Abstract

This exciting new book offers a fundamental reappraisal of political realism - one of the dominant schools of international relations theory - and of the place of morality within it. Conventional opinion has always held that realism is an amoral or even immoral approach to international politics. Recent revisionist readings have sought to move beyond this simplistic view, taking account of the concern with morality evidenced in realist work. However, unable to reconcile this theme with the realist concern for power politics, they have tended to treat it as either incoherent or inconsequential. Alastair Murray argues that the entire debate about the theory has been misframed and that by using the insights to be gained from the study of historical texts, the different strands of realist thought can be related to one another, and understood to represent equally essential parts of the theory. In a challenging and detailed analysis, Murray reconstructs the theory of realism as a coherent and unified tradition of political ethics, highlighting its cosmopolitan moral discourse and demonstrating how, once reconstructed as a coherent tradition of thought, realism can contribute to contemporary debates in normative international theory.