How did Kenneth Waltz read political texts – and how did his readings shape his own International Relations (IR) theory? Waltz was likely the most influential anglophone IR theorist of the postwar period and, more than his contemporaries, was a reader of canonical political thought. His graduate training was in political theory as much as or more than in IR. His first book, Man, the State and War,Footnote 1 was a survey of political thought on a core problem of world politics – armed conflict – and he spent much of his early career teaching political theory at Swarthmore and Brandeis. However, we have little systematic sense of how he went about reading, interpreting, and comparing theory. His method matters, I argue, because his readings informed how he constructed theories of his own. In so doing, they informed the school he founded, neorealism, and with it much of how IR has drawn on the history of political thought.
This essay reconstructs Waltz's method for reading historical political theory. Drawing on his early writing and on archival sources, I document Waltz's idiosyncratic approach, assess its sources, and explain how it shaped his thought.Footnote 2 I argue he adopted four basic tenets for interpreting texts, although he did not systematically articulated them. First, he thought texts could be linked to one another across historical contexts by focusing on the questions they asked. Where thinkers addressed the same problems, he thought their answers could be productively compared. Second, he was a textualist. Contra later contextualisms, he largely ignored the circumstances in which texts were written, instead viewing works across historical periods as addressing recurring questions about political life. Third, his focus was on explanation. He took normative debates to be secondary or downstream matters and saw the primary purpose of theory as explanatory. Fourth, contra Leo Strauss and others, he implicitly dismissed esoteric writing. He did not aim to tease hidden meanings out of texts.
To explain how Waltz arrived at this method, I take a broadly contextualist approach, evaluating influences on Waltz's biography as a graduate student and young academic. I identify three scholars who were involved in his graduate training in political theory at Columbia: William T. R. Fox, his doctoral advisor, Franz Neumann, a Frankfurt School researcher who was at Columbia during and after WWII, and Justus Buchler, a philosopher with whom Waltz studied epistemology. Their influence on him appears to have been real but limited. Differing from Cambridge School and Straussian methods, Waltz's approach aligned instead with an older style of cross-historical survey in the history of political thought. I thus point to once-standard survey texts on which he based his teaching. All that said, Waltz's approach to reading and interpreting past political theorists appears to have been largely his own happenstance invention.
I argue Waltz's method informed the IR theory he went on to develop. I show Theory of International Politics (TIP) parallels and relies on the readings in Man, the State and War (MSW), in three respects. First, Waltz's later structuralism famously relied on core ideas from his earlier work. Second, both rely on similar forms of parsimony in treating their objects of study, whether texts or international systems. Third, both are methodologically ahistorical, being committed to transhistorical comparison. The ‘texture of international politics’ that he diagnosed in TIP, in which ‘patterns recur, and events repeat themselves endlessly’, was formally analogous to his transhistorical conception of intellectual history.Footnote 3 To illustrate more specifically, I show these features at work in ideas spanning both books: his reading of Rousseau's stag hunt in MSW and his return to the same material in TIP.
My argument thus has consequences for how we understand both Waltz's body of work and IR as he influenced it. Waltz's ideas deeply shaped the trajectory of IR theory, through both the school he founded, neorealism, and the broader discourses of images or levels of analysis and of international anarchy.Footnote 4 I illustrate by imagining a counterfactual Waltz who foregrounded historical or contextual variation in theory. I suggest a different method of reading might have yielded grist for building different, perhaps more historically situated and heterogeneous theories of international politics.
Waltz's approach to reading canonical political texts was idiosyncratic, and most historians of political thought today would reject some or all of his premises. I aim not to reconstruct a defensible method so much as to document how Waltz read and how his readings shaped his thought. Doing so serves to distinguish two tasks Waltz did not explicitly differentiate: the history of international thought and the writing of IR theory itself. I argue his approach, whatever its limitations, was useful – if not for historians, then for social scientists engaged in theory building.
Below, I proceed in three stages. First, I define and delineate the four precepts I find in Waltz's approach to reading and interpretation. Second, I biographically reconstruct his early development as an interpreter of political theory, documenting influences on his approach to reading. Third, I consider implications for how we assess TIP, Waltz, and postwar IR theory more broadly as they approach world politics.
Waltz's method of interpretation
Waltz placed considerable emphasis on classical or canonical political theory. At the end of a 2011 interview, James Fearon asked him if scholars of politics generally should focus on political philosophy. He answered
I believe that very strongly. One of the advantages that we have in political science is a great historical body of literature in the western world, largely from Plato onward. But all kinds of different emphases and all kinds of different schools are represented. And you think of Plato and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, I mean, anything that could be of importance politically is represented and written about and discussed and debated at the highest intellectual levels. It's a wonderful literature. And it's a shame that there are people in the field who have not had the benefit of thorough exposure to that literature, not to the exclusion of other things, by any means, but there's enough time to read the really great literature in our field and to do other things as well.Footnote 5
Waltz's doctoral education had focused on political theory, and turned to international politics only later and somewhat incidentally.Footnote 6 While his main later interlocutors drew on game-theoretic rationality or sociological theory, he drew at length on texts he regarded as classics.Footnote 7 And while TIP, his third and most cited book, drew chiefly on structural explanations and philosophy of social science, he remained focused on canonical texts, publishing on KantFootnote 8 and naming five works by Kant, Thucydides, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Smith among the 10 texts that had most influenced him.Footnote 9 For Waltz, a historical canon of political thought – in his case, a deeply Eurocentric one – constituted an essential foundation for serious thinking about politics.
However, his approach to these texts is remarkably opaque: he published scant methodological guidance for doing so and associated himself with no particular school in the history of political thought. Drawing on a scattering of remarks across his works, and on the substance of his approach in MSW, I identify four elements to Waltz's method. His approach was purposive, textualist, explanatory, and anti-esoteric.
First, Waltz's cross-historical comparisons are structured by problems or questions. Here, he drew on an imperative he claimed to find in Collingwood, to interpret political philosophers by ‘seek[ing] out the questions they were attempting to answer’.Footnote 10 He focused on a core problem, war, to which he imputed trans-historical properties.Footnote 11 This methodological wager provided an anchor point, to which comparisons of quite varied texts could be tethered, against differences of meaning, and audience. His account of the first image compares freely across Milton, Malthus, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Spinoza, and St Augustine, in the first several pages alone.Footnote 12 His third image draws on Thucydides, John Adams, Cobden, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and others.Footnote 13 So long as the authors address broadly the same question, he implied, differences in their mode and context of inquiry are no barrier to useful comparison.Footnote 14
While it is now nonstandard in the history of political thought, this approach remains more common than we might think. Ronald Beiner compares theorists across centuries, in their answers to the problem of ‘civil religion’.Footnote 15 Alison McQueen compares realist authors from the Renaissance to the 20th century on the challenge of apocalyptic politics (thought she frames her study as contextualist).Footnote 16 Corey Robin finds unifying themes in conservative political thought across the whole of the modern period.Footnote 17 Like MSW, these studies are problem or question focused: they identify a theme, question, or applied problem and compare texts on how they engage with it. Waltz, too, aimed ‘to pose a central question and identify the answers that can be given to it’.Footnote 18
Third, Waltz distinguished facts or explanations from values or prescriptions, and concerned himself chiefly with the former.Footnote 19 The methods section of his dissertation is largely given over to distinguishing between what he called ‘analysis’ and ‘prescription’.Footnote 20 Only with causal relationships established could we proceed to consider what was possible – and from there what was to be done. Put differently, Waltz was a realist, in the moral or political sense, even in the domain of his textual methodology.Footnote 21 If texts provided reliable causal explanations – he has in mind to evaluate them against one another, relative to the historical record – then, and only then, can we ask what courses of action those explanations would permit or endorse.Footnote 22 The purpose of theory then is to make the world cohere analytically.Footnote 23 This understanding precludes normative (moral) analysis as an autonomous area of study.Footnote 24 For Waltz, all analysis was first concerned with the world as it is. ‘A prescription based on faulty analysis would be unlikely to produce the desired consequences’ Waltz remarks.Footnote 25 He appears to take as given that the good in question – peace, however narrowly defined – was desirable.Footnote 26
Second, Waltz was a relatively straightforward textualist. He believed the relevant meanings of canonical works could be derived from texts themselves, independent of sociopolitical context or dialog with other texts. His textualism is most easily seen in the analytical form of MSW, which compares freely across periods and genres, without reference to context. His textualism thus underwrites the problem-focused, cross-historical comparisons described above. This contrasts Waltz with the contextualist methods of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School – which MSW, in any case, predates.Footnote 27 Skinner and his colleagues explain the content of a work or corpus by situating it in intellectual-historical context, emphasizing dialog across texts, under a given period's political circumstances, through which texts' meanings are made clear.Footnote 28 Nothing could be further from Waltz's approach. He shared with Skinner et al., a belief that political theory was inseparable from practical concerns, but did not link it to practice in any situated way. Waltz took scant interest in texts as objects of inquiry unto themselves. He focused instead on the explanations they provided or that could be derived from them. Canonical texts, he implied, are viable theoretical resources for the present.
Strict textualism is now an unusual position in the history of political thought.Footnote 29 Nonetheless, a broad textualism was once the default approach to interpreting political theory. It was standard to survey works Waltz sometimes relied on and was among the existing approaches that Skinner was concerned to refute.Footnote 30 Moreover, many canonical political theorists themselves read and compared relatively freely across periods and contexts. Machiavelli understood himself to be reading and writing in dialog with his Roman antecedents.Footnote 31 More recently, as Beiner notes, Hannah Arendt ‘accorded greater intellectual urgency to putting her political philosophy in dialog with the great thinkers of the canon than in putting it in dialog with leading contemporaries’.Footnote 32 Waltz's approach was, in its way, similar.Footnote 33
Fourth and finally, Waltz concerned himself more or less exclusively with surface meanings. He took no interest in esoteric or Aesopian writing, presuming relevant ideas and arguments are found in the literal or explicit content of texts. In political theory, esoteric reading and writing have been linked chiefly with Leo Strauss and his followers.Footnote 34 For Strauss, many if not most historical political theorists held views that made them subject to potential persecution. They therefore coded their meanings ‘between the lines’, leaving a trail for later philosophers to uncover.Footnote 35 The covert dialog between the resulting canon of works forms the basic material for esotericist inquiry.Footnote 36 Admittedly, a concern with surface as against covert meaning is less a methodological decision for Waltz (and others) than a default position. Still, it distinguishes him from an important position in the history of political thought. As with Waltz's textualism, the implication is that we can derive meaning straightforwardly from canonical texts.Footnote 37
Waltz did not state all of these propositions explicitly and seems not to have been committed to them in any absolute way. While he aimed to compare texts as regards particular questions or problems, he often defined those problems loosely and adaptively. Thus, MSW often slips from comparing the causes of war to comparing the origins of violence as such.Footnote 38 In comparing across contexts, he commonly acknowledged differences of origin.Footnote 39 He did not reject prescriptive or moral analysis; he merely thought it flowed from practicality.Footnote 40 He took his goal – avoiding war – as given.Footnote 41 While I have found no indication of him attributing to authors hidden or surreptitious meaning and intents, neither is there a blanket indication that he would not do so.
Waltz's approach also entailed the assumption of a canon – one that was taken as given, relatively fixed, and deeply Eurocentric.Footnote 42 This assumption of ‘a great historical body of literature in the western world’, in which ‘anything that could be of importance politically is represented and written about and discussed and debated at the highest intellectual levels’ shaped both his writing and his teaching.Footnote 43 While hardly surprising, it formed a general basis for much of his thought. Contextualists, in contrast, take canons to be constructed things.Footnote 44 He shared a roughly defined canon with Strauss and his descendants, as well as a belief in enduring problems or questions. Waltz may also have, in assembling a fairly standard set of Eurocentric texts for the task of answering a core IR question, helped to define a canon of classical texts on which the newer enterprise of IR theory could be built.Footnote 45 IR theory was just beginning to catalyzing as a self-consciously distinct enterprise in the early 1950s, as Waltz wrote his dissertation.Footnote 46 His choice of texts presumably also shaped his work, informing the kind state (Hobbesian) he put at its center as well as his gendered and Eurocentric blind spots.Footnote 47
Waltz's approach may strike current intellectual historians as less than sophisticated. However, none of his imperatives are opposed to close, critical, analytically sustained reading. He could and did read texts closely, as indicated by his grappling with Kant's Perpetual Peace over decades.Footnote 48 Nor was his approach necessarily distortive.Footnote 49 His assessment of Machiavelli is instructive. He notes that a prescription commonly found in the Prince – ‘The end justifies the means’ – is commonly read without enough qualification and or reference to his other works.Footnote 50 In place of contextualization, he invoked ‘the depth of Machiavelli's understanding of the necessities of politics’.Footnote 51 He understood Machiavelli to be invoking core features of politics as such, grounding comparison to Thucydides, Rousseau, and Kant.Footnote 52 His approach also left room for considerable debate over meanings. His reading of Kant against democratic peace accounts is exemplary.Footnote 53 These debates would not have been possible were interpretations of classic texts not open to disagreement.
Waltz's background as a reader
Where did this approach come from? The general political context of Waltz's major works was, of course, the Cold War, by which they were deeply marked. Thus, MSW aimed to provide new, structural–theoretical groundwork for American realism, a largely postwar invention. TIP served to fill out that realism with reference to Waltz's peers in 1960s and 1970s American IR, bolstered by his reading of philosophy of science in those decades.Footnote 54 However, his approach to texts used in his doctoral research must have arisen in the early 1950s, circa his graduate training. I show his method, while shaped in some specific respects by others, was, taken together, distinctively and idiosyncratically his own. Three figures from Waltz's graduate school years at Columbia may have somewhat informed his thinking about theory. Waltz began at Columbia in economics, changing disciplines a year in, to study political theory.Footnote 55 The project emerged while preparing for an oral qualifying exam in his second field, IR, on power in world politics.Footnote 56 His examiner, and later dissertation advisor, was William T. R. Fox. He also retained notes from classes with two other Columbia professors: Franz Neumann and Justus Buchler.
Fox, best known for coining the term ‘superpower’,Footnote 57 was a scholar of US foreign policy who, along with other American IR scholars, had helped to establish IR as distinct theoretical space, through a series of conferences in the 1950s.Footnote 58 He was a central influence on Waltz's career and, as a realist, likely shaped Waltz's insistence on explanation before prescription.Footnote 59 Neumann was Frankfurt School critical theorist, who had landed at Columbia during the former institution's wartime expatriation on Morningside Heights. During the war, he worked as an intelligence analyst for the OSS.Footnote 60 Waltz held onto notes from one of his Columbia classes, on German political thought.Footnote 61 Neumann may have informed his interest in Kant.Footnote 62 However, his works reflect little of the dialectical Frankfurt approach. Buchler was something else again. A native New Yorker, he was a philosophical descendent of the American pragmatists and advanced a metaphysics based on ‘natural complexes’.Footnote 63 His thought appears now to be rarely read.Footnote 64 Waltz took Buchler's course on epistemology, for which he took and retained copious notes.Footnote 65 Buchler's pragmatism may have shaped Waltz's later anti-positivism and thus his conception of theory. However, there is scant suggestion these three shaped him beyond these limited points.
Elsewhere, the secondary texts Waltz later assigned to his own students may reflect his interpretive preferences. In the 1960s, he assigned or recommended three survey texts in the history of political thought, by George Sabine, and to a lesser extent Charles McIlwain and Sheldon Wolin. His selections, though they post-dated MSW, likely reflected his more general predilections. Wolin was a historian of political thought who developed an approach often compared to Thomas Kuhn's view of the history of science.Footnote 66 McIlwain offered a workmanlike survey, from the Greeks to the Middle Ages.Footnote 67 Sabine's History of Political Theory marked the apex of a genre of doorstopper history – works that surveyed a unified ‘tradition’ of political thought.Footnote 68 In the 1960s, it was Waltz's chief secondary text for political theory undergraduate courses.Footnote 69 Sabine claimed two basic principles animated it. First, he saw theory as a part of political practice, not an abstraction apart from it. Second, he (like Waltz) endorsed a Humean fact-value distinction.Footnote 70 Sabine, McIlwain, and to a lesser extent Wolin exemplified an older style of general survey that elided context and took their canon as given a canon. Waltz's own approach was similar.Footnote 71
Waltz published almost nothing on how to read texts – his 1959 book includes little on the matter. However, his 1954 dissertation details its methodology over several pages.Footnote 72 There, he makes clear he reads for explanations: ‘Theoretical research is concerned with causal relations as they have been in the past and are in the present[.]’.Footnote 73 As in his later work on methods of theory building, Waltz insists on theory as a supplier of (abstract and unobservable) causation: ‘The fact of correlation means nothing, or at least should not be taken to mean anything, apart from the analysis that accompanies it’.Footnote 74 He excised most of this discussion from his 1959 book. He inserted in its place a brief reference to theory as question – or problem – driven: ‘R. G. Collingwood once suggested that the best way to understand the writings of philosophers is to seek out the questions they were attempting to answer’.Footnote 75 This appears central to Waltz's approach to texts, forming the core research design principle of MSW: texts may be most usefully compared cross-historically when they address the same question – without particular regard to the contexts in which they wrote.
Waltz's way of reading had limits. For example, while the idea from Collingwood captures Waltz's preference for a problem-centric approach to texts, he also appears to considerably skew its meaning. Collingwood's point was not to establish a basis for cross-historical comparison, but precisely to undermine it. For example, he contrasted accounts of the Greek polis in Plato and the early modern absolutist state in Hobbes as differing because they were focused on different historically situated political institutions.Footnote 76 The one could not be substituted for the other. It was not just the answers that differed, but the questions that could be asked.Footnote 77 We should thus be leery of assuming Waltz reliably read with sustained care. For example, his reading notes for Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism state that ‘skimming 1 chapter leads to conclusion that this is pompous nonsense, with some useful data thrown in. Basically she is Hobson – Luxemburg + a little Schumpeter’.Footnote 78 This is, at best, an uncharitable reading. Arendt's influence on postwar political thought is expansive. Still, some of her thought clearly lingered. Years later, his lecture notes on constructivist IR linked an idea he attributed to the George W. Bush Administration – ‘we make reality’ – to Arendt's conception of a totalitarian state that ‘made reality’ as well.Footnote 79 The idea stayed with him, however glancingly and dismissively he treated it in the first instance.
Implications
What follows from this assessment? I argue Waltz's method for reading political thought substantially shaped his thought more generally, thus also influencing the field as he shaped it. I argue his approach to reading prefigured, directly or by analogy, key features of his conception of theory-building in TIP.Footnote 80 Both books are structuralist, parsimonious, and ahistorical.
First and most basically, the account in TIP is structural, on specific terms developed in MSW. Waltz insists, against what he terms reductionism, that structural theories better explain net outcomes in a political system.Footnote 81 Waltz's Reference Waltz1979 structuralism is famously derived directly from his 1959 third image, derived in turn from his comparison of historical political thought. He finds it ‘[i]mplicit in Thucydides and Alexander Hamilton, [and] made explicit by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau’.Footnote 82 He thus conceptualized international politics in TIP through categories derived from comparison across theoretical texts in MSW.Footnote 83
Second, both books adopt similar kinds of parsimony, such that MSW prefigured the approach to theory in TIP. Waltz engages in what Gunitsky terms ‘cartographic parsimony’, through which ‘theories, like maps, necessarily distort and simplify in order to be useful’.Footnote 84 To evaluate and compare texts in MSW, Waltz strips their ideas to core particulars. In TIP, he aims to capture only a limited band of political phenomena – states and state systems – to theorize and compare clearly and systematically. He establishes cross-historical structural comparability by simplifying away specific political institutions, cultural circumstances, and military technologies.Footnote 85 ‘Waltz adopts an instrumentalist conception of theory-creation, arguing that the goal of theory is not to reflect reality but to abstract from it…. [T]he process of theory construction cannot be led by pure empiricism’.Footnote 86 An alternative – perhaps the alternative – to deriving theory from fact is deriving it from other theory. The raw material for theory making was thus past ideas. The parsimony of MSW's comparative method was both a precondition for and analogous to the parsimonious theory in TIP.
Third and consistent with this parsimony, TIP is ahistorical: it assumes a fixed conception of international structure, varying over time only in a few particulars.Footnote 87 These limited differences facilitate transhistorical comparison and contrast. This approach to the history of world politics is prefigured by his attitude to intellectual history in MSW, which also enables comparison by eliding historical context. Both deploy cross-historical analysis, oriented by specific problems or questions. MSW treats theoretical texts as TIP would later treat states and international systems: as isomorphic units, comparable across time and space. In both, the purpose is to confront the problem of war.
While these parallels do not capture the whole of Waltz's approach, they do indicate his positions on reading theory and building theory were closely aligned. And while the causal link is not direct, there is reason to think one led to the other. The purposive, structural, ahistorical, and parsimonious conception of theory in MSW recurs fairly directly in TIP. Both are predicated on the possibility of transhistorical comparison. The earlier work then appears to have laid the groundwork for the style of theorization undertaken in TIP.
We see his approach at work in his well-known reading of a passage in Rousseau: the ‘stag hunt’ in the Discourse on Inequality.Footnote 88 Waltz reads Rousseau as addressing a complex of transhistorical problems: violence, survival, and political order. He imputes to Rousseau an explanatory or analytical (as against normative) argument, to do with the conditions of possibility for political order-making. Waltz attributes this view without particular regard to Rousseau's historical context, and without recourse to any implied or esoteric meaning. He then goes looking for the idea, stripped to bare essentials, across a wide swathe of canonical political thought. Whatever we think of this reading, its effect was distinctively Waltzian – the reading appears to have been genuinely new. It also gave rise to reams of later theoretical research: it apparently originated the entire ‘stag hunt’ discourse in game theory.Footnote 89 His specific reading thus had considerable downstream impact.
Waltz's reading of the stag hunt is commonly treated as an artifact of MSW. However, it resurfaces in TIP, during a rejoinder to Stanley Hoffmann.Footnote 90 Hoffmann had argued Waltz misread Rousseau, locating the stag hunt in the larger, more complex argument Rousseau made. Waltz responded not with contrary textual evidence, but by questioning Hoffmann's approach in general: ‘One can … find evidence to support almost any interpretation in an author who writes profoundly and at length about complicated matters’.Footnote 91 If texts underdetermine our readings, how should we interpret complex canonical works? Waltz had tacitly answered the question two decades before. We can derive a coherent and defensible reading by knowing the author's purpose and reading with it in mind. That purpose will be explanatory before it is normative. With it in hand, we can usefully compare a given text with others, contrasting and evaluating them, appealing directly to their surface meanings. Waltz's recourse to Rousseau in TIP also reminds us that he had first found the self-help logic of the third image in this passage. The stag hunt provides the ideas underwriting Waltz's structural conception of anarchy.Footnote 92 His reading of a classical political text, informed by his method, shaped a core idea in his thought.
Did Waltz actually arrive at this approach before his core ideas about world politics? This is the chicken and egg question: perhaps he arrived at an understanding of IR first and developed his method of reading later, in justifying it. There are reasons to think the reading and method informed the theory, more than the other way around. First, this was the order in which they occurred in time. His reading of political theory, and method for arriving at it, appeared before his international theory. Waltz started his graduate training in politics as a political theorist – his interest in IR came later.Footnote 93 He developed readings of canonical texts, in his first book, from comparison and analysis of which he distilled analytical categories – which he applied in his third, to produce a systematic theory. Because Waltz spent much of his intellectual life with both, it seems doubtful either wholly takes precedent over the other. However, to the extent a general approach shaped his career course, it involved first comparing and distilling ideas and then later building explanations from them.
How directly did his reading method shape his ideas? A counterfactual Waltz, a necessarily speculative one, who thought differently about how to read and assess theory might have produced a different contribution to IR. A Waltz less moored to transhistorical comparison might have produced a book that, while perhaps as systematic and theoretically intensive as TIP, was also more sensitive to historical variation. A Waltz more focused on differences of ideas across historical periods might have recognized a role for those ideas in producing historical differences in world politics. That Waltz might have been better equipped to deal with, for example, the structural transformations John Ruggie identified in his response to TIP. Waltz's book, Ruggie charged, ‘provides no means by which to account for, or even to describe, the most important contextual change in international politics in this millennium: the shift from the medieval to the modern international system’.Footnote 94 Waltz, of course, was aware of both the Middle Ages and the limits of his theory.Footnote 95 But to adjust this theory to fit would have undermined a principle of transhistorical comparison that was central not just to both his 1959 and 1979 books. This counterfactual Waltz – again, necessarily speculative – with different priors about theory, might have produced a quite different later work.
The extent of this hypothetical divergence allows us to see more clearly the shape of Waltz's contribution to the discipline and the specific effect of his method on it. Recovering a systematic view of world politics from his survey of canonical theory required that he render those historically disparate texts comparable. He could only generate new ideas by taking texts as raw materials, rather than as historical phenomena that called for historicized understanding. When Waltz said that he ‘started out to be a political philosopher’ he implied more than he knew.Footnote 96 He has set out to be a political philosopher, not a historian of political thought. He was concerned with things in the world to which political thought referred, more than with the historical sources of those thoughts. MSW treated texts as resources, not objects of inquiry. Doing so required him to take their meanings as given. Waltz faced the problem described by Nietzsche: ‘only something which has no history can be defined’.Footnote 97 Waltz needed definitions or systematic meanings – coherent, portable, comparable ones – with which to make explanations. Concern with meanings did not require him to historicize, so much as foreclose doing so. This was the price of admission to building new international theory out of past ones.Footnote 98
Waltz was thus concerned with international political thought, but was not a historian of it. Contextualists might argue he thereby consigned himself to misread his sources. But his goal in reading them was not strictly to unpack their situated complexity – to ‘get them right’ as a task unto itself.Footnote 99 Instead, he had begun by addressing himself to a practical problem: to explain the causes of war. Wars were, he wrote, disasters in which ‘there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat’.Footnote 100 His aim was not a strictly historical one; it was to confront a pressing problem, ongoing in his lifetime and impinging on his life experience.Footnote 101 His method differed from history of political thought because his purpose did.Footnote 102
Conclusion
I have argued that Waltz's method for reading, interpreting, and comparing texts was purposive, textualist, explanatory, and anti-esoteric. While Waltz likely drew some of this from an assortment of influences during his graduate education and early academic career, the combination was idiosyncratically his own. It aimed not at historical accounts of political thought so much as the production and evaluation of new theoretical explanations.
I close by noting his approach's downstream influence on the discipline. While they did not all share his substantive claims, Waltz's approach to reading was often mirrored by his contemporaries, including his critics. While Keohane's theory of international cooperation does not grow out of a survey as large as that in MSW, it does reference freely across the theoretical canon, citing Marx, Smith, Hobbes, Gramsci, Locke, Lenin, Hobson, and others.Footnote 103 Broadly the same seems true of Wendt.Footnote 104 English School theorists appear to assume Hobbes, Locke, Grotius, Kant, and perhaps others can in principle be applied transhistorically.Footnote 105 MSW itself remains an influential work.Footnote 106 IR theorists themselves also appear to read one another purposively and comparatively. The most expansive exceptions are critical IR scholars who reconstruct ideas, past and present, in situ.Footnote 107 Perhaps not coincidentally, these are also scholars more inclined to historicize the state and other institutions of domination or rule.
More basically, my argument allows us to re-evaluate the form of Waltz's influence on IR. The canons of political thought to which we refer inform our thinking, in terms of both what they include and how we interpret them. Waltz left behind analytical categories shaped not just by the theories he read, but by the assumptions on which those readings were based. We should read his own work accordingly.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Luke Glanville, Ian Hall, Christopher LaRoche, Knox Peden, several anonymous reviewers, and the journal's editors for comments on previous versions, as well as the staff at the Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library for help with Waltz's papers.
