TENSIONS WITHIN REALISM: 1954 AND AFTER (pp. 54-78)
JACK SNYDER
The 1954 Rockefeller-funded meeting of realism’s luminaries seems on first inspection to have been a rambling step backward in coherence and clarity from Hans Morgenthau’s elegant paradigmatic statement of 1948, Politics Among Nations. The conference documents reveal unresolved ambivalence toward science and democracy and anxiety about realist morality, yet little concern is shown about a taken-for-granted philosophical pessimism. On further reflection, however, what is interesting about the 1954 meeting is precisely the unresolved tensions in realist thought, which are present but smoothed over in Morgenthau’s text and with which all subsequent reformulations of realism have had to struggle.