Introduction

In Man the State and War Kenneth Waltz writes: ‘So fundamental are man, the state, and the state system in any attempt to understand international relations that seldom does an analyst, however wedded to one image entirely overlook the other two. Still, emphasis on one image may distort one's interpretation of the others.’ Although Waltz' use of the word ‘image’ delivers some unfortunate non-cognitive overtones, he is, nonetheless, fundamentally correct in underlining the importance of wheeling our conception of man, the state and state system into coherent line with one another at the very outset of our reflections on these subjects. Reserving our discussion of Homo sapiens for the next chapter, we shall focus our attention here on the state-system and the state and enunciate our first thesis for a revised and refurbished political realism.

Thesis One stands in marked contrast with two competing metaphysical assumptions which underpin alternative conceptions of international relations from within emancipatory international relations and positivist-empiricism. For classical Marxism (paradigmatically ‘emancipatory’ in our terms) there is no such thing as an ‘essential property’ since the world is constituted, ultimately speaking, of matter in motion: matter is the ultimate reality in space and in time.