Introduction

Summary

This is an unusual book in that it is not simply a revised or updated edition of a work that in certain quarters has become well known; it is really two books in one. The first part contains the original text of The Power of Power Politics: A Critique. This provides a theoretical intellectual history of international relations inquiry, applying and testing several propositions about scientific disciplines initially presented by Thomas Kuhn (1962). Its argument is that realism, specifically the work of Hans J. Morgenthau, has provided a paradigm for the field that guides theory and research. It then goes on to review systematically the statistical findings in the field to show that the paradigm has not been very successful in passing such tests and concludes that this evidence along with well-known conceptual flaws indicates that the realist paradigm is a fundamentally flawed and empirically inaccurate view of the world.

Since the original text has acquired a life of its own, I have not sought to revise it so as to make the views of someone who was starting out in the profession accord with someone who is now in his mid-career. It is published as it was in its first printing except for the deletion of a few minor citations and about eighty pages from chapter 4 – pages which provided a detailed review of international relations theory in the 1950s and 1960s but which is less relevant now.