The Optimism of Classical Realism: Thucydides, Clausewitz, Morgenthau

Realism is widely understood as a dark and unforgiving exaltation of power among states. Yet traditional or classical realism stresses the mitigating factors of leadership and international norms or morality, which contemporary neorealism has eliminated. An examination of three of realism¡¯s founders - Thucydides, Clausewitz and Morgenthau - demonstrates how these excisions cripple such ¡®scientific¡¯ realism. Classical realists never intended to reify anarchy as an immovable, natural state of war while ¡®exogenizing¡¯ leadership or morality. The result is an unnecessarily dark, neorealist ¡®scientific¡¯ parsimony which leaves no exit from anarchy and conflict, where a qualitative-historical classical realism does. This essay seeks to reintegrate the classical realist theorists Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau to recover a more flexible and optimistic realism. Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau are often invoked as godfathers of realism, but usually as a passing, hat-tip reference. This essay seeks to restore them more fully in the realist tradition and finds that they are more optimistic than the contemporary international relations theory has received them. A research program based on classical realism¡¯s insights about statesmanship and morality in international politics should be possible, and such an effort would help realism generally, as neorealism has struggled with the post-Cold War world.