Description
In his famous 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that realist theories of power-political competition had outlived their usefulness in an age where liberal recognition would reign as much between nations as individuals. However, this paper argues that not only has realism failed to wither away, but also that the very "end of history" idea - and the conditions from which it arose - gave life to sophisticated variants of it. To make this case, I review and contextualise two bodies of literature that have emerged since 1989 where they did not exist before, namely the historiographical reclaiming of "classical" realism in IR on the one hand, and the resurgence of realism in political theory (PT) on the other. I find that, despite attempts to engage these two bodies of literature by assailing the blindness of PT realism to IR historiography, they spring from quite different intellectual responses to the end of history. On the one hand, as Fukuyama anticipated, the peaceful collapse of international bipolarity catalysed a questioning of the realist paradigm in IR and, in turn, a greater intellectual pluralism. In this context, following scholars such as Brian Schmidt, there began a thoroughgoing excavation of IR’s disciplinary history, resulting in numerous revisionist accounts of a pre-positivist “classical” realism that could be mobilised in the eclectic new theoretical arena. But such intellectual pluralism in IR stands at several removes from what PT realism has identified as an enfeeblement of the imagination in “real politics” since the 1990s. Indeed, for scholars such as Chantal Mouffe, John Gray, Jeremy Waldron and Raymond Geuss, the “end of history” idea – and the technocratic, consensus-driven, and even authoritarian politics it is seen as having enabled – is the ideological analogue to Rawlsian liberal theory, whose ideally just realistic utopia appears uncannily similar to the structure of the American republic. Against Rawls’s “applied ethics” model, realists offer to reinsert the “the political” into PT, drawing normative inspiration from within the conflictual domain of politics itself rather than from an idealised moral realm, in order to secure liberal democracy on more agonistic bases. If these two bodies of literature are to be brought into fruitful conversation, I conclude by suggesting, each must listen to the other: PT realism must surely revisit the history of IR realism, but “critical” IR historians – and perhaps “critical” IR more generally – would do well to take seriously the insights of realist PT into key issues of theory and practice. I then suggest a research programme that could realise such a coming together.
