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Kenneth Waltz's Kantian moral philosophy: ‘the virtues of anarchy’ reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2024

Alex Prichard*
Affiliation:
SPSPA, Centre for Advanced International Studies (CAIS), University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ, UK
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Abstract

Kenneth Waltz once stated, unequivocally, that, ‘I consider myself to be a Kantian, not a positivist’. I explain what Waltz might have meant by this, and how deep this professed Kantianism ran. Such is the depth of the engagement, I argue, that it is no exaggeration to claim that Waltz's political philosophy, his philosophy of history, his philosophy of science, his methodology, and his normative theory of anarchy are all broadly Kantian. Crucially, what Waltz meant by the ‘virtues of anarchy’, is best understood as an attempt to develop a regulative ideal, or an ‘organising principle’ of ‘practical reason’ that would guide diplomats in the nuclear age. Indeed, in his most contentious intervention in global public policy, Waltz deploys Kant to argue that horizontal nuclear spread, rather than the spread of democracy, would ensure the peaceful development of states. This anarchic nuclear peace would, he thought, be the means to achieve ‘perpetual pacification’. This revisionist reconstruction is the primary contribution of the paper. But through unsettling paradigmatic readings of ‘Waltzian IR theory’, the paper also presents an immanent critique of ‘the virtues of anarchy’ that contributes to a wider research project on the concept of anarchy and its emancipatory potential.

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Introduction

In an interview with Fred Halliday and Justin Rosenberg in 1998, Kenneth Waltz stated, unequivocally, that: ‘I consider myself to be a Kantian, not a positivist’.Footnote 1 To date, no one has taken the time to show how deep this professed Kantianism ran. And why would they? Waltz was arguably one of the most important theorists of international affairs, and, as far as textbook accounts proceed, his ‘neo-realist’ approach to world politics was predicated on a rejection of Kant. As all budding IR theorists are taught, often using Waltz's own writings, Kant is apparently the progenitor of the liberal approach to IR, one which seeks to explain war via the character of states, and hypothesises that war is inevitable unless non-democratic states can be democratised. Waltz himself characterised this ‘second image’ theory as flawed because it was ‘reductionist’, and rejected the argument that the spread of democracy would bring peace.Footnote 2 Waltz also rejected the more ‘revolutionary’ or cosmopolitan reading of Kant,Footnote 3 and paid no attention to neo-Kantian ideal international political theory. It has been almost universally assumed since that the ‘neo-realist’ approach to IR is predicated on a rejection of Kant, and Waltz's two seminal works, Man the State and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979), books which defined, directed, and dominated IR theory for two generations, are considered the twin foundations of this critique.

So, what could Waltz possibly have meant by claiming he was a Kantian? Unfortunately, his interviewers did not follow up with this question, but Waltz did set out his thinking succinctly in a piece published in the American Political Science Review (APSR) in 1962 entitled, ‘Kant, Liberalism and War’. This long ignored, but outstanding piece of scholarship, expands the analysis of Kant that appeared as an appendix to his doctoral dissertation,Footnote 4 but was removed from the monograph that followed (Man, The State and War). This engagement with Kant continued to fundamentally shape Waltz's thinking far beyond the publication of Theory of International Politics. Such is the depth of the engagement, I argue, that it is no exaggeration to claim that Waltz's political philosophy, his philosophy of history, his philosophy of science, his methodology, and his normative theory of anarchy, are all broadly Kantian. That, at least, is what this paper will attempt to demonstrate.

Waltz's Kantianism hasn't gone completely unnoticed. As William Scheuerman has shown, though only in brief outline, Waltz only rejected a specific form of Kantianism, and did so on the basis of what he considered to be a better, more faithful anti-cosmopolitan reading of Kant.Footnote 5 Joseph McKay's excellent reconstruction supports this analysis, but only notes in passing that Waltz grappled with Kant's Perpetual Peace for ‘decades’, generally also reading ‘Kant against democratic peace’ theory.Footnote 6

The primary contribution of this paper is the detailed reconstruction and exegesis of this Kantianism. I will show that Waltz uses Kant to develop a highly original theory of the ‘virtues of anarchy’, one that reformulates classical social contract theory as neo-Kantian American social science. But this scientific account, like the faux anthropology of the state of nature theory it supplants, is explicitly not a ‘description’ of world affairs. Rather, the theory of international anarchy is explicitly a regulative ideal that can guide moral and political agency.Footnote 7 Anarchy is an ‘organising principle’ of ‘practical reason’, in other words a normative political theory that can guide politicians in the thermonuclear age.Footnote 8 Waltz's most controversial intervention in global public policy, his defence of horizontal nuclear proliferation, is expressed broadly in these terms, as I will show.

In each part of this reconstruction, I show how the concept of anarchy is central to Waltz's Kantianism. Anarchy (or the international state of nature as Kant understood it) is the result and the cause of the establishment of states, and this is a moral good, from a Kantian point of view. For Waltz, anarchy has distinct normative ‘virtues’ because, understood more capaciously than simply the absence of world government, the idea of anarchy generates a regulative ideal, a form of neo-Kantian phronesis, that can guide policy making in conditions of epistemic, political, moral and material uncertainty.

My secondary aim with this paper is to use this reconstruction as a form of immanent critique of Waltz's theory of anarchy, and by extension of ‘Waltzian IR theory’.Footnote 9 By redescribing the concept of anarchy from the perspective of Waltz's Kantianism, I am able to show that not only is Waltzian IR a quite distinct form of realism, but mainstream realist IR theory is also deeply normative. Realists, like Waltz, are deeply committed to the realisation of freedom and human emancipation, though primarily through a form of liberal republican statism.

I will show, pace Scheuerman (Reference Scheuerman2012), that Waltz's Kantian defence of the ‘virtues of anarchy’ does not necessarily lead to statism, and rejecting statism does commit us to a cosmopolitan world state. As Waltz pointed out, but did not explore further, a maximalist Kantian theory of autonomy in anarchy also ‘leads to anarchism’.Footnote 10 Indeed, we might read Theory of International Politics as an attempt to balance the ‘anarchist ideal [of statelessness] applied to international relations’Footnote 11 with his Kantian statism. This is not to claim that Waltz was a critical theorist per se, and most certainly not an anarchist. But Waltz's theory of international politics can be extended to a defence of the emancipatory potential of anarchy more broadly.Footnote 12

The paper is structured in the following way. The first part of the paper provides a working explanation of the relative oversight of Waltz's Kantianism. Part two of the paper sets out Waltz's Kantianism across five sub-sections. First, I reconstruct Waltz's Kantianism as it appears in his philosophy of science and epistemology; I then show how Waltz explains the relationship between epistemology and politics, before moving on to show how this idealist epistemology is developed into a Kantian moral philosophy visible and explicit in all his writings. I then set out Waltz's distinctly Kantian philosophy of history, which accounts for the role of war and the pursuit of peace in the development of republican states. To show how Waltz's Kantianism works in practice, I close the exegesis with a summary of the Kantian basis of Waltz's defence of horizontal nuclear proliferation. A nuclear peace is a normative good, for Waltz, because it brings about peace in anarchy, a ‘perpetual pacification’ that rests on the right of war in anarchy. Without this nuclear peace, Waltz suggests, pursuing the good within states or between them would be impossible. In other words: ‘peace is considered as a means not as an end’.Footnote 13

This account of the ‘virtues of anarchy’ contributes to and invites further research on the concept of anarchy in IR and political science more broadly, research I connect to in the conclusion of the paper.Footnote 14 And finally, if my account of Waltz's Kantianism is accurate, it has significant implications for the way in which we understand the ‘self-images of the discipline’, and how we teach IR theories to our students.Footnote 15

Recovering and reconnecting Waltz and Kant

One of the likely reasons that the connection between Waltz and Kant has not yet been made is because Waltz explicitly disparages Kant as a ‘second image’ theorist in his first book, Man, the State and War (1959). Liberal theorists like Kant, Waltz argued here, reduce the causes of war to the character of states, and believe that as soon as states are perfected, war will vanish as a problem for humanity.Footnote 16 In his 1962 article, Waltz argues forcefully against this reading of Kant, and offers us a completely different reading of his own. But this piece seems to have vanished from our disciplinary memory. All other references to Kant are disconnected and fragmented, like a puzzle scattered across a table, and there is no reference to Kant in any of his responses to his critics or well-wishers.Footnote 17 This is surprising, since Waltz's theory generated huge controversy, and some of the criticisms of his work were quite robust. One can only guess at the likely reasons Kant was never marshalled in his self-defence. Perhaps assuming people would continue to read ‘Kant, Liberalism and War’, Waltz felt no need to lean on Kant for extended intellectual support in any subsequent English language publication.Footnote 18

This lack of interpretive nuance has resulted in the entrenched and paradigmatic readings and interpretations of Waltz's neo-realism. Waltz's contribution to the discipline has in some instances been reduced to a series of hypotheses about the motivations of states, anarchy, the balance of power, and rationality.Footnote 19 Jack Donnelly's rejection of anarchy in IR inadvertently exposes the problems with this way of reducing Waltz to ‘Waltzian IR’.Footnote 20

Donnelly objects to what Buzan and Little have called IR's ‘anarchophilia’.Footnote 21 Donnelly argues that the concept of anarchy does not appear in the disciplinary lexicon in any meaningful way prior to the publication of Waltz's seminal work in 1979, and that there is no obvious link between state of nature theories and the theory of anarchy that followed. Anarchy in ‘Waltzian IR’ is a much narrower concept, a ‘demarcation criteria’, a descriptive, not a normative concept, that describes a ‘formless void’ that results from the absence of government in the international order.Footnote 22 Anarchy has no causal properties, and no sui generis cultural characteristics. Following Alex Wendt Donnelly argues that anarchy should be understood as merely a context for action, and as such cannot explain anything, let alone the balance of power.Footnote 23 The explanations for the features of world politics that we take for granted today must come from elsewhere, not anarchy, he argues. Given the empirical and theoretical failure of ‘anarchy’ on these terms, it would be preferable for IR to return to the ‘ordinary language concept [of anarchy] indicating disorder and lawlessness’. ‘Waltzian IR’ is ‘at best, a dead end’.Footnote 24

Others have offered more sympathetic and complementary accounts of the purpose of Waltz's IR theory. For example, Bressner and Guilhot have argued that Waltz's neo-realist liberalism was an attempt to rescue conservative liberal statism from Morgenthau's left republican internationalism.Footnote 25 LaRoche and Pratt distinguish Waltz from neorealism because of his grand-theoretic vision, and other such acts of intellectual rescue from ‘neo-realism’ exist across in the literature.Footnote 26 But none of these accounts link Waltz to Kant. Even Seán Molloy, who made two separate, highly sophisticated studies of modern realism and Kant, overlooked this connection.Footnote 27

Far more common is for IR theorists to debate Kant's ‘Waltzian’ credentials, rather than Waltz's Kantianism. Waltz was guilty of this too, claiming that Kant was a ‘thoroughgoing realist’.Footnote 28 Wade Huntley followed suit, explaining the more ‘structural’ elements in Kant's theory in ‘Waltzian’ terms.Footnote 29 Ewan Harrison went further to claim that Kant developed a ‘Waltzian’ scientific approach to world politics as well.Footnote 30 Martin Weber rightly objected to Harrison's claims on methodological grounds: reading a structural IR theory into history undermines both the historicity of the past and the present.Footnote 31

Others have asked whether Waltz's writings were more akin to Kant's than he realised. For example, Nicholas Onuf has pointed out that Waltz's work mirrors Kant's in three ways: first, Waltz, like Kant, is a philosophical idealist; secondly, Waltz's use of ‘as if’ models of human behaviour is distinctly Kantian (as I will discuss further below); and third, Waltz's conception of structure is, like Kant's ‘radically constructivist’, perhaps even more consistently so ‘than Wendt is’. Onuf continues: ‘If Waltz had ever considered fully the philosophical implications of his Kantian affinities, he might indeed have acknowledged how close he is to an updated constructivism.’Footnote 32 But Waltz did set out his Kantianism, and at length.

‘Kantian’ IR theory doesn't particularly help matters, and general understandings of it no doubt dissuade readers from seeing parallels in less paradigmatic readings of Kant. For example, most read Kant's works to defend what has come to be called the ‘liberal peace thesis’ and, more problematically, liberal imperialism. This interpretation is well known, has animated the discipline of IR for over 40 years, and was the object of Waltz's criticisms on many occasions.Footnote 33 Secondly, the analytical approach to international political theory is generally considered to have derived from Rawls's reading of Kant, and the conjoining of the two has resulted in the analytical strictures of ideal political theory. This tradition is largely a-historical, and certainly does not rely on any more or less authentic reading of Kant to proceed. This of course results in the ever-narrower reading of key texts in the history of political thought. For example, Thomas Doyle II has argued, on ‘Kantian’ normative and analytical grounds, that nuclear proliferation is defensible. But Waltz's nuclear spread argument, which I argue is Kantian, is presented by Doyle as Hobbesian, without any justification at all.Footnote 34 In Doyle's defence, such is the hold of these paradigmatic readings that no one requires any justification of them.

A smaller group caution that the liberal, analytical, even imperialist Kant, is not at all obvious in his published writings, and that Kant's international thought is far more conservative, and indebted to Rousseau and Hobbes. This results in a defensive, and far more cautious, sanguine, understanding of the possibility of Zum Ewigen Freiden, or ‘perpetual peace’.Footnote 35 For example, As Susan Shell has argued at length, Kant was neither an ‘idealist’ nor a ‘realist’ in the way they are understood conventionally today, and his defence of a loose federation of autonomous free states was a riposte to the French Napoleonic and Jacobin universalism of the time.Footnote 36 This is but one recent intervention. But such is the extent of the revisionist literature on Kant, that Filkschuh and Ypi have recently argued that ‘the least “Kantian” among current political philosophers and global theorists are often those working on Kant’.Footnote 37

If we acknowledge the secondary literature on Kant that Waltz cited, we can better account for what looks like a change of mind. Waltz attended the lectures of Franz Neumann, a prominent Frankfurt School Critical Theorist, while reading for his doctorate during the McCarthy era at Columbia,Footnote 38 and was a close reader of Hans Kelsen, a neo-Kantian jurist, as William Scheuermann has shown.Footnote 39 Waltz's sophisticated account of Kant's international theory runs throughout his dissertation. His objections are not to Kant per se, but the way in which his thinking has been interpreted and deployed. Waltz's references to Kant's key writings on international politics all come from the same source too: the Reverend William Hastie's 1891 translations, introduced by Edwin Mead.Footnote 40 Mead's introduction bore all the hallmarks of the brand of liberalism rejected by the discipline by 1945. It was also the text Martin Wight referred to when setting out his interpretation of Kant as a philosopher of the ‘revolutionary’ tradition of international theory.Footnote 41

But, as is so often the case with doctoral research, a seminal text is published by a world-renowned expert, and through a popular press, immediately after final submission: in this case Stephen Körner's ‘superb little book’, Kant, published by Penguin 1955.Footnote 42 Körner's critical interpretation of Kant as a sceptic within limits redirected subsequent Anglo-American studies of Kant, and is central to Waltz's reappraisal of Kant in his 1962 APSR piece. However, Körner's book has almost nothing to say about the problems of international politics,Footnote 43 which makes Waltz's piece so original for that time.

Reconstructing Waltz's Kantianism

What if we ask a less anachronistic question: how and in what ways did Kant's thought shape Waltz's theory of international politics? In the following four sections I set out Kant's influence on Waltz's philosophy of science and epistemology, Waltz's account of the relation between epistemology and politics, between politics and morality, and then war and the philosophy of history. I close with an illustration of how each shaped his theory of horizontal nuclear proliferation.

Theory and epistemology

Before we get to the emancipatory politics of Waltz's theory, we must of course traverse his theory of theory, since this is arguably Waltz's most famous and contentious intervention in the development of IR. If Kant cannot be found here, there is little reason to suspect he can be found anywhere else. But he can, and the depth of engagement is striking.

Waltz was a visiting fellow in the department of philosophy at the LSE in the early 1970s, a time when Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Kuhn were having a very public set of disagreements about epistemology and the philosophy of science. Waltz was caught up in the intellectual ferment of this time. He too, he said, was driven by their concerns, but not by their solutions. As he put it: ‘One might think that philosophers of science would begin by asking what theories are and how one makes them. Instead, they skip quickly to figuring out how theories can be tested. I decided to start at the beginning.’Footnote 44

For Waltz, this began, as with Kant, with assumptions about the nature of reality itself. In his 1962 essay on Kant, Waltz sets out his sceptical anti-empiricism. Like Kant, Waltz made a categorical distinction between the real, phenomenal world, and the ideal, or what kant called the ‘noumenal’ realm. The former can only be interpreted by the latter, its meaning is not given to us. Meaning cannot be expressed directly by a thing, nothing's reality is self-contained within it, Kant argued. Likewise, and against empiricists like Hume, the ‘constant conjunction of events’ cannot in and of themselves tell us anything. We must interpret them using more or less plausible theoretical explanation. As Waltz put it: ‘If we look at the world and see discrete events, we are overwhelmed by the chaos: each event without cause and all events without meaning. But if we look at the aggregate of events with a proper organizing principle in our minds, we may see in the chaos, order; in the welter of events, a plan of nature.’Footnote 45 The question Waltz then asked at the outset of Theory of International Politics was also Kant's: how do we derive knowledge about this chaotic world; how do we infuse it with meaning? Can our senses give us direct knowledge, or do we need to deploy reason to give the empirical world meaning?

Körner, who, as we have seen, was one of Waltz's key influences, argued that for Kant, ‘Judging and perceiving are irreducibly different. In this he is opposed both to his rationalist predecessors, for whom perceiving was a kind of low-grade judging, and to his empiricist teachers [e.g., Hume], who were inclined to assimilate judging to perceiving. Kant expresses the sharp distinction between judging and perceiving as between two distinct faculties of the mind: understanding and sense.’Footnote 46 Waltz follows the same path and dismisses what he calls the ‘inductivist illusion’, that the facts can speak for themselves.Footnote 47 To make sense of the world it is necessary to develop theories, which are only a collection of statements that are logically coherent and help explain complex patterns in the empirical world around us. Theories can and should be amended as new evidence comes to light. Kant called these sorts of statements about the world, statements informed by empirical data, synthetic aprioris, but they are not theories, only claims. This position, as Waltz put it, is ‘less sceptical than the British empiricists, but deeply sceptical nonetheless’.Footnote 48

This broad distinction between the empirical and the ideal, or the phenomenal and the noumenal realm in Kant's formulation, is what drives Waltz's famous philosophy of science in the opening pages of Theory of International Politics. As he puts it on page five ‘[n]othing is ever both empirical and absolutely true, a proposition established by Immanuel Kant and now widely accepted at least by natural scientists […] If we could directly apprehend the world that interests us, we would have no need for theory.’Footnote 49 In fact, theories, Waltz argues, are ‘creative’, born of ‘intuition’ conveying a ‘sense’ of things: theory building is art and/as science.

Waltz argues that theories have four roles: ‘isolation’, ‘abstraction’, ‘aggregation’, and ‘idealisation’.Footnote 50 It is this latter role that is quintessentially Kantian, and central to Waltz's theory of international politics. It is because we do not act ‘automatically’, ‘like bees and beavers’, producing ‘predicable’ ‘patterns of behaviour’, Waltz argues, and because the world does not present itself to us unmediated by our senses or our consciousness, that we must idealise.Footnote 51 Idealisation is unavoidable. Idealisation is the rational, that is, noumenal, production of meaning about the world, and for Kant and Waltz is a fact of life, of consciousness, and wholly internal and individual.

Moreover, Waltz is adamant that the reality or existence of a thing is immaterial to theory. Following Kant, Waltz argued that existence is not a necessary predicate of reason, which means that whether something exists or not adds nothing to our understanding of the meaning of a thing, Kant argues. This aversion to ontology, central to Kant's transcendental and critical idealism, can also be attributed to the historic complicity of ontology in debates around the existence or otherwise of God, which Kant avoided for that reason (more on this below). De-ontology, the basis of Kantian ethics, denies the moral salience of the real world. Only reason can give us firm ideas of right and wrong.

Waltz's Kantian deontologising of politics was a similar attempt to divorce theory from the mechanical, Newtonian, or ‘phenomenal’ world. If the real world was mechanical, it left no room for free will. While Waltz may have appreciated Durkheim's theory of state development, he nevertheless makes a categorical distinction between Durkheimian ‘social facts’ and the necessary ‘reification’ of concepts like ‘anarchy’ on precisely these terms. In a private communication with Justin Rosenberg, Waltz suggests that the reification of concepts is a necessary part of theory building. Claiming anarchy is real, in the Durkheimian or philosophical sense, is an ontological and inductive step too far.Footnote 52 In other words, whether there is a real world or not makes no difference to the development of theories about it.Footnote 53

Theories may not be true or false, but we have to work ‘as if’ the theories are true. In Körner's reading of Kant, this ‘as if’ principle is ‘the supreme maxim of method’.Footnote 54 For Waltz and Kant, theories have to be useful, and put into practice, and even though they cannot be true, we must treat them as if they're true just to get out of bed in the morning.Footnote 55 The critical reflection it takes to revise pure reason through our activities in the world is what stops theory becoming whimsical, abstract, or solipsistic reflection. As Waltz says, it is difficult to envisage scientific practice that does take proceed ‘as if’ its hypotheses were true. But that doesn't mean they are.Footnote 56

Waltz, like Kant, also warns against the ‘deductivist fallacy’: the idea that reason can tell us anything independent of facts. The critical use of reason emerges after a ‘creative idea has emerged’, and then from using both deduction and induction ‘in combination’: a ‘synthetic apriori’.Footnote 57 The point of theory is not to more closely approximate reality. As Waltz put it in ‘Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory’: ‘To achieve “closeness of fit” would negate theory’.Footnote 58 1:1 scale maps are useless. If we cannot rely on materiality for meaning, we cannot shy from the hermeneutic problem of the complexity of meaning. Trying to ‘turn the problem of meaning into the technical one of making terms operational […] won't help’, Waltz says.Footnote 59 As the distinguished comparativist, Giovanni Sartori put it a decade previously, ‘operational definitions generally entail a drastic curtailment of meaning for they can only maintain those meanings that comply with the operationist requirement’.Footnote 60 Reducing meaning to what you need to make sense of the world is counter-productive, because the reductionism takes you away from your goal. Waltz was fully aware therefore, that words, concepts, and theories convey meaning, that meaning is hermeneutic, and defined by the syntactical structure of the sentences of which they are a part. They are also part of the world and are developed in communication with observation. But at root, ‘[t]heories not only define terms; they also specify the operations they can rightly perform’.Footnote 61 As Popper conceded, language, conceptual or otherwise, fundamentally shapes the scientific endeavour.Footnote 62 In other words, prevailing theories (or ideologies) shape our understanding of the world by constraining the normal language we might use to describe it. Even though Popper is only discussed in Theory of International Politics with reference to the errors of falsification, his later-Wittgenstein approach to language is also central to his neo-Kantian objection to logical positivism.Footnote 63 In sum, Waltz seems to be arguing, like Paul Feyerabend,Footnote 64 that epistemology has no Archimedean point of authority, because meaning is anarchic. From this point of view, Waltz shared an epistemology and broad philosophy of science with the poststructuralists and constructivists, but he didn't acknowledge it.Footnote 65

Moving on, for Waltz, theory is a synthetic idealisation, a profoundly creative generalisation,Footnote 66 and ‘variables’ are simply a synonym for ‘terms’ of the theory, rather than the formal way in which the term is used in neo-positivist theory.Footnote 67 As he says, ‘The trick, obviously, is to link theoretical concepts with a few variables in order to contrive explanations from which hypotheses can be inferred and tested.’Footnote 68 But bear in mind that this is literally a ‘trick’. The truth of a theory, or the meaning of empirical regularities, remains beyond objective science. The theory of gravity had to be invented and refined, and reinvented too, and in the case of quantum theory, long before anyone could ‘see’ anything.

But how does all this relate to anarchy? Kant argued that ‘If we review our knowledge in its entire extent, we shall find that the peculiar business of reason is to arrange it into a system, that is to say, to give it connection according to a principle.’Footnote 69 In Waltz's work, as is well known, and as I will elaborate below, anarchy is this regulative ideal, principle, or creative intuition. For example, the ‘idea’ of the state of nature was simply that. Likewise the idea of God was crucial for Kant, even if he objected to debates about whether God existed or not: ‘The idea of a Supreme Being’ he argues, ‘is in many respects a highly useful idea; but for the very reason that it is an idea, it is incapable of enlarging our knowledge with regard to the existence of things’.Footnote 70 Ideas like God perform important regulative roles in society ‘although only from the practical point of view’ (a point I will develop soon).Footnote 71 Reflecting on what Kant is doing with this theory, Waltz observes that, ‘The unknowability of noumena, the limitations placed on pure reason, do not, from this point of view, lead Kant to scepticism. He simply gives to man in the form of practical reason, or will, what he has denied to him in the form of pure reason. We are forced to assume progress, an immortal soul, a God.’Footnote 72 Put slightly differently, Kant argues that questioning whether God exists generates rational insight, enlightenment even, but it cannot finally disprove God's existence. This doesn't make the idea of God any less significant. For Kant, and Waltz who follows him here, ideas are regulative ideals and through their interrogation and influence on individual and collective practice, shape history.

Waltz's antinomic approach to concepts is also quintessentially Kantian. Rather than the truth or falsity of concepts being sui generis, their meaning is derived in opposition to their antinomy, or opposite. For example, good and evil are not things which we can determine from the evidence, since the evidence is highly contextual, but rather needs to be compared in the ideal. Good and evil must be counterposed to one another, theories about their necessary or sufficient conditions posited, and then used to assess the real (and vice versa). As Roger Scruton put it in a memorable turn of phrase, ‘these antinomies are not to be lightly dismissed as errors no sooner perceived than forgone. The assumption of totality which generates them is both the cause and effect of all that is most serious in science.’Footnote 73

Anarchy's antinomy in Waltz's theory is, of course, hierarchy. These two political ideals have a singular ‘principle’ of their organisation,Footnote 74 he argues, and that is the presence or absence of ‘legitimate and competent government’.Footnote 75 The functions and capabilities of actors in these two systems can be posited without a statement about ordering principles, but it would simply be a descriptive enterprise not a theoretical one, he says. Waltz elaborates that anarchic orders are necessarily ‘self-help’ orders, and in international relations the primary units are states (Waltz later includes gangs, criminal organisations and so forth).Footnote 76 These must rely on their own means and wits for the realisation of their freedom, their security and any common good. He contrasts this with a Durkheimian view of functionally organised orders, namely hierarchical ones, in which organisations and bureaucracies develop roles that facilitate the smooth operation and continuity of the specialist skills of others.Footnote 77 Then, in classically Weberian style, Waltz observes that hierarchic orders are hugely problematic: the struggle for ‘control of the controllers’Footnote 78 precipitates the endless struggles for political power that is the hallmark of politics. But this is just a theory.

Epistemology and politics

Waltz's Theory of International Politics has been interpreted as both a paradigmatic case of value-free social scientific analysis of world politics, and an implicitly normative account of the way the world ought to be. The reality is that Waltz, like Kant, saw no necessary distinction between epistemology and politics: good science ought to lead to better politics, and vice versa. What I want to show in this section is how Waltz accepts and deploys the deeply political nature of epistemology. Morality is discussed in more depth in the section to follow.

First, let's go back to Kant. As Körner shows, there are two types of ‘Ideas’ for Kant, theoretical and practical ones. Practical ideas unconnected to a theory cannot be said to be generalisable: they are just unthinking actions. But if your maxim of behaviour can be universalised, then it can be said that there is a unity between theory and practice.Footnote 79 The most famous iteration of this is of course Kant's categorical imperative, the claim that maxims of moral behaviour must be determined ‘according to a possible and general law’.Footnote 80

Policy options cannot be derived from the evidence alone. For the idealist, regularities in the evidence can only be identified theoretically, which is to say in the ideal, which makes policy fundamentally ideological (from this point of view). Laws ‘identify invariant or probable associations’, but, he continues, ‘[t]heories show why those associations obtain’. In other words, ‘[t]heories explain laws’.Footnote 81

The state of nature theory is a paradigm example of an ideal theory that explains the so-called laws of the jungle, and is a paradigm case of the relationship between epistemology, and politics. It has also guided politicians for centuries. Waltz's theory of anarchy is his own modern iteration. For Hobbes, who Kant and Waltz both follow, material insecurity in the state of nature is secondary, even caused by a prior and more philosophically significant epistemic uncertainty. Which religion is true? Which form of society is right? Hobbes argued, in Maloney's words, that ‘[s]avages lived as they did because they suffered from the effects of intellectual anarchy’, which caused them to be regularly at war.Footnote 82 For Hobbes, without a sovereign power to determine the meanings of words, to legislate for right and wrong, anarchy prevails. Likewise for Kant: the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular Hume's radical scepticism, and the Old World-shattering exploits of Napoleon Bonaparte, demanded the affirmation of reason.Footnote 83 Kant pinned his hopes on ‘moral politicians’, individuals guided by an aspiration to reason and the moral law.Footnote 84 Outside the state of nature (an ‘as if’ of civilizational proportions), in well governed republics, the dictates of the sovereign, being in line with the moral law and demonstrably rational, demand absolute fealty.Footnote 85 In other words, the theory of the state of nature, or anarchy, operates as epistemology and politics at the same time. As Waltz puts it in his discussion of Kant in Man, the State and War, the state releases us from ‘uncertainty’ as well as ‘violence’.Footnote 86

While Waltz discusses the state of nature theory at length, unfortunately the snippet on Rousseau's stag hunt ‘allegory’ has dominated the subsequent secondary literature, and is a further distraction from Waltz's fundamentally Kantian politics.Footnote 87 Rousseau's stag hunt ‘allegory’ is extremely ‘useful’, Waltz argues because it gives an idea of the problem of politics, not because it offers any account of the truth or reality of the world in which we live.Footnote 88 So the allegory goes, the material impulse to satisfy immediate need trumps the long-term collaboration needed to hunt a stag. In the absence of the state, defection is inevitable, self-help a necessity, and anarchy a structural product of human social interaction (but not of nature, for Rousseau at least). What Kant fails to recognise in this, according to Waltz's materialist reading of Rousseau here, is that ‘conflict is a by-product of competition and […] cooperation’,Footnote 89 and that this renders the categorical imperative fundamentally flawed. As he puts it later, ‘the absence of an effective decision making authority’ at the global level is a key problem for those, like Kant, committed to universal conceptions of justice: tendencies towards protectionism by states were a case in point.Footnote 90 In Man, The state and War, Waltz disparages Kant, arguing that the hope that ‘republics […] will act in accordance with the categorical imperative’, is naïve:Footnote 91 ‘war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it’.Footnote 92

But in the appendix to his PhD thesis, Waltz argued something quite different. Here, and in his 1962 APSR piece, Waltz argues that the categorical imperative is an aspiration of the moral law, not an objective reality, and it is the striving for it that develops good politics, not its realisation: even a band of ‘devils’ will see the logic of forming a state to mutually regulate their interactions, but this doesn't mean their state will ever be fully realised, or objectively good. Moral politicians, on the other hand, can at least aspire to perpetual peace and the categorial imperative, because neither are in principle ‘an impossibility’.Footnote 93 In Man, The State and War, Waltz claims that Kant repeats Spinoza's error, which was to suggest that if we all reasoned alike, harmony would prevail in anarchy – an argument that ‘leads to anarchism’, he thought.Footnote 94 But three years later, he had changed his mind. There he writes, ‘[Kant] has, as many liberals do not, an appreciation of politics as struggle, an idea of possible equilibrium not as simple and automatic harmony but always as something perilously achieved out of conflict’.Footnote 95 In adopting this agonistic account of politics, Waltz accepts that the republic will always be ‘dissoluble’,Footnote 96 at least in principle, for two important political reasons. First, for reason, law, and right to be realised, they must be struggled for. If they were automatic or natural ‘as for bees and beavers’, they could not be rational in the Kantian sense. Secondly, it is because we struggle for what is right, and that ideas about right change, that politics is a never ending struggle guided by contingent and routinely universalised ideals.

Politics and morality

Waltz's political ethics are fully in keeping with a wider tradition that Michael Williams calls ‘wilful realism’. While Waltz does not feature in Williams' discussion of realist ethics, we can already see synergies between Waltz and the wider realist tradition, in so far as he too believed that there ‘are no obvious foundations – no “natural” or essential structures of either the self or the political order’ which begs the question of ‘how is one to achieve a politics of responsibility?’Footnote 97 For Waltz, statism and anarchy mutually generate this ethic, but unlike his forebears, Waltz sees the priority in defending anarchy rather than necessarily the state.

The first substantive discussion of the concept of anarchy in any of Waltz's writings begins on page 111 of Theory of International Politics. His opening claim here is that anarchy is a ‘virtue’.Footnote 98 It certainly isn't a virtue in the sense that it is a character trait, like honesty or bravery. As Körner shows, Kant objected to this model of ethics. For Kant, our actions should be ‘for the sake of duty’ to a generalisable law. In other words, it is not moral to blindly follow rules, or to copy the law-abiding behaviour of others, but it is moral to act because that is the rationally correct way to act. It must, therefore, be in line with ‘the subjective principle of action’.Footnote 99 As Waltz puts it in relation to the balance of power: ‘The further distortion of the theory [of the balance of power] arises when rules are derived from the results of states’ actions and then illogically prescribed to the actors as duties.’Footnote 100 Do not ‘mistake a theory of international politics for a theory of foreign policy’, he continues (Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 120). This statement is usually interpreted as a statement of analytical levels, which it may well be, but it is also fundamentally normative in a Kantian sense: balance of power theory generates the virtue of responsibility.

The assumptions, or what Jackson calls the ‘wagers’ of epistemology,Footnote 101 and the ideological explanations of empirical laws, are the chassis of a Kantian ethics. Only action that is in accordance with the duty imposed on you by reason is moral. The injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’ is rational because you cannot generalise its opposite as a moral law without obliterating reason itself (and people of course). The maxims of morality are in ‘accordance’ with duty when they can plausibly guide action ('the subjective principle of action’).Footnote 102 In short, science is vital to good, moral practice. Get the first wrong and the second follows suit (and vice versa).

Leaning on Kant, Waltz counsels prudence and restraint, or ‘balancing’ and ‘bandwagoning’, not outright conflict, or what Mearsheimer calls ‘offensive realism’.Footnote 103 The former is a principle that can be rationally universalised, the latter is not. These arguments are most clearly set out in ‘Kant, Liberalism and War’, published in the same year that the US tripled its ground forces in Indochina, and ‘The Politics of Peace’ published five years later.Footnote 104 Read together with Waltz's critical reflections on the neo-Wilsonianism of Michael Doyle (2000), these pieces are explicitly anti-War, and anti-imperialist, on Kantian grounds.Footnote 105

Let's unpack this in a little more detail. In the first three pages of Kant, Liberalism and War, Waltz sets out what he sees as the three fundamental principles of Kant's ethics.Footnote 106 He argues, first, that freedom is relative to consciously established political orders, and not an absolute universal value, he then argues that the maxims of moral law have no necessary content, and that they can be pursued in different ways in different political contexts (but not without some form of political context); and finally, that individuals are ends in themselves. Whether the first is a correct interpretation of Kant's universalism need not detain us here. More importantly, if there can be no objective grounding to morality, but by virtue of our universal dignity, all humans are ends not means, then freedom must be grounded on socially agreed rules that recognise and presuppose the equal dignity of all. Waltz's reading of Kant is fundamentally communitarian in this respect, and a defence of practical ethics, one which is less common in the wider analytical Kantian literature, but nevertheless has highly regarded modern Kantian defenders.

Onora O'Neill, one of the foremost Kantian scholars of her generation, is a defender of this neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Kant's theory of ethics. She argued that Kant's practical reason is elaborated most clearly in broadly the same five texts that animated Waltz: Religion within the limits of reason alone; Contest of the Faculties; Perpetual Peace; On the popular saying ‘This may be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’; and Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. O'Neill argues that therein one finds an account of Kant that is decidedly un-Kantian by more modern standards, if by Kantianism we assume an aversion to the virtues and to Aristotle. ‘However’, she says, ‘it is less obvious whether or how far […these anti-Aristotelian forms of Kantianism] apply to Kant's ethics’.Footnote 107 Waltz would have agreed wholeheartedly.

Waltz's account of the virtues follows O'Neill's very closely indeed, surprising as that may seem. Waltz, like O'Neill, observes that Kant understood the maxims of ethics, such as the categorical imperative, as a subjective theory of ethics that could guide political action, and an ideal standard against which to measure it: the injunction to do the right thing is not dictated by pragmatism, or circumstance, but by reason.Footnote 108 In the face of empirical uncertainty and the inability of the human mind to fathom the complexity of nature directly, the maxims of ethics are supremely useful, but can only ever be contingent. The categorical imperative, for example, is an idea towards which we must aspire, but are fated never to realise. The upshot of this reliance on ideology is that good moral counsel demands prudence, virtue, and the development of ‘practical reason’, or phronesis.

In Waltz's writings, anarchy operates in the same sort of way as the categorical imperative works for Kant's. Recall that for Waltz anarchy is not real, but it can be universalised since the ethical principle is a non-interference principle that rests on, presupposes, and reinforces, the sovereign equality of all actors. While the international domain may be free of law, for Waltz, and international law little more than the will of the powerful, nevertheless, the condition of anarchy presses actors to mutually recognise one another in this way to avoid perpetual war. For Waltz, anarchy, like a state of nature in Kant's thought, is a mutual condition of insecurity, that, if understood correctly, can and should breed trust and cooperation between groups, trust that their mutual vulnerability, and assured destruction in the case of nuclear war, will lead them to see that reason lies in mutual restraint (see below for more on this). Waltz's defensive realism is Kantian in this respect, in so far as it is predicated on a principle of deterrence in defence of the republic.

But beyond this principle of self-defence, war is in and of itself materially and psychologically efficacious for both Kant and Waltz. As the First Supplement of Perpetual Peace makes clear, war is the principle means by which humans came to understand the moral law, first by escaping violence and thereby becoming ‘scattered’, then by forcing them into political relations with one another as communities once more.Footnote 109 War produces republican constitutions by compelling people to work together to find the ideal form of political community through which to defend themselves from others. As Kant famously put it: ‘Establishing a state, as difficult as it may sound, is a problem that can be solved even for a nation of devils (if only they possess understanding).’Footnote 110 Differences, which might lead to ‘mutual hatred’, are natural and necessary for human psychological, moral, and political development. Nature, in this case war, ‘does this with a certainty that is not sufficient to foretell the future of this peace (theoretically), but which is adequate from a practical perspective and makes it a duty to work toward this (not simply chimerical) goal’.Footnote 111 For Kant, ‘peace among human beings can be brought forth from the warlike state of nature’,Footnote 112 but only if everyone understands the rationality of this theory in similar ways.

Unfortunately, because we don't all reason identically, or ‘automatically’, what is required for the pursuance of justice and order in anarchy, as Kant elaborates in the first appendix to Perpetual Peace, is ‘moral politicians’ who understand ‘political prudence’ in accordance with a wider moral law.Footnote 113 These individuals are guided by better theory, in Waltz's terms. But to argue that these individuals are the harbingers of war or peace would be a reductionist argument Waltz disavows. The causal logic works the other way: the international anarchy causes statesmen to act in particular ways. As he put it in a lecture in 1999, ‘In the state of nature, as Kant put it, there is no “mine and thine”. States turn possession into property and thus make saving, production and prosperity possible.’Footnote 114 Contrary to liberal ideology, Waltz notes that this process of economic development does not bring peace, nor does it usher in any inevitable equality. In fact, it breeds the conditions for all sorts of future conflicts. But it is the management of this conflict, and the pursuit of peace, that generates enlightenment. As Waltz puts it: ‘The most important causes of peace, as of war, are found in international-political conditions, including the weaponry available to states.’Footnote 115 And this weaponry has to be paid for, managed, sustained, and updated.

In a nuclear stalemate, however, anarchy becomes the norm of international affairs, and states are compelled to find other ways of managing their affairs than through open warfare.Footnote 116 The balance of power becomes a series of socialisation processes that are ‘induced by the system’. If external stimuli are understood in the same way, ‘we should find widespread imitation among competing states’, he posits.Footnote 117 His example is ‘Chicherin, who personified the carefully tailored traditional diplomat rather than the simply uniformed revolutionary, […] refrain[ed] from inflammatory rhetoric for the sake of working deals’.Footnote 118 By reforming the Soviet identity, Chicherin was able to become pragmatic, responsible, and engage with the Soviet Union's ‘ideological enemy, Germany’.Footnote 119 Anarchy breeds peace, Waltz says.

Pragmatism and an ethic of responsibility is the most sensible political and moral strategy in anarchy, and will lead to pacification, Waltz argues. ‘The fate of each state depends on its responses to what other states do. The possibility that conflict will be conducted by force produces a tendency towards the sameness of the competitors […] And so the weapons of the major contenders, and even their strategies, begin to look much the same all over the world.’ This pragmatism is the effect of ‘[s]ocialisation’ in international anarchy, and those who resist will be compelled to balance that power or bandwagon.Footnote 120 A rational moral law is useful, he says, ‘and […] to follow it is not necessarily impossible’, it's just improbable.Footnote 121 All of this is prefigured in the final line of Waltz's PhD thesis: ‘Both moral behavior and perpetual peace are logical necessities to man. Our reward, however, is not in the attainment of either, but in the struggle for both.’Footnote 122

War and the philosophy of history

One of the standard criticisms of Waltz's work, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, was that it lacked a theory of change.Footnote 123 But read from this Kantian point of view, a different, highly determinist philosophy of history emerges. This philosophy of history becomes more visible if we reconstruct it on Kantian, theological grounds. It is also a vital piece in the reconstruction of Waltz's nuclear spread argument, which we will turn to in the next, final section.

Waltz's pays close attention to Kant's theodicy.Footnote 124 What interests him is the rationally providential account of how good can come of evil, or how republics emerge from war. Bear in mind that Perpetual Peace was first published in 1796, the year Prussia ceded the left bank of the Rhine to Napoleon's forces, before he then went on to annex Poland. Had God abandoned his rational progeny, Kant asked? God commanded that ‘There shall be no war. Yet’, as Waltz continues, ‘without war in the past, men now would be feeble types sheltering in caves and feeding on nuts and berries’.Footnote 125 Central to Kant's philosophy of history and his political anthropology is the claim that it is in states that man is made and bettered, not by them: ‘The civil state made changes in man's behavior possible; it was not the other way around’,Footnote 126 and the primary motor of this improvement is war and international relations, which necessitated the emergence of reason. Against the Marxist theories of imperialism, Waltz argues that ‘the reasons for the material well-being of rich states are found within their own borders – in their use of technology and in their ability to organise their economies on a national scale’.Footnote 127

The philosophy of history is clear, however: wars, if they are to be won, must be justified, with people rallied to the cause, and they must be paid for. If any of these fails, so too does the republic. Hence, internal development, good organisation, restraint, and caution are the eternal counsel, even while war with your neighbour is the likely consequence of the founding of a successful republic. But, Waltz observes, ‘Kant, in contrast to Mazzini and Woodrow Wilson, is a non-interventionist liberal’, and rejected the idea of an imperialism for the sake of peace. ‘He [Kant] fears that such a state, once achieved, would be a greater evil than the wars it is designed to eliminate. It could so easily become a terrible despotism, stifle liberty, kill initiative, and in the end lapse into anarchy’Footnote 128 (the bad sort).

Seventeen years later, in Theory of International Politics, Waltz restates Kant's theory of Perpetual Peace, but in terms of international anarchy. ‘If freedom is wanted’, Waltz claims, ‘insecurity must be accepted’.Footnote 129 Since, by this schema, freedom is only possible within states, not without them, and a world state would be an invitation to global civil war, then the bipolar balance of power, which is a product of nuclear insecurity, is the only way to enable development within states, and their freedom vis-a-vis one another. ‘If might decides’, he continues at the foot of the same paragraph, ‘then bloody conflicts over right can be more easily avoided’.Footnote 130 This might be understood as pacification necessitated by anarchy. It does not matter whether anarchy is real; we must ‘act on the supposition of its being real’ by ‘adopting the maxim of action that will guide us in working incessantly for it; for it is a duty to do this’.Footnote 131 For Kant, the minimalist confederalism of perpetual peace is important to hope for, even if it ‘may always remain but a pious wish’. In the meantime, pacification will have to do.Footnote 132

Anarchy, practical reason, and the spread of nuclear weapons

In this final section, I want to pull together the threads of the exegesis to illustrate how Waltz's Kantian moral philosophy works in practice. Central to this is the way in which anarchy, as a regulative ideal, shapes the world around us and guides politics in ways that are more in accord with the universal moral law than they would otherwise be. I also want to show (but not overemphasise) the coherence of Waltz's Kantian theory over the course of his output, and its presence in arguably the most contentious of all Waltz's highly contentious interventions in IR theory and global public policy: his defence of horizontal nuclear spread.

Waltz's belief that nuclear weapons could be a pacifying force in world politics has caused huge debate and consternation. It goes without saying that if Waltz had characterised his position on nuclear weapons as explicitly Kantian and providentialist, at least in principle, he would have received a quite different reception to the one he did, and doubtless even more fraught. Nevertheless, that is his implied strategy.

In his (in)famous Adelphi Paper,Footnote 133 which was originally a report for the CIA, Waltz theorises the reasons why nuclear states would be less likely to be martial and/or belligerent. First, the struggle to develop nuclear weapons is a lengthy, time-consuming business and will slow down arms races, making war less likely over the long term. Secondly, developing a nuclear capability requires a stable state, not one in which planners, technicians, and engineers are continually compelled to defend themselves from competing military factions, or where politicians must continually defend the polity's fragile political gains. Third, unstable states with nuclear capabilities will not see the use of nuclear weapons as a rational, proportional, responsible solution to their declining status or internal conflicts. And fourth, Waltz argues that retaliation in the event of deliberate targeting or misfiring would be unlikely: nuclear warheads are a lose-lose weapon that stabilises the bipolar balance of power.Footnote 134

These arguments are well known and have been vociferously debated in the literature,Footnote 135 but for our purposes it is the second reason that needs most attention. Waltz argues on broadly Kantian lines that the internal development of states, and then what Wendt, following Hedley Bull, characterised as ‘the culture of anarchy’,Footnote 136 is driven by the demands on states to effectively signal to others to avoid using nuclear weapons.

Waltz argues that nuclear weapons impose restraint and responsibility internally and externally, and demand state development. Considered rationally, the possession of nuclear weapons, he argues, ought to remove the need to acquire territory to feed and sustain conventional forces, and would encourage others to protect similar absolute gains rather than risk them for relative ones, which recede in importance in the face of nuclear spread.Footnote 137 Whether neighbouring countries are ruled by bloodthirsty zealots or not, the threat of mutually assured destruction makes states risk-calculators, and risk is calculated by the possibility or otherwise of the loss of domestic political power. This is not a feature of anyone's race or culture (as he puts it, ‘[a]s is usual with ethnocentric views, speculation takes the place of evidence’Footnote 138) but rather that material conditions, and the desire to protect gains and resources (or anarchy), imposes constraints regardless of who you are. Waltz claimed, wrongly as it turned out, that development aid for Israeli nuclear projects would strengthen Israel's ‘legitimate borders’ and breed ‘independence’ from US aid, with the effect that regional security becomes stabilised.Footnote 139 Thirty years later, Waltz doubles down. Iran should ‘get the bomb’, he argues, because the ‘decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis […] will end only when a balance of military power is restored’.Footnote 140

Reality to one side, Waltz continues that ‘[u]ncertainty about the course a nuclear war might follow, along with the certainty that destruction can be immense, strongly inhibits the first use of nuclear weapons’.Footnote 141 In other words, overwhelming force pacifies, not unilaterally, but through a rational calculation of the risks involved with initiating a first nuclear strike with an inevitably incomplete understanding of one's adversary's second strike capability: crucially, it is not the quantity of weapons, nor necessarily their power that determines their use, but whether the first strike can be guaranteed to knock out your opponents' ability to retaliate. If this cannot be assured, which it cannot, of course, then the risk of mutually assured destruction is more or less guaranteed, and the opponent's deterrence threat practically insurmountable. This deterrence threat needs only to be well hidden, or, say, housed on practically invisible but very expensive submarines. The uncertainty this generates ‘make strategy obsolete’.Footnote 142 As Kant might well have foreseen, the production of the ultimate weapon results in the rational reluctance to use it.Footnote 143

While much of the subsequent debate on horizontal spread has focused on accidents, the failure of deterrence and so on, the underlying sociology of state development has gained less attention, despite being more significant from Waltz's Kantian point of view. Absent developed states, nuclear proliferation can't take place at all, and nuclear war is less likely between developed states who can muster the deterrence capability. Waltz theorises that the budget, expertise, command and control systems, and public buy-in for such vast endeavours are what makes developed states cohesive and hierarchical. But once nuclear states have been established, the costs of war are exponentially higher, and the permanence of the international anarchy is baked in.

Kant might have objected that these are all claims that are an ontological step too far: perhaps there is too much here that is determined by the material conditions of military production, and not enough derived from reason. Indeed, drawing on the then unpublished work of Steven Van Evera, Waltz's Kantian philosophy of history becomes decidedly materialist, even technologically deterministic.Footnote 144 But perhaps this was the only way to convince policy makers of what he believed to be the rational coherence and moral superiority of his nuclear spread argument?

In ‘Nuclear Myths and Political Realities’, published in APSR in 1990, Waltz concludes in a quintessentially Kantian way: ‘How can we perpetuate peace without solving the problem of war? […] Never since the Treaty of Westphalia […] have great powers enjoyed a longer period of peace than we have known since the second world war. One can scarcely believe that the presence of nuclear weapons does not greatly help to explain this happy condition.’Footnote 145 A nuclear peace in anarchy is a form of necessary ‘pacification’, a means to an end, not the end in itself. We might rightly be concerned by the type of peace it prefigures. But wider conversations about more substantive, positive ends, goals, or values are only possible or realistic once the mutual fear of annihilation has abated. Waltz did not believe that a world state would help in this regard. Others disagreed.Footnote 146

Conclusion

In this paper, I have demonstrated that Waltz was a Kantian. His philosophy of science, the way he understood the relationship between politics and epistemology, his normative political theory, and his philosophy of history are all broadly Kantian. His advocacy of nuclear spread was also defended on broadly Kantian terms. Waltz's key aim for international political theory was, arguably, to de-anthropologise and de-ontologise the state of nature, science, and ethics, by developing a novel theory of the causal effects of anarchy. This is most strikingly articulated in the highly controversial defence of normative virtues of the twentieth century thermonuclear balance of power. The faux anthropology and the hyperinflated ethnocentric claims about human nature that pervaded much of the ‘realist’ and ‘liberal’ theories of international relations at that time, and the implicit and explicit racism and sexism of much that preceded it, were imperfectly sidestepped by developing a neo-Kantian theory of ‘the virtues of anarchy’.Footnote 147

So what? The answer to this question very much depends on who's asking it. When dealing with such pivotal thinkers in the history of political thought, trying to reduce a reinterpretation like mine into a neat disciplinary contribution, does epistemic violence to their thought. On the other hand, given the extent to which Waltz and Kant have shaped modern political thought, we ought all to be able to hear whispers, or catch glimpses of the significance of this re-association. For example, linking Kant and Waltz further erodes the largely implausible distinction between twentieth and twenty-first century ‘realism’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘neo-realism’; this reconstruction also helps us erode the distinction between the ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ that has shaped so much historical debate about realist politics; Waltz also shines a harsh light on the sublimated, deeply normative nature of all science, not only in IR;Footnote 148 and we ought to be able to learn from some of both Waltz and Kant's mistakes.

Answering the ‘so what?’ question with reference to any one of these speculative hypotheses would be important if not be particularly original. But that arguments like these could be made should give us pause to reflect on the ways in which we narrate the ‘self-images’ of the discipline,Footnote 149 and especially how we teach IR theory to our students.

Buzan and Little once argued that the centrality of ‘anarchy’ to the discipline of IR explains its ostracism from the rest of the social sciences: simply no one else sees any virtue in the concept.Footnote 150 Perhaps it is not the concept itself that is at fault, but the way it has been understood and used. The foregoing discussion should give us pause to reflect on the ways in which an uncritical, ahistorical, and decontextualised concept of anarchy pervades IR and political science, and how this paradigmatic reading of key texts and concepts has shaped these disciplines. Too often mainstream accounts of anarchy continue with no critical scrutiny of arguably the pivotal concept in the field, while critical theorists accept mainstream definitions of the concept and throw the baby out with the bathwater. As I have argued elsewhere, for a concept so central to the development of IR over the past 50 years, the meaning of anarchy is remarkably un-contested.Footnote 151

Continuing Waltz's work might lead us to further historicise and contextualise the theory and concept of anarchy, to relink IR theory back to the history of political thought, and rediscover more expansive, emancipatory meanings and uses of the concept, for example, those found in the anarchist tradition.Footnote 152 But this demands a move away from the statism that has characterised political science.

My immanent critique of Waltz's theory of anarchy takes his theory on its own terms, and intimates that re-theorising the concept of anarchy in political science and IR, from an anarchist point of view, can point away from statism. For the anarchists, many of whom leant heavily on Kant,Footnote 153 anarchy is the prerequisite of freedom, not only of states, but for all groups.Footnote 154 This is not to laud the freedoms of the most heavily armed in society (practically everyone but the anarcho-pacifists do that).Footnote 155 Rather, the aim of foregrounding anarchy as a regulative ideal, as a principle of practical reason, is to push us to think more clearly about the question of freedom and justice in world politics, and to continue the unending quest for ‘the kingdom of ends’.Footnote 156

Ken Booth was not exaggerating when he said that, ‘[i]ntellectually speaking, we are all Waltz's subjects, whether we be loyal disciples, friendly critics, or rebellious opponents: the discipline defines itself in relation to the authority of his work’.Footnote 157 The problem is that, with the exception of Wendt's structural constructivism, this disciplinary development has proceeded almost entirely from the rejection of the concept of anarchy, and a general scepticism surrounding claims, like Alex Wendt's, that anarchy ‘can be historically progressive’.Footnote 158 Some have seen this opening. Ken Booth put it like this in one of his earliest and most striking interventions in IR theory:

To achieve security in anarchy, it is necessary to go beyond Bull's ‘anarchical society’ of states to an anarchical global ‘community of communities’. Anarchy thus becomes the framework for thinking about the solutions to global problems, not the essence of the problem to be overcome. This would be a much messier political world than the states system, but it should offer better prospects for the emancipation of individuals and groups, and it should therefore be more secure.Footnote 159

The recontextualising of Hedley Bull's theory of anarchy would demand another paper, but the point applies equally to Waltz's theory, if we understand Waltz in the way I have suggested. We have ample tools and materials to restart the work Booth ultimately abandoned,Footnote 160 we need to only move beyond the idea that anarchy is the antithesis of justice, peace, and order. It might well be, as Waltz suggests, its precondition.

Acknowledgements

I have been ruminating on this paper for years and have accrued significant and welcome debts of gratitude in that time. Special thanks to colleagues affiliated with the Centre of Advanced International Studies at the University of Exeter. In particular, Stephane Baele, Gregorio Bettiza, Ross Carroll, Irene Fernandez-Molina, John Heathershaw, Beverley Loke, Brieg Powell, and Biao Zhang. I'm also grateful to Laurence Davis, Ana Juncos Garcia, Jonathan Joseph, David Karp, Ruth Kinna, Justin Rosenberg, Joe Hoover, Andreas Benkhe, Louiza Odysseos, and three diligent and supportive reviewers, for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Joe MacKay's extensive comments on an earlier draft, and access to Waltz's archive, confirmed and vastly improved my reading of Waltz. I'm also grateful to my students, Ian Metzger and Tom Heathfield, for valuable research assistance. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the PSA and BISA annual conventions, and at the BISA Ethics and World Politics Workshop at the University of Sussex.

Competing interests

None.

Footnotes

1 Halliday and Rosenberg Reference Halliday and Rosenberg1998, 379.

4 Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 290–96.

6 MacKay Reference MacKay2022, 345, n. 48 (emphasis added). In ‘Structural Realism After the Cold War’ (2000), Waltz reaffirms the value of neo-realism over neo-liberalism with reference to Kant: ‘If the democratic peace thesis is right, structural realist theory is wrong […] The causes of war lie not simply in states or in the state system; they are found in both. Kant understood this. Devotees of the democratic peace thesis overlook it’ Waltz Reference Waltz2000, 13. This paper is not a contribution to these debates, but echoes and develops arguments I have made elsewhere. See Prichard Reference Prichard2010b, Reference Prichard2013b; Baron et al. Reference Baron, Havercroft, Kamola, Koomen, Murphy and Prichard2019.

7 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 111.

8 Waltz's views compare well with Behnke Reference Behnke2008 Schmidt and Williams Reference Schmidt and Williams2008.

10 Waltz Reference Waltz1959, 23. For the fullest account of this connection between Kant and anarchism, see Wolff Reference Wolff1998. Cf. Shell Reference Shell2009, ch. 4.

11 Waltz Reference Waltz1959, 115.

13 Waltz Reference Waltz1997b, 105. My translation.

14 A note on method. I employ a broadly contextualist approach to the history of ideas drawing on established methods of historicised critical reading. Rather than provide a ‘Kantian’ reading of Waltz, or a ‘Waltzian’ reading of Kant, I will set out as faithfully as possible, the reading of Kant that Waltz elaborates. The result, I hope, destabilises the categories of both ‘Waltzian’ and ‘Kantian’, while it presents Waltz's intentions on this score for the first time. On contexualist methods, see for example, Lamb Reference Lamb2009. On the history of political thought as critical theory, see Vigneswaran and Quirk Reference Vigneswaran and Quirk2010.

16 These ‘images’ are synoptic reconstructions of the causes of war in modern political theory. ‘First image’ theorists reduce the causes of war to human nature, ‘second image’ to the character of states, and ‘third image’ explanations for the causes of war refer to the relatively autonomous international anarchy.

18 Though he did return to Kant in a French publication. See Waltz Reference Waltz1997b. The English original is Waltz Reference Waltz1996. I am grateful to Joseph MacKay for sharing his copy with me.

19 This literature is ubiquitous and paradigmatic. See for example, Legro and Moravcsik Reference Legro and Moravcsik1999. Cf. Feaver et al. Reference Feaver, Hellman, Schweller, Taliaferro, Wohlforth, Lergo and Moravcsik2000.

22 Donnelly Reference Donnelly2015, 25.

24 Donnelly Reference Donnelly2015, 26.

25 Bessner and Guilhot Reference Bessner and Guilhot2015. See also Shilliam Reference Shilliam2007; Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2012.

27 See Molloy Reference Molloy2006 and Reference Molloy2017, respectively.

28 Cited in Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2012, 468. This association of Kantian thought with ‘realism’ is a little cryptic, given Waltz's preference for ‘neo-realist theory’.

32 Onuf, Reference Onuf2009, 195.

33 For example, Doyle Reference Doyle1983a, Reference Doyle1983b, Reference Doyle1986; Williams Reference Williams1992, Reference Williams1996; Williams and Booth Reference Williams, Booth, Clark and Neumann1996. Waltz's criticisms are fleshed out below.

34 Doyle II Reference Doyle2010, 88, n.3.

36 Shell Reference Shell2009, 214.

38 MacKay Reference MacKay2022, 346–47.

39 Scheuermann Reference Scheuerman2012.

41 Wight Reference Wight, Butterfield and Wight1966, 44, n. 1. Carl Friedrich's 1948 book Inevitable Peace also comes in for some sardonic criticism: ‘Let me acknowledge Kant's wisdom’, writes Carl Friedrich, ‘only the triumph of constitutional government will bring us peace in permanency. This is Kant's conclusion, if not his wisdom’. Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 273.

42 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 339, n. 49.

44 Waltz Reference Waltz2009, 501. In his response to John Vasquez's reading of Lakatos and Kuhn, Waltz reaffirmed his Kantian idealism, through the claim that theories merely provide a set of ideas that can guide scholarship, they do not necessarily have to predict or explain anything in the real world. See Waltz Reference Waltz1997a.

45 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 335.

46 Körner Reference Körner1955, 30.

47 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 4.

48 Waltz, Reference Waltz1954, 292.

49 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 5. A recent special issue of Kantian Review (28(3), 2003), surveys developments in Kantian philosophy of science.

50 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 9.

51 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 335. Kant also uses the example of ‘bees and beavers’ in his Idea of a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent. See Kant Reference Kant and Reiss1991, 42.

52 Waltz Reference Waltz2005. Rosenberg of course disagrees with Waltz's aversion to ontology, and his theory of ‘multiplicity’ is an attempt to ontologise anarchy along Trotskyist lines. I am grateful to Professor Rosenberg for sharing this correspondence with me. Cf. Prichard Reference Prichard2018.

53 Compare this idealism with Bhaskar's (Reference Bhaskar1989) ‘transcendental critical realism’. The latter provides a realist and ontological corrective to Kant. See also Agar Reference Agar2005; Joseph Reference Joseph2010.

54 Körner Reference Körner1955, 124.

55 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 6.

56 Waltz, like Kant, seemingly tries to have his cake and eat it too. It is not because Waltz does not want to consider difficult countervailing evidence that he rejects ‘falsification’, but because all theories will ultimately be proved wrong. The point is not ‘can it be falsified’, but how ‘fruitful’ it is in particular time and place. Waltz Reference Waltz1997a, 914. For more on Waltz's theory of theory, see Wæver Reference Wæver2009, Jackson Reference Jackson2011.

57 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 11.

58 Waltz Reference Waltz1990, 31.

60 Sartori Reference Sartori1970, 1045. Recent years has seen a return to concept analysis in IR and political theory, though this has had little impact on more empirical approaches to political science. See, for example, Freeden Reference Freeden1996; Berenskötter Reference Berenskoetter2016, Reference Berenskötter2017.

61 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 12.

62 Naraniecki Reference Naraniecki2010, 518–20.

63 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 123.

65 See Lundborg Reference Lundborg2019.

66 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 332. Cf. Kant Reference Kant1993, on the vanities of speculative metaphysics.

67 Footnote Ibid., 13, 14.

69 Kant Reference Kant1993, 435.

72 Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 291.

73 Scruton Reference Scruton1982, 50.

74 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 82.

76 See Waltz Reference Waltz1990.

77 Typically, Waltz's state theory has been defined as Durkheimian and this too has generated considerable debate. See Barkdull Reference Barkdull1995; Donnelly Reference Donnelly2012; Albert and Buzan Reference Albert and Buzan2013. But Waltz was not an ontological realist and would have rejected Durkheim's conception of ‘social facts’. Nevertheless, his theory of social development, and the complex division of labour, clearly shaped Waltz's state theory. There is some cross-over between Kant and Durkheim, though explaining this is beyond the scope of this paper. See, for example, Garlitz Reference Garlitz2020.

78 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 111.

79 Körner Reference Körner1955, 136.

80 Kant, cited in Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 332. See Kant Reference Kant1964.

81 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 5, 6.

82 Moloney Reference Moloney2011, 196. See also Williams Reference Williams1996.

83 But Kant's sexism led him to believe that women were unable to be free since they were the slaves of their passions. For example, Mendus Reference Mendus and Williams1992.

86 Waltz Reference Waltz1959, 163 (emphasis added).

87 Tuck Reference Tuck2001 remains arguably one of the best syntheses of the ideas of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, and the influence of the former two on the latter.

88 Waltz Reference Waltz1959, 192.

91 Footnote Ibid., 164, n8; 171.

93 Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 295.

94 Waltz Reference Waltz1959, 23, 115.

95 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 339. Ironically, this summary is in fact closer to anarchism than the stereotype he supported three years earlier. See, for example, Proudhon Reference Proudhon2022 [1861].

96 Kant, cited in Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 337.

97 Williams Reference Williams2005, 171.

98 Waltz Reference Waltz1979,111.

99 Körner Reference Körner1955, 131, 132.

100 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 120, emphasis added.

102 Körner Reference Körner1955, 132.

103 Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2001.

106 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 331–33.

107 O'Neill Reference O'Neill1998, 77.

108 Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 294–5; Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 332.

112 Footnote Ibid., 100.

114 Waltz Reference Waltz1999, 697.

115 Footnote Ibid., 698.

116 Biao Zhang has characterised this as ‘axiological reason’. Developing Waever's insight that Waltz was distinctly constructivist, Zhang argues that for Waltz states are not cultural dopes, responding unthinkingly to external material stimuli. Rather, states respond to and are guided by a plethora of ideals. The presumption of anarchy helps orient statesmen: ‘anarchy is itself a rule of the game’, Zhang argues. Zhang Reference Zhang2014, 292. See also, Onuf and Klink Reference Onuf and Klink1989.

117 Waltz, Reference Waltz1979, 126; see also Waltz, Reference Waltz1979, 124.

118 Footnote Ibid., 128.

120 Footnote Ibid., 127.

121 Waltz, Reference Waltz1962, 339.

122 Waltz Reference Waltz1954, 296.

123 For example, Ruggie Reference Ruggie and Keohane1986.

125 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 336.

126 Footnote Ibid., 337.

127 Waltz Reference Waltz1979, 33.

129 Footnote Ibid., 112.

131 Waltz Reference Waltz1962, 339.

134 Footnote Ibid., 2–3.

135 Sagan and Waltz Reference Sagan and Waltz1995.

136 Wendt Reference Wendt1999, 246–312.

137 Waltz Reference Waltz1981, 6.

139 Waltz Reference Waltz1981, 26.

140 Waltz Reference Waltz2012, 3.

142 Waltz Reference Waltz1990, 738.

143 Footnote Ibid., 740.

144 See Waltz Reference Waltz1981, 31, n. 10, and Van Evera Reference Van Evera1999.

145 Waltz Reference Waltz1990, 743–44. Emphasis added.

146 See, for example, Sheuerman Reference Scheuerman2012 and Deudney Reference Deudney2007.

147 Cf. Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2020; Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2012.

148 For an equivalent critique of neoliberalism, see Jahn Reference Jahn2009.

150 Buzan and Little Reference Buzan and Little2001.

151 Havercroft and Prichard Reference Havercroft and Prichard2017.

155 See Christoyannopoulos Reference Christoyannopoulos2022.

157 Booth Reference Booth2009, 179.

158 Wendt Reference Wendt1992, 425.

159 Booth Reference Booth1991, 540. Cf. Prichard Reference Prichard2017.

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