A Review Essay

Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

International relations is one of the last academic disciplines still to take seriously the Western canon, that body of philosophical and literary work that has shaped the Western world. The natural sciences and most social sciences, when bothering to notice the Aristotles and Descartes, do so to remind themselves of just how far they have come. The humanities have for years been engaged in a project of deposing “dead white males” and enthroning in their place critical theorists (many of whom are also white, male, and dead). But many international relations scholars believe that the classics more or less got it right, particularly about politico-military affairs. Other international relations scholars would prefer it if there were one less discipline that still paid attention to the dead white males. They might be disinclined to read Michael W. Doyle‘s big book, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism.’ Also disinclined might be many scholars who do value the philosophical canon, because such scholars tend to be realists, and Doyle is a liberal. Both of these groups should overcome their disinclinations. Doyle has written one of the most important books on international politico- military theory since Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics.2 Doyle has made many important contributions to the field, but is best known as an early and profound expositor of the liberal (or democratic) peace, the proposition that liberal democracies do not fight wars against one another. In

John M Oweii, W, IS an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Foreign Afairs at the University of Virginia

The author wishes to thank Dale Copeland, Philip Hill, and especially Randall Schweller for comments on an earlier draft.

1. Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberulism, and Socialism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Subsequent references to this book appear in parentheses in the text. 2. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).

lnfernnfionaf Security, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Winter 1998/99), pp. 147-178 0 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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arguing for a liberal peace, Doyle credited Immanuel Kant with predicting something very much like it back in the 1790s, and with offering an explanation of it that seemed to have aged extremely well.3 In a subsequent treatment of the question, Doyle invoked Niccolo Machiavelli and Joseph Schumpeter (a spring chicken among this group, having died in 1950) as sources of insight as well.4 Although the treatments of Kant by other international relations scholars since Doyle's seminal articles suggest that few actually bothered to read more than one paragraph of "To Perpetual Peace"-the one stating that average citizens will be hesitant to go to war because they were the ones to pay for it-the consensus was that Kant had at least come up with an interesting and testable (and probably true) proposition. Now comes Doyle again, trying to spark interest in such thinkers as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and Karl Marx, and persuade us to reread Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Lenin, and of course Thucydides. He sets out to show us that the canon has much to say about the cannon (and the ICBM). Doyle, then, is a champion of long-deceased philosophers, a Knight of the Living Dead, tilting at those who would forget the sources of the categories that structure our field. But he is not simply offering new interpretations and typologies of the canon; such scholars as Martin Wight, Kenneth Thompson, W.B. Gallie, Kenneth Waltz, F.H. Hinsley, Stanley Hoffmann, and Hedley Bull have done that well en~ugh.~Doyle's ambitions are many, but four central ones are (1) to show that positivistic researchers in security studies should take the time to reread the canonical sources; (2) to demonstrate that realism, liberalism, and socialism are each coherent traditions-a term he borrows from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre; (3)to test empirically the truth of each tradition via crucial hypotheses; and, although he does not put it this way (4) to synthesize the traditions.

3. Michael W. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," Parts 1 and 2, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (Summer and Fall 1983), pp. 205-254 and 323-353, respectively. 4. Michael W. Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169. 5. Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International Theory?" in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, Diplomatic Investigations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Kenneth W. Thompson, Fathers of International Thought: The Legacy of Political Theory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); W.B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Knnt, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels, and Tolstoy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Stanley Hoffmann, "Rousseau on War and Peace," in Hoffmann, junus nnd Minerva (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 25-51; and Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, 2d ed. (New York Columbia University Press, 1995).

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In this essay I argue that Doyle realizes his first and second ambitions; partially realizes his third; and only realizes his fourth for thoroughgoing liberal scholars such as himself. First, in close and often brilliant readings of difficult texts, Doyle shows that not only is it not necessarily a vice for an explanation to be ”multi-image,” but that it can be a great virtue. A theory that incorporates more than one level of analysis need not be inferior, and may be more adequate because it tells a more complete story. Hobbes, for example, purports to tells us with a single parsi- monious theory not only why anarchy leads to insecurity, but also why we have an anarchical system at all. Second, Doyle also shows that the time-honored realist-liberal-socialist typology remains the best we have, in that each school of thought has an underlying coherence. Realists of all stripes are united by the premise of a permanent state of war among states, and have as their primary goals power and security. Liberals share the premise that sometimes the state of war is overcome, and they have as their primary goal individual autonomy. Socialists start with a premise of class (rather than state) struggle, and are committed to economic, political, and social equality. Third, Doyle’s empirical tests of realism, liberalism, and socialism are thoughtful and persuasive, but in the case of realism and socialism do not bear the inferential weight he places upon them. Although he is almost certainly correct that structural realism cannot wholly account for balancing behavior, his single case study cannot show that. His attempt to resuscitate socialist security theory involves showing (pace Waltz) that European socialists were being orthodox Marxists in supporting war in August 1914. He makes a good case, but even that case cannot revive socialism. Finally, Doyle’s synthesis involves not combining valid elements from each tradition into a single theory, but rather asking us, the scholars and policymak- ers, to assume multiple identities as realists, liberals, and socialists. This synthesis, however, is liberal in character, and thus will not be accepted by realists or socialists. Below I address these issues somewhat out of order. First, I argue that Doyle should win a hearing for the canon from all scholars who study politico- military affairs. His glosses on these old texts, while sometimes open to challenge (e.g., in the case of Kant), turn up profound theoretical insights and testable propositions. In the second section, I argue that his empirical tests are genuine contributions to the literature. In particular, his test of balance-of- power theory is ingenious and raises the question of why such tests have been

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so rare. That test, and the test of socialism, however, are not as decisive as Doyle suggests. I also devote special attention to socialism as a framework for understanding security, arguing that its potential remains slight. In the third section, I examine Doyle’s account of what unites each tradition, and conclude with him that moral propositions are at the heart of each. In the final section, I argue that Doyle’s metatheoretical synthesis is well motivated, but will fail to convince nonliberals precisely because it is a liberal synthesis.

Why We Should Read the Canon

Doyle’s first task is to convince today’s average researcher of international security to read these difficult, seemingly archaic works, or at least to read his own closely argued interpretations of the works. A certain type of scholar will want to read the canon simply out of respect, just as a certain type of Yankees baseball fan will always attend Old Timers’ Day. But a majority of those who have kept the classics alive have done so out of a conviction that the historico- philosophical approach they take is superior to the positivistic approach that dominates major political science departments in North America today. In a famous article, Hedley Bull argues that the ”classical approach” is better suited to the messy subject matter of international relations because it acknowledges its reliance on judgment and intuition rather than on abstract models and measurement of dubious accuracy. When the scientific approach has furthered our understanding of international politics, it has secretly employed classical methods.6 In a spirited rejoinder, J. David Singer argues that Bull’s approach is doomed to stagnation because it does not test theories against e~idence.~ Doyle dodges this debate, and so shall I. It is clear, however, that his concern is to show the Singers of the field that the canon remains a fruitful source of theory for a positivist: it offers powerful, coherent, and falsifiable propositions. Doyle aims to convince scholars who believe life is too short to read Hobbes, who believe that their duty to the classics is discharged when they mention to

6. Hedley Bull, ”International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach,” World Politics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (April 1966), pp. 361-377. 7. J. David Singer, “The Incompleat Theorist: Insight without Evidence,” in James N. Rosenau and Klaus Knorr, eds., Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1969), pp. 63-86. Excerpts from both Bull‘s and Singer’s essays are reprinted in John A. Vasquez, Classics of International Relations, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pp. 7&90.

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their undergraduate students that people hundreds of years ago also thought about war and peace, will find that the scientific rewards from reading the canon will outweigh the costs. Doyle must address two central objections to the classics, implied by Singer: that they are not empirical, and that they are not theoretically rigorous. The first he mitigates by showing that we can test their propositions even if they did not (and that they often pass our tests). The second he meets by demonstrating the coherence of a number of thinkers.

POLITICS IS POLITICS Before addressing these two objections, however, Doyle briefly discusses an objection from another direction, that of historicists and interpretivists. Histo- ricists argue that the social world of today is entirely different from that of ancient Greece, or Renaissance Italy, or Enlightenment Prussia. Because the institutions, norms, identities, meanings, and other constitutive elements of life are so different, theories formulated for (and by) those different worlds are of no use in explaining ours (nor are ours of use in explaining theirs).8 This objection has little following among mainstream positivists, because it is typically extended across space as well as time: Western international relations theory, critics charge, has no business trying to explain the non-Western world. International relations theory tells us more about Western self-understandings than about actual cause-and-effect in world politics. Doyle, a positivist, is aware of the historicist criticism, and his primary reply is to acknowledge that the three traditions are indeed not universally valid-a concession unaccept- able to realism-but, as products of specific times and places (the West, mostly in the modern era), are contingent. Yet he correctly notes that, with the spread- ing of the Western political norms such as liberalism, socialism, and the states system itself, the three Western traditions are more widely applicable than many critics acknowledge (pp. 35-37). Doyle also makes a crucial move: he assumes that a theory best explains outcomes in a particular time and place when states and/or statesmen in that time and place believe it. Socialist states are more likely to act according to socialist theory. Thus the book's title, Ways of War and Peace: statesmen, states, and systems with different norms exhibit different behaviors. I return to this point in a later section.

8. This argument has been stated many times in many places; a succinct example is Alasdair MacIntyre, "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" in MacIntyre, Against the Self-images of the Age (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 260-279.

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CANONICAL WRITERS ARE LOGICALLY COHERENT A second objection to the classics is that the philosophers were not theoretically rigorous enough. Scientific theory is internally valid-noncontradictory-and, say the most ambitious, ultimately reducible to mathematical expression. The canonical writers were, it is thought, insightful but too often used imprecise language, blended distinct causal mechanisms, and contradicted themselves. They are more like poets than scientists. KANT'S RIGOR Take for example David Lake's charge that, concerning liberal peace, Kant (and Doyle) offers a "normative philosophy for the conduct of foreign policy but not a positive theory of international relations."' The distinction between normative philosophy and positive theory for Lake is that the former "lacks what today we would call a fully developed and consistent set of micro motives"" (i.e., motives animating individual actors). The micromotives are underdeveloped, asserts Lake, in that Kant attributes to publics in liberal states altruism, a willingness to forgo material benefits for the sake of peace with liberal brethren in foreign states. The micromotives are inconsistent, he charges, in that Kant simultaneously asserts that autocrats are selfish (i.e., Kant arbitrarily ascribes to despots a motive different from that of ordinary citizens). Two replies to Lake are possible. First, whether persons are always motivated by material self-interest is an empirical question, not a logical one. There are no a priori grounds to label underdeveloped a theory that posits altruism. Second, in any case Kant does not build peace upon individual or state altruism. Rather, citizens hold a view of what later became called "enlightened self-interest": the republics that forgo war with one another may comprise "devils (if only they possess understanding)."" That is, a republic may be composed of selfish individuals, so long as they are intelligent enough to set up rational institutions (i.e., those that cause the selfishness of each to cancel out the selfishness of all others). In this regard, Kant's republic is similar to that of James Madison, where the factions that inevitably arise in politics will counterbalance one another." In setting up republican institutions, selfish

9. David A. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," Aniericnn Politicnl Science Reviezu, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1992), pp. 24-37. 10. bid., 29. 11. Immanuel Kant, "To Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch," 5366, in Perpetual Pence atid Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), p. 124. 12. James Madison, Federalist No. 10, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federnlist Pupers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 77-84

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persons are in effect demonstrating a low discount rate on future utility by sacrificing immediate for greater future gain. For republics, peace is to pay off handsomely in the long run (as the historical record confirms). Kant does hope and predict that under republican institutions individuals over time should become more moral (i.e., willing to treat persons as ends rather than just as means), given that morality would no longer be punished as it was in the state of nature. In fact, moral development is the goal of his political theory. But a republic is constituted by rational institutions, not moral citizens. The differ- ence between pacifically inclined citizens and bellicose autocrats is not their moral character, but the incentives they face as a result of institutional differences in their respective societies.I3 Kant, then, offers an internally valid theory of liberal peace. This is not to say that he looks entirely to state-level factors. Doyle in fact argues that Kant is primarily a systemic-level theorist. For Kant, international and cosmopolitan conditions must be met for perpetual peace to be possible: a league of sovereign republics must form, and people must treat aliens with hospitality. Wade Huntley pushes Kant’s systemic component further by arguing that Kant locates the ultimate cause of peace in the international system, which will become so brutal that people will demand the republican government that leads ineluctably to peace.I4 Regardless of which ”image” Kant stresses the most, he does provide a strong example of how a theory that appeals to more than one level of analysis is not necessarily confused, and in fact may be more adequate than its alternatives. KANT IS NO DEMOCRAT. Kant’s refusal to rely on citizens’ goodwill, however, points to two difficulties with Doyle’s interpretation. Kant is less democratic, and less opposed to liberal crusading, than Doyle would have it. Kant is often credited with predicting a “democratic peace,” yet he was an adamant opponent of democracy.” His opposition comes not simply because his notion of ”democracy” is different from ours (although it is that). It is because in a republic the sovereign is right reason rather than the people. Virtually all writers on liberal peace, including the present writer, ascribe a

13. On this point, see also Doyle, Wnys of Wor and Pence, pp. 278-279. Others see a stronger role for morality in supporting Kant’s perpetual peace; see, for example, Andrew Hurrell, ”Kant and the Kaiitian Paradigm in International Relations,” Reoiezo of Interrinfionnl Strrdics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1990), pp. 18S206. 14. Wade L. Huntley, “Kant’s Third Image: Systemic Sources of the Liberal Peace,” Iriternntiorzal Stiidies Qirnrtc,rly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 1996), pp. 45-76. 15. See Scott Gates, Torbjsrn Knutsen, and Jonathon W. Moses, ”Democracy and Peace: A More Skeptical View,” Joirnml of Pence Research, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1996), pp. 1-10.

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greater role to popular sovereignty than does Kant. In ”Perpetual Peace,” Kant makes it clear that democracies are always despotic, precisely because they cannot be republics. Republics are constituted by the separation of the legisla- tive and executive powers, and democracies (as Kant defines them) by definition cannot feature such a separation. Monarchies and aristocracies may separate powers, and thus may be republics. The problem with mingled powers is that when the same power makes and executes the laws, abuse of power against minorities becomes likely.I6On his mind, and on the mind of Madison in Federalist 10, is what Tocqueville later calls the “tyranny of the rnaj~rity,”’~ the persecution of minorities by a majority that sets itself up as judge and jury. This fear of majority rule leads Kant to some undemocratic positions. He limits the franchise to ”independent” citizens, householders, whose ranks do not include women or laborers, who are ”mere auxiliaries to the common- wealth, for they have to receive orders or protection from other individuals, so that they do not possess civil independence.”’* Doyle, by contrast, insists that male suffrage be ”wide” ke., 30 percent) and that ”female suffrage [be] granted within a generation of its being demanded by an extensive female suffrage movement” (p. 264). Kant also categorically rejects the right to rebellion upheld by John Locke.” Predictably, Kant’s case is logical: a right to rebellion is self-contradictory, because codifying it in the state’s constitution or supreme law implies that there is an authority (the party with the right to rebel) above the supreme law, meaning the supreme law is not really supreme. In other words, ”Who would act as judge in this dispute between the people and the sovereign?”2u Because the separation of powers is central to Kant, his statement that republics tend to be pacific because the people are able to veto war decisions is less democratic than it seems. The ”people” express their will through duly elected legislators. These legislators are supposed to consider what their con- stituents would want if they were perfectly reasonable and had access to all relevant information. ”If it is at least possible that a people could agree to [a law], it is our duty to consider the law as just, even if the people is at present

16. Kant, “To Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch,” 5352-3.53, pp. 113-115. 17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Dcrnocracy in Ainericn, Vol. I, Pt. 2, chaps. 7-8, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Harper and Row, 19691, pp. 24G276. 18. Kant, “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, but Is of No Practical Use,” a295, in Perpetid Pivcc and Other Essays, p. 76. 19. John Locke, Second Treatise of Governtnent, 9227, in Locke, Two Treatises of G~~~rtzi~~e~zt,ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 416. 20. Kant, ”Theory and Practice,” 5302-303, in Perpetid Peace and 0Nii.r Essays, pp. 83-84.

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in such a position or attitude of mind that it would probably refuse its consent if it were consulted,” Kant writes, giving the telling example of a war tax.2’ Thus when the government asks the legislature’s permission to go to war, it is performing a formal test of the a priori legitimacy of that war, not acknowl- edging that the people are sovereign. The right answers exist whether people recognize them or not. Institutional checks maximize the probability that the right answers will be found. Another area in which Kant differs from his modern interpreters is in his attitude toward the spread of republicanism by force. Kant is less a scold and more a cheerleader concerning liberal crusading. It is true that one of the preliminary articles of perpetual peace is that no state will attempt forcibly to change the constitution of another.22This appears a clear prohibition against liberal states using force (or subversion) to liberalize despotisms. As I discuss elsewhere, however? Kant in other places clearly justifies such policies by liberal states. For Kant, republics remain in a state of nature with nonrepublics, and that state of nature is brutally Hobbesian. Republics must expect aggression from nonrepublics and conduct themselves accordingly. In the state of nature, in fact, states have the ”right ...to make war upon one another (for example, in order to bring about a condition close to that governed by right)”’4-a condition that can only mean their becoming more republican. A vanquished despotism, moreover, may ”be made to accept a new constitution that is unlikely to encourage their warlike inclinations” (i.e., a republican con~titution).~~Kant’s 1798 ”justification” of the French Republic’s invasion of Spain in its war against England leaves no doubt that, at least in his last years, he clapped rather than wrung his hands over liberal crusades.26

~~~~~ ~ ~ ~~ 21. Ibid., pp. 77-78 (emphasis in original). Compare Edmund Burke’s theory of “virtual repre- sentation,” in his ”Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” The Works of the Right Hurioirrnblr Ednrllfid Burke, Vol. 3 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1801), pp. 18-19. 22. Kant, ”To Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch,” 9346, p. 109. 23. John M. Owen, IV, Liherc7l Pence, Likrnl Wnr: Airiericni? Politics atid Ii7trrnntionnl Serrrrity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 30. 24. Imiiianuel Kant, The Metnpbysics of Mornls, in Knnt’s Political Writrr~gs,trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 19701, p. 170. 25. Ibid., p. 166. 26. Immanuel Kant, “Rechtfertigung des Directoriums der franziisischen Republik wegen seines angeblich ungereimten Planes, den Krieg mit England zu ihrem Vortheil zu beendigen, 1798” [Justification of the Directory of the French Republic on account of its allegedly absurd plan to end the war against England to her advantage], in Immntiirel Krrr~f’sSiirrlrnt/ichr Werke [Immanual Kant’s Complete Works], Vol. 7, ed. Gustav Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1868), pp. 664 645.

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If my reading of Kant is correct, it reinforces Doyle’s point that Kant is consistent and realistic (if not a realist), rather than the starry-eyed utopian so many envisage.

MULTIPLE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS AS A VIRTUE One reason why we find Kant and the other canonical sources difficult to follow is that they do not have our typologies. We tend to ask of an international relations scholar, past or present: At what level of analysis is his or her causal focus? We forget that typologies are constructed for analytical conven- ience; we should not treat them as dogmas, automatically declaring muddled a theory that does not fit neatly into our favorite schema. On Doyle’s reading, Kant has state-level and systemic-level variables reinforcing one another. His theory cannot be dismissed a priori on those grounds. Doyle combines our two dominant typologies, realist-liberal-socialist and individual-state-systemic levels of analysis. He treats the categories in the first typology as mutually exclusive: a writer is realist, liberal, or socialist, not some combination thereof. But concerning the second typology, he argues that each writer uses all three levels of analysis, even while emphasizing one image over the others. Among the realists, Machiavelli stresses human nature (and is classified as a fundamentalist realist); Hobbes, the interstate system (structural realist); Rousseau, domestic society (constitutional realist); and Thucydides, all three (complex realist). Among the liberals, John Locke and Jeremy Bentham emphasize human nature; Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter, domestic society; and Kant, the interstate system. Among socialists, Marx and Engels concentrate mainly on domestic society; Lenin, on the interstate system. At times the framework seems stretched, as when Doyle argues that Locke and Bentham are primarily first-image thinkers. But he shows that these thinkers are interesting and satisfying in part because each crosses the boundaries between images. THUCYDIDES, THE COMPLEX REALIST. Thucydides is the realist whose name is most often taken in vain as a structuralist. The Athenian’s intellectual descen- dants typically pluck one sentence from his History of the Peloponizesiniz Wnv and hold it up as the essence of his argument about the causes of the conflagration between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.c.: ”The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this caused in Lacedaemon, made war inevi- table.”27It is a strong statement indeed. No other factor, Thucydides asserts,

27. Thucydides, H~toryof the Pc/oyo/zrzesim~War, Book 1, 523, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), p. 49.

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could have prevented war once Athenian power rose and Spartan fear followed. But more is happening here than a shift in the balance of material power. Thucydides implies that the Spartan fear that helped make war inevi- table need not have followed the rise in Athenian power (p. 73). Had Athens, or Sparta, or both, had different characteristics, Sparta might not have feared Athens‘s rise. Athens and Sparta, Thucydides is at pains to tell us, have very different cultures, political and economic systems, and leaders. Athens is a democracy, and for classical Greeks that does not imply the pacific commercial state that today’s liberals envisage. States ruled by the demos are restive, conquering regimes. Athens has also built a commercial empire using men who are motivated to fight because they have a say over policy. Its foremost citizen, Pericles, is a public-spirited genius. Sparta, by contrast, is an oligarchy, handicapped by its agricultural economy, its innate conservatism, and its inability to elicit popular enthusiasm. Sparta’s “empire” is actually a voluntary alliance that is coming increasingly unglued. Even then, however, Sparta would probably have done well to heed the counsel of King Archidamus and postpone war with Athens. Instead, it listened to Sthenelaidas, who frightened his fellow Spartans into believing that the time to fight was now (pp. 61, 68-69, 76-78). Alter any of these factors-leadership, political institutions, economic system, or culture-and Sparta might not have feared the rise of Athens. A rising conservative oligarchical land-power might not have been so intimidating to Sparta. Thucydides devotes far too many pages to the history of Athens and to intercity differences for us to infer that he thinks nonstructural factors unimportant. That is not to say that the anarchical milieu in the Mediterranean world was not the most important cause of the Peloponnesian War. It is rather to say that it was one of several conditions that in the event caused the war. None by itself was a sufficient cause, not even the structure of the interstate system. HOBBES, STRUCTURE PLUS. Thomas Hobbes, Thucydides’ most famous disci- ple, is more of a structural realist, argues Doyle. Anarchy is a crucial condition for the state of war among sovereign states. But Hobbes too relies on the first and second images. Indeed, his masterpiece Leuiatlzan is almost entirely about domestic politics, using international politics only as an analogue to help readers understand the state of nature among individuals.28 To understand

28. That statement is only true if we rule transnational subversion out of the realm of international politics. Hobbes‘s concern is with sovereignty, which involves eliminating foreign as well as domestic threats to the Leviathan. In his time the greatest threats to the English king’s sovereignty

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why the international system is anarchical, we need to know why states are sovereign (i.e., we need to look at the unit-level question of state formation). Hobbes’s familiar story is that men find anarchy so violent and terrifying that they enter a social contract wherein they give up their natural rights (excepting self-preservation) to a nearly absolute sovereign, the Leviathan. Without the state of war among men, the discrete units upon which the anarchical international system is built would not exist. Of course, the state of war among men must also be explained. Rather than attribute it wholly to anarchy, Hobbes posits certain assumptions about individual men. Men, he asserts, are at bottom matter in motion, like rocks, rivers, or planets. Motivating man is not any end or telos implanted by God, as the Schoolmen suppose, but rather his appetites, above all the desire for self-preservation. To sum up, then, if man did not fear violent death, he would not find the state of nature so terrifying, would not set up sovereign states, and would not end up in a world of international anarchy. In other words, Hobbes gives us an account of human nature that is necessary to a full account of international anarchy (pp. 113-116). His theory has a broader scope and uncovers more facts than a theory confined to one level of analysis. ROUSSEAU, THE SECOND-IMAGEREALIST. Kenneth Waltz‘s Man, the State, aid War presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the model of a third-image theorist. The familiar stag hunt game Rousseau presents in his Discourse 011 the Origins of Inequality, in which hunters fail to cooperate for mutual gain because none is able to make credible commitments, is said by Waltz to capture the essence of international politics. The identities of the hunters are irrelevant; what matters is the anarchical situation in which they find themselves. In his subtly argued chapter 4, Doyle takes issue with Waltz’s interpretation of Rousseau as a structuralist. Rousseau is rather a ”constitutional realist,” or a realist who builds on Thucydides’ insight that the internal characteristics of states affect the quality of their relations. Rousseau is famous for describing a social contract in which the ”General Will,” the combined wishes of the citizenry, is sovereign. He does not expect commonwealths governed by the General Will to be pacifistic, even toward one another: Rousseau clearly is a pessimist, seeing the state of war as a permanent condition. But he does not see this state

were religious, including the papacy and its continental supporters (roughly half of Lez~idim- Parts 3 and &is concerned with the sovereign’s control over religion). For an exploration of transnational struggles over internal institutions, see John M. Owen, IV, “Pessimistic Constructiv- ism: Common Identities, Common Enemies,” paper presented at the aiiiiual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, September 2-5, 1998.

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of war as a state of nature; rather, it is a social construct, a situation that does not exist until men set it up. Thus the characteristics of the states men build affect how the state of war is played out. The rub is that Rousseau’s democracies are able to play power politics more efficiently than their despotic neighbors (p. 148), in part because a people who governs itself will fight harder to protect the state (cf. Thucydides on Athenian democracy). His recommenda- tions for constitutional reform in Corsica and Poland have as one end rendering those states unconquerable by foreign invaders. For Rousseau, tlie identities of the hunters in the stag hunt do matter. AN EFFICIENT SOURCE OF HYPOTHESES. If the insights Doyle finds in Thucyd- ides, Hobbes, and Rousseau sound familiar, it is because these writers anticipate most of the debates that have defined the security field in recent years. Most of today’s scholars would acknowledge Thucydides’ status as founding father. But in Hobbes lie the roots of the rationalism, including game theory and formal modeling, that is shaping so much of the security literature today. Hobbes was a mathematician so impressed with Galileo’s achievements that he became convinced that the sociopolitical world was reducible to mechan- ic~.’~Not surprisingly, lie touched on such issues as the possibility of overcom- ing what we call the security dilemma, of cooperation under anarchy, and the conditions under which balancing happens (pp. 116-128). For his part, Rous- seau anticipates the subsequent literatures that distinguish strong from weak states, and homogeneous from heterogeneous international systems.30 Doyle might have added that today’s constructivists would benefit from a return to Rousseau, an early constructivist who was also a pessimist. Nature was peaceful for Rousseau, but society was always conflictual because it necessarily entailed men’s developing amour propre, or the selfish, jealous form of self-love. Other canonical writers anticipate today’s debates as well. Locke, in emphasizing the fear of cheating in the state of nature, foreshadows international regime

29. George Croon1 Robertson, H~hhes(Edinburgh: n.p., 1886; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 35-37. 30. Doyle lists Raymond Aron, Henry Kissinger, Stanley Hoffmann, Robert Gilpin, Stephen Kras- ner, and Peter Katzenstein as ”constitutionalists”; and more recent writers on ”soft realism,” such as Fareed Zakaria and Gideon Rose, also build on the insight that states, the units in the international system, are different in significant ways. See Zakaria, Fvorn Wealth fo Pozucr: Tl7e U~iusual Origriis of Americn‘s World Role (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics, Vol. 51, No. 1 (October 1998). Another permutation is the distinction between status quo and revisionist states; see, for example, Randall L. Scliweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripohrity oiid Hitlrr’s Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 22-24, 84-89.

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theory (pp. 223-226).31 Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter anticipate the ”pacific commercial states” literature (pp. 246-248).32 That so many crucial controversies were present centuries ago is not only interesting; it suggests that one or both of two propositions is correct. First, our world is not so different from the world of Renaissance or Enlightenment Europe. Second, our thinking about our world is shaped by the thinking of these long-dead men. In any case, it should be clear that reading the classics is an efficient way for us to find propositions about security. Even if their work was not peer reviewed, even if they would not receive tenure at our leading universities, we must grant the philosophers this: they were very, very smart.

Testing the Traditions

A more serious objection to Doyle’s claim that we can learn from the classics is that the writers in question do not test their theories in a rigorous fashion. When they use evidence, they pick out data that would support their propositions, or select on the dependent variable. Thus, like the cosmology of the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time, their theories are not open to empirical correction. The same “scientific method” that propelled the natural sciences into their modern successes can do the same for human sciences such as international relations, but that means abandoning the methods of the canonical writers.33 It is certainly true that none of the philosophers employed the rigorous hypothesis tests that we use. Lacking our statistical techniques, our giant libraries, and our computers, they could not do so. So in that sense they were doing something different from what mainstream international relations does today. Yet the important question is: Can zue test their theories? Doyle presents empirical tests of crucial hypotheses drawn from each tradition. His test of Kant’s liberal hypotheses on the spread and effects of liberalism is already familiar; here he presents again and supplements his evidence that liberal states do not fight wars against one another. His test of realism, one of

31. Major works include Robert 0. Keohane, Aftrr Hegewfon!y (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1986); and Stephen D. Krasner, ed., li?terriationn( Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 32. Major works include Richard Rosecrance, ThRise of thu Tvadi,ig State (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and John Mueller, Refreat from Duoriisdny (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 33. Singer, ”The Incompleat Theorist.” Singer does call for a collaborative effort by “classicists” and “scientists” that involves rigorous testing of the philosopher’s propositions.

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the most interesting parts of the book, affirms that eighteenth-century Euro- pean states balanced against one another as if material power were all that mattered. Doyle’s test of socialism is less direct: he endeavors to show that, contrary to the usual interpretation, true socialism would have predicted that the socialist parties of Europe would vote for war in August 1914. Some readers will find Doyle’s tests odd. They are predicated on the notion that a theory works best when statesmen or other actors believe that theory to be true. Doyle explicitly chooses eighteenth-century Europe as a testing ground for realism because statesmen in that time and place were realists: they were not concerned with religion as their seventeenth-century predecessors had been, nor with political ideology as their post-1789 successors were to be (pp. 175-176). It then becomes obvious why Doyle picks liberal states to test liberalism. He argues that he cannot test socialism directly because there have never been any Marxist socialist states (a problematic claim to which I return below). In any event, the notion that ideas, at least as shapers of cognition, affect international relations is a controversial one. It is a hallmark of constructivism, an approach compatible with all three traditions but sure to be opposed by structural realists and many liberals as well. A neorealist, for example, predicts that states will balance against power regardless of the ideas held by their leaders or citizens. The neorealist would therefore say that Doyle is importing a constructivist premise into his test. The importation of constructivism, however, is harmless enough. Neorealists should not object to a test of balance-of-power theory in any spatio-temporal domain. They will object, however, to the inference Doyle draws from the test.

BALANCE OF POWER IN THE DOCK One of the great services the book provides is the formulation and execution of a test of realism’s most prominent prediction. As Doyle writes, the balance of power is ”among the most discussed and the least examined aspects of world politics” (p. 161). Most realists have in common the expectation that states will increase military spending and/or form external alignments to prevent any one state or coalition from dominating. Yet do they always balance against material power, as structural realism asserts? Power balancing is usually identified ex post facto, and is thus afflicted with a circularity problem. We can say now that France and Russia balanced against Germany after 1890, but how do we know that France and Russia were balancing against German power alone, and not against some other factor or set of factors such as the threat brought on by the accession of William I1 to the Prussian throne and his firing

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of the judicious Bismarck? And were the resulting alignments truly balanced in terms of power?34 That there are so few examples of ex ante propositions as to who will balance against whom and when raises suspicions that structural realism’s central claim, its sine qua non, is not falsifiable. The main reason why tests of whether states balance against power alone have been rare is the difficulty of measuring power objectively. Hans Morgenthau acknowledges this as a problem.35Wil- liam Wohlforth complicates the picture by showing conclusively that during the Cold War the superpowers’ perceptions of the balance of power were at variance with each other’s and with those that academic analysts would esti- mate.36If perceptions did not match reality, then the question becomes, what produced the perceptions that produced the balancing?37Unless realists can overcome this problem, their claim to have a predictive theory collapses. Doyle formulates measures of material power metrics that should be uncon- troversial. Since eighteenth-century European statesmen gauged power based on sizes of armies and navies, population, and physical distance, that is exactly how Doyle gauges power. His two most interesting balancing hypotheses are ”counterpoise” and ”equipoise.” Counterpoise, an idea he derives from the ancient Indian writer Kautilya, predicts that states will balance against power discounted by distance. (Why Doyle measures the distances between capitals rather than between borders, where soldiers could be posted and over which states often fought, is not clear.) Ceteris paribus, closer states are more threat- ening. Thus counterpoise predicts that states will intentionally balance against their closest neighbors, resulting in a checkerboard alliance pattern. Equipoise predicts nothing about states’ intentions, but simply that they will end up in roughly equally balanced blocs regardless of geography. Equipoise seems more appropriate for the late twentieth century, when technology, especially long-range nuclear weapons, makes distance less relevant. To take into account the ”tyranny of distance” in the eighteenth century, Doyle adds a term incorporating the distance between capitals in an alliance: the closer the allies geographically, the stronger their alliance.

34. Stephen Walt attempts to mitigate the problem by arguing that states balance against threats, including hostile intentions, rather than power alone. Walt, The Origins of Allinnces (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). Reading intentions, however, is at least as subjective an activity as gauging power. 35. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 3d ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), Part 3. 36. William Curti Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Pozuer and Perceptioris in the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 37. Robert Jervis is a prominent realist who has considered questions of perception at length. See Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).

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Particularly interesting in the 1730-89 period is the so-called Diplomatic Revolution of May 1756, when the alignments shifted from Great Britain + Austria versus France + Prussia + Russia to Great Britain + Prussia versus Austria + France + Russia. Here longtime enemies Austria and France aligned, and Britain abandoned Austria for Prussia. Balance-of-power theory would expect that this shift in alignments was correlated with a shift in material power. And material power did shift: Prussia had begun to rise at Austria’s expense. As Austria’s northern neighbor gained population and military strength, particularly through its seizure of Silesia, a theory of counterpoise balancing would expect Vienna to seek precisely what it did seek, an alignment with St. Petersburg and Paris. It would also expect Prussia to seek an alignment with Britain. These alignments are all in the numbers, requiring no additional assumptions about ideology, culture, history, or individual leadership. A theory of equipoise balancing, which discounts geography, would predict that the resulting alliances would be roughly evenly balanced in terms of military strength and population. The results here are somewhat less impressive, but the Diplomatic Revolution did produce alignments more evenly balanced than the old alignments would have been after the rise of Prussia. So although historians traditionally have credited the revolution to Kaunitz (thus exhibiting a Machiavellian fundamentalist realism), the Austrian chancellor who sought it for nine years, Doyle says the material structure of international politics is the prime cause (pp. 191-192). Its successes notwithstanding, Doyle concludes that structural realism is not fully vindicated by the 1730-89 case study. Doyle might have supported this conclusion by asking how Prussia gained the strength to take Silesia from Austria in the first place. Fundamentalist realism would suggest looking to Frederick the Great (and his father, Frederick William I, who left him a strong army). Constitutional realism would draw upon the centralization that Frederick, the archetypal ”enlightened absolutist,” implemented in Prussia. Doyle pursues a different tactic. He asserts that structural realism explains the 1730-89 period well only because state structures were relatively homogeneous. Other studies in more heterogeneous periods cast doubt on balance-of- power theory (pp. 173-174).38Thus constitutional realism subsumes structural

38. Examples include Emerson Niou, Peter Ordeshook, and Gregory Rose, The Balance of Pouier: Stnbility in Iiiteriiational Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Brian Healy and Arthur Stein, “The Balance of Power in International History,” Iournal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1973), pp. 33-61; and James D. Morrow, “Arms vs. Allies,” International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 207-233.

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realism. Many of us will find this inference appealing, but structural realists will have reason to dispute it. The other studies Doyle cites use different indices of power; Doyle should have performed his own test on periods where domestic institutions varied across states. In choosing an easy case for structural realism, Doyle is offering the structuralists a Trojan horse. Trojan horses do not end battles, they begin them.

LIBERAL PEACE PUT TO THE TEST Doyle’s theoretical and empirical work on liberal peace is already well known.39 Here he reiterates his argument that Kant predicted an expanding zone of liberal peace, and that that prediction has come true. To be sure, there are problems with the liberal peace proposition. First, as I argue elsewhere, it is not always clear to either actors or analysts which states are liberal.“’ Built into most accounts of liberal peace, including that of Kant, is the assumption that liberal states will recognize one another as liberal (i.e., that the liberal peace is intentional). In fact, however, definitions and thus perceptions of liberalness vary widely across time and space, even within states4*If Kant is correct, then two states (e.g., arguably France and Britain in the late nineteenth century) that we regard as liberal but do not regard each other as liberal do not belong in the pacific union, even if they do not fight each other. Second, case-study research suggests that some of the propositions that liberal peace scholars take for granted are problematic (e.g., that authoritarian states per se are more warlike).42Third is the endogeneity problem: Does liberalism cause peace, or does peace cause liberali~m?~~Fourth, some have questioned whether there were really any liberal democracies prior to the end of World War I, when women were granted the franchise in most industrialized countries. If that is the case, the liberal peace becomes a more recent phenomenon and loses some of its statistical ~ignificance.~~

39. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics; and Doyle, ”Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Parts 1 and 2. 40. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War. 41. Ido Oren, ”The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany,” in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 263-300. 42. See the case studies by Martin Malin, Kurt Dassel, and John C. Matthews, 111, in Miriam Fendius Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Aiiswer? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 43. William R. Thompson, “Democracy and Peace,” Internatioid Organization, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 141-174. 44. Henry S. Farber and Joanne Gowa, “Polities and Peace,” in Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller, Debating the Democratic Peace, pp. 239-262; see also David Spiro, ”The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” in ibid., pp. 202-238.

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Doyle acknowledges most of these problems and more, and offers replies. The crucial facts here, however, are that liberal peace remains one of the most fruitful and practical research programs in the field, and that it was all predicted more than two hundred years ago by a philosopher who never left his home city of Konigsberg, Prussia.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH SOCIALISM? I have set aside socialism, Doyle’s third tradition, until now because its status as a viable framework for understanding war and peace is more dubious. At 66 pages, Part 3, Doyle’s section on socialism, is shorter by far than that on realism (161 pages), or on liberalism (107 pages). Nonetheless, many readers will be tempted to bypass Part 3. As political program and as academic theory-and any good socialist will see theory and practice as related-social- ism45has fallen on hard times. As a way to understand security in particular, socialism is, if not dead, then in a persistent vegetative state. Socialism’s general problem became acute in August 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing to a climax the crisis in Marxism-Leninism that had become obvious when China began its economic reforms in the early 1980s. Socialism’s securify problem came in a much earlier August, August 1914, when the Second International, and thus proletarian class solidarity, melted away under the heat of the nation-state. It was then that the socialist parties in Germany, France, and Great Britain all supported the Great War. The interpretation most contemporaries and subsequent scholars have put on the collapse of the Second International is that it damaged socialism’s claim that a world of socialist states would be peaceful.46Contra Marx, the workers had countries after all. Doyle wants to revive Marxist security theory by restoring credibility to the notion that socialist states will not fight one another. Thus he must take aim at both August 1914 and August 1991. That is, he must show that the socialist parties of Europe were actually being good Marxists in voting for war. Such a demonstration would mean that we cannot infer how socialist states would behave from how socialist opposition parties behaved. But, the objection will arise, we know how socialist states “would behave,” because we have had the Soviet Union and its satellites, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and so on. Sino-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Cambodian wars, Soviet inva- sions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and vehement Sino-Soviet enmity in

45. Like Doyle, I use socialism and Marxism interchangeably, recognizing that there have been nonMarxist socialists as far back as the ancient world. 46. The most familiar treatment of this issue is that of Waltz in Mun, the State, and War, chap. 5.

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the 1960s and 1970s tell us what we need to know. To turn aside this answer, Doyle must also show that these states were not Marxist after all, that the Soviet Union that dissolved in August 1991 was actually a ”state capitalist” state. He employs a single strategy to accomplish both goals: he attempts to detach Lenin from Marx, to show that their ideas about war and peace were very different, to demonstrate that Lenin was ”Marx’s usurping heir” (p. 339). Doyle does argue persuasively that Marx was primarily a state-level theorist, Lenin a system-level one. He does not thereby succeed, however, in reviving socialism as a viable framework for understanding security. MARX AND ENCELS ON WAR Marx and Engels were internationalists, looking forward to world socialism (pp. 323-326). In their minds, however, progress toward that end is furthered by means painful to the oppressed, for example, imperialism, which spreads the very capitalism that is a prerequisite for socialist revolution (pp. 328-334). War among the European states could also be progressive. The proletariat ought not to support wars of imperial conquest, but in certain circumstances should support war among the imperfectly bourgeois states of Europe even though war would mean killing their fellow workers in other countries. Crucially, one of those cases for Marx is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Should Louis Napoleon conquer Germany, Marx judges, regressive forces would be strengthened. The revolution would be delayed. Thus Marx lauds the German workers for supporting the war against Louis Napoleon’s ”aggression,” and for stopping short of calling for the conquest of France, which would have been a regressive move. Another crucial case comes in the 1890s, when Engels advises the German workers to support war against a Franco-Russian combination should the possibility of such a war arise. An increase in the power of the Russian czar, the most regressive force in Europe, would set back the socialist cause, particularly if that increase were at the expense of Germany, the state where Engels believes the revolution most likely to begin. In other words, had Engels, and presumably Marx, lived to 1914, there is strong evidence that they would have praised the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) for voting for war credits (pp. 338-339). Not only would they approve of the SPDs vote, they would predict it as well. Marx and Engels hold a teleological theory, where the end state of communism was the ultimate cause, pulling history toward itself, so to speak. Thus, if a development were ”progressive,” then it conformed to Marxist expectations. Marxism predicts that, at Europe’s stage of development in the middle and late nineteenth century, the proletariat will acquiesce to national loyalties. August 1914 then would not be a failure for orthodox Marxism.

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This story, of course, is at odds with the interpretation that both Lenin's contemporaries and ours put on August 1914. Waltz reminds us that the collapse of the Second International was perceived as a catastrophe for socialism. Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Franz Mehring, German Marxists all, stated in 1915 that their "cherished belief" that "the class interests of the proletariat are . . . identical," which was "the basis of our theory and practice," had been proved false.47Non-German socialists meanwhile blamed the Ger- man socialists for betraying the cause. The lesson that Lenin drew from the fiasco was that the proletariat needed a single vanguard that could impose discipline on the rank and file. How he and his Soviet successors applied that lesson is painfully familiar. SOCIALISM AND SECURITY.Who is correct? Although Doyle's reading of Marx and Engels is compelling, it is not clear that he takes Marxism's dialectical materialism sufficiently into account. For Marxists, a change in the underlying "objective" conditions, preeminently economic structures, requires a change in theory and practice. These underlying conditions may well have changed between 1870 and 1914 (Lenin's view is that production and finance had become more centralized). In other words, orthodox Marxism does not demand an ahistorical application of Marx's advice in 1870 or Engels's in 1890 to socialists in 1914, because orthodox Marxism would suspect that the situation socialists face is not really the same. It may be that Marx himself would have done exactly what his disciples did. Even if Doyle is right that the socialists of 1914 acted like good Marxists, he pushes his Marx-Lenin opposition past the breaking point when he claims, "Unlike Realists and Liberals who have held state power, Marxist Socialists have yet to do so" (p. 365). The statement seems at odds with his earlier statement that we should continue to study Marxist international relations theory because "communist parties continue to hang on to power in China, Vietnam, Romania, and Cuba" (p. 321 Furthermore, in supporting his "no Marxist states" claim, Doyle makes the peculiar (and hyperdialectical) assertion that the Soviet Union and its fellow communist states were actually more capitalist than socialist. Unlike the socialist states we were supposed to get, Doyle writes, the communist states we got exemplified in the end "Marx's crisis of capitalism-extreme centralization of the ownership of the means of production, socialization of labor in large factories, economic stagnation, and immiserization of the population at large." Hence the democratic-egalitarian

47. bid., p. 139 (emphasis added). 48. Romania has since dropped from the list.

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revolutions of 1989 are properly seen as Marxist rather than anti-Marxist (pp. 379, 490). If states outlawing the fundamental institution of capitalism, private prop- erty, may plausibly be described as capitalist, the word "capitalist" has lost its usefulness. Moreover, if Doyle is correct in banishing "Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, and the many other variants of socialist doctrine that have shaped state policy" (p. 365) from true Marxism, he raises suspicions that orthodox Marxists cannot hold power and retain their orthodoxy. Why does power always corrupt socialists, while allowing liberals and (more under- standably) realists to remain true to their principles? Doyle speculates that the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe may become truly Marx- ist, but admits that they may not. If the Paris Commune of 1871, which never held state power, is the only example of pure socialism we have (p. 3781, then socialism would seem to have little to say about war and peace. Socialists might reply to this entire discussion that the very category of "security" as defined by realists and liberals is biased against socialist theory. The "security" sought by realists and liberals is the security of the sovereign state, or the states system, phenomena in which socialism has little stake. Socialists are concerned with class domination in all its forms, and with uses of power that are often invisible to nonsocialists. Insofar as realists and liberals are concerned with interstate war and peace, then, they will find socialism of little help, and will be confused by the way socialists invariably seem to change the subject by discussing imperiali~rn.~~This socialist objection is valid, and has to do with the moral underpinnings of all international relations theory, a topic I address at the end of this essay.

THE FUTURE Since Ways of War and Peace is intended as a practical book, Doyle bravely extends his hypotheses into the future, forcing each tradition to predict outcomes over the coming decades. STRUCTURAL REALISM ON THE FUTURE. Assuming that the great powers are and will be the European Union (EU), Japan, Russia, China, and the United States-an assumption India-watchers might challenge-and removing all historical, cultural, and ideological factors, Doyle finds that equipoise and counterpoise models both predict that the current alignments would be the United

49. For an interesting treatment of this issue, see Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, eds., "Democ- racy, the Use of Force, and Global Social Change," unpublished manuscript. Not all contributors to this volume are socialists, but all are concerned with aspects of security not captured by mainstream international relations scholarship.

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States-Japan-Russia versus EU-China. (A close second for the counterpoise model is EU-Japan versus the United States-China-Russia.)Doyle uses World Bank economic forecasts to project ahead to the year 2020, and finds that equipoise predicts a rivalry between Asia and the West5’ (Russia, the World Bank projects, will no longer be an economic power). Counterpoise would expect an EU-China versus United States-Japan rivalry, with several other alignments possible. Interestingly, counterpoise balancing in 2020 would in- volve all Asian states banding together against China. Some of these alignments, such as a Sino-Russian-Americanor a Sino-Euro- pean alignment, seem far-fetched to any but a pure structuralist. Doyle, who tends to favor Rousseau’s constitutional realism, does submit that states with differing internal structures have more difficulty aligning. Unless all of the great powers in 2020 are internally similar as the European powers of 1756 were, we should expect some deviation from the equipoise and counterpoise models. Predicting those deviations, of course, would require predicting how internal institutions will evolve in these states; and in his section on liberalism and the future, Doyle does just that, daring to hope that states will all eventu- ally become liberal, rendering realism, in his view, irrelevant. KANTIAN LIBERALISM ON THE FUTURE. The expansion of the liberal pacific union is not certain, but Doyle believes it possible. The two ”tracks” upon which liberalism moves are commerce and war: international trade and invest- ment reconfigures domestic power in favor of liberalizers, and militarization leads to demands for more self-government. Barring derailments, the entire world should become liberal sometime in the latter half of the twenty-first century (p. 481). There are always derailments, however, as Kant acknowledges. An economic crisis such as that of the 1930s could wreck the enterprise, because the relationship between liberal government and economic prosperity is intimate. As realists never tire of reminding liberals, the German people elected the National Socialists in 1933. Doyle might also have mentioned the possibility that even an all-liberal world would not be peaceful. Kant himself writes that a league of peace can include only a limited number of states, and that several such leagues ”would again bring on a state of war. So perpetual peace . . . is indeed an unachievable idea.”51

50. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 51. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, §6l, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 19961, p. 119 (emphasis in the original); see also Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War, pp. 234-235.

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MARXIST SOCIALISM ON THE FUTURE. Socialism has little to Say directly about the future of international war and peace, because as noted, its primary concerns lie elsewhere. Doyle simply raises the possibility that, despite its (evi- dent) failings, socialism might turn out to be true after all. Should such innovations as worker ownership of companies become the wave of the future, and should the egalitarianism of Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans, remain, then we might see a revival of socialism in a different form. We might then see a test of socialist international relations theory that would satisfy even the purest, most literal Marxist.

The Coherence of the Traditions

Realism, liberalism, and socialism are all diverse traditions, and not all of their adherents would agree with the predictions Doyle makes on their behalf. The diversity of each tradition, however, should not obscure the unity. Demonstrat- ing that each tradition is coherent is one of the achievements of Ways of War and Peace. Some realists and liberals will resist Doyle’s continuity thesis, fearing that it will obscure positivistic moves they have made in recent years. Realism shed the “reductionism” of what is now called traditional or classical realism by looking exclusively to international anarchy and the distribution of material power. Realists were no longer to incorporate human nature, individual leadership, differing cultures or political or economic systems, or any other allegedly subsystemic variable into their analysis.” Liberalism moved in various directions. Institutionalists shed reductionism as well, redescribing international friction as collective action problems among functionally similar states.53

Others concentrated on jettisoning the teleological causality, the ” utopianism,” of the old liberals.54Liberals were no longer to assume that people or states could become better, but instead were to show how cooperation could be built on selfishness. Scholars adhering to these ”neo” forms of realism and liberalism claim or at least imply that they are working in research programs distinct from those of

52. The classic text is of course Waltz’s Theory of lnternafional Politics. 53. A representative neoliberal work is Keohane’s After Hegemony; see also Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 54. Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” Iizternafional Organization, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 513-553.

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their intellectual ancestors." Whether that is true or not depends on what exactly are the core assumptions of realism and liberalism, an issue bound to be contr~versial.~~In any event, Doyle attacks the notion that the new realism and liberalism are radically discontinuous with their namesakes. His crucial move comes early in the book: realism, liberalism, and socialism, he asserts, are not only theories, research programs, and paradigms, but fradifions, in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense of the word (p. 17). A tradition has three crucial qualities. First, it is a set of practices and inquiries that share a set of presuppositions. Second, it emerges historically rather than spontaneously. Third, we all at all times operate within a tradition, even those of us who fancy ourselves traditionless. That, at least, is what MacIntyre means by tradition. Thus scholars studying war and peace are using not timeless concepts but rather categories that emerged in history. A tradition is not marked by uniformity on all issues, but rather by consensus on what the issues are and how they are to be addres~ed.~~ If Doyle is correct, then today's realists, liberals, and socialists, for all their adaptations of the categories of the natural sciences, cannot escape their deep connections to their intellectual forebears. They are still trapped in the worlds built by the classics. But what exactly are the "facts" of each the presuppositions that enable thought and action? It is difficult to state the presuppositions in a neutral fashion, but Doyle's attempt is as good as any. Realists from Thucydides to John Mearsheimer assume that states are the most important actors; that international relations is always and everywhere a state of war; and that the most important ends are power and security (pp. 18-19, 43, 209-210). Liberals from Locke to Doyle himself assume that states differ according to internal organization; that the state of war may be overcome in some times and places; and that the most important end is individual autonomy (pp. 19-20, 210-212). Socialists from Marx to Andre Gunder Frank assume that classes are more important than states; that these classes are in a state of war; and that social, economic, and political equality is the most important end (p. 20).

55. See, for example, Waltz's argument that he and Randall Schweller, a second-image realist, "work within different research programs." Kenneth N. Waltz, "Evaluating Theories," American Political Science Reviezu, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 1997), p. 915. 56. Stephen M. Walt, "The Progressive Power of Realism," Ainerican Political Science Review, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 1997), p. 932. 57. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose ]usticr? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 7-8. 58. bid., p. 7.

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Note that each set of presuppositions is normative as well as positive. Each purports to describe the way the world is and to prescribe ends toward which to work. This mixing of facts and values will be denied and resisted by many scholars, implying as it does that we have yet to emerge from our prescientific, teleological past. But Doyle is right: in the end, there is no fact-value distinction in our traditions. In the rest of this section I argue more forcefully than he that our scientific debates are simultaneously moral debates. I do not argue that our theories reduce to competing moralities (although that may be true), but simply that moral propositions are among those at the core of our traditions, and thus of the practice of studying security. All three traditions are teleological: realist, liberal, and socialist scholars interpret the world based on what they value most, on the direction in which they want the world to move.

FACTS AND VALUES Two anecdotes suggest that our values help us determine what the facts are. The first concerns the unusual history of the liberal peace thesis. The second concerns the continuing controversy over the basis for criticizing neorealism. A STILLBORN LIBERAL PEACE THESIS.In 1974 R.J. Rummel published the finding that ”libertarian” states do not fight wars against one an~ther.~’Two years later, Melvin Small and J. David Singer published a paper providing strong evidence that liberal democracies do not fight wars against one another. Rummel’s and Small and Singer’s findings went all but unnoticed by the discipline, including by Small and Singer themselves. The article in which the findings appeared, in fact, was titled ”The War-Proneness of Democratic Re- gimes.”60Small and Singer explained away the liberal peace as a probable artifact of the lack of shared borders among such states. Their failure to consider that the liberal peace rendered their article’s title problematic, their (and virtually the entire discipline’s) lack of curiosity about what later became known as ”the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations,”61had nothing to do with unmediated facts and every- thing to do with the values of the scholarly community at the time. In 1976 America was still reeling from the Vietnam War, and Americans were flagel- lating their democracy with rare vehemence, as evidenced by Small and

59. R.J. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War, Vol. 4 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974). 60. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, “The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 50-69. 61. Jack S. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Orzgiii and Prevention of Major Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 88.

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Singer’s label ”bourgeois democracies.” Rummel, meanwhile, made much of his finding; but he was somewhat out of step with the times, having recently come to support vigorously US.-style democratic institutions.62 Since the middle 1980s, of course, the same liberal peace has become one of the most vibrant research programs in political science. The puzzle is, why was the liberal peace greeted with silence in the 1970s, and with enthusiasm in the 1980s and 1990s? Are we now living in a less ideological time, when scholars can see the facts more clearly? Or is it that liberals’ faith in ”bourgeois democracy” has been restored as memories of Vietnam have faded? Realist and socialist critics of the liberal peace thesis would say the latter. They accuse liberal peace scholars of wishful thinking, of wanting to push the American Way upon the world. More particularly, realists fear that a belief in liberal peace could lead to crusading, which involves a waste of power and invites disorder.63Socialists fear that liberal peace is a peace among the owners of wealth that disguises other forms of violence (e.g., covert action by core states against progressive forces in the periphery).64Such critics of course use positivistic arguments against the liberals-that the liberal peace is an illusion, that there have been too few democracies for a real test, and so on. That is the point: the normative and the positive are mingled. Liberals and their critics all believe that the facts conform to their values. The world works the way they want it to work. NEOREALISM’S SCOPE AS A MORAL ISSUE. The trouble the liberal peace thesis had in gaining attention suggests that theories of international politics do not stand or fall based on simple tests of falsification. Waltz himself has reiterated this point recently. Answering John Vasquez and other critics who argue that neorealism has been falsified too often by the facts, Waltz notes that ”theories should be judged by what they claim to explain.” That is, neorealism stands or falls depending on whether it explains its self-prescribed domain, not whether it can account for findings it is not concerned with. Waltz in effect says, ”Don’t attack my theory because it doesn’t explain what you think is im~ortant.”~~

62. See R.J. Rummel, ”Roots of Faith 11,” in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau, eds., Journeys through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travelers (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 311-328. 63. See, for example, Miriam Fendius Elman, ”Testing the Democratic Peace Theory,” in Elman, Paths to Peace, pp. 499-500. 64. See, for example, Barkawi and Laffey, Democracy, the Use of Force, and Global Social Change. 65. Waltz, ”Evaluating Theories,” pp. 914-915.

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If Waltz is correct, and neorealism were to succeed in explaining its domain, would everyone become neorealist? Certainly not. Those who dislike neorealism’s domain will continue to reject it.hhLiberals will still believe that concen- trating on the pacifying effects of bipolarity and nuclear weapons is a distraction from more important concerns, such as the expansion of individual freedom and prosperity. Socialists will continue to believe that neorealism’s domain renders invisible their concerns, including the plight of the poor classes and/or countries. These normative concerns motivate them to try to poke holes in neorealism’s propositions (e.g., by arguing that nuclear deterrence was irrelevant to the ”long peace” between the United States and Soviet Union).h7 In other words, as Robert Cox wrote years ago, ”Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” It is thus inescapably from one perspective rather than another.68 A scholar’s perspective itself is a product of complex factors, but clearly moral presuppositions are among those factors. This is not necessarily to say that there is no reality ”out there,” that all is constructed by our moral ideas. It is rather to say that our understanding of what is out there is necessarily mediated by such ideas.69Facts do not present themselves to us; we have to find them, and we find them using tools fashioned in part by our moral convictions. For neorealists, the limited scope of their theory seems simply a prudent, scientifically sound feature. For their critics, it is a moral issue. So each tradition is fundamentally coherent, in that each takes a consistent basic moral stance toward world politics. Today’s realists, liberals, and socialists retain their forebears’ fundamental assumptions about the way the world works. But ”works” entails more than a value-free factual description of a state of war or lack thereof. It also entails propositions about our goals and actions.

Is a Synthesis Possible?

Doyle, then, does the field of international relations a great service in labeling realism, liberalism, and socialism traditions, thereby laying bare their compet-

66. Robert W. Cox, ”Social Forces, States, and World Orders,” Milltwnium, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1981), pp. 126-155; and Richard K. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” Intematioml OYgUlll2~7ti0i?, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Spring 1984), pp. 225-261. 67. Mueller, Retreat fvorn Doomsday. 68. Cox, ”Social Forces, States, and World Orders,” p. 128 (emphasis in original). 69. It could be (many of us believe it is) the case that there is an objective moral order, and that our ideas, including our social-scientific theories, are good or bad depending on how well they conform to that order.

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ing moral presuppositions. Yet, that move renders problematic his final ambi- tion, which is to forge a sort of synthesis among the traditions in order to help scholars and statesmen navigate through the thick fog of international relations today. The synthesis Doyle has in mind is not a cobbling together of various features of the three into an eclectic but coherent whole. Rather, the synthesis is something that happens to us, the scholars and practitioners of international politics. Doyle calls upon us to acknowledge the validity and identify the shortcomings of each tradition, and to try to be a realist at times, a liberal at others, and a socialist at still others. In today’s world we all have ”multiple selves,” so we can rotate among the three traditions of security theory (pp. 409-502). In this concluding section, I argue that this sort of synthesis will only work for a certain type of person, one able to juggle contradictory worldviews-one who fits the description of a modern liberal.

LIBERAL ”NEUTRALITY” Doyle tries assiduously to be impartial among the three traditions, to criticize and affirm each when appropriate, even though he belongs to one of the traditions, liberalism. Doyle’s liberalism is especially clear in Part 4, ”Con- science and Power,” the section explicitly concerned with morality. He chooses two current issues, international intervention and the global distribution of wealth. As always, Doyle skillfully presents the approaches the other traditions take to these issues. But these are liberal issues, and Doyle settles on liberal answers. Only a liberal would consider preeminent whether an intervention such as the American invasion of Grenada was just (rather than prudent or progressive), and only a liberal would conclude that liberal states should give aid only to other liberal states (pp. 410419, 436443).70 That he is a liberal helps us to make sense out of his synthetic project, for he is attempting a feat analogous to the project normative liberal political theorists have been debating for nearly three decades. Normative liberal theory has attempted to find a way to organize a pluralistic society (i.e., a society comprising people holding competing conceptions of the good life, a society deeply divided over the question of how society ought to be organized). Mainstream liberal theorists have argued that laws and institutions can and

70. Doyle’s position on aid is an intriguing use of Kant: liberal states need not worry about relative gains with one another; thus wealthy liberal states, by giving aid to poor liberal states, can help fellow liberals and themselves. This rule for aid would also create an incentive for illiberal states to liberalize. We are seeing something like this in many former communist states that wish to join the European Union.

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ought to be neutral concerning these competing conceptions. The state ought not to favor religious believers over agnostics, traditional families over inno- vative social groupings, opponents of abortion over abortion rights advocates, and so 011.~’ The liberal state is never to impose a vision of happiness on individuals, but rather to allow individuals to pursue their own happiness, whether that involves orthodox Islam, sailboarding, or leveraged buyouts. The parallels between Doyle’s project and that of the liberal normative theorists should be clear: they both seek a way to mediate among competing moral visions. The bad news is that, however well motivated they are, both are bound to fail on their own terms. Neither Doyle nor his political-theorist analogues can find a neutral framework within which to arbitrate among these competing accounts. Liberalism itself always sets up the rules, asks the questions, decides what is important. Thus nonliberals must become liberal in order to join the discussion. The so-called communitarian critique of liberal political theory emphasizes that liberalism sets ground rules that may not be permissible to nonliberals. For example, liberalism insists that citizens privatize their religious beliefs. They can be Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or all of the above as long as they do not impose their beliefs on others. To take the most volatile debate in American politics today, a Christian who believes that abortion is murder is free not to have an abortion herself, but cannot prohibit those who disagree from having abortions. But communitarians note that privatization may entail modifying the substantive beliefs of believers, and is thus not neutral. ”Neutrality” over abortion does not appear neutral to the antiabortion Christian. It rather appears to be the assertion by society of the substantive position that abortion is not murder (because if it were, it would be prohibited like all murder).72In fact, liberalism requires that, at least in her capacity as a citizen, the antiabortion Christian think like a nonbeliever. Far from being neutral, it requires that she assume a second, alien identity.

71. See, for example, John Rawls, A Theory of justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); and John A. Hall, Liberalism: Politics, Ideology, atid the Market (London: Paladin, 1988). 72. Communitarian critiques include Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of lustice, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sandel, Libera/isnl and Its Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study irz Moral Thzoty, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). For an extreme view of the incompatibility of religion and liberalism, see Stanley Fish, ”Mission Impossible: Setting the Just Bounds between Church and State,” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 97, No. 8 (December 1997), pp. 225552333, For a rebuttal, see J. Judd Owen, ”Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1998.

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Similarly, Doyle seeks to include nonliberal traditions, to identify and affirm their virtues rather than eradicate them. He attempts to be scrupulously fair to them, which involves being unusually (for an international relations theorist) self-critical of his own liberalism. This he sees as a real duty in a pluralistic setting. Today, Doyle writes, we need ”an ethic of statesmanship” that can ”accommodate our diverse moralities.” His answer is to locate the synthesis in the modern self, which is itself pluralistic. Modern (or postmodern?) persons have multiple identities based on nation, class, religion, race, gender, and so on. We can thus rotate from one tradition to another, and then to a third, and then back again. In a twist on Marx’s vision of communist society, we can be a realist in the morning, a liberal in the afternoon, and a socialist in the evening. The problem is not that such a rotating posture is impossible: it is possible, even easy, for one type of person. But that type of person is bound to be a liberal, and one of the modern stripe. A realist or a socialist will wonder why he should engage in such a rotation. More concretely, a nonliberal would find that Doyle has set an agenda that presupposes liberal answers: the greatest problems that face us at the end of the twentieth century are ”international intervention, international redistribution, and the prospects for the transforma- tion of international politics.” In the case of redistribution of wealth, for example, Doyle concedes that realists do not care about it except as a way to buy friends, and socialists see it as an attempt to co-opt the poor states and keep meaningful change at bay (pp. 428431). The problem arises at the beginning of the book, when Doyle rightly calls realism, liberalism, and socialism traditions. Part of what it means to say that all security scholarship (in the West) belongs to one of three traditions is that there is no place outside of these traditions from which to analyze war and peace. By definition, all analysis takes place within a tradition. No neutral ground exists. Thus Doyle’s evaluation of all three traditions, including liberalism, is unavoidably stamped with the values of liberalism. Liberalism is prone to crusading, which involves coercion, which violates liberalism’s moral presuppositions; so it needs a realist corrective. Liberalism can be indifferent to the plight of the oppressed, which prevents them from achieving the individual autonomy it values; so it needs a socialist corrective. Realism and socialism are called upon to help make liberalism more liberal. A realist or socialist, invited to join Doyle’s synthetic project, will find that it betrays what is most important to him. He will find that it makes him into a liberal.

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Conclusion

This final problem certainly does not negate Doyle’s achievement in this book. He should not be blamed for failing to square the circle, but praised for trying. Wqs of War and Prace remains a capacious, learned, rigorous, very much needed book. It is a masterful exercise in intellectual genealogy. It reminds us that a writer who appeals to more than one level of analysis is not necessarily muddleheaded, but may in fact uncover more facts and thereby be superior. Unusual for a book about theory, it presents empirical tests of crucial hypotheses, and thus shows directly how the classics can contribute to progress in the security field. Perhaps most important, it shows conclusively that we all work in traditions, that we cannot escape those traditions, and that we should not want to. Doyle’s seminal book should make those who wish we could all just forget the dead white males and get on with our science ask the crucial question: What if the reason why we cannot seem to escape the canon is not that we are too unscientific, but that the canon is itself, in a broader sense, scientific?

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