Prussianism, Hitlerism, Realism: The German Legacy in British International Thought

Abstract

The myth of the First Great Debate dominates the historiography of International Relations (IR). It maintains that realism evolved immediately before, during, and after the Second World War a s the critique of idealism, which it blamed for underestimating the analytical relevance of power in international relations as well as the importance of the international system’s anarchic structure. According to this myth, in other words, there is no continuity between idealism—sometimes called liberalism—and realism. The evolution of realism is cut off from ideological and cultural contexts and located in an apolitical, scientific, analytically focused realm. Since the 1990s and the “historiographical turn” in IR, a revisionist literature has questioned this disciplinary myth and the corresponding characterization of the origins of realism in the field (Bell 2001). But this revisionism has arguably only gone so far. There remains broad agreement that IR realism, as a self-conscious tradition, is of Anglophone origin, but gained wide support after the Second World War as a “discourse of disillusionment,” informed by German political theory and motivated by the attempt to understand the horror of German totalitarianism (Ashworth 2011; Bell 2010; Hobson 2012; Sylvest 2008).¹