture of how Atlantic Realism might be seen as a sort of Bildungsroman for competing and late-developing empires. Should they follow the older, eighteenth-century version of international political and economic thought, emulating successful and powerful states through leveraging whatever comparative advantage was available. Or was there something different in this new realist sensibility, that saw emulation as too docile, and that sought to strike out in a world in which the preeminent limits to politics were economic, but where the economy was thought to be in principle limitless? There is much more that might be said here about such tensions, but it also suggests something profound about the history of international thought. For example, if the mainstays of modern eighteenth-century political theory simply were studies in IR as it is now considered, then the separation of IR and political theory needs an historical explanation. And Specter at least implicitly provides one here, in terms of the rise of modern imperialism and Weltpolitik.

Instead of the universality of politics, a sense of the “power of nature” and the sentiment that certain ways of seeing the world were truer, according to what nature dictated, was put forward to teach those who would be realistic, how to order their thoughts, and then, of course, to order the world (p. 48). Here, American figures like Paul Reinsch and Archibald Coolidge were thinking about American destiny in world power terms at the same time, and in similar registers, to the ways in which German writers and politicians were coming to terms with ideas about a world divided along imperial lines. As Specter notes, from this moment in the development of his book, Ratzel the theorist of geopolitics and Mahan the theorist of naval power became mirrors to each other, and the rest of the book follows something of that structure; by holding up a mirror to the past, in that mirror we see others holding up their own mirrors and Weltpolitik, not Realpolitik, is what stares back at us and them. Weltpolitik as Atlantic “realism” basically meant the political economy of imperialism as the fundamental feature of modern politics, and from this foundation, the history takes on a different kind of coherence. As Specter tells it, as well as registering this the key protagonists were set on showing that “seeing” the world realistically required education, cultivation, and a certain capacity exhibited only by the truly great leader to provide through their force of personality an illustration of such a view.

This helps explain why the concept of space and spatial ordering became so consequential. Was there something analogous to nature in the ideas of Schmitt’s attempt to see the political world through the prism of competing “great spaces” or Großraüme, for example, and did such an approach generate a capacity for comparison of different empires (those of land or of sea)? Specter narrates the history of why other Nazi jurists thought Schmitt’s analyses of space too abstract, having been trumped by the concrete transcendence of a Volksgemeinschaft seemingly working in unison toward the Führer. He shows, too, the irony of Schmitt’s Nuremberg defense, wherein he complained that his work was purely scholarly and focused on concrete particulars, and that it was Hitler’s geopolitical vision that was far too abstract to have any properly political meaning. He also tells a modified story about how Schmitt came to “ventriloquize” the idea of empty, abstract space as a pejoratively “Jewish-Enlightenment” aberration, whereas concrete order thinking, as he called it, was able to be simultaneously antiliberal but also comparative. And this capacity for simultaneously antiliberal but comparative perspective was the holy grail for Atlantic Realists. The standout discussion for me in the book, is the chapter on Wilhelm Grewe, historian of the “epochs” of international law and esteemed diplomat under Konrad Adenauer. Adding to the long-standing discussion about the transition from Third Reich to the Wirtschaftswunder of the West German state, Specter draws a portrait of Grewe as a committed Nazi jurist in the evolution of his book manuscript from 1933 to 1945, much of which is downplayed and sterilized in the version published around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, after he had been so consequential in shaping Germany’s postwar foreign relations. Grewe’s skepticism about the power of international law might have a resonance for both conservative as well as anticolonial writers and activists, but the genealogy of his realism, and his epochal divisions, tells a troubling story about the need to see clearly how the intellectual history of present ideas about the international sphere really came to the forefront.

Other hinge figures like Hans Morgenthau, whose prose mirrored the terse forms of the artistic movement of Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity, transitioning from Weimar to the United States, tells another part of this evolving story of how Atlantic Realism was rebranded as it bridged from Germany into the development of North American IR. Yet what was presumed by the Atlantic Realists’ habitus, what remained unseen to their eyes as they reproduced themselves, is precisely what has been challenged by more recent scholarship, from women’s international thought, to writing alert to multiple forms of anticolonial internationalisms, or by environmental historians, among many others. What these and other writings are more straightforwardly attuned to, are the unacknowledged assumptions about the intersecting forms of exclusionary solidarities lying behind the realist habitus. And by showing us the powerfully imperial roots of Atlantic Realist thought, we might not be that surprised at the conservative, antiliberal, mostly White, and mostly male, sources that lie behind modern IR as a discipline. But by forcing us once more to confront the quixotic character of realism as both aggressively imperial, but with a hyperromantic attachment to politics as the art and exercise of power, Specter compels us to consider very carefully what exactly we think we are doing if we are also teachers of political thought in the first place. In this, it seems like we still urgently need to learn how to do our own thinking for ourselves, as Quentin Skinner puts it, without cleaving to atavistic forms of realism as the best way of seeing the world and its politics.