Breaking the mould

The consensus on the conceptual mould of realism was not shattered by a single revolutionary insight, but by a plurality of approaches that matured in the 1960s and 1970s. As the axioms of power politics were found to be incomplete or wanting, it became necessary to think in terms of the reform of realism or, failing that, of its replacement. Indeed, Morgenthau, himself, had lamented the decline, in the postwar world, of the conditions most propitious for the proper working of the balance of power – a view echoed cogently by Inis Claude. ¹ But the very axioms of power politics were challenged by John Burton ² and later, from the perspective of political theory, by Charles Beitz, and empirically, in a behaviouralist mode, by John Vasquez. ³ By then an agenda had emerged, which gave emphasis to the questions of the degree of state-centricity in the contemporary world and that of the pervasiveness of power politics.