essay on realism

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The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with respect to a large number of subject matters, including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their properties. Although it would be possible to accept (or reject) realism across the board, it is more common for philosophers to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics: thus it would be perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties, but a non-realist about aesthetic and moral value. In addition, it is misleading to think that there is a straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a realist and a non-realist about a particular subject matter. Rather, one can be more-or-less realist about a particular subject matter. Also, there are many different forms that realism and non-realism can take.

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism is so controversial that no brief account of it will satisfy all those with a stake in the debates between realists and non-realists. This article offers a broad brush characterization of realism, and then fills out some of the detail by looking at a few canonical examples of opposition to realism. The discussion of forms of opposition to realism is far from exhaustive and is designed only to illustrate a few paradigm examples of the form such opposition can take. Note that the point of this discussion is not to attack realism, but rather to give a sense of the options available for those who wish to oppose realism in a given case, and of the problems faced by those main forms of opposition to realism.

There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by looking at realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties. First, there is a claim about existence . Tables, rocks, the moon, and so on, all exist, as do the following facts: the table’s being square, the rock’s being made of granite, and the moon’s being spherical and yellow. The second aspect of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their properties concerns independence . The fact that the moon exists and is spherical is independent of anything anyone happens to say or think about the matter. Likewise, although there is a clear sense in which the table’s being square is dependent on us (it was designed and constructed by human beings after all), this is not the type of dependence that the realist wishes to deny. The realist wishes to claim that apart from the mundane sort of empirical dependence of objects and their properties familiar to us from everyday life, there is no further (philosophically interesting) sense in which everyday objects and their properties can be said to be dependent on anyone’s linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or whatever.

In general, where the distinctive objects of a subject-matter are a , b , c , … , and the distinctive properties are F-ness , G-ness , H-ness and so on, realism about that subject matter will typically take the form of a claim like the following:

Generic Realism : a , b , and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness , G-ness , and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Non-realism can take many forms, depending on whether or not it is the existence or independence dimension of realism that is questioned or rejected. The forms of non-realism can vary dramatically from subject-matter to subject-matter, but error-theories, non-cognitivism, instrumentalism, nominalism,relativism, certain styles of reductionism, and eliminativism typically reject realism by rejecting the existence dimension, while idealism, subjectivism, and anti-realism typically concede the existence dimension but reject the independence dimension. Philosophers who subscribe to quietism deny that there can be such a thing as substantial metaphysical debate between realists and their non-realist opponents (because they either deny that there are substantial questions about existence or deny that there are substantial questions about independence).

1. Preliminaries

2. views opposing the existence dimension (i): error-theory and arithmetic, 3. views opposing the existence dimension (ii): error-theory and morality, 4. reductionism and non-reductionism, 5. views opposing the existence dimension (iii): expressivism about morals, 6. views opposing the independence dimension (i): semantic realism, 7. views opposing the independence dimension (ii): more forms of anti-realism, 8. views which undermine the debate: quietism, 9. concluding remarks and apologies, other internet resources, related entries.

Three preliminary comments are needed. Firstly, there has been a great deal of debate in recent philosophy about the relationship between realism, construed as a metaphysical doctrine, and doctrines in the theory of meaning and philosophy of language concerning the nature of truth and its role in accounts of linguistic understanding (see Dummett 1978 and Devitt 1991a for radically different views on the issue). Independent of the issue about the relationship between metaphysics and the theory of meaning, the well-known disquotational properties of the truth-predicate allow claims about objects, properties, and facts to be framed as claims about the truth of sentences. Since:

‘The moon is spherical’ is true if and only if the moon is spherical,

the claim that the moon exists and is spherical independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices and conceptual schemes, can be framed as the claim that the sentences ‘The moon exists’ and ‘The moon is spherical’ are true independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes and so on. As Devitt points out (1991b: 46) availing oneself of this way of talking does not entail that one sees the metaphysical issue of realism as ‘really’ a semantic issue about the nature of truth (if it did, any question about any subject matter would turn out to be ‘really’ a semantic issue).

Secondly, although in introducing the notion of realism above mention is made of objects, properties, and facts, no theoretical weight is attached to the notion of a ‘fact’, or the notions of ‘object’ and ‘property’. To say that it is a fact that the moon is spherical is just to say that the object, the moon, instantiates the property of being spherical, which is just to say that the moon is spherical. There are substantial metaphysical issues about the nature of facts, objects, and properties, and the relationships between them (see Mellor and Oliver 1997 and Lowe 2002, part IV), but these are not of concern here.

Thirdly, as stated above, Generic Realism about the mental or the intentional would strictly speaking appear to be ruled out ab initio , since clearly Jones’ believing that Cardiff is in Wales is not independent of facts about belief: trivially, it is dependent on the fact that Jones believes that Cardiff is in Wales. However, such trivial dependencies are not what are at issue in debates between realists and non-realists about the mental and the intentional. A non-realist who objected to the independence dimension of realism about the mental would claim that Jones’ believing that Cardiff is in Wales depends in some non-trivial sense on facts about beliefs, etc.

There are at least two distinct ways in which a non-realist can reject the existence dimension of realism about a particular subject matter. The first of these rejects the existence dimension by rejecting the claim that the distinctive objects of that subject-matter exist, while the second admits that those objects exist but denies that they instantiate any of the properties distinctive of that subject-matter. Non-realism of the first kind can be illustrated via Hartry Field’s error-theoretic account of arithmetic, and non-realism of the second kind via J.L. Mackie’s error-theoretic account of morals. This will show how realism about a subject-matter can be questioned on both epistemological and metaphysical grounds.

According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the existence of an abstract object , the number 7. This object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false (hence the name ‘error-theory’). Platonists divide on their account of the epistemology of arithmetic: some claim that our knowledge of arithmetical fact proceeds by way of some quasi-perceptual encounter with the abstract realm (Gödel 1983), while others have attempted to resuscitate a qualified form of Frege’s logicist project of grounding knowledge of arithmetical fact in knowledge of logic (Wright 1983, Hale 1987, Hale and Wright 2001).

The main arguments against platonic realism turn on the idea that the platonist position precludes a satisfactory epistemology of arithmetic. For the classic exposition of the doubt that platonism can square its claims to accommodate knowledge of arithmetical truth with its conception of the subject matter of arithmetic as causally inert, see Benacerraf (1973). Benacerraf argued that platonism faces difficulties in squaring its conception of the subject-matter of arithmetic with a general causal constraint on knowledge (roughly, that a subject can be said to know that P only if she stands in some causal relation to the subject matter of P ). In response, platonists have attacked the idea that a plausible causal constraint on ascriptions of knowledge can be formulated (Wright 1983 Ch.2, Hale 1987 Ch.4). In response, Hartry Field, on the side of the anti-platonists, has developed a new variant of Benacerraf’s epistemological challenge which does not depend for its force on maintaining a generalised causal constraint on ascriptions of knowledge. Rather, Field argues that ‘we should view with suspicion any claim to know facts about a certain domain if we believe it impossible to explain the reliability of our beliefs about that domain’ (Field 1989: 232–3). Field’s challenge to the platonist is to offer an account of what such a platonist should regard as a datum—i.e. that when ‘ p ’ is replaced by a mathematical sentence, the following schema holds in most instances:

If mathematicians accept ‘ p ’ then p . (1989: 230)

Field’s point is not simply, echoing Benacerraf, that no causal account of reliability will be available to the platonist, and therefore to the platonic realist. Rather, Field suggests that not only has the platonic realist no recourse to any explanation of reliability that is causal in character, but that she has no recourse to any explanation that is non-causal in character either.

(T)here seems prima facie to be a difficulty in principle in explaining the regularity. The problem arises in part from the fact that mathematical entities as the [platonic realist] conceives them, do not causally interact with mathematicians, or indeed with anything else. This means we cannot explain the mathematicians beliefs and utterances on the basis of the mathematical facts being causally involved in the production of those beliefs and utterances; or on the basis of the beliefs or utterances causally producing the mathematical facts; or on the basis of some common cause producing both. Perhaps then some sort of non-causal explanation of the correlation is possible? Perhaps; but it is very hard to see what this supposed non-causal explanation could be. Recall that on the usual platonist picture [i.e. platonic realism], mathematical objects are supposed to be mind- and language-independent; they are supposed to bear no spatiotemporal relations to anything, etc. The problem is that the claims that the [platonic realist] makes about mathematical objects appears to rule out any reasonable strategy for explaining the systematic correlation in question. (1989: 230–1)

This suggests the following dilemma for the platonic realist:

• Platonic realism is committed to the existence of acausal objects and to the claim that these objects, and facts about them, are independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on (in short to the claim that these objects, and facts about them, are language- and mind-independent).
• Any causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with the acausality of mathematical objects.
• Any non-causal explanation of reliability is incompatible with the language- and mind-independence of mathematical objects.
• Any explanation of reliability must be causal or non-causal.
• There is no explanation of reliability that is compatible with platonic realism.

Whether there is a version of platonic realism with the resources to see off Field’s epistemological challenge is very much a live issue (see Hale 1994, Divers and Miller 1999. For replies to Divers and Miller see Sosa 2002, Shapiro 2007 and Piazza 2011, Paseau 2012).

Field’s alternative proposal to platonic realism (1980, 1989) is that although mathematical sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false, the utility of mathematical theories can be explained otherwise than in terms of their truth. For Field, the utility of mathematical theories resides not in their truth but in their conservativeness , where a mathematical theory S is conservative if and only if for any nominalistically respectable statement A (i.e. a statement whose truth does not imply the existence of abstract objects) and any body of such statements N , A is not a consequence of the conjunction of N and S unless A is a consequence of N alone (Field 1989: 125). In short, mathematics is useful, not because it allows you to derive conclusions that you couldn’t have derived from nominalistically respectable premises alone, but rather because it makes the derivation of those (nominalistically respectable) conclusions easier than it might otherwise have been. Whether or not Field’s particular brand of error-theory about arithmetic is plausible is a topic of some debate, which unfortunately cannot be pursued further here (see Hale and Wright 2001).

According to Field’s error-theory of arithmetic, the objects distinctive of arithmetic do not exist, and it is this which leads to the rejection of the existence dimension of arithmetical realism, at least as platonistically conceived (for a non-platonistic view of arithmetic which is at least potentially realist, see Benacerraf 1965; for incisive discussion, see Wright 1983, Ch.3). J. L. Mackie, on the other hand, proposes an error-theoretic account of morals, not because there are no objects or entities that could form the subject matter of ethics (it is no part of Mackie’s brief to deny the existence of persons and their actions and so on), but because it is implausible to suppose that the sorts of properties that moral properties would have to be are ever instantiated in the world (Mackie 1977, Ch.1). Like Field on arithmetic, then, Mackie’s central claim about the atomic, declarative sentences of ethics (such as ‘Napoleon was evil’) is that they are systematically and uniformly false. How might one argue for such a radical-sounding thesis? The clearest way to view Mackie’s argument for the error-theory is as a conjunction of a conceptual claim with an ontological claim (following Smith 1994, pp. 63–66). The conceptual claim is that moral facts are objective and categorically prescriptive facts, or, equivalently, that our concept of a moral property is a concept of an objective and categorically prescriptive quality (what Mackie means by this is explained below). The ontological claim is simply that there are no objective and categorically prescriptive facts, that objective and categorically prescriptive properties are nowhere instantiated. The conclusion is that there is nothing in the world answering to our moral concepts, no facts or properties which render the judgements formed via those moral concepts true. Our moral (atomic) moral judgements are systematically false. We can thus construe the argument for the error-theory as follows:

• Conceptual Claim: Moral facts are objective and categorically prescriptive facts.
• If there are moral facts, then there are objective and categorically prescriptive facts (Definitional consequence of the Conceptual Claim)
• If there are true, atomic, declarative moral sentences, then there are objective and categorically prescriptive facts.
• Ontological Claim: there are no objectively and categorically prescriptive facts.
• There are no moral facts.
• Conclusion: There are no true, atomic, declarative moral sentences.

The conclusion of this argument clearly follows from its premises, so the question facing those who wish to defend at least the existence dimension of realism in the case of morals is whether the premises are true. (Note that strictly speaking what the argument purports to establish is that there are no moral facts as-we-conceive-of-them. Thus, it may be possible to block the argument by advocating a revisionary approach to our moral concepts; or by deploying a Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis conception of theoretical terms and arguing that there are moral facts, just ones that do not answer to our concept but which (coming closer than other candidates) would best deserve the “moral fact” label (see Smith 1994), section 2.10 for a good explanation of the application of the Ramsey-Lewis-Carnap conception in the moral case).

Mackie’s conceptual claim in effect amounts to the claim that our concept of a moral requirement is the concept of an objectively, categorically prescriptive requirement. What does this mean? To say that moral requirements are prescriptive is to say that they tell us how we ought to act, to say that they give us reasons for acting. Thus, to say that something is morally good is to say that we ought to pursue it, that we have reason to pursue it. To say that something is morally bad is to say that we ought not to pursue it, that we have reason not to pursue it. To say that moral requirements are categorically prescriptive is to say that these reasons are categorical in the sense of Kant’s categorical imperatives. The reasons for action that moral requirements furnish are not contingent upon the possession of any desires or wants on the part of the agent to whom they are addressed: I cannot release myself from the requirement imposed by the claim that torturing the innocent is wrong by citing some desire or inclination that I have. This contrasts, for example, with the requirement imposed by the claim that perpetual lateness at work is likely to result in one losing one’s job: I can release myself from the requirement imposed by this claim by citing my desire to lose my job (perhaps because I find it unfulfilling, or whatever). Reasons for action which are contingent in this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called hypothetical imperatives.

So our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a categorically prescriptive requirement. But Mackie claims further that our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of an objective and categorically prescriptive requirement. What does it mean to say that a requirement is objective? Mackie says a lot of different-sounding things about this, and the following (as outlined in Miller 2013a) is by no means a comprehensive list (references are to Ch. 1 of Mackie 1977). To call a requirement objective is to say that it can be an object of knowledge (24, 31, 33), that it can be true or false (26, 33), that it can be perceived (31, 33), that it can be recognised (42), that it is prior to and independent of our preferences and choices (30, 43), that it is a source of authority external to our preferences and choices (32, 34, 43), that it is part of the fabric of the world (12), that it backs up and validates some of our preferences and choices (22), that it is capable of being simply true (30) or valid as a matter of general logic (30), that it is not constituted by our choosing or deciding to think in a certain way (30), that it is extra-mental (23), that it is something of which we can be aware (38), that it is something that can be introspected (39), that it is something that can figure as a premise in an explanatory hypothesis or inference (39), and so on. Mackie plainly does not take these to be individually necessary: facts about subatomic particles, for example, may qualify as objective in virtue of figuring in explanatory hypotheses even though they cannot be objects of perceptual acquaintance. But his intention is plain enough: these are the sorts of conditions whose satisfaction by a fact renders it objective as opposed to subjective. Mackie’s conceptual claim about morality is thus that our concept of a moral requirement is a concept of a fact which is objective in at least some of the senses just listed, while his ontological claim will be that the world does not contain any facts which are both candidates for being moral facts and yet which play even some of the roles distinctive of objective facts.

How plausible is Mackie’s conceptual claim? This issue cannot be discussed in detail here, except to note that while it seems plausible to claim that if our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action then that concept must be a concept of a categorical reason for action, it is not so clear why we have to say that our concept of a moral fact is a concept of a reason for action at all. If we deny this, we can concede the conditional claim whilst resisting Mackie’s conceptual claim. One way to do this would be to question the assumption, implicit in the exposition of Mackie’s argument for the conceptual claim above, that an ‘ought’-statement that binds an agent A provides that agent with a reason for action. For an example of a version of moral realism that attempts to block Mackie’s conceptual claim in this way, see Railton (1986). For defence of Mackie’s conceptual claim, see Smith (1994), Ch.3 and Joyce (2001). For exposition and critical discussion, see Miller (2013a), Ch.9.

What is Mackie’s argument for his ontological claim? This is set out in his ‘argument from queerness’ (Mackie has another argument, the ‘argument from relativity’ (or ‘argument from disagreement’) (1977: 36–38), but this argument cannot be discussed here for reasons of space. For a useful discussion, see Brink (1984)).The argument from queerness has both metaphysical and epistemological components. The metaphysical problem with objective values concerns ‘the metaphysical peculiarity of the supposed objective values, in that they would have to be intrinsically action-guiding and motivating’ (49). The epistemological problem concerns ‘the difficulty of accounting for our knowledge of value entities or features and of their links with the features on which they would be consequential’ (49). Let’s look at each type of worry more closely in turn.

Expounding the metaphysical part of the argument from queerness, Mackie writes: “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” (38) What is so strange about them? Mackie says that Plato’s Forms (and for that matter, Moore’s non-natural qualities) give us a ‘dramatic picture’ of what objective values would be, if there were any:

The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it. Or we should have something like Clarke’s necessary relations of fitness between situations and actions, so that a situation would have a demand for such-and-such an action somehow built into it (40).

The obtaining of a moral state of affairs would be the obtaining of a situation ‘with a demand for such and such an action somehow built into it’; the states of affairs which we find in the world do not have such demands built into them, they are ‘normatively inert’, as it were. Thus, the world contains no moral states of affairs, situations which consist in the instantiation of a moral quality.

Mackie now backs up this metaphysical argument with an epistemological argument:

If we were aware [of objective values], it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ways of knowing everything else. These points were recognised by Moore when he spoke of non-natural qualities, and by the intuitionists in their talk about a faculty of moral intuition. Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to point out its implausibilities. What is not so often stressed, but is more important, is that the central thesis of intuitionism is one to which any objectivist view of values is in the end committed: intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up (38).

In short, our ordinary conceptions of how we might come into cognitive contact with states of affairs, and thereby acquire knowledge of them, cannot cope with the idea that the states of affairs are objective values. So we are forced to expand that ordinary conception to include forms of moral perception and intuition. But these are completely unexplanatory: they are really just placeholders for our capacity to form correct moral judgements (the reader should here hear an echo of the complaints Benacerraf and Field raise against arithmetical platonism).

Evaluating the argument from queerness is well outwith the scope of the present entry. While Railton’s version of moral realism attempts to block Mackie’s overall argument by conceding his ontological claim whilst rejecting his conceptual claim, other versions of moral realism agree with Mackie’s conceptual claim but reject his ontological claim. Examples of the latter version, and attempts to provide the owed response to the argument from queerness, can be found in Smith (1994), Ch.6, and McDowell (1998), Chs 4–10.“Companions in Guilt” style responses attempt to undermine Mackie’s argument by suggesting that if it were sound, it would undermine much more than moral realism. For an example of such a strategy, see Cuneo (2007). For a general discussion, see Lillehammer (2010).

There are two main ways in which one might respond to Mackie’s argument for the error-theory: directly, via contesting one of its premises or inferences, or indirectly, pointing to some internal tension within the error-theory itself. Some possible direct responses have already been mentioned, responses which reject either the conceptual or ontological claims that feature as premises in Mackie’s argument for the error-theory. An indirect argument against the error-theory has been developed in recent writings by Crispin Wright (this argument is intended to apply also to Field’s error-theory of arithmetic).

Mackie claims that the error-theory of moral judgement is a second-order theory, which does not necessarily have implications for the first order practice of making moral judgements (1977: 16). Wright’s argument against the error-theory begins by suggesting otherwise:

The great discomfort with [Mackie’s] view is that, unless more is said, it simply relegates moral discourse to bad faith. Whatever we may once have thought, as soon as philosophy has taught us that the world is unsuited to confer truth on any of our claims about what is right, or wrong, or obligatory, etc., the reasonable response ought surely to be to forgo the right to making any such claims …. If it is of the essence of moral judgement to aim at the truth, and if philosophy teaches us that there is no moral truth to hit, how are we supposed to take ourselves seriously in thinking the way we do about any issue which we regard as of major moral importance? (1996: 2; see also 1992: 9).

Wright realises that the error-theorist is likely to have a story to tell about the point of moral discourse, about “some norm of appraisal besides truth, at which its statements can be seen as aimed, and which they can satisfy.” (1996: 2) And Mackie has such a story: the point of moral discourse is—to simplify—to secure the benefits of social co-operation (1973: chapter 5 passim; note that this is the analogue in Mackie’s theory of Field’s notion of the conservativeness of mathematical theories). Suppose we can extract from this story some subsidiary norm distinct from truth, which governs the practice of forming moral judgements. Then, for example, ‘Honesty is good’ and ‘Dishonesty is good’, although both false, will not be on a par in point of their contribution to the satisfaction of the subsidiary norm: if accepted widely enough, the former will presumably facilitate the satisfaction of the subsidiary norm, while the latter, if accepted widely enough, will frustrate it. Wright questions whether Mackie’s moral sceptic can plausibly combine such a story about the benefits of the practice of moral judgement with the central negative claim of the error-theory:

[I]f, among the welter of falsehoods which we enunciate in moral discourse, there is a good distinction to be drawn between those which are acceptable in the light of some such subsidiary norm and those which are not—a distinction which actually informs ordinary discussion and criticism of moral claims—then why insist on construing truth for moral discourse in terms which motivate a charge of global error, rather than explicate it in terms of the satisfaction of the putative subsidiary norm, whatever it is? The question may have a good answer. The error-theorist may be able to argue that the superstition that he finds in ordinary moral thought goes too deep to permit of any construction of moral truth which avoids it to be acceptable as an account of moral truth. But I do not know of promising argument in that direction (1996: 3; see also 1992: 10).

Wright thus argues that even if we concede to the error-theorist that his original scepticism about moral truth is well-founded, the error-theorist’s own positive proposal will be inherently unstable. In recent years, inspired by error-theory, philosophers have developed forms of moral fictionalism, according to which moral claims either are or ought to be “useful fictions”. See Kalderon 2005 and Joyce 2001 for examples. For a book-length treatment of moral error-theory, see Olson 2014.

The error-theories proposed by Mackie and Field are non-eliminativist error-theories, and should be contrasted with the kind of eliminativist error-theory proposed by e.g. Paul Churchland concerning folk-psychological propositional attitudes (see Churchland 1981). Churchland argues that our everyday talk of propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires and intentions should eventually be abandoned given developments in neuroscience. Mackie and Field make no analogous claims concerning morality and arithmetic: no claim, that is, to the effect that they will one day be in principle replaceable by philosophically hygienic counterparts. For some discussion of the contrast between eliminativist and non-eliminativist error theories, see Miller (2015).

Although some commentators (e.g. Pettit 1991) require that a realistic view of a subject matter be non-reductionist about the distinctive objects, properties, and facts of that subject matter, the reductionist/non-reductionist issue is really orthogonal to the various debates about realism. There are a number of reasons for this, with the reasons varying depending on the type of reduction proposed.

Suppose, first of all, that one wished to deny the existence claim which is a component of platonic realism about arithmetic. One way to do this would be to propose an analytic reduction of talk seemingly involving abstract entities to talk concerning only concrete entities. This can be illustrated by considering a language the truth of whose sentences seemingly entails the existence of a type of abstract object, directions. Suppose there is a first order language L, containing a range of proper names ‘ a ’, ‘ b ’, ‘ c ’, and so on, where these denote straight lines conceived as concrete inscriptions. There are also predicates and relations defined on straight lines, including ‘ … is parallel to …’. ‘ D ( )’ is a singular term forming operator on lines, so that inserting the name of a concrete line, as in ‘ D ( a )’, produces a singular term standing for an abstract object, the direction of a . A number of contextual definitions are now introduced:

• ‘ D ( a ) = D ( b )’ is true if and only if a is parallel to b .
• ‘Π D ( x )’ is true if and only if ‘ Fx ’ is true, where ‘… is parallel to …’ is a congruence for ‘ F ( )’.

(To say that ‘… is parallel to …’ is a congruence for ‘ F ( )’ is to say that if a is parallel to b and Fa , then it follows that Fb ).

• ‘(∃ x )Π x ’ is true if and only if ‘(∃ x ) Fx ’ is true, where ‘Π’ and ‘ F ’ are as in (B).

According to a platonic realist, directions exist and have a nature which is independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. But doesn’t the availability of (A), (B), and (C) undermine the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism? After all, (A), (B), and (C) allow us to paraphrase any sentence whose truth appears to entail the existence of abstract objects into a sentence whose truth involves only the existence of concrete inscriptions. Doesn’t this show that an analytic reduction can aid someone wishing to question the existence claim involved in a particular form of realism? There is a powerful argument, first developed by William Alston (1958), and convincingly resuscitated by Crispin Wright (1983, Ch.1), that suggests not. The analytic reductionist who wishes to wield the contextual definitions against the existence claim at the heart of platonic realism takes them to show that the apparent reference to abstract objects on the left-hand sides of the definitions is merely apparent: in fact, the truth of the relevant sentences entails only the existence of a range of concrete inscriptions. But the platonic realist can retort: what the contextual definitions show is that the apparent lack of reference to abstract objects on the right-hand sides is merely apparent. In fact, the platonic realist can say, the truth of the sentences figuring on the right-hand sides implicitly involves reference to abstract objects. If there is no way to break this deadlock the existence of the analytic reductive paraphrases will leave the existence claim at the heart of the relevant form of realism untouched. So the issue of this style of reductionism appears to be orthogonal to debates between realists and non-realists.

Can the same be said about non-analytic styles of reductionism? Again, there is no straightforward connection between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism. The problem is that, to borrow some terminology and examples from Railton 1989, some reductions will be vindicative whilst others will be eliminativist . For example, the reduction of water to H 2 0 is vindicative: it vindicates our belief that there is such a thing as water, rather than overturning it. On the other hand:

… the reduction of ‘polywater’—a peculiar form of water thought to have been observed in laboratories in the 1960s—to ordinary-water-containing-some-impurities-from-improperly-washed-glassware contributed to the conclusion that there really is no such substance as polywater (1989: 161).

Thus, a non-analytic reduction may or may not have implications for the existence dimension of a realistic view of a particular subject matter. And even if the existence dimension is vindicated, there is still the further question whether the objects and properties vindicated are independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on. Again, there is no straightforward relationship between the issue of reductionism and the issue of realism.

We saw above that for the subject-matter in question the error-theorist agrees with the realist that the truth of the atomic, declarative sentences of that area requires the existence of the relevant type of objects, or the instantiation of the relevant sorts of properties. Although the realist and the error-theorist agree on this much, they of course disagree on the question of whether the relevant type of objects exist, or on whether the relevant sorts of properties are instantiated: the error-theorist claims that they don’t, so that the atomic, declarative sentences of the area are systematically and uniformly false, the realist claims that at least in some instances the relevant objects exist or the relevant properties are instantiated, so that the atomic, declarative sentences of the area are at least in some instances true. We also saw that an error-theory about a particular area could be motivated by epistemological worries (Field) or by a combination of epistemological and metaphysical worries (Mackie).

Another way in which the existence dimension of realism can be resisted is via expressivism. Whereas the realist and the error-theorist agree that the sentences of the relevant area are truth-apt , apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, the realist and the expressivist (alternatively non-cognitivist, projectivist) disagree about the truth-aptness of those sentences. It is a fact about English that sentences in the declarative mood (‘The beer is in the fridge’) are conventionally used for making assertions, and assertions are true or false depending on whether or not the fact that is asserted to obtain actually obtains. But there are other grammatical moods that are conventionally associated with different types of speech-act. For example, sentences in the imperatival mood (‘Put the beer in the fridge’) are conventionally used for giving orders, and sentences in the interrogative mood (‘Is the beer in the fridge?’) are conventionally used for asking questions. Note that we would not ordinarily think of orders or questions as even apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity: they are not truth-apt. Now the conventions mentioned here are not exceptionless: for example, one can use sentences in the declarative mood (‘My favourite drink is Belhaven 60 shilling’) to give an order (for some Belhaven 60 shilling), one can use sentences in the interrogative mood (‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’) to make an assertion (of whatever fact was the subject of the discussion), and so on. The expressivist about a particular area will claim that the realist is misled by the syntax of the sentences of that area into thinking that they are truth-apt: she will say that this is a case where the conventional association of the declarative mood with assertoric force breaks down. In the moral case the expressivist can claim that ‘Stealing is wrong’ is no more truth-apt than ‘Put the beer in the fridge’: it is just that the lack of truth-aptness of the latter is worn on its sleeve, while the lack of truth-aptness of the former is veiled by its surface syntax.(There are some very important issues concerning the relationship between minimalism about truth-aptitude and expressivism that we cannot go into here. See Divers and Miller (1995)and Miller (2013b) for some pointers. There are also some important differences between e.g. Ayer’s emotivism and more modern forms of expressivism (such as those developed by Blackburn and Gibbard) that we gloss over here. For a useful account, see Schroeder 2009).

So, if moral sentences are not conventionally used for the making of assertions, what are they conventionally used for? According to one classical form of expressivism, emotivism , they are conventionally used for the expression of emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Thus, A.J. Ayer writes:

If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money’. In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker (Ayer 1946: 107, emphases added).

It follows from this that:

If I now generalise my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false (1946: 107).

Emotivism faces many problems, discussion of which is not possible here (for a survey, see Miller 2003a Ch.3). One problem that has been the bugbear of all expressivist versions of non-realism, the ‘Frege-Geach Problem’, is so-called because the classic modern formulation is by Peter Geach (1965), who attributes the original point to Frege.

According to emotivism, when I sincerely utter the sentence ‘Murder is wrong’ I am not expressing a belief or making an assertion, but rather expressing some non-cognitive sentiment or feeling, incapable of being true or false. Thus, the emotivist claims that in contexts where ‘is wrong’ is being applied to an action-type it is being used to express a sentiment or feeling of disapproval towards actions of that type. But what about contexts in which it is not being applied to an action type? An example of such a sentence would be ‘If murder is wrong, then getting little brother to murder people is wrong’. In the antecedent of this ‘is wrong’ is clearly not being applied to anything (compare: in uttering ‘If snow is black then it is not white’ I am not applying ‘is black’ to snow). So what account can the emotivist give of the use of ‘Murder is wrong’ within ‘unasserted contexts’, such as the antecedent of the conditional above? Since it is not there used to express disapproval of murder, the account of its semantic function must be different from that given for the apparently straightforward assertion expressed by ‘Murder is wrong’. But now there is a problem in accounting for the following valid inference:

• Murder is wrong.
• If Murder is wrong, then getting your little brother to murder people is wrong.
• Getting your little brother to murder people is wrong.

If the semantic function of ‘is wrong’ as it occurs within an asserted context in (1) is different from its semantic function as it occurs within an unasserted context in (2), isn’t someone arguing in this way simply guilty of equivocation? In order for the argument to be valid, the occurrence of ‘Murder is wrong’ in (1) has to mean the same thing as the occurrence of ‘Murder is wrong’ in (2). But if ‘is wrong’ has a different semantic function in (1) and (2), then it certainly doesn’t mean the same thing in (1) and (2), and so neither do the sentences in which it appears. So the above argument is apparently no more valid than:

• My beer has a head on it.
• If my beer has a head on it, then it must have eyes and ears.
• My beer must have eyes and ears.

This argument is obviously invalid, because it relies on an equivocation on two senses of ‘head’, in (4) and (5) respectively.

It is perhaps worth stressing why the Frege-Geach problem doesn’t afflict ethical theories which see ‘Murder is wrong’ as truth-apt, and sincere utterances of ‘Murder is wrong’ as capable of expressing straightforwardly truth-assessable beliefs. According to theories like these, moral modus ponens arguments such as the argument above from (1) and (2) to (3) are just like non-moral cases of modus ponens such as

• Smith is in Glasgow;
• If Smith is in Glasgow then Smith is in Scotland;
• Smith is in Scotland.

Why is this non-moral case of modus ponens not similarly invalid in virtue of the fact that ‘Smith is in Glasgow’ is asserted in (7), but not in (8)? The answer is of course that the state of affairs asserted to obtain by ‘Smith is in Glasgow’ in (7) is the same as that whose obtaining is merely entertained in the antecedent of (8). In (7) ‘Smith is in Glasgow’ is used to assert that a state of affairs obtains (Smith’s being in Glasgow), and in (8) it is asserted that if that state of affairs obtains, so does another (Smith’s being in Scotland). Throughout, the semantic function of the sentences concerned is given in terms of the states of affairs asserted to obtain in simple assertoric contexts. And it is difficult to see how an emotivist can say anything analogous to this with respect to the argument from (1) and (2) to (3): it is difficult to see how the semantic function of ‘Murder is wrong’ in the antecedent of (2) could be given in terms of the sentiment it allegedly expresses in (1).

The Frege-Geach challenge to the emotivist is thus to answer the following question: how can you give an emotivist account of the occurrence of moral sentences in ‘unasserted contexts’—such as the antecedents of conditionals—without jeopardising the intuitively valid patterns of inference in which those sentences figure? Philosophers wishing to develop an expressivistic alternative to moral realism have expended a great deal of energy and ingenuity in devising responses to this challenge. See in particular Blackburn’s development of ‘quasi-realism’, in his (1984) Chs 5 and 6, (1993) Ch.10, (1998) Ch.3 and Gibbard’s ‘norm-expressivism’, in his (1990) Ch.5, and further refined in his (2003). For criticism see Hale (1993) and (2002), and Kölbel (2002) Ch.4. For an overview, see Schroeder (2008) and Miller (2013a), Chs 4 and 5. For very useful surveys of recent work on expressivism, see Schroeder (2009) and Sinclair (2009).

Examples of challenges to the existence dimension of realism have been described in previous sections. In this section some forms of non-realism that are neither error-theoretic nor expressivist will be briefly introduced. The forms of non-realism view the sentences of the relevant area as (against the expressivist) truth-apt, and (against the error-theorist) at least sometimes true. The existence dimension of realism is thus left intact. What is challenged is the independence dimension of realism, the claim that the objects distinctive of the area exist, or that the properties distinctive of the area are instantiated, independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Classically, opposition to the independence dimension of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic objects took the form of idealism , the view that the objects of the everyday world of macroscopic objects are in some sense mental . As Berkeley famously claimed, tables, chairs, cats, the moons of Jupiter and so on, are nothing but ideas in the minds of spirits:

All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind (Berkeley 1710: §6).

Idealism has long been out of favour in contemporary philosophy (though see Goldschmidt & Pearce 2017 for some recent discussion), but those who doubt the independence dimension of realism have sought more sophisticated ways of opposing it. One such philosopher, Michael Dummett, has suggested that in some cases it may be appropriate to reject the independence dimension of realism via the rejection of semantic realism about the area in question (see Dummett 1978 and 1993). This section contains a brief explanation of semantic realism, as characterised by Dummett, Dummett’s views on the relationship between semantic realism and realism construed as a metaphysical thesis, and an outline of some of the arguments in the philosophy of language that Dummett has suggested might be wielded against semantic realism.

It is easiest to characterise semantic realism for a mathematical domain. It is a feature of arithmetic that there are some arithmetical sentences for which the following holds true: we know of no method that will guarantee us a proof of the sentence, and we know of no method that will guarantee us a disproof or a counterexample either. One such is Goldbach’s Conjecture:

(G) Every even number is the sum of two primes.

It is possible that we may come across a proof, or a counterexample, but the key point is that we do not know a method, or methods, the application of which is guaranteed to yield one or the other. A semantic realist, in Dummett’s sense, is one who holds that our understanding of a sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its truth-condition, where the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent or bivalent . To say that the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent is to say that (G) may be true (or false) even though there is no guarantee that we will be able, in principle, to recognise that that is so. To say that the notion of truth involved is bivalent is to accept the unrestricted applicability of the law of bivalence, that every meaningful sentence is determinately either true or false. Thus the semantic realist is prepared to assert that (G) is determinately either true or false, regardless of the fact that we have no guaranteed method of ascertaining which. (Note that the precise relationship between the characterisation in terms of bivalence and that in terms of potentially recognition-transcendent truth is a delicate matter that will not concern us here. See the Introduction to Wright 1993 for some excellent discussion. It is also important to note that in introducing the idea that a speaker’s understanding of a sentence consists in her knowledge of its truth-condition, Dummett is packing more into the notion of truth than the disquotational properties made use of in §1 above. See Dummett’s essay ‘Truth’, in his 1978).

Dummett makes two main claims about semantic realism. First, there is what Devitt (1991a) has termed the metaphor thesis : This denies that we can even have a literal, austerely metaphysical characterisation of realism of the sort attempted above with Generic Realism. Dummett writes, of the attempt to give an austere metaphysical characterisation of realism about mathematics (platonic realism) and what stands opposed to it (intuitionism):

How [are] we to decide this dispute over the ontological status of mathematical objects[?] As I have remarked, we have here two metaphors: the platonist compares the mathematician with the astronomer, the geographer or the explorer, the intuitionist compares him with the sculptor or the imaginative writer; and neither comparison seems very apt. The disagreement evidently relates to the amount of freedom that the mathematician has. Put this way, however, both seem partly right and partly wrong: the mathematician has great freedom in devising the concepts he introduces and in delineating the structure he chooses to study, but he cannot prove just whatever he decides it would be attractive to prove. How are we to make the disagreement into a definite one, and how can we then resolve it? (1978: xxv).

According to the constitution thesis , the literal content of realism consists in the content of semantic realism. Thus, the literal content of realism about the external world is constituted by the claim that our understanding of at least some sentences concerning the external world consists in our grasp of their potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions. The spurious ‘debate’ in metaphysics between realism and non-realism can thus become a genuine debate within the theory of meaning: should we characterise speakers’ understanding in terms of grasp of potentially recognition-transcendent truth-conditions? As Dummett puts it:

The dispute [between realism and its opponents] concerns the notion of truth appropriate for statements of the disputed class; and this means that it is a dispute concerning the kind of meaning which these statements have (1978: 146).

Few have been convinced by either the metaphor thesis or the constitution thesis. Consider Generic Realism in the case of the world of everyday macroscopic objects and properties:

(GR1) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape, colour, and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

Dummett may well call for some non-metaphorical characterisation of the independence claim which this involves, but it is relatively easy to provide one such characterisation by utilising Dummett’s own notion of recognition-transcendence:

(GR2) Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape,colour, and so on, is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. Tables, rocks, mountains, seas, and so on exist, and in general there is no guarantee that we will be able, even in principle, to recognise the fact that they exist and have properties such as mass, size, shape, colour, and so on.

On the face of it, there is nothing metaphorical in (GR2) or, at least if there is, some argument from Dummett to that effect is required. This throws some doubt on the metaphor thesis. Moreover there is nothing distinctively semantic about (GR2), and this throws some doubt on the constitution thesis. Whereas for Dummett, the essential realist thesis is the meaning-theoretic claim that our understanding of a sentence like (G) consists in knowledge of its potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition, for Devitt:

What has truth to do with Realism? On the face of it, nothing at all. Indeed, Realism says nothing semantic at all beyond … making the negative point that our semantic capacities do not constitute the world. (1991a: 39)

Devitt’s main criticism of the constitution thesis is this: the literal content of realism about the external world is not given by semantic realism, since semantic realism is consistent with an idealist metaphysics of the external world. He writes:

Does [semantic realism] entail Realism? It does not. Realism … requires the objective independent existence of common-sense physical entities. Semantic Realism concerns physical statements and has no such requirement: it says nothing about the nature of the reality that makes those statements true or false , except that it is [at least in part potentially beyond the reach of our best investigative efforts]. An idealist who believed in the … existence of a purely mental realm of sense-data could subscribe to [semantic realism]. He could believe that physical statements are true or false according as they do or do not correspond to the realm of sense-data, whatever anyone’s opinion on the matter: we have no ‘incorrigible knowledge’ of sense-data. … In sum, mere talk of truth will not yield any particular ontology. (1983: 77)

Suppose that Dummett’s metaphor and constitution theses are both implausible. Would it follow that the arguments Dummett develops against semantic realism have no relevance to debates about the plausibility of realism about everyday macroscopic objects (say), construed as a purely metaphysical thesis as in (GR2)? It can be argued that Dummett’s arguments can retain their relevance to a metaphysical debate even if the metaphor and constitution theses are false, and, indeed, even if Dummett’s view (1973: 669) that the theory of meaning is the foundation of all philosophy is rejected. For a full development of this line of argument, see Miller 2003a and 2006.

Dummett’s main line of argument against semantic realism is the manifestation argument . Here is the argument (See Dummett 1978 and the summary in Miller 2018, chapter 9):

Suppose that we are considering region of discourse D . Then:

• We understand the sentences of D .

Suppose, for reductio , that

• The sentences of D have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions.
• To understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions (Frege 1892, cf. Miller 2018 chapters 1 and 2).

We can conclude

• We know the (recognition-transcendent) truth-conditions of the sentences of D .

We then add the following premise, which stems from the Wittgensteinian insight that understanding does not consist in the possession of an inner state, but rather in the possession of some practical ability (see Wittgenstein 1958):

• To understand a sentence is to manifest the practical abilities that constitute our understanding of that sentence

For example, in the case of a simple language consisting of demonstratives and taste predicates (such as “bitter” and “sweet”), applied to foodstuffs within reach of the speaker, a speaker’s understanding consists in his ability to determine whether “this is bitter” is true, by putting the relevant foodstuff in his mouth and tasting it (Wright 1993).

It now follows that:

• To know the truth-conditions of a sentence is to manifest the practical abilities that constitute our understanding of that sentence.
• Our knowledge of the (recognition-transcendent) truth-conditions of the sentences of D is manifested in our exercise of the practical abilities that constitute our understanding of the sentences of D .
• Knowledge of recognition-transcendent truth-conditions is never manifested in the exercise of practical abilities

It follows that

• Knowledge of the (recognition-transcendent) truth-conditions of the sentences of D is never manifested in the exercise of practical abilities.
• We cannot exercise practical abilities that constitute our understanding of D .
• (11) We do not understand the sentences of D .

This yields a contradiction with (1), whence, by reductio , we reject (2) to obtain:

• The sentences of D do not have recognition-transcendent truth-conditions, so that semantic realism about the subject matter of D must be rejected.

The key claim here is (8). So far as an account of speakers’ understanding goes, the ascription of knowledge of recognition-transcendent truth-conditions is simply redundant : there is no good reason for ascribing it. Consider one of the sentences introduced earlier as a candidate for possessing recognition-transcendent truth-conditions ‘Every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes’. The semantic realist views our understanding of sentences like this as consisting in our knowledge of a potentially recognition-transcendent truth-condition. But:

How can that account be viewed as a description of any practical ability of use? No doubt someone who understands such a statement can be expected to have many relevant practical abilities. He will be able to appraise evidence for or against it, should any be available, or to recognize that no information in his possession bears on it. He will be able to recognize at least some of its logical consequences, and to identify beliefs from which commitment to it would follow. And he will, presumably, show himself sensitive to conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe propositional attitudes embedding the statement to himself and to others, and sensitive to the explanatory significance of such ascriptions. In short: in these and perhaps other important respects, he will show himself competent to use the sentence. But the headings under which his practical abilities fall so far involve no mention of evidence-transcendent truth-conditions (Wright 1993: 17).

This establishes (8), and the conclusion (12) follows straightforwardly.

A detailed assessment of the plausibility of Dummett’s arguments is impossible here. For a full response to the manifestation argument, see Miller 2002. See also Byrne 2005. For Dummett’s other argument, the acquisition argument, see Miller 2003b. Wright develops a couple of additional arguments against semantic realism. For these—the argument from rule-following and the argument from normativity—see the Introduction to Wright 1993. For an excellent survey of the literature on Dummett’s arguments against semantic realism, see Hale 2017. For an excellent book-length introduction to Dummett’s philosophy, see Weiss 2002. For a robust defence of keeping issues in metaphysics sharply separate from issues about language, see Dyke (2008)

Suppose that one wished to develop a non-realist alternative to, say, moral realism. Suppose also that one is persuaded of the unattractiveness of both error-theoretic and expressivist forms of non-realism. That is to say, one accepts that moral sentences are truth-apt, and, at least in some cases, true. Then the only option available would be to deny the independence dimension of moral realism. But so far we have only seen one way of doing this: by admitting that the relevant sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true, and possessed of truth-conditions which are not potentially recognition-transcendent. But this seems weak: it seems implausible to suggest that a moral realist must be committed to the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth. It therefore seems implausible to suggest that a non-expressivistic and non-error-theoretic form of opposition to realism must be committed to simply denying the potential recognition-transcendence of moral truth, since many who style themselves moral realists will deny this too. As Wright puts it:

There are, no doubt, kinds of moral realism which do have the consequence that moral reality may transcend all possibility of detection. But it is surely not essential to any view worth regarding as realist about morals that it incorporate a commitment to that idea. (1992: 9)

So, if the debate between a realist and a non-realist about the independence dimension doesn’t concern the plausibility of semantic realism as characterised by Dummett, what does it concern? (Henceforth a non-error-theoretic, non-expressivist style of non-realist is referred to as an anti-realist). Wright attempts to develop some points of contention, (or ‘realism-relevant cruces’ as he calls them) over which a realist and anti-realist could disagree. Wright’s development of this idea is subtle and sophisticated and only a crude exposition of a couple of his realism-relevant cruces can be given here.

The first of Wright’s realism-relevant cruces to be considered here concerns the capacity of states of affairs to figure ineliminably in the explanation of features of our experience. The idea that the explanatory efficacy of the states of affairs in some area has something to do with the plausibility of a realist view of that area is familiar from the debates in meta-ethics between philosophers such as Nicholas Sturgeon (1988), who believe that irreducibly moral states of affairs do figure ineliminably in the best explanation of certain aspects of experience, and opponents such as Gilbert Harman (1977), who believe that moral states of affairs have no such explanatory role. This suggests a ‘best explanation test’ which, crudely put, states that realism about a subject matter can be secured if its distinctive states of affairs figure ineliminably in the best explanation of aspects of experience. One could then be a non-expressivist, non-error-theoretic, anti-realist about a particular subject matter by denying that the distinctive states of affairs of that subject matter do have a genuine role in best explanations of aspects of our experience. And the debate between this style of anti-realist and his realist opponent could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

For reasons that needn’t detain us here, Wright suggests that this ‘best explanation test’ should be superseded by questions concerning what he calls width of cosmological role (1992, Ch.5). The states of affairs in a given area have narrow cosmological role if it is a priori that they do not contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about that subject-matter (or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter). This will be an anti-realist position. One style of realist about that subject matter will say that its states of affairs have wide cosmological role: they do contribute to the explanation of things other than our beliefs about the subject matter in question (or other than via explaining our beliefs about that subject matter). It is relatively easy to see why width of cosmological role could be a bone of contention between realist and anti-realist views of a given subject matter: it is precisely the width of cosmological role of a class of states of affairs—their capacity to explain things other than, or other than via, our beliefs, in which their independence from our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on, consists. Again, the debate between someone attributing a narrow cosmological role to a class of states of affairs and someone attributing a wide cosmological role could proceed independently of any questions concerning the capacity of sentences in the relevant area to have potentially recognition-transcendent truth values.

Wright thinks that it is arguable that moral discourse does not satisfy width-of-cosmological role. Whereas a physical fact—such as a pond’s being frozen over—can contribute to the explanation of cognitive effects (someone’s believing that the pond is frozen over), effects on sentient, but non-conceptual creatures (the tendency of goldfish to cluster towards the bottom of the pond), effects on us as physically interactive agents (someone’s slipping on the ice), and effects on inanimate matter (the tendency of a thermometer to read zero when placed on the surface), moral facts can only to contribute to the explanation of the first sort of effect:

[I]t is hard to think of anything which is true of sentient but non-conceptual creatures, or of mobile organisms, or of inanimate matter, which is true because a … moral fact obtains and in whose explanation it is unnecessary to advert to anyone’s appreciation of that moral fact (1996: 16).

Thus, we have a version of anti-realism about morals that is non-expressivist and non-error-theoretic and can be framed independently of considerations about the potential of moral sentences to have recognition-transcendent truth-values: moral sentences are truth-apt, sometimes true, and moral states of affairs have narrow cosmological role.

The second of Wright’s realism-relevant cruces concerns judgement-dependence. Suppose that we are considering a region of discourse D in which P is a typical property. Consider the opinions formed by the participants in that discourse under cognitively ideal conditions: call such opinions best opinions , and the cognitively ideal conditions the C-conditions. Suppose that the best opinions covary with the facts about the instantiation of P . Then there are two ways in which we can explain this covariance. First, we might take best opinions to be playing at most a tracking role: best opinions are just extremely good at tracking independently constituted truth-conferring states of affairs. In this case, best opinion plays only an extension-reflecting role, merely reflecting the independently determined extensions of the relevant properties. Alternatively, rather than viewing best opinion as merely tracking the facts about the extensions of the relevant properties, we can view them as themselves determining those extensions. Best opinions, on this sort of view, do not just track independently constituted states of affairs which determine the extensions of the the properties that form the subject matter of D : rather, they determine those extensions and so to play an extension-determining role. When we have this latter sort of explanation of the covariance of best opinion and fact, we’ll say that the truth about the instantiation of the relevant properties is judgement-dependent ; when we have only the former sort of explanation, we’ll say that the truth about their instantiation is judgement-independent .

How do we determine whether the truth about the instantiation of the typical properties that form the subject matter of a region of discourse are judgement-dependent? Wright’s discussion proceeds by reference to what he terms provisional equations . These have the following form:

(PE) ∀ x [ C → (A suitable subject s judges that Px ↔ Px )]

where ‘ C ’ denotes the conditions (the C -conditions) which are cognitively ideal for forming the judgement that x is P . The property P is then said to be judgement-dependent if and only if the provisional equation meets the following four conditions:

The A Prioricity Condition: The provisional equation must be a priori true: there must be a priori covariance of best opinions and truth. (Justification: ‘the truth, if it is true, that the extensions of [a class of concept] are constrained by idealised human response—best opinion—ought to be available purely by analytic reflection on those concepts, and hence available as knowledge a priori ’ (Wright 1992: 117)). This is because the thesis of judgement-dependence is the claim that, for the region of discourse concerned, best opinion is the conceptual ground of truth).

The Substantiality Condition The C -conditions must be specifiable non-trivially : they cannot simply be described as conditions under which the subject has ‘whatever it takes’ to form the right opinion concerning the subject matter at hand.(Justification: without this condition, the truth about any property will turn out to be judgement-dependent, since for any property Q it is going to be an a priori truth that our judgements about whether x is Q , formed under conditions which have ‘whatever it takes’ to ensure their correctness, will covary with the facts about the instantiation of Q -ness. We thus require this condition on pain of losing the distinction between judgement-dependent and judgement-independent truth altogether).

The Independence Condition : The question as to whether the C -conditions obtain in a given instance must be logically independent of the class of truths for which we are attempting to give an extension-determining account: what makes an opinion best must not presuppose some logically prior determination of the extensions putatively determined by best opinions. (Justification: if we have to assume certain facts about the extension of P in the determination of the conditions under which opinions about P are best, then we cannot view best opinions as themselves constituting those facts, since whether a given opinion is best would then presuppose some logically prior determination of the very facts the judgement-dependent account wishes to view as constituted by best opinions).

The Extremal Condition : There must be no better way of accounting for the a priori covariance: no better account, other than according best opinion an extension-determining role, of which the satisfaction of the foregoing three conditions is a consequence. (Justification: without this condition, the satisfaction of the foregoing conditions would be consistent with the thought that certain states of affairs are judgement-independent even though infallibly detectable, “states of affairs in whose determination facts about the deliverances of best opinions are in no way implicated although there is, a priori, no possibility of their misrepresentation” (Wright 1992: 123).)

When all of the above conditions can be shown to be satisfied, we can accord best opinion an extension-determining role, and describe the truth about the subject matter as judgement-dependent. If these conditions cannot collectively be satisfied, best opinion can be assigned, at best, a merely extension-reflecting role.

Two points are worth making. First, it is again relatively easy to see why the question of judgement-dependence can mark a bone of contention between realism and anti-realism. If a subject matter is judgement-dependent we have a concrete sense in which the independence dimension of realism fails for that subject matter: there is a sense in which that subject matter is not entirely independent of our beliefs, linguistic practices, and so on. Second, the debate about the judgement-dependence of a subject matter is, on the face of it at least, independent of the debate about the possibility of recognition-transcendent truth in that area.

Wright argues (1989) that facts about colours and intentions are judgement-dependent, so that we can formulate a version of anti-realism about colours (intentions) that views ascriptions of colours (intentions) as truth-apt and sometimes true, and truth in those areas as judgement-dependent. In contrast to this, Wright argues (1988) that morals cannot plausibly be viewed as judgement-dependent, so that a thesis of judgement-dependence is not a suitable vehicle for the expression of a non-expressivistic, non-error-theoretic, version of anti-realism about morality.

For discussion of further allegedly realism-relevant cruces, such as cognitive command, see Wright 1992 and 2003. For critical discussion of Wright on cognitive command, see Shapiro and Taschek 1996. See also Miller 2004 and the papers in section III of Coliva (ed.) 2012.It is the availability of these various realism-relevant cruces that makes it possible to be more-or-less realist about a given area: at one end of the spectrum there will be areas that fall on the realist side of all of the cruces and at the opposite end areas that fall on the non-realist side of all of the cruces, but in between there will be a range of intermediate cases in which some-but-not-all of the cruces are satisfied on the realist side.

Some of the ways in which non-realist theses about a particular subject matter can be formulated and motivated have been described above. Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate between realism and non-realism is impossible. Gideon Rosen nicely articulates the basic quietist thought:

We sense that there is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism— … But after a point, when every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful,suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss (1994: 279).

Quietism about the ‘debate’ between realists and their opponents can take a number of forms. One form might claim that the idea of a significant debate is generated by unsupported or unsupportable philosophical theses about the relationship of the experiencing and minded subject to their world, and that once these theses are exorcised the ‘debate’ will gradually wither away. This form of quietism is often associated with the work of the later Wittgenstein, and receives perhaps its most forceful development in the work of John McDowell (see in particular McDowell 1994 and 2009). Other forms of quietism may proceed in a more piecemeal fashion, taking constraints such as Wright’s realism-relevant Cruces and arguing on a case-by-case basis that their satisfaction or non-satisfaction is of no metaphysical consequence. This is in fact the strategy pursued in Rosen 1994. He makes the following points regarding the two realism-relevant Cruces considered in the previous section.

Suppose that:

(F) It is a priori that: x is funny if and only if we would judge x funny under conditions of full information about x s relevant extra-comedic features

and suppose that (F) satisfies (in addition to a prioricity) the various other constraints that Wright imposes on his provisional equations ((F) is actually not of the form of a provisional equation, but this is not relevant to our purposes here). Rosen questions whether this would be enough to establish that the facts about the funny are in some metaphysically interesting sense ‘less real’ or ‘less objective’ than facts (such as, arguably, facts about shape) for which a suitable equation cannot be constructed.

In a nutshell, Rosen’s argument proceeds by inviting us to assume the perspective of an anthropologist who is studying us and who ‘has gotten to the point where he can reliably determine which jokes we will judge funny under conditions of full relevant information’ (1994: 302). Rosen writes:

[T]he important point is that from [the anthropologist’s] point of view, the facts about the distribution of [the property denoted by our use of ‘funny’] are ‘mind-dependent’ only in the sense that they supervene directly on facts about our minds. But again, this has no tendency to undermine their objectivity … [since] we have been given no reason to think that the facts about what a certain group of people would think after a certain sort of investigation are anything but robustly objective (1994: composed from 300 and 302).

How plausible is this attempt to deflate the significance of the discovery that the subject matter of a particular area is, in Wright’s sense, judgement-dependent? Argument—as opposed to the trading of intuitions—at this level is difficult, but Rosen’s claim here is very implausible. Suppose we found out that facts about the distribution of gases on the moons of Jupiter supervened directly on facts about our minds. Would the threat we then felt to the objectivity of facts about the distribution of gases on the moons of Jupiter be at all assuaged by the reflection that facts about the mental might themselves be susceptible to realistic treatment? It seems doubtful. Fodor’s Psychosemantics would not offer much solace to realists in the world described in Berkeley’s Principles. Rosen’s claim derives some of its plausibility from the fact that he uses examples, such as the funny and the constitutional, where our pre-theoretical attachment to a realist view is very weak: it may be that the judgement-dependence of the funny doesn’t undermine our sense of the objectivity of humour simply because the level of objectivity we pretheoretically expect of comedy is quite low. So although there is no knock-down argument to Rosen’s claim, it is much more counterintuitive than he might be willing to admit.

Rosen also questions whether there is any intuitive connection between considerations of width of cosmological role and issues of realism and non-realism. Rosen doubts in particular that there is any tight connection between facts of a certain class having only narrow cosmological role and mind-dependence in any sense relevant to the plausibility of realism. He writes:

It is possible to imagine a subtle physical property Q which, though intuitively thoroughly objective, is nonetheless nomically connected in the first instance only with brain state B —where this happens to be the belief that things are Q . This peculiar discovery would not undermine our confidence that Q was an objective feature of things, as it should if [a feature of objects is less than fully objective if it has narrow cosmological role] (1994: 312).

However it seems that, at least in the first instance, Wright has a relatively quick response to this point at his disposal. Waiving the point that in any case the width of cosmological role constraint applies to classes of properties and facts, he can point out that in the example constructed by Rosen the narrowness of Q’s cosmological role is an a posteriori matter. Whereas what we want is that the narrowness of cosmological role is an a priori matter: one does not need to conduct an empirical investigation to convince oneself that facts about the funny fail to have wide cosmological role.

Wright thus has the beginnings of answers to Rosen’s quietist attack on his use of the notions of judgement-dependence and width of cosmological role. It is not possible to deal fully with these arguments here, let alone with the other quietist arguments in Rosen’s paper, or the arguments of other quietists such as McDowell, beyond giving a flavour of how quietism might be motivated and how those active in the debates between realists and their opponents might start to respond. For a further discussion of quietism by Wright, see Wright 2007.

This discussion of realism and of the forms that non-realist opposition may take is far from exhaustive, and aims only to give the reader a sense of what to expect if they delve deeper into the issues. In particular, nothing has been mentioned about the work of Hilary Putnam, his characterisation of ‘metaphysical realism’, and his so-called ‘model-theoretic’ argument against it. Putnam’s writings are extensive, but one could begin with Putnam 1981 and 1983. For critical discussion, see Hale and Wright 2017 and Wright 2001; see also the entries on scientific realism and challenges to metaphysical realism . Nor have issues about the metaphysics of modality and possible worlds been discussed. The locus classicus in this area is Lewis 1986. For commentary, see Divers 2002 and Melia 2003; see also the entries on David Lewis’s metaphysics and the epistemology of modality . And the very important topic of scientific realism has not been touched upon. For an introductory treatment and suggestions for further reading, see Bird 1998 Ch. 4; see also, the entries on scientific realism and structural realism . Finally, it has not been possible to include any discussion of realism about intentionality and meaning (but see the entries on intentionality and theories of meaning .) The locus classicus in recent philosophy is Kripke 1982. For a robustly realistic view of the intentional, see Fodor 1987. For a collection of some of the central secondary literature, see Miller and Wright 2002, and for a robust defence of Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, see Kusch (2006). For an entertaining defence of metaphysical realism, see Musgrave 2001 (exercise for the reader: do any of the forms of opposition to realism described in this entry rely on what Musgrave calls word-magic?). For an alternative approach to mapping the debates about realism involving conceptions of independence more distinctively metaphysical than those focussed on here, see Fine (2001) and the entry on metaphysical grounding . For good introductory book length treatments of realism, see Kirk 1999 and Brock and Mares 2006. Greenough and Lynch (2006) is a useful collection of papers by many of the leading lights in the various debates about realism.

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cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | dependence, ontological | fictionalism | fictionalism: modal | grounding, metaphysical | intentionality | Lewis, David: metaphysics | meaning, theories of | metaethics | modality: epistemology of | moral anti-realism | moral realism | nominalism: in metaphysics | Platonism: in metaphysics | possible worlds | realism: challenges to metaphysical | relativism | structural realism | truth

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to successive cohorts of students in my Meaning and Metaphysics class at the University of Otago. Thanks, too, to SEP reviewers and editors. I should also note that I relied on parts of Miller 2013a and Miller 2018.

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Essay on realism.

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Read this essay to learn about Realism. After reading this Essay you will learn about: 1. Introduction to Realism 2. Fundamental Philosophical Ideas of Realism 3. Forms 4. Realism in Education 5. Curriculum 6. Evaluation

• Essay on the Evaluation

Essay # 1. Introduction to Realism:

Emerged as a strong movement against extreme idealistic view of the world around.

Realism changed the contour of education in a systematic way. It viewed external world as a real world; not a world of fantasy.

It is not based upon perception of the individuals but is an objective reality based on reason and science.

The Realist trend in philosophical spectrum can be traced back to Aristotle who was interested in particular facts of life as against Plato who was interested in abstractions and generalities. Therefore, Aristotle is rightly called as the father of Realism. Saint Thomas Aquinas and Comenius infused realistic spirit in religion.

John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Freiderich Herbart and William James affirmed that external world is a real world. In the 20th century, two sections of realist surfaced the area of philosophy. Six American professors led by Barton Perry and Montague are neo-realists. Another section spearheaded by Arthur Lovejoy, Johns Hopkins and George Santayana emerged are called as critical realists.

Essay # 2. Fundamental Philosophical Ideas of Realism :

(i) phenomenal world is true:.

Realists believe in the external world which is true as against the idealist world-a world d this life. It is a world of objects and not ideas. It is a pluralistic world. Ross has commented, “Realism simply affirms the existence of an external world and is therefore the antithesis of subjective idealism.”

There is an order and design of the external world in which man is a part and the world idealism by the laws of cause and effect relationships. As such there is no freedom of the will for man.

(ii) Opposes to Idealist Values :

In realism, there is no berth for imagination and speculation. Entities of God, soul and other world are nothing; they are mere figments of human imagination. Only objective world is real world which a man can know with the help of his mind. Realism does not believe in ideal values, would discover values in his immediate social life. The external world would provide the work for the discovery and realization of values.

(iii) Theory of Organism :

Realists believe that an organism is formed by conscious and unconscious things. Mind is regarded as the function of organism. Whitehead, a Neo-realist remarks “ The universe is a vibrating organism in the process of evolution. Change is the fundamental feature of this vibrating universe. The very essence of real actuality is process. Mind must be regarded as the function of the organism.”

(iv) Theory of Knowledge :

According to realists, the world around us is a reality; the real knowledge is the knowledge of the surrounding world. Senses are the gateways of knowledge of the external world. The impressions and sensations as a result of our communication with external world through our sense organs result in knowledge which is real.

The best method to acquire the knowledge of the external world is the experiment or the scientific method. One has to define the problem, observe all the facts and phenomena pertaining to the problem, formulate a hypothesis, test and verify it and accept the verified solution. Alfred North, Whitehead, and Bertrand Russel have stressed on the use of this scientific method.

(v) Stress on Present Applied Life :

According to realists, spiritual world is not real and cannot be realized. They believed in the present world-physical or material which can be realized. Man is a part and parcel of this material world. They put premium upon the molding and directing of human behaviour as conditioned by the physical and material facts of the present life, for this can promote happiness and welfare.

Therefore, metaphysics according to realism is that the external world is a reality-it is a world of objects and not ideas. Epistemology deals with the knowledge-knowledge of this external world through the senses and scientific method and enquiry. Axiology in it is that realists reject idealistic values, favour discovering values in the immediate social life.

Essay # 3. Forms of Realism :

There are four forms of realism, viz., humanistic realism, social realism, sense realism and neo-realism.

(i) Humanistic Realism :

The advocates of this form of realism are Irasmus, Rebelias and Milton. The supporters of the realism firmly believed that education should be realistic which can promote human welfare and success. They favoured the study of Greek & Roman literature for individual, social and spiritual development.

Irasmus (1446-1536) castigated narrow educational system and in its place. favoured broad and liberal education. Rebelias (1483-1553) also advocated liberal education, opposed theoretical knowledge and said that education should be such as to prepare the individual to face all the problems of life with courage and solve them successfully.

He suggested scientific and psychological methods and techniques. Milton (1608-1674) also stressed liberal and complete education. He, in this connection, writes, “I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of peace and war.”

He opposed mere academic education and insisted that education should give knowledge of things and objects. He prescribed language, literature and moral education is main subjects of study; and physiology, agriculture and sculpture as subsidiary subjects of study for children.

(ii) Social Realism :

Social realists opposed academic and bookish knowledge and advocated that education should promote working efficiency of men and women in the society. Education aims at making human life happier and successful. They suggested that curriculum should include History, Geography. Law, Diplomacy, Warfare, Arithmetic’s, Dancing, Gymnastics etc. for the development of social qualities.

Further, with a view to making education practical and useful, the realists stressed upon Travelling, Tour, observation and direct experience. Lord Montaigne (1533-1552) condemned cramming and favored learning by experience through tours and travels. He opposed knowledge for the sake of knowledge and strongly advocated practical and useful knowledge.

John Locke (1635-1704) advocated education through the mother tongue and lively method of teaching which stimulates motivation and interest in the children. As an individualist, he believed that the mind of a child is a clean slate on which only experiences write. He prescribed those subjects which are individually and socially useful in the curriculum.

(iii) Sense Realism :

Developed in the Seventeenth century sense realism upholds the truth that real knowledge comes through our senses. Further, sense realists believed all forms of knowledge spring from the external world. They viewed that education should provide plethora of opportunities to the children to observe and study natural phenomena and come in contact with external objects through the senses.

Therefore, true knowledge is gained by the child about natural objects, natural phenomena and laws through the exercises of senses. They favoured observation, scientific subjects, inductive method and useful education. Mulcaster (1530—1611) advocated physical and mental development aims of education.

Reacted against any forced impressions upon the mind of the child, he upheld use of psychological methods of teaching for the promotion of mental faculties-intelligence, memory and judgement.

Francis Bacon (1562-1623) writes, “The object of all knowledge is to give man power over nature.” He, thus, advocated inductive method of teaching-the child is free to observe and experiment by means of his senses and limbs. He emphasised science and observation of nature as the real methods to gain knowledge.

Ratke (1571-1625) said that senses are the gateways of knowledge and advocated the following maxims:

a. One thing at a time,

b. Follow nature,

c. Repetition,

d. Importance on mother-tongue,

e. No rote learning,

f. Sensory knowledge,

g. Knowledge through experience and uniformity of all things.

Comenius (1592-1671) advocated universal education and natural method of education. He said that knowledge comes not only through the senses but through man’s intelligence and divine inspiration. He favoured continuous teaching till learning is achieved and advocated mother-tongue to precede other subjects.

(iv) Neo-Realism :

The positive contribution of neo-realism is its acceptance of the methods and results of modern development in physics. It believes that rules and procedures of science are changeable from time to time according to the conditions of prevailing circumstances.

Whitehead said that an organism is formed by the consciousness and the unconsciousness, the moveable and immovable thing. Education should give to child full-scale knowledge of an organism. Man should understand all values very clearly for getting full knowledge about organism. Bertrand Russell emphasized sensory development of the child.

He favoured analytical method and classification. He assigned no place to religion and supported physics to be included as one of the foremost subjects of study. Further, he opposed emotional strain in children as it leads to development of fatigue.

Essay # 4. Realism in Education :

Realism asserts that education is a preparation for life, for education equips the child by providing adequate training to face the crude realities of life with courage as he or she would perform various roles such as a citizen, a worker, a husband, a housewife, a member of the group, etc. As such, education concerns with problems of life of the child.

Chief Characteristics of Education :

The following are the chief characteristics of realistic education:

(i) Based on Science:

Realism emphasized scientific education. It favored the inclusion of scientific subjects in he curriculum and of natural education. Natural education is based on science which is real.

(ii) Thrust upon present Life of the Child :

The focal point of realistic education is the present life of the child. As it focuses upon the real and practical problems of the life, it aims at welfare and happiness of the child.

(iii) Emphasis on Experiment and Applied life :

It emphasizes experiments, experience and practical knowledge. Realistic education supports learning by doing and practical work for enabling the child to solve his or her immediate practical problems for leading a happy and successful life.

(iv) Opposes to Bookish Knowledge :

Realistic education strongly condemned all bookish knowledge, for it does not help the child to face the realities of life adequately. It does not enable the child to decipher the realities of external things and natural phenomena. The motto of realistic education is ”Not Words but Things.”

(v) Freedom of Child:

According to realists, child should be given full freedom to develop his self according to his innate tendencies. Further, they view that such freedom should promote self-discipline and self-control the foundation of self development.

(vi) Emphasis on Training of Senses:

Unlike idealists who impose knowledge from above, realists advocated self-learning through senses which need to be trained. Since, senses are the doors of knowledge, these needs to be adequately nurtured and trained.

(vii) Balance between Individuality and Sociability :

Realists give importance to individuality and sociability of the child equally. Bacon lucidly states that realistic education develops the individual on the one hand and tries to develop social trails on the other through the development of social consciousness and sense of service of the individual.

Aims of Education :

The following aims of education are articulated by the realists:

(i) Preparation for the Good life:

The chief aim of realistic education is to prepare the child to lead a happy and good life. Education enables the child to solve his problems of life adequately and successfully. Leading ‘good life’ takes four important things-self-preservation, self-determination, self-realization and self-integration.

(ii) Preparation for a Real Life of the Material World:

Realists believe that the external material world is the real world which one must know through the senses. The aim of education is to prepare a child for real life of material world.

(iii) Development of Physical and Mental Powers:

According to realists, another important aim of education is to enable the child to solve different life problems by using the faculty of mind: intelligence, discrimination and judgement.

(iv) Development of Senses:

Realists thought that development of senses is the sine-qua-non for realization of the material world. Therefore, the aim of education is to help the development of senses fully by providing varied experiences.

(v) Acquainting with External Nature and Social Environment:

It is an another aim of realistic education to help the child to know the nature and social environment for leading a successful life.

(vi) Imparting Vocational Knowledge and Skill :

According to realists, another important aim of education is to provide vocational knowledge, information, skill etc., to make the child vocationally efficient for meeting the problems of livelihood.

(vii) Development of Character :

Realistic education aims at development of character for leading a successful and balanced life.

(viii) Enabling the Child to Adjust with the Environment :

According to realists, education should aim at enabling the child to adapt adequately to the surroundings.

Essay # 5. Curriculum of Realism :

Realists wanted to include those subjects and activities which would prepare the children for actual day to day living. As such, they thought it proper to give primary place to nature, science and vocational subjects whereas secondary place to Arts, literature, biography, philosophy, psychology and morality.

Besides, they have laid stress upon teaching of mother- tongue as the foundation of all development. It is necessary for reading, writing and social interaction but not for literary purposes.

(i) Methods of Teaching :

Realists favoured principles of observation and experience as imparting knowledge of objects and external world can be given properly through the technique of observation and experience. Further, they encouraged use of audio-visual aids in education as they would develop sensory powers in the children.

Children would have “feel” of reality through them. Realists also encouraged the use of lectures, discussions and symposia. Socratic and inductive methods were also advocated. Memorization at early stage was also recommended.

Besides, learning by travelling was also suggested. The maxims of teaching are to proceed from easy to difficult, simple to complex, known to unknown, definite to indefinite, concrete to abstract and particular to general. In addition, realists give importance on the principle of correlation as they consider all knowledge as one unit.

(ii) Discipline :

Realists decry expressionistic discipline and advocate self-discipline to make good adjustment in the external environment. They, further, assert that virtues can be inculcated for withstanding realities of physical world. Children need to be disciplined to become a part of the world around in and to understand reality.

(iii) Teacher :

Under the realistic school, the teacher must be a scholar and his duty is to guide the children towards the hard core realities of life. He must expose them to the problems of life and the world around. The teacher should have full knowledge of the content and needs of the children.

He should present the content in a lucid and intelligible way by employing scientific and psychological methods is also the duty of the teacher to tell children about scientific discoveries, researches and inventions id he should inspire them to undertake close observation and experimentation for finding out new facts and principles.

Moreover, he himself should engage in research activities. Teachers, in order to be good and effective, should get training before making a foray into the field of teaching profession.

(iv) School :

Some realists’ view that school is essential as it looks like a mirror of society reflecting its real picture of state of affairs. It is the school which provides for the fullest development of the child in accordance with his needs and aspirations and it prepares the child for livelihood. According to Comenius, “The school should be like the lap of mother full of affection, love and sympathy. Schools are true foregoing places of men.”

Essay # 6. Evaluation of Realism :

Proper evaluation of realism can be made possible by throwing a light on its merits and demerits.

(i) Realism is a practical philosophy preaching one to come to term with reality. Education which is non-realistic cannot be useful to the humanity. Now, useless education has come to be considered as waste of time, energy and resources.

(ii) Scientific subjects have come to stay in our present curriculum due to the impact of realistic education.

(iii) In the domain of methods of teaching the impact of realistic education is ostensible. In modern education, inductive, heuristic, objective, experimentation and correlation methods have been fully acknowledged all over the globe.

(iv) In the area of discipline, realism is worth its name as it favours impressionistic and self-discipline which have been given emphasis in modern educational theory and practice in a number of countries in the globe.

(v) Realistic philosophy has changed the organisational climate of schools. Now, schools have been the centres of joyful activities, practical engagements and interesting experiments. Modern school is a vibrant school.

(i) Realism puts emphasis on facts and realities of life. It neglects ideals and values of life. Critics argue that denial of ideals and values often foments helplessness and pessimism which mar the growth and development of the individuals. This is really lop-sided philosophy.

(ii) Realism emphasizes scientific subjects at the cost of arts and literature. This affair also creates a state of imbalance in the curriculum. It hijacks ‘humanities’ as critics’ label.

(iii) Realism regards senses as the gateways of knowledge. But the question comes to us, how does illusion occur and how do we get faulty knowledge? It does not provide satisfactory answer.

(iv) Realism accepts the real needs and feelings of individual. It does not believe in imagination, emotion and sentiment which are parts and parcel of individual life.

(v) Although realism stresses upon physical world, it fails to provide answers to the following questions pertaining to physical world.

(i) Is the physical world absolute ?

(ii) Is there any limits of physical world ?

(iii) Is the physical world supreme or powerful?

(vi) Realism is often criticized for its undue emphasis on knowledge and it neglects the child. As the modern trend in education is paedocentric, realism is said to have put the clock behind the times by placing its supreme priority on knowledge.

In-spite of the criticisms, realism as a real philosophy stands to the tune of time and it permeates all aspects of education. It is recognized as one of the best philosophies which need to be browsed cautiously. It has its influence in modern educational theory and practice.

Related Articles:

• Influence of Sense-Realism on Education | J. A. Comenius
• Importance of Realism in Geography

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What Is Realism? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Realism definition.

Realism  (REEL-iz-um), or literary realism, is an era of literary technique in which authors described things as they are without embellishment or fantastical plots. Works of literary realism shun flowery language, exotic settings and characters, and epic stories of love and heroism. Instead, they focus on everyday lives and people in ordinary times and places.

Realism is also a style of visual art that focuses on producing a photographic quality through realistic lighting, color palettes, and subject matter.

The History of Realism

The advent of literary realism was a direct response to the over-the-top stories typical of  romanticism , an extremely popular movement in European literature and art between the late 18th century and the mid-19th century.

France was at the epicenter of realism. The writer Stendhal created pioneering works that realistically portrayed French life. He and others drew on the then-emerging fields of biology and psychology—as well as history, sociology, and the advancing Industrial Age—to craft stories and characters with whom the average reader could identify. Author Honoré de Balzac became a French realism icon with the publication of  La Comédie humaine , a series of more than 100 interconnected novels showing the reality of French life from 1815 to 1848. Novelist Gustave Flaubert was also highly influential with novels like  Madame Bovary , establishing a quintessential narrative  voice  for literary realism.

Realism did not remain a uniquely French phenomenon. It spread throughout Europe, with works like British author George Eliot’s  Middlemarch , and eventually the United States. William Dean Howells’s  The Rise of Silas Lapham , Mark Twain’s  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Stephen Crane’s  The Red Badge of Courage , and Horatio Alger, Jr.’s  Ragged Dick  all depict realistic characters from various pockets of American life as they grapple with war, racism, materialism, and upward mobility. Other American realist authors include John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair.

The impact of these early realist authors’ works shifted the larger literary focus away from explicitly romantic literature. They made realistic components essential to most genres of writing, even those that don’t meet the strictest definition of realism. Though literary realism as a movement died down around the mid-20th century, its impact lives on. Most modern writers seek to create characters and stories with which readers can, to some extent, relate.

But realism is not without its detractors. Critics say it is not possible to portray reality in literature because some amount of imagination and creative license is always necessary. Others argue that all literature—to one degree or another—has realist elements and can thus fall under the definition of  realism . Finally, there are those who think reality is subjective, which would make a definitive label of realism virtually impossible.

The Components of Realism

Works of realism aim to represent a specific reality. They accomplish this goal by incorporating various components into the narrative, including:

• Realistic characters:  Realist writers create characters who are rarely as black and white as the more cookie-cutter protagonists and antagonists of romanticism. In realism, characters are neither entirely righteous or totally corrupt—they are complex, with both positive and negative traits.
• Labor:  This concept plays a prominent role in many kinds of literary realism. The protagonist’s job is a significant aspect of their identity, whether for good or ill. Matters of heart and acts of monumental courage take a backseat to the more pressing demands of earning a living.
• Internal motivations:  In realist works, characters’ actions come less from external forces—for instance, honor, chivalry, or a noble effort to right a wrong—and more from internal needs like curiosity, desire, or greed.
• Genuine settings:  Writers of realism zero in on specific environments and the impact they have on the story. Their settings lean toward the sobering or the stark, and they tend to be more focused on smaller locations.
• Society:  This goes beyond a mere aspect of setting. Societies usually play a significant role in characters’ fates. Choices and events are dictated not by a grand idea of personal virtue and valor but by the conditioning imposed by society.
• Straightforward speech:  Dialogue is not lofty or overtly cultured. Instead, it reflects the  vernacular  of the characters of the specific time and place in which the story is set.
• Verisimilitude:  This is a philosophy that lends greater credibility and believability to the narrative. It concentrates on the details that accurately reflect human behavior and psychology.

Subgenres of Realism

A writer of literary realism might present their story through any of several subgenres.

• Magical Realism

In magical realism, the author integrates mystical or fantastical elements into a realistic  setting  and worldview. These elements don’t significantly alter the story’s logic and rationality, but they do add another dimension that gently pushes the boundaries of the possible. As a result, works of magical realism unearth magic in the everyday and celebrate the potential for transcendence amid the ordinary. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s  One Hundred Years of Solitude  is a classic example of a magical realist work.

Naturalism  utilizes scientific thought, especially the theories of Charles Darwin, to illustrate the inescapable influences that shape characters and their experiences. At the heart of all works of literary naturalism is the belief that science explains the conditions of reality and that metaphorical and supernatural elements have no credibility or presence in a story’s trajectory.  The Grapes of Wrath  by John Steinbeck is a popular naturalist work.

Psychological Realism

Works of this genre take an interest in characters’ motivation. Rooted in psychological thought, authors examine characters’ interior lives—their thoughts, emotions, and mental processes—to provide a fuller understanding of human behavior. One of the best-known works is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s  Crime and Punishment .

Social Realism

This era of literary technique involves telling stories about the poor and working classes. Social realism delves into the socioeconomic and political conditions to which these groups are subjected daily. This emphasis allows the author to comment on the political and social power structures that manufacture the challenges unique to characters’ demographics. An example of this subgenre is Arthur Miller’s  The Crucible .

Socialist Realism

These works venerate the struggles of the working classes to support larger socialist ideals. In fact, it was the official literary style in the socialist Soviet Union. An important work in this subgenre is  How the Steel Was Tempered  by Nikolai Ostrovsky.

Theatrical Realism

Theatrical realism applies to dramatic works written for the stage. Plays in this style aim to make theatrical stories truer to life. Theatrical realism might employ any of the aforementioned subgenres to provide a more authentic grounding for the drama, the characters, and their choices. One prominent play in the theatrical realist style is  A Doll’s House  by Henrik Ibsen.

Realism’s Relationship to Other Literary Eras

There are two prominent eras of literary technique that oppose or intersect with realism: romanticism and idealism.

Realism vs. Romanticism

Romanticism  is realism’s polar opposite. Romantic works tell stories of larger-than-life characters who embark on ambitious adventures, pursue passionate love affairs, discover new worlds, conquer fearsome enemies, or otherwise make themselves paragons of virtue and nobility. Conversely, literary realism tells stories as truthfully and authentically as possible, without glamorizing or sentimentalizing key details. Jane Austen and Herman Melville are prominent romantic authors.

Realism vs. Idealism

Idealist literature spotlights characters who place substantial importance on pursuing their values and principles—whether moral, philosophical, or political. They will persist at the expense of all else, including practical behavior. In fact, a hallmark of idealism is imagining things not as they currently are but as they would be in a perfect world.

In this way, idealism is a separate, antithetical idea to realism. At the same time, idealistic tendencies can make their way into works of literary realism. In socialist realism, for instance, there is heavy-handed idealism; by integrating it, the authors extol the benefits of socialism to persuade the masses.

The Function of Realism

Literary realism presents an accurate depiction of reality to the reader. Consequently, the reader may better identify with the characters or situations because they’re seeing aspects of themselves or their own experiences in the work. Representation is important to readers, especially marginalized populations who don’t always see characters who look, act, think, or in any significant way mirror themselves or their lives. In this sense, realism can help readers find community and remind them they are not alone.

Realism also sheds light on important social and political issues that are frequently ignored. By presenting reality as it is, readers see the struggles others deal with, creating awareness, empathy, and understanding.

Notable Realist Authors

• Isabelle Allende,  The House of the Spirits
• Anton Chekhov,  The Seagull ,  The Cherry Orchard
• Theodore Dreiser,  Sister Carrie
• George Eliot,  Adam Bede ,  Middlemarch
• Gabriel García Márquez,  One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
• Leo Tolstoy,  War and Peace
• Ivan Turgenev,  Fathers and Sons
• Edith Wharton,  The Age of Innocence ,  Ethan Frome
• Émile Zola,  Germinal

Examples of Realist Literature

1. Frank Norris,  McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

A prominent work of American literary realism,  McTeague: A Story of San Francisco  chronicles the moral descent of a young dentist, McTeague, and his wife, Trina. On the eve of their wedding, Trina wins $15,000 in the lottery. The couple settles into married life, but each partner spirals down a pit of greed and despair. McTeague grows abusive, and Trina increasingly fixates on money. In the end, McTeague kills Trina, as well as his best friend Marcus, and ends up stranded in Death Valley, handcuffed to Marcus’s corpse.

The novel illustrates in brutal detail that human lives and fates are not always determined by conscious choices but by external forces. This passage shows Trina’s increasing preoccupation with money:

At times […] she would lock her door, open her trunk, and pile all her little hoard on her table. By now it was four hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. Trina would play with this money by the hour, piling it, and repiling it, or gathering it all into one heap, and drawing back to the farthest corner of the room to note the effect […]. She polished the gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone […]. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. […] She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs.

2. Henry James,  What Maisie Knew

This work tells the story of Maisie Farange, a little girl caught between her divorced, warring parents. The adults focus only on their own happiness and use Maisie as a pawn. The book is a scathing commentary on relationships, the dark side of human nature, and the untenable position in which children are often placed. This is evident in the following description of Maisie’s parents’ fighting—and of the society that created it:

This was a society in which for the most part people were occupied only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at last grounds for expecting a time of high activity. They girded their loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel. There had been “sides” before, and there were sides as much as ever; for the sider too the prospect opened out, taking the pleasant form of a superabundance of matter for desultory conversation.

3. Margaret Drabble,  A Summer Bird-Cage

A Summer Bird-Cage  is an account of a marriage in shambles seen through the eyes of a third party. Sarah watches as her sister Louise enters a loveless marriage with the insufferable Stephen. Louise knows that her husband is arrogant but chooses to ignore it; she instead occupies her time by having an affair with his friend. Tensions build between the two sisters until Sarah confronts Louise about the latter’s damaging decisions and attitudes toward life and love.

Drabble concentrates less on plot and more on cultivating the psychological realism of the story and the two principal characters. The sisters share a barely concealed animosity. For example, Sarah says:

In the end she taught me the art of competition, and this is what I really hold against her: I think I had as little desire to outdo others in my nature as a person can have, until she insisted on demonstrating her superiority. She taught me to want to outdo her. And when, occasionally, I did so, her anger hurt me, but as I had won it by labour from indifference, I treasured it. And when, finally, I took over one of her men at Oxford, the game was out in the open, I thought, for the rest of our lives.

Further Resources on Realism

Goodreads has a list of  Popular Realism Books .

English professor Ali Taghizadeh offers an academic perspective on  A Theory of Literary Realism .

The British Library looks at  realism in British literature .

Salon  puts forth the theory that  Literary Realism Is Dead .

Longwood University has compiled a comprehensive list of  American realist authors and their works .

Related Terms

• Romanticism

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Europe 1800 - 1900

Course: europe 1800 - 1900   >   unit 5, a beginner's guide to realism.

• Courbet, The Stonebreakers
• Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50
• Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans
• Courbet, The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life
• Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet
• Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais
• Bonheur, Sheep in the Highlands
• Millet, L'Angelus
• Millet, The Gleaners
• Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens
• Édouard Manet, Olympia
• Manet, Olympia
• Manet's Olympia
• Manet, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
• Manet, The Railway
• Manet, Émile Zola
• Manet, The Balcony
• Manet, Plum Brandy
• Manet, In the Conservatory
• Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
• Manet, Corner of a Café-Concert
• Eva Gonzalès, A Loge at the Théâtre des Italiens
• Daumier, Rue Transnonain
• Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of an Art

Realism and the Painting of Modern Life

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Nineteenth-century french realism.

Young Communards in Prison (Les Fédérés à la Conciergerie)

Gustave Courbet

The Past, the Present, and the Future (Le passé – Le présent – L'Avenir), published in La Caricature, no. 166, Jan. 9, 1834

Honoré Daumier

Le ventre législatif: Aspect des bancs ministériels de la chambre improstituée de 1834

Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834, Plate 24 of l'Association mensuelle

Retreat from the Storm

Jean-François Millet

The Horse Fair

Rosa Bonheur

Young Ladies of the Village

Sheepshearing Beneath a Tree

Woman with a Rake

The Third-Class Carriage

The Witnesses - The War Council

First Steps, after Millet

Vincent van Gogh

Ross Finocchio Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. Realism emerged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and developed during the period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. As French society fought for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn from the everyday lives of the working class. Rejecting the idealized classicism of academic art and the exotic themes of Romanticism , Realism was based on direct observation of the modern world. In keeping with Gustave Courbet’s  statement in 1861 that “painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things,” Realists recorded in often gritty detail the present-day existence of humble people, paralleling related trends in the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. The elevation of the working class into the realms of high art and literature coincided with Pierre Proudhon’s socialist philosophies and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto , published in 1848, which urged a proletarian uprising.

Courbet (1819–1877) established himself as the leading proponent of Realism by challenging the primacy of history painting, long favored at the official Salons and the École des Beaux-Arts, the state-sponsored art academy. The groundbreaking works that Courbet exhibited at the Paris Salons of 1849 and 1850–51—notably A Burial at Ornans (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and The Stonebreakers (destroyed)—portrayed ordinary people from the artist’s native region on the monumental scale formerly reserved for the elevating themes of history painting. At the time, Courbet’s choice of contemporary subject matter and his flouting of artistic convention was interpreted by some as an anti-authoritarian political threat. Proudhon, in fact, read The Stonebreakers as an “irony directed against our industrialized civilization … which is incapable of freeing man from the heaviest, most difficult, most unpleasant tasks, the eternal lot of the poor.” To achieve an honest and straightforward depiction of rural life, Courbet eschewed the idealized academic technique and employed a deliberately simple style, rooted in popular imagery, which seemed crude to many critics of the day. His Young Ladies of the Village ( 40.175 ), exhibited at the Salon of 1852, violates conventional rules of scale and perspective and challenges traditional class distinctions by underlining the close connections between the young women (the artist’s sisters), who represent the emerging rural middle class, and the poor cowherd who accepts their charity.

When two of Courbet’s major works ( A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Studio ) were rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he withdrew his eleven accepted submissions and displayed his paintings privately in his Pavillon du Réalisme, not far from the official international exhibition. For the introduction to the catalogue of this independent, one-man show, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto, echoing the tone of the period’s political manifestos, in which he asserts his goal as an artist “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation.” In his autobiographical Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay), Courbet is surrounded by groups of his friends, patrons, and even his models, documenting his artistic and political experiences since the Revolution of 1848.

During the same period, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) executed scenes of rural life that monumentalize peasants at work, such as Sheep Shearing Beneath a Tree ( 40.12.3 ). While a large portion of the French population was migrating from rural areas to the industrialized cities, Millet left Paris in 1849 and settled in Barbizon , where he lived the rest of his life, close to the rustic subjects he painted throughout his career. The Gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon of 1857, created a scandal because of its honest depiction of rural poverty. The bent postures of Millet’s gleaners, as well as his heavy application of paint, emphasize the physical hardship of their task. Like Courbet’s portrayal of stonebreakers, Millet’s choice of subject was considered politically subversive, even though his style was more conservative than that of Courbet, reflecting his academic training. Millet endows his subjects with a sculptural presence that recalls the art of Michelangelo and Nicolas Poussin , as seen in his Woman with a Rake ( 38.75 ). His tendency to generalize his figures gives many of his works a sentimental quality that distinguishes them from Courbet’s unidealized paintings. Vincent van Gogh greatly admired Millet and made copies of his compositions, including First Steps, after Millet ( 64.165.2 ).

The socially conscious art of Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) offers an urban counterpart to that of Millet. Daumier highlighted socioeconomic distinctions in the newly modernized urban environment in a group of paintings executed around 1864 that illustrate the experience of modern rail travel in first-, second-, and third-class train compartments. In The First-Class Carriage (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), there is almost no physical or psychological contact among the four well-dressed figures, whereas The Third-Class Carriage ( 29.100.129 ) is tightly packed with an anonymous crowd of working-class men and women. In the foreground, Daumier isolates three generations of an apparently fatherless family, conveying the hardship of their daily existence through the weary poses of the young mother and sleeping boy. Though clearly of humble means, their postures, clothing, and facial features are rendered in as much detail as those of the first-class travelers.

Best known as a lithographer , Daumier produced thousands of graphic works for journals such as La Caricature and Le Charivari , satirizing government officials and the manners of the bourgeoisie. As early as 1832, Daumier was imprisoned for an image of Louis-Philippe as Rabelais’ Gargantua, seated on a commode and expelling public honors to his supporters. Daumier parodied the king again in 1834 with his caricature The Past, the Present, and the Future ( 41.16.1 ), in which the increasingly sour expressions on the three faces of Louis-Philippe suggest the failures of his regime. In the same year, Daumier published Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834 , in the journal Association Mensuelle ( 20.23 ). Though Daumier did not witness the event portrayed—the violent suppression of a workers’ demonstration—the work is unsparing in its grim depiction of death and government brutality; Louis-Philippe ordered the destruction of all circulating prints immediately after its publication.

As a result of Courbet’s political activism during the Paris Commune of 1871, he too was jailed. Incarcerated at Versailles before serving a six-month prison sentence for participation in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, Courbet documented his observations of the conditions under which children were held in his drawing Young Communards in Prison ( 1999.251 ), published in the magazine L’Autograph , one of a small number of works inspired by his experiences following the fall of the Commune.

Like Millet, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) favored rural imagery and developed an idealizing style derived from the art of the past. Similar in scale to Courbet’s works of the same period, Bonheur’s imposing Horse Fair ( 87.25 ), shown at the Salon of 1853, is the product of extensive preparatory drawings and the artist’s scientific study of animal anatomy; her style also reflects the influence of such Romantic painters as Delacroix and Gericault and the classical equine sculpture from the Parthenon. Édouard Manet and the Impressionists were the immediate heirs to the Realist legacy, as they too embraced the imagery of modern life. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, their art no longer carried the political charge of Realism.

Finocchio, Ross. “Nineteenth-Century French Realism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Nochlin, Linda. Realism . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Nochlin, Linda. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Tinterow, Gary. Introduction to Modern Europe / The Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. See on MetPublications

Additional Essays by Ross Finocchio

• Finocchio, Ross. “ Fra Angelico (ca. 1395–1455) .” (October 2006)
• Finocchio, Ross. “ Mannerism: Bronzino (1503–1572) and his Contemporaries .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• The Barbizon School: French Painters of Nature
• Claude Monet (1840–1926)
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• Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
• Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
• France, 1800–1900 A.D.
• 19th Century A.D.
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Artist or Maker

• Bonheur, Rosa
• Courbet, Gustave
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Online Features

• The Artist Project: “Swoon on Honoré Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage “
• The Artist Project: “Wayne Thiebaud on Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair “
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On the site

Essays on realism.

by Georg Lukács

Edited by Rodney Livingstone

ISBN: 9780262620420

Pub date: May 10, 1983

• Publisher: The MIT Press

256 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262120883

Pub date: May 5, 1981

• 9780262620420
• Published: May 1983
• 9780262120883
• Published: May 1981

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Originally published in the 1930s, these essays on realism, expressionism, and modernism in literature present Lukacs's side of the controversy among Marxist writers and critics now known as the Lukacs-Brecht debate. The book also includes an exchange of letters between Lukács, writing in exile in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist novelist, Anna Seghers, in which they discuss realism, the European literary heritage, and the situation of the artist in capitalist culture.

Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic.

Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University of Southampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others.

Considering [his] capacity for historical intervention and personal survival, the least one can say is that Lukács was the most successful Marxist intellectual of the 20th century.... The six essays and one public exchange of letters that David Fernbach's translation makes available to English readers were all written between 1931 and 1940, a period during which Lukács served the Comintern as one of its most formidable (and certainly its most erudite) critical hitmen. J. Hoberman The Village Voice

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Naturalism

Introduction, general overviews.

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Realism and Naturalism by John Dudley LAST REVIEWED: 13 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0059

Variously defined as distinct philosophical approaches, complementary aesthetic strategies, or broad literary movements, realism and naturalism emerged as the dominant categories applied to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Included under the broad umbrella of realism are a diverse set of authors, including Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hamlin Garland. Often categorized as regionalists or local colorists, many of these writers produced work that emphasized geographically distinct dialects and customs. Others offered satirical fiction or novels of manners that exposed the excesses, hypocrisies, or shortcomings of a culture undergoing radical social change. A subsequent generation of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, are most often cited as the American inheritors of the naturalist approach practiced by Emile Zola, whose 1880 treatise Le Roman Experimental applied the experimental methods of medical science to the construction of the novel. Governed by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance, the typical characters of naturalist fiction find themselves constrained from achieving the transcendent goals suggested by a false ideology of romantic individualism. Over the past century, critics and literary historians have alternately viewed realist and naturalist texts as explicit condemnations of the economic, cultural, or ethical deficiencies of the industrialized age or as representations of the very ideological forces they purport to critique. Accordingly, an exploration of these texts raises important questions about the relationship between literature and society, and about our understanding of the “real” or the “natural” as cultural and literary phenomena. Though of little regard in the wake of the New Critics’ emphasis on metaphysics and formal innovation, a revived interest in realism as the American adaptation of an international movement aligned with egalitarian and democratic ideology emerged in the 1960s, as did an effort to redefine naturalist fiction as a more complex form belonging to the broader mainstream of American literary history. More recently, the emergence of deconstructive, Marxist, and new historicist criticism in the 1980s afforded a revised, and often skeptical, reevaluation of realism and naturalism as more conflicted forms, itself defined or constructed by hegemonic forces and offering insight into late-19th- and early-20th-century ideologies of class, race, and gender.

In the wake of Parrington’s attempt to reconcile the rise of realism and naturalism with an essentially romantic tradition ( Parrington 1930 ), interest in the rise of these movements has occurred in waves. In particular, efforts to provide large-scale summaries reflect the attention to social problems in 1960s, and the influence of—and reaction to—post-structuralism and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In all cases, however, comprehensive hypotheses about the nature of realism and naturalism remain grounded, to a large extent, in the political, economic, and cultural history of the late 19th century. Berthoff 1965 , Pizer 1984 , and Lehan 2005 represent attempts to accommodate the horizons established by Parrington’s definition of the study of literary form. Kaplan 1988 , Borus 1989 , and Bell 1993 each make valuable contributions to the new historicist reexamination of naturalism. Murphy 1987 offers one of the few comprehensive accounts of realism within dramatic literature.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Provides compelling readings of the canonical authors, suggesting little common ground beyond the fact that both realism and naturalism explicitly reject the conventional dictates of artistry and dominant notions of style. Unified in their attraction to “reality” as an abstraction, Howells, Twain, James, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and Jewett each constructed radically unique responses to a common “revolt against style” (p. 115)

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 . New York: Free Press, 1965.

Suggests that realism as a category may be best understood though an examination of practice, rather than through the study of principles or theories. In this light, establishes forceful reading of realist novels as varied statements of outrage and opposition to the increasing materialism, disorder, and perceived moral decay in the years leading up to World War I.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Draws on concerns of new historicism, yet emphasizes the process of literary publication and reception itself. Explores Howells, James, and Norris in detail, with some attention to other writers, including compelling discussions of the publishing industry, literary celebrity, and rise of the political novel.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Includes a concise summary of earlier critical debates about realism (including and subsuming naturalism) and describes the cultural work in novels of Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser to construct social spaces that contain and defuse class tensions emerging in the late 19th century. Among the more influential new historicist interventions.

Lehan, Richard Daniel. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Resolutely formalist overview of realism and naturalism as literary modes. Describes the philosophical and cultural assumptions that helped shape these movements and traces their development throughout the 20th century. At times polemical in its dismissal of post-structuralist or materialist rereadings (see, for example, Kaplan 1988 ; Howard 1985 or Michaels 1987 , both cited under Philosophy, History, and Form ), nonetheless immensely useful and readable synthesis of key ideas.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

A treatment of realism in American theater, tracing the development of realist ideas about dramatic representation and their subsequent influence on American dramatists of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and others. Addresses the scant attention paid to the theater in the scholarship on realism.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 . Vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

Though left incomplete at Parrington’s death, offers what would become the dominant view of realism and naturalism for much subsequent criticism. Sees these movements as antitheses of idealism represented by the Emersonian tradition, providing a needed corrective to “shoddy romanticism” that threatened to consume the American literary tradition.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Revision of essential 1966 work, offering a comprehensive formal theory of realism and naturalism, linked by adherence to an ethical idealism that informs, restructures, and complicates the diversity of themes and topics, the often bleak subject matter, and the presence of a deterministic worldview. Collects a variety of essays that construct a coherent portrait of the movements and their defining tensions.

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Realism in Today’s International Relations

Introduction, theories that support these assertions, reference list.

Realism is a theory that basis its principle beliefs on self-competiveness. The human nature of self-interest and egoism and lack of international government have led to sphere of power and interest in the international relations. The theory upholds the view that world politics involves sovereign states that compete to attain security. However, this build up of security sometimes come along with greater instability as a result of the competing powers accumulating power arms to defend their territories.

This therefore makes national security search an endless game. The theory also upholds the view that there is no higher source of authority that exists above the great powers (Donnelly 2000, p. 8). These higher powers are the ones that bring order in the international relations; however, realism is against the actions of these higher powers claiming that the international relations should be left in the hands of the control of human nature.

Realism brings out the realist perception that today’s state relations are based on the notion of competition. This is where various nations focus more on what they are to gain from any relation in terms of attaining the ability to help themselves. Firstly, by basing its fundamentals on emphasis on international anarchy and human selfishness, realism only focuses on one side of the issue and ignores the whole general theory of international relations. In addition, its promise to provide an overview explaining the theory of international politics has made this theory to be viewed as a great failure (Galston 2010, p. 388).

Realists’ emphasis on political needs that are derived from lack of international government makes the evil human nature become the order of policy making in the sensitive international relation issues. This is because human nature is known to be controlled by a structured political authority and exercise of rules. Adopting realism in international relations, therefore, serves to empower the exercise of the human nature which when left to reign can express the worst attributes making the world politics unmanageable (Donnelly, 2000, p. 435) This is because human nature is led by egoism that makes nations seek to control the struggle for power and security without considering the limitations of power and space.

Realism fails to provide an ideal political life even during the most favorable circumstances. This is because it holds the view that harmony is unachievable and focuses on amassing security arms to guard a nation from ever present conflict and instability.

From the early times of the history of international relations, realism has not been perceived as an alternative to the idea of transforming the world politics. For instance, many scholars have always viewed the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union as an illustration of a weakness in the adoption of realist international theory. Since this theory of international relations did not cease to exist though most people had predicted its end after resolution of this crisis, its persistence continues to bring harm to the current situation in the international relations.

Despite these weaknesses in the realism theory, it has remained an important theory in the international relations even in the present age. Firstly, the political theory has shown that this theory is still being applied in the international relations. This is due to the nature of the theory to refuse the utopian claim of always expecting the best and adoption of preparation mechanisms to defeat the worst. According to Mearsheimer’s (2001, p.10-11) argument, the atmosphere that the current states have adopted is that which is dominated by a cycle of violence that is not likely to be overcome easily. He proposes this through suggestion of the five basic assumptions that dominate the international relations system.

Firstly, the international system still operates on the system of anarchy. This is where there is no functional central authority to govern or control different states’ actions. This assumption can gain its ground since the few international organizations that assume the position of central authority are either not functional or they are not empowered enough to command much authority from all the nations of the world. Secondly, the renowned great powers in the world have access to military capability that can be used against other states through destruction especially during the times of attacks or inter-state wars.

Mearsheimer’s (2001, p. 11) third assumption about the international system is that different states cannot have the certainty of their counterparts’ intentions. His fourth assumption is that the main objective of all states is attaining their means of survival. Finally, he argues that the international system is governed by the notion that states are able to remain balanced thus claiming that they should be treated as rational actors. When the international system has assimilated the five assumptions, then what result are the negative results of realism.

The consistent fear among both great and even small nations has become a reality in the world today. Nations are in constant fear against their neighbors or other nations that appear to them as a threat. This fear has developed as a result of the possession of the means and ways of inflicting fear by the great powers. In addition there lacks a functional institution that is able to control a given nation from being aggressive to another nation.

The other behavior that has been adopted by various nations today as a result of assimilating realism in their relations is the desire to find ways of assisting themselves. The current state of anarchy in the world has forced the nations to seek ways of ensuring their own safety and survival. They do this by seeking ways of maximizing their own power in order to counterattack any unknown intentions of other states around them.

Different nations are currently investing a lot of their resources in trying to become better than their counterparts. They do this through various strategies; some of these include the use of wars and blackmail to gain more power than others. This is because a situation of war between two nations gives a chance for the warring nations to become certain of the other’s power and also to define their power position. This is after establishing their rival’s capability which gives them a sense of satisfaction.

Realism makes power the basis of international politics. According to Schmidt (2004, p. 429), this view evolves from describing the power of a state based on state machinery and materials that the state has in comparison with other states. This makes a state to measure its power by focusing on its ability to defeat other nations in a situation of war between them.

Even if Mearsheimer (2001, p. 23) focuses on other aspects in determining the strength of a nation like socio-economic components, these aspects zero back to the nation’s ability to come up with a strong military power system. The nations that are known to be the strongest are those that besides being wealthy and having large populations, they also have a strong army and possess strong military mechanism. This has therefore made international politics a consistent security competition where their relations are those of continued struggle to gain a higher position than other nations.

According to realism, the introduction of a relationship where nations depend on each other based on a common ground of trust is unnecessary as this relation would lack benefits since nations would have nothing to gain. In addition, realism argues that when a nation invests its resources in attaining power, there would be no reason for other nations to do the same in an attempt to compete against it. This is because it is doing this in its attempt to secure a security mandate which is important in all states.

While relating the theory of realism to the global political economy, an individual must have the reality that reality is changing. This is in terms of relations of production, power, and forms of states among other forces. These forces are the ones that can describe the current state of the world. Various scholars in their attempt to criticize the approaches of the international relations have focused on the Global Political Economy, GPE.

The theory of orthodoxy which holds close perceptions as those of the theory of positivism leads to the confirmation that realism is still an important concept in the international relations. In coming up with this theory, Hume (1972, p.38) claimed that the main determiner of the prices of products in the market is the availability of the exchange commodity. The application of this claim in the market is that this commodity that is used as the means of exchange controls free trade by ensuring that it remains balanced.

He advanced this claim by the observation that since the demand is determined by prices of the commodity, the countries that produce in surplus will make their exports to drop while those that produce deficit products will go up. This therefore makes markets gain the ability to stabilize independently. All these claims were directed to elimination of the restrictions that are placed to control importation of goods by assuming that this would not be harmful to the global market. Free trade that is in existence today is based on this notion that buyers and sellers can simply continue with their market transactions regardless of existence of any set body to keep check or control how this is done.

Marxist capitalism in the market economy also possesses some realist inclinations. The theory’s basis is founded on expanding oneself without considering the limitations of time and location. This is because it argues on the importance of opening the market which in the long run ends up benefiting the capitalist traders and those who have the power to define the way the market is run due to their influence and power. This therefore leads to a market economy that is dominated by laissez faire capitalism.

The current form of free trade has taken this feature where the most influential nations insist that the other states and especially the developing nations open their borders in order to allow easy flow of goods due to elimination of all restrictions. However, due to lack of a powerful system to control this process, the wealthy nations become hideous by refusing to open theirs or through exercising high taxes on products being imported to their country from other trade partners. This perpetuates economic imbalance and creates ‘master’ and ‘slave’ nations.

Capitalism perceives conflicts that exist between trade partners as necessary in the process of ascertaining the power of an individual nation. This is because these conflicts ensure the possibilities of nations to put up empires and new property in new areas. These views are similar to those of current realism since the current international relations views a conflict in a nation as a chance to empower their power and authority over others.

Feminism is another theory that can also explain the existence of realism in the international relations today. This theory in the international relations aims at making a difference through changing the way the world is perceived. In addition, the theory through its introduction of new ideas aims at giving more emphasis to gender issues in the platform of international relations. The emergence of this theory in the international relations has come to strengthen the current international relations order in which realism has become an important concept.

This is because the theory has brought the discussions on very core aspects of the theory. These include aspects like security, issues of human rights and authority. According to the theory’s view, women have been left behind while the international relations is analyzing the state, political economy and even issues of international security. This can explain why women have remained powerless in the military and foreign arena. This is because according to the feminists view, the constraints that have existed for a long time in the global order and gender relations should be eliminated.

The policies and rules that prevent evenly distribution of power between genders should be removed in order to empower all the genders equally and allow them to compete on a common ground. The adoption of the feminism theory in the current society has encouraged the real exercise of unrestrained human nature between different genders. This is where competition and search for glory has dominated the various fields of gender relations and since there lacks a superior power to control these measures, lack of trust has led to fear and doubt between these relations.

In the view of critical realism, the aspect that determines economic efficiency and growth is through ensuring that there are no market leaders or the financial markets take charge of the developments as these leaders may end up manipulating developments in order to favor their situations (Edkins & Vaughan-Williams 2009, p. 67). This however, may cause conflicts as the situation would encourage unfriendly control and since there is no one to lead or to take charge, the market players may start operating in anarchy. This may end up destroying the principles of market economy. This theory of economics became the basis of current theories of economists, though at first it had been viewed as contradictory.

Politics in the international community is based on the notion of agreement through justice; it also views this as possible through adoption of coordination which is undertaken by a system that checks the balances of power. However, in today’s international relations, the views that have been adopted are those of realism which continue to dominate the politics in the international arena. This is because according to political realists, agreement that is necessary in order to sustain ordered politics in the international relations is not possible.

Realists believe in having autonomy on the political arena since according to them, politics cannot flourish well if there is lack of freedom to exercise judgment without restriction by any forces or principles. Realists view political conflict as a recurrent situation; thus, the need to consistently seek better ways of preventing the individual nation from its effect. The current state of international relations domination of this theory can be identified by the relations between various nations which have been dominated by tension. This has been due to lack of trust which has made nations to relate only with a motive of understanding each other’s intentions. The realist view of political life with perceived skepticism is the order of international relations today.

The current systems that run the political international relations lack a hierarchic structure. The perception that order should be imposed by a higher authority instead of the interactions of political actors that operate on the same level has caused the current state of politics in the international relations. There is however need to level this ground if international relations are to improve. Nevertheless; political, military, and economic might will remain as determinant factors in the field of international relations.

Donnelly, J., 2000. Realism and international relations . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Edkins, J., & Vaughan-Williams, N., 2009. Critical theorists and international relations. Oxon, OX: Taylor & Francis.

Galston, W. A., 2010. Realism in political theory. European Journal of Political Theory 9 (4), 385–411.

Hume, D., 1972. “Of money”, in E. Rotwein (ed) Writings on economics . Freeport, NY: Hume, Books for Libraries Press. pp. 33-46.

Mearsheimer, J. J., 2001. The tragedy of great power politics . New York, NY: Norton New York.

Schmidt, B. C., 2004. Realism as tragedy. Review of International Studies, 30 : 427-441.

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Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics

G. Anthony Bruno

Does Kant’s restriction of knowledge to phenomena undermine objectivity? Jacobi argues that it does, daring the transcendental idealist to abandon the thing in itself and embrace the “strongest idealism”. According to Bruno, McDowell and Meillassoux adopt a similar critique of Kant’s conception of objectivity and, more significantly, echo Jacobi’s dare to profess the strongest idealism – what McDowell approvingly calls “consistent idealism” and Meillassoux disparagingly calls “extreme idealism”. After exposing the Cartesian projection on which Jacobi’s critique rests, Bruno shows that McDowell’s and Meillassoux’s critiques make the same projection. He argues that whereas McDowell offers an inconsistent alternative to Kant’s idealism, Meillassoux begs the question against it. Finally, Bruno sketches the account of objectivity that follows from Kant’s distinction between general and transcendental logic.

I make a critical exposition of Kant’s transcendental idealism and empirical realism about space and time: I see that while transcendental idealism, to Kant, warrants his distinction between mere appearances (mere presentations) and things-in-themselves pertaining to external objects, it necessitates empirical realism which demarcates it from the other ‘metaphysically erroneous’ versions of idealism. I argue that Kant’s distinction between these two “doctrinal systems” – or rather, the correlation between the two – serves to defend his conception of objectivity (of perceptual experiences and of judgments) as that which arises from subjectivity. Such relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, in turn, defends his contention of synthetic a priority, the possibility of which determines the plausibility of metaphysics as a science of pure reason. Furthermore, I argue that Kant’s treatment of objectivity goes against the Lockean construal of “secondary qualities” as the ‘powers of objects’; rather, to Kant, the cognitive powers lie in us. (Content word count 1,624)

Continental philosophy has recently been shaken by the so called “speculative realism” movement. What is actually at stake in this philosophical tendency is a “speculative turn”, trying to access the real as the condition of both our conditioned knowledge and the existence of subject-independent objects. Accordingly, speculative realism tries to provide a non-idealist solution to the typically post-Kantian problem of the genesis of the transcendental. In the first part of this paper I will show how Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant – three of the participants of the workshop that gave “Speculative Realism” its name on April 2007 at Goldsmith University of London – propose to overcome the circle of correlation, specifically in the form created by Fichte, so as to access the in-itself as a reality which is completely independent of thought, while being able to ground the possibility of its existence. In the second part I will compare their different strategies and consider some issues that, in my opinion, are problematical as non-correlationist solutions. Finally, in the last part, I will propose a rough account of the direction that I mean to take towards solving the problem of the genesis of the transcendental.

Tobias Rosefeldt

In this paper I present a new solution to the so-called ‚neglected alternative'-objection against Kant's argument for transcendental idealism. According to this objection, Kant does not give sufficient justification for his claim that not only are space and time forms of our intuition but that they also fail to be things in themselves or properties thereof. I first discuss a proposal by Willaschek and Allais, who try to defend Kant against this charge by building on his account of a priori intuition, and argue that it is insufficient in order to meet the objection in its full force. I then present my own solution to the problem. It is based on a reconstruction of Kant's account of properties of appearances and tries to show that this account implies that spatio-temporal properties could in principle not pertain both to appearances and to things in themselves.

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State of the Field Essay: On the Unreality of Realism in International Relations 52 min read

I n 1939, E.H. Carr published The Twenty Years’ Crisis , [1] which argued that the world was divided into two camps: utopians and realists. Utopians like President Woodrow Wilson and his followers had made a mess of the world through their well-intentioned but naïve attempts at international cooperation. Realists were those, like Carr, who recognized that the struggle for power and survival were perennial features of human life and politics among nations. Carr wanted policymakers to face the facts, acknowledge reality, and not get lost in idealistic dreams. ‘Realism’ as a professionalized academic school of international relations was born.

H- Diplo | ISSF Essay 49 State of the Field Essay: On the Unreality of Realism in International Relations

Essay by paul d. miller , georgetown university, published 2 october 2019 | issforum.org, editors: robert jervis, joshua rovner , and diane labrosse production editor: george fujii, https://issforum.org/essays/49-realism, pdf version.

To understand ‘realism,’ it helps to ask what function the ideology tries to perform. What do its advocates think realism does? What problem does it purport to solve? Realism is an ideology defined in opposition to “idealism,” “ideology” (including religious ideology), “utopianism,” or, these days, “liberal hegemony.” It is principled opposition to moral aspiration in politics. But why? Realists claim that moral aspiration is dangerous because it is “unrealistic,” that is, it cuts against the grain of reality. Going against reality or trying to change other people’s beliefs or behavior is always hard, often impossible, and inevitably costly and risky. Catholic and Protestant zealotry plunged Europe into the Wars of Religion; French revolutionary utopianism plunged Europe into the Napoleonic Wars; and Wilsonian utopianism lost the peace after World War I and set the stage for its sequel. If such catastrophes are the consequence of ideological crusading, better leave off and accept the world as it is.

Realists advocate the path of least resistance: go with the grain of reality for a low-cost, low-opposition foreign policy. In popular usage, realism means being hawkish; realism in the academic sense means something closer to the opposite. Carr’s 1939 book was a defense of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. George Kennan, probably the most prominent American realist of the Cold War, was hesitant about the formation of NATO, thought the democratization of Japan a waste of time, opposed the Truman Doctrine and the recognition of Israel, and criticized most the American government’s implementation of his policy of “containment.” [2] Today’s realists, like John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt, advocate ‘restraint’ or ‘offshore balancing,’ and have called for a dramatic reduction of American involvement abroad to avoid what they see as needless conflicts and ideological crusades.

There is an oddity in realists’ policy positions. Why would they bother having any in the first place? One of the often-noted chief problems with realism is that it blurs the line between description and prescription. It usually begins by presenting itself as a neutral description of the way the world is—but then it becomes a policy agenda and tries to persuade policymakers to comport themselves with realists’ understanding of reality. But if realism is an accurate description of reality, why do policymakers need persuading? Policymakers’ behavior is, by definition, part of the reality that realism purports to explain. If policymakers are not acting in accordance with realism—as when they repeatedly embark on ideological crusades—realism is not a very good description of reality. If they are acting in accordance with realism, realism is entirely superfluous as prescription.

Given realists’ record of advocacy, they seem to recognize that the first problem is the bigger one. Realism is not a very good description of reality. In fact, it is not a description of reality at all: it is an ideology, one that cloaks itself with the rhetoric of ‘reality’ as a biased framing device designed to make itself look natural, truthful, hard-nosed, no-nonsense, and data-driven, while its opponents are supposedly the opposite. Realism uses its rhetorical trappings to try to convince us that moral aspiration is dangerous and that we should instead accept that the pursuit of national power and national security is the telos of international politics.

But realism is unable to account for the very real, and very universal, moral dimension of the human experience. Human beings have moral aspirations; only rarefied scholars in elite universities could convince themselves otherwise. The idea that human beings can or should act without reference to morality when they enter the political sphere is a strikingly unrealistic view—no small irony for an ideology that labels itself ‘realist.’ Realism can become an uncomfortably dogmatic and un-empirical ideology in its refusal to acknowledge the lived experience of human life. Hans Morgenthau’s attempt at a pared-down definition of realism in his classic 1948 text, Politics Among Nations—the pursuit of national interest defined in terms of power—solves no problems. [3] It only raises the question: what is ‘interest’ and what is ‘power’? What is the nation? The entire burden of liberalism and constructivism is to highlight how values, identity, and culture can—and should—influence human behavior, human politics, and human societies. When we simply recognize that these things are real, they immediately become more realistic than so-called realism.

Realism and History

Like all schools, realists mined the past to construct a useable history. The work of Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, the culture of realpolitik in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, and perhaps scholarship in the parallel field of strategy all served to give the emerging school of realism a sense of roots and the authority of a tradition. Having a lineage gives one confidence that comes from inheriting the wisdom of the ages, even if that lineage is only discovered ex post facto. The narrative that realists tell about themselves—that they are the inheritors of the mantle of Thucydides—is a self-serving fiction (as all narratives are), because there is no continuous tradition of Thucydidean interpretation, and realpolitik originally meant something close to the opposite of how most people understand the term. [4]

Hobbes is a plausible figurehead for the founding of realism. We could view intellectual history since 1648 as a prolonged debate about how to organize Europe and the world in the aftermath of Christendom. On the one hand were the loosely connected ideas of realism, nationalism, and absolutism; on the other side, liberalism. Hobbes is a father of realism not just because he ascribed to mankind “a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” [5] His banishment of religious ideology from the public square, his reinterpretation of sovereignty, his insistence on unrestricted national autonomy, and his emphasis on anarchy and competition as the natural state of humanity were all essential parts of this way of viewing the world. This meshed well, first, with absolutism; subsequently, with nationalism, both of which overlapped with Hobbes’s foundational ideas.

The realist-nationalist tradition in Western thought continued after Hobbes in the work of continental philosophers and jurists like Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694), Christian von Wolff (1679-1754), and Emer de Vattel (1714-1767). Writing in the century after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, their burden was to explain and defend a new understanding of sovereignty and a new meaning of statehood, and to describe how independent sovereign units should aspire to maintain an “equilibrium of power” amongst themselves (the phrase is Vattel’s). [6] Previously, sovereignty meant responsibility for the commonweal, for upholding abstract notions of justice and peace, starting with one’s own realm but not excluding the wider world. Crucially, this sense of responsibility came from standards external to the state (God, Scripture, Church, or Nature), standards to which the sovereign was ultimately accountable. Wars over which standard to use, Catholic or Protestant, or what the standards actually meant ultimately led thinkers to deny that there was any standard at all.

Hobbes and his successors reinterpreted sovereignty to mean the only thing it could mean in a world shorn of Christendom’s cosmology: the sanctity of borders, territorial integrity, political independence, and freedom from interference from outsiders. It also meant freedom from any standard of accountability to which sovereigns had to pay court. For them, the defense of the state elided into the security of the state, in turn evolving into the power of the state under the guise that power was necessary for security. In that way the Westphalian tradition gave birth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the doctrine that states should pursue power for its own sake. The state became self-legitimating, and raison d’état became a recognized principle. “In regard to those things which affect nations, natural reasons are to be derived from the purposes of the state,” Wolff had argued, “from which is to be measured the right of the whole against individuals.” [7] The “purposes of the state” are the measure of right, and are not measured by it. Prior to Westphalia, the major question of political theory was how to salvage a world of common values; afterwards, it was about how to consolidate power at home and balance power abroad.

Realism and Nationalism

This is an important history to keep in mind as we enter the contemporary debate about realism, nationalism, and classical liberalism. Realism is, as John Mearsheimer rightly argues in his recent magnum opus, The Great Delusion, a good fit with nationalism. [8] That was true historically because early modern nationalists’ keenness to secure their independence and build their nations drew them to a strong Westphalian understanding of sovereignty. It was also true for the theorists of Westphalian sovereignty because they envisioned a world of mutually distinct, fully autonomous, internally coherent national units whose competition for power and prestige was to be the defining fact about the world.

For Mearsheimer, realism means embracing nationalism because nationalism is a natural and universal aspect of human politics. “Nationalism is more in sync with human nature than liberalism” (215) because nationalism “satisfies individuals’ emotional need to be part of a large group with a rich tradition and a bright future” (2056) while liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism, leaves us wanting something more. National identity and national loyalty are, for Mearsheimer, of defining, overriding importance in human life and human history, more so than allegiance to ideals of human rights, limited government, or reciprocal tolerance. The nation “fundamentally shapes [people’s] identities and behavior,” he argues, going so far as to claim that nations “help shape their essences and command their loyalties” (1598). These are bold claims about human nature, psychology, and political fundamentals. “Allegiance to the nation usually overrides all other forms of an individual’s identity,” (1614) which is why “nationalism is much like a religion” (1832).

That nations exist and command primary allegiance over human lives is important for Mearsheimer’s overall argument. His brand of realism depends on nationalism being more powerful than liberalism. He is a realist because he argues that we cannot and will never arrive at a common understanding of the good life across cultural and national lines; we therefore band together in tribes or nations that serve as survival vehicles; and these national units compete with one another for power, wealth, and survival in an anarchic world. He thinks that a politics of moral aspiration necessarily involves trying to impose a vision of the good life on one another, and he wants us to abandon such efforts. This is essentially Hobbes’s argument against the belligerents of the English Civil War and Pufendorf’s against the combatants in the Thirty Years’ War.

Despite the importance of the concept of the ‘nation,’ Mearsheimer spends strikingly little time interrogating it. Nations are characterized by six features: “a powerful sense of oneness, a distinct culture, a marked sense of specialness, a historical narrative that emphasizes timelessness, a deep attachment to territory, and a strong commitment to sovereignty or self-determination” (1814). That, for Mearsheimer, is sufficient for his purposes. Mearsheimer neither defends nor provides empirical evidence for his assertion that that there exist mutually distinct and internally coherent nations. “The human population is divided into many different nations composed of people with a strong sense of group loyalty,” (1613) he says, and now that nations have acquired states, “The world is now entirely populated with sovereign nation-states” (2800).

That is an extraordinary claim because of how much evidence there is against it. Excluding micro-sovereignties, there are almost no nation-states in the world today. This is a clear example of how realism has little connection to reality. Early modern efforts to create nations with a homogenous culture, language, or ethnicity were legendarily brutal, and almost all were unsuccessful. Virtually every state in the international system today is a pluralistic, multiethnic, multilingual polity in which questions of who or what defines the polity are live debates. Perhaps only Japan and a few European countries have the strong sense of oneness and a cultural consensus that Mearsheimer says defines nations (and Europe is in the midst of a fractious debate about immigration and national identity).

Most developed Western states today are more akin to the multiethnic empires of the past than the culturally homogenous units of the nineteenth century’s aspirations. The postcolonial states of Africa and Asia are even less “national.” Indonesia and India have scores and hundreds of constituent ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Nationalism—the correspondence between nations and states—has always been more aspiration than reality, in part because of the ambiguity surrounding what exactly a “nation” is. Realism is, in one perspective, the effort to decide the matter by fiat, announcing that “national” identity will take priority over more particular identities, and that the state’s efforts to bolster that identity are presumptively legitimate. But no one seems to be able to give a clear and consistent answer to the question of what national identity really is, which is a far greater problem for realism than is widely recognized.

Mearsheimer relies on a view of national origins that is consistent with the story nations tell themselves and their citizens. Nations weave myths about their naturalness, antiquity, and rootedness in smaller forms of affiliation. In this myth, the family, tribe, and nation are simply different versions of each other at different scales. We owe to our fellow nationals the same familial devotion, attachment, and loyalty we owe to our siblings and parents. (Yoram Hazony recently made the same argument at greater length in The Virtue of Nationalism.) [9] Of course, this story is untrue. A nation is not simply a large tribe; it is the conquest by one tribe over many other tribes and their assimilation—usually coerced—into a larger unit. Nationalism is internal imperialism, typically the rule by a majority group over minority groups under the ruling group’s language, culture, or religion. As a nation’s definition gains specificity—as it settles on a particular language, culture, or religion—it necessarily excludes those who do not share the nation’s identity. In fact, nationalism is not the opposite of a politics of moral aspiration; it is another version of the same, substituting Nation for God, Scripture, Church, or Nature.

That is why everywhere nationalism has actually been tried, it has rarely resulted in states that are at peace with themselves and their neighbors. Nationalism is virtually always contested: once citizens come to believe that their state should embody something called a “nation,” people immediately begin to fight over what that nation is and who counts as a member. Historically, nationalism has an unsettling tendency to attract racist, xenophobic, and sectarian fellow-travelers. The age of nationalism is the age of civil wars, insurgencies, terrorism, and “national” liberation movements, to say nothing of inter-national competition and war. “Nations” are not very realistic, and efforts to act like they are tend to be destructive and harmful.

Mearsheimer acknowledges some—but only some—of this reality. He acknowledges that nationalism oftentimes comes with chauvinism, but implies that this can be addressed through some form of federalism or power-sharing. In his telling, some “nations” are actually composites of majority and minority constituent nations. They have to fabricate a sense of shared unity at a higher level to allow themselves to coexist and develop a thicker sense of peoplehood at lower levels. He describes more homogenous nations as those with a “thick” national culture, while pluralistic polities that are better understood as confederations of nations come together and create a “thin” national culture. Somewhat bafflingly, he puts the United States in the category of states with a “thick” national culture that “largely comprises one nation,” despite the United States’ long history as a melting pot of the world (2045).

Mearsheimer is right that a thin national culture may be the right path to keep the peace domestically. But the problem remains: even thin national identities exclude those who do not share them. Mearsheimer recommends the solution used by absolutists, autocrats, and nation-builders throughout history: “The key to success is to eliminate heterogeneity,” (1962) such as by enforcing a single national language. There are, of course, even less savory ways of eliminating heterogeneity. The problem with nationalism is that plenty of people do not want to be part of whatever culture the state tries to enforce as the national model. If nationalism is much like a religion, it does not often admit room for heresy. Eliminating heterogeneity may be pragmatic, but it is not liberal.

Realism is, at root, the ideology of state power. The defense, maintenance, and increase of state power is a self-justifying principle, the standard of legitimacy against which other policies are judged. Nationalism goes well with this agenda because it involves the state using its power to create a more homogenous, governable nation, one that can be taxed, conscripted, and pacified at lower cost. But to the extent that realism is entwined with nationalism, it is taking its cue from a distorted version of reality at the expense of the empirical data. Nations do not have a natural existence, meaningful human lives does not depend on there being mutually distinct and internally coherent nations, and the effort to create such nations is usually exclusionary and violent in practice. In fact, the effort to create nations goes against the grain of reality, an effort to impose an artificial construct on human society—the criticism realists usually lodge against their opponents.

Classical Liberalism

Hobbes and his followers were not wrong that Christendom had fractured and that the world needed new principles of sovereignty, legitimacy, and world order. But theirs were not the only ideas in currency. The alternative to realism and nationalism is, and has always been, classical liberalism. Liberalism was just as fast off the blocks as realism in the race to define the coming world order after Westphalia, most famously articulated by John Locke (1632-1704), but also the Baron Charles-Louise de Montesquieu (1689-1755), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), among others. For that matter, some religious thinkers started advocating early liberal ideas even before Locke in recognition of the flawed political theology of their predecessors, thinkers like John Smyth (1570-1612), John Milton (1608-1674), and Roger Williams (1629-1676).

Liberalism argues that the fundamental unit of politics is the individual, not the nation; that sovereignty derives from those individuals and is accountable to them; that sovereignty is therefore not a plenary grant of power to do with whatever the sovereign pleased; that the state’s jurisdiction is limited in an important sense by the fundamental rights of its citizens; and that states can escape endless competition and anarchy through cooperation, especially with like-minded states. Liberalism holds out the promise of a different basis of politics both domestically and internationally. It is unapologetically an aspirational ideology, hoping to ameliorate the human condition, liberate human beings, and enable human flourishing through applied reason. In that sense, it is inimical to realism. It is also at odds with nationalism and tribalism because it stresses the individual over the group and minority rights over social cohesion. For realism to be persuasive, it has to offer a better explanation of the world than liberalism.

Thinkers have spent centuries trying to reconcile versions of realism, liberalism, and nationalism with each other. The intellectual and political currents weaved and sometimes overlapped, especially when nationalists looked to liberalism to structure their national political life. But the broad trend is of realists, absolutists, nationalists, and other reactionary forces defining themselves in opposition to liberalism. That was as true of Carr, defining himself in opposition to the Wilsonian project after the Great War as it was of Otto von Bismarck and other practitioners of machtpolitik in the nineteenth century. For that matter, it was true of the Holy Alliance as it sought to contain liberalism after Napoléon.

It is also true of today’s realists. Mearsheimer’s arguments are predictably hostile to liberalism. This hostility to liberalism is odd because, on the surface, it seems to match much more neatly with his insistence that human beings cannot and will never agree on ultimate truths. Mearsheimer rightly says that, “A liberal state seeks to stay out of the business of telling people what kind of behavior is morally correct or incorrect” (985). Interestingly, that distinguishes the liberal state from the nationalist state. The nationalist state tells people that national identity is an essential part of the good life and national loyalty is morally correct behavior (a point Mearsheimer does not address). If liberal neutrality is viable, we do not have to put up with the illiberality of nationalism.

Mearsheimer must therefore argue that such neutrality is not possible. He suggests that liberal neutrality is a façade—which amounts to saying that liberalism is impossible at root. “The rules that govern social groups reflect a particular vision of the good life and invariably favor some individuals’ or factions’ interests over others,” (783) he says, “The state is unable to be neutral” (1018). It cannot be neutral because disputes over the good are intractable; “There is no such thing as a neutral state that merely acts as an umpire among rival factions” (2244). Liberalism is an exercise in hypocrisy: “When liberals talk about inalienable rights, they are effectively defining the good life,” despite their protestations of neutrality (2115). This is all the more true when liberalism goes abroad. When the liberal hegemon tries to foster liberalism in illiberal societies, Mearsheimer claims, it discovers that many people do not like liberalism. “Many people around the world do not privilege individual rights,” (2327) he says, “There is little evidence that most people think individual rights are inalienable or that they matter greatly in daily political life” (2617).

Mearsheimer asserts this as fact without citing evidence. In fact, a 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center across 38 states across the world found 78 percent of respondents supported representative democracy, which is tightly correlated with individual rights. [10] The poll included respondents in non-Western states like the Philippines, Turkey, and Kenya, and autocratic states like Russia. Another worldwide Pew poll in 2015 found 65 percent support for women’s rights, 74 percent support for religious freedom, and 56 percent support for the freedom of speech. Even the notoriously illiberal Middle East registered 73 percent support for religious freedom and 43 percent support for free speech. [11]

One might question the depth of commitment behind those numbers and emphasize that people are unlikely to prioritize rights when survival is threatened. But then again, women across the world registered much higher support for women’s rights than did men, probably because to them, rights are survival—and that points to a key flaw in Mearsheimer’s dismissal of the universal appeal of liberalism. This is the same argument that powerful men in autocratic states make about why their country is never quite ready for liberal rights. Sunni Pashtun men were the most hostile to the arrival of democracy in Afghanistan—but democracy proved wildly popular among women, Shia, Tajiks, Hazara, and others. Mearsheimer spends no time discussing the empirical evidence about the appeal of liberalism around the world, particularly to the disenfranchised and powerless. Like Mearsheimer’s comments about nations and nationalism, his arguments about liberalism are strikingly detached from any empirical analysis. (I have written elsewhere about the surprising strength and resilience of non-western liberalism.) [12]

It is, in fact, an odd time to doubt the global appeal of liberalism and democracy because the post-Cold War era is the high point of human freedom in recorded human history. Mearsheimer claims that “true Liberal democracies have never made up a majority of states in the international system,” (1608). The word “true” does a lot of work in that sentence. Freedom House estimates that 45 percent of states in the world are “free” today and another 30 percent are “partly free”—and that is after a decade of democratic decline. By another measure, Freedom House counts a majority—114 of the world’s 195 states—to be electoral democracies. [13] There is nothing uniquely Western about not wanting to be oppressed. Liberalism is far stronger and more broadly popular than Mearsheimer grants.

The legacy of realism is to set itself in opposition to one of the greatest achievements of human political institutions in history. The question of whether liberal neutrality really is possible is a complex and difficult question for political theorists. For our purposes, we can simply note that if Mearsheimer is right that liberal neutrality is impossible and that liberalism is actually smuggling in a vision of the good life, then we seem to have come extraordinarily close to global consensus on a vision of the good life, or at least one aspect of it, disproving one of the key philosophical presuppositions behind Mearsheimer’s realism. If, alternatively, liberal neutrality is possible, it makes his realism unnecessary because we can then conclude liberalism truly is universalizeable across cultures and nations and might hold out the promise of fostering international peace among liberal democracies.

The Democratic Peace Theory

That, of course, is anathema to the foreign policy that realists prefer. The idea that liberalism might lead to world peace is a cornerstone of liberalism, one of its strongest selling points to scholars and practitioners, and a potential death-blow to realism. The idea of a liberal or democratic peace is almost as old as liberalism itself, having first been outlined by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). Kant argued with remarkable prescience that a confederation of republican governments could be the anchor of world peace. Two centuries later, Jack Levy famously would observe that “the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” [14] Despite the initial failure of the Wilsonian project, subsequent decades have gradually vindicated much of it through the spread of democracy and international cooperation. If it is true that liberal democracies do not fight each other, then a foreign policy that champions and encourages democracy abroad holds out the promise of spreading peace, stability, and prosperity—and to do so on grounds antithetical to realism. If the democratic peace theory is true, realism is not only false, it is basically immoral for leading humanity away from its best hope for peace.

Given the challenge that the democratic peace theory presents to realism, it is striking how rarely realists engage with it. In research for my last book, I found almost no effort to rebut it in the major recent works advocating for restraint or retrenchment. Mearsheimer commendably tries to fill the gap. He argues that for the democratic peace theory to be relevant, it has to trump concerns about survival. Clearly it does not; states and people care more about survival than about freedom, Mearsheimer claims, and so the theory is of limited applicability. Mearsheimer seemingly argues that this scope condition is a weakness of the democratic peace theory: “These conditions do not always exist. The world has never been populated with democracies alone, which significantly restricts the scope of democratic peace theory” (3579). Democracies will always have to live by realist logic, like the balance of power, when dealing with non-democratic powers. He later notes that democracies can backslide, making the democratic peace not apply to them anymore.

Mearsheimer’s argument is a non-sequitur; he is refuting an argument no one makes. Advocates of the democratic peace theory do not argue that democracy is or will be global, or that it must become global for the democratic peace theory to be relevant. We do not claim that democracy is more important than survival or that it exempts democracies from acting according to realist logic in relation to non-democratic powers. (In my book I specifically argue that the two logics operate in tandem). We claim that the question of survival does not arise in the first place between two liberal democracies, and thus does not have to be trumped. And I was taught in graduate school that specifying your theory’s scope conditions strengthens your case; it does not weaken it. By contrast, Mearsheimer claims “Realism is a timeless theory,” (2551) which is simply false, arising as it did in the unique conditions of post-Westphalian Europe to explain the era’s new interpretation of sovereignty. In any case, if it were timeless, realists would be unable to explain variance across history.

Mearsheimer is not engaging with a fair version of his critics’ arguments. This is particularly on display with his treatment of Francis Fukuyama, whose arguments he repeatedly mischaracterizes. Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay is essentially a restatement of the democratic peace theory, resting as it does on the potent idea that liberal democracy and capitalism are superior to their alternatives and that their spread will also spread peace, liberty, and human flourishing. But in his critique of liberalism, Mearsheimer returns several times to Fukuyama and uses a caricatured version of it as a foil for himself. “According to Fukuyama, [democratic] nations would have virtually no meaningful disputes, and wars between great powers would cease,” Mearsheimer argues (165). In his reading, Fukuyama believed “liberal democracy would steadily sweep across the globe, spreading peace everywhere” (3635).

What Fukuyama actually wrote was very different from what Mearsheimer recounts. Fukuyama wrote in his original essay that the ‘end of history’ does not mean “there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’ yearly summaries of international relations.” Fukuyama did not suggest that every state would immediately convert to liberal democracy. “At the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” Nor does the End of History mean the end of war: “This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se… terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda.” Conflict would continue and many states would remain within “History” for the foreseeable future. “Russia and China are not likely to join the developed nations of the West as liberal societies any time in the foreseeable future,” he wrote. [15]

More positively, in contrast to his discussion of nationalism and liberalism, Mearsheimer’s treatment of the democratic peace theory does engage with some of the empirical data. Mearsheimer argues there are four clear-cut cases of democracies fighting against each other: Germany against the Allies in World War I; the Boer War (1899-1902); the Spanish-American War of 1898; and the Kargil War between India and Pakistan in 1999. Along the same lines, he also claims that the United States “has a rich history of toppling democratically elected governments,” further disproving the democratic peace theory. He cites Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973 as examples. None of these cases hold up.

Mearsheimer gives prominent place to his claim that Wilhelmine Germany was a liberal democracy, and thus that World War I falsifies the democratic peace theory. (Christopher Layne makes the same argument in Peace of Illusions). [16] The claim is false. The Polity IV project gives Germany in 1914 a score of 2 on its scale of -10 (full autocracy) to 10 (full democracy). Like many hybrid, transitional, or incomplete democracies, Wilhelmine Germany blended traits of democracy and autocracy. It held elections and had a parliament; it also censored the press and established a military dictatorship over foreign and defense policy with no democratic checks on war-making powers. This is not the kind of regime that scholars of the democratic peace have in mind.

The Boer War and Spanish-American War and coups in Guatemala, Iran, and Brazil fail by the same measures. One or the other party in the war or coup simply were not full democracies. As importantly, Mearsheimer does not engage with more recent historiography on these cases; he is recycling old talking points by critics of U.S. foreign policy. [17] Suffice to say, the coups are more complicated than Mearsheimer’s single sentence makes them out to be. (Chile, in particular, was emphatically not a U.S.-sponsored coup, despite what your college professor told you). If these cases are to be used to disprove the democratic peace theory, more is needed.

Mearsheimer’s discussion of the democratic peace theory has more problems. “Perhaps the most damning evidence against the case for liberal democratic norms is found in Christopher Layne’s careful examination of four cases where a pair of liberal democracies marched to the brink of war, but one side pulled back and ended the crisis,” (3772) he writes. No, in fact these cases are not evidence against the democratic peace theory; if anything, they could be seen as evidence for it because the democracies in question did not go to war. Whatever the causal mechanism at work, the cases simply do not comment on the democratic peace theory because they do not include examples of democracies going to war against each other.

The Kargil War is perhaps the single case of a militarized crisis between two democracies (Pervez Musharraf overthrew the Pakistani democracy months later), though one that was so small and brief, and killed so few people, that the Uppsala Data Conflict Program (UDCP) codes it as falling below the conventional threshold of 1,000 battle deaths that political scientists use to define “war” (UDCP estimates 886 battle deaths). [18] That is a technicality, however, and the case does raise a potential problem for the democratic peace theory. But not a large one. As I often tell my students, the fact that scholars have spent so much time debating the marginal cases proves that the democratic peace theory is true the rest of the time—which is to say, it is true for the other 99.9 percent of cases. It is true enough for policymaking: scholars can reliably trust that democracies virtually never go to war against each other. And if it is true, realism is not just a faulty guide; it is a treacherous one, leading us in exactly the opposite direction we should go.

Liberal Hegemony: Realism’s Straw Man

Today the debate between realism and liberalism is most vividly on display in the debate over U.S. grand strategy. The central complaint of realists like Mearsheimer—and Steve Walt, whose The Hell of Good Intentions is another recent attempt to vindicate realism [19] —is that the United States has pursued a grand strategy of liberal hegemony, which is costly, self-defeating, and doomed to fail. Like past realists complaining of religious violence, revolutionary utopianism, or Wilsonian naïveté, Walt and Mearsheimer take issue with the moral aspiration to foster a more liberal international order. Their views are an excellent test case of realism today. They offer a perfect illustration of how realism is historically myopic, morally stunted, and strategically incoherent.

Mearsheimer claims that liberal hegemony aims “to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies while also fostering an open international economy and building formidable international institutions” (40). Mearsheimer characterizes liberal hegemony in bold language: “In essence, the United States has sought to remake the world in its own image” (41). Liberal states “have a crusader mentality hardwired into them that is hard to restrain” (121). The United States “is likely to end up fighting endless wars” (130). Again, he argues that “the costs of liberal hegemony begin with the endless wars a liberal state ends up fighting to protect human rights and spread liberal democracy around the world. Once unleashed on the world stage, a liberal unipole soon becomes addicted to war” (2861). He warns that if the United States continues to pursue this strategy, it “is likely to end up in a perpetual state of war” (2935) because liberal hegemony “calls for doing social engineering all across the globe” (3489).

Walt, similarly, is unsparing in his critique. Like Mearsheimer, he accuses the United States of pursuing liberal hegemony since the end of the Cold War. “The United States spent the past quarter century pursuing an ambitious, unrealistic, and mostly unsuccessful foreign policy,” (49) he argues. Advocates of liberal hegemony are guilty of “viewing the United States as the ‘indispensable nation’ responsible for policing the globe, spreading democracy, and upholding a rules-based, liberal world order” (122). He agrees with Mearsheimer that “Washington sought to remake other countries in its own image” (391).

Before we examine Walt’s and Mearsheimer’s critique of liberal hegemony, we should ask if this is an accurate description of U.S. foreign policy. Realists claim to be the empiricists in the room: how well have Walt and Mearsheimer taken stock of the empirical reality of U.S. foreign policy? As I wrote in my book, a liberal hegemon worth the name that was trying to enforce liberalism and entrench American hegemony would have acted differently than the United States has since 1989. [20] Walt claims the United States should have “retrench[ed] slightly” after the Cold War but “the foreign policy establishment never considered this possibility for more than a moment” (372).

Walt is reiterating a piece of conventional wisdom that is false. The notion that the United States expanded its overseas commitments after the Cold War is one of those frustrating notions that most people seem to believe because they have never paused to examine it. In fact, the United States retrenched considerably after the Cold War: it cut its military and intelligence budgets by a third, reduced the size of its standing military forces by the same amount, severely cut foreign aid, public diplomacy, and the diplomatic corps, demobilized and destroyed its own chemical weapons stockpile, decommissioned three-quarters of its nuclear warheads, and withdrew half of its troops from East Asia and over three-quarters of its troops from Europe. These are not the choices of a state hell-bent on hegemony.

We see the same restraint in American foreign policy choices. Realists emphasize the handful of American interventions in the 1990s and after the terrorist attacks of 2001, but rarely consider everything the United States did not do. The United States did not insist on the democratization of Kuwait after its liberation from Iraq in 1991. When it did intervene in Afghanistan, after 2001, it did so in response to a direct attack and made only desultory and unimpressive efforts to liberalize and rebuild the country. The United States did not go to war against North Korea or Iran to enforce the nonproliferation regime.

Nor did the United States prioritize liberalism. It did not halt Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in Venezuela or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey; did not halt or reverse coups against democratically elected governments in Turkey, Mali, Pakistan, Thailand, or Egypt; did not find opportunities to use the Arab Spring to advance liberalism in the Middle East; and did not invest in the reconstruction of Libya after overthrowing its government. The United States did not join a host of beloved liberal institutions and treaties, such as the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the Law of the Sea Treaty, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in fact pulled out of several others. Perhaps most damningly, it made only a paltry and ineffective effort to push for the democratization of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and did nothing to stop Vladimir Putin’s reestablishment of autocracy there.

Whether you think these are good policies or bad policies, the fact remains that they do not add up to the strategy of a crusading liberal hegemon. The United States demonstrably has not tried to do “social engineering all across the globe,” is not “addicted to war” and has no “crusader mentality.” Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s books exemplify the way in which so much of the foreign policy commentary in the past decade has fallen prey to recency bias over Iraq: because the United States’ most recent large foreign policy initiative went poorly, commentators read that failure backwards and forwards in history and find Iraq-like problems everywhere they look. Walt blames the strategy of liberal hegemony for the “costly quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries,” (272) as if the United States invaded those countries with the express and sole purpose of forcibly democratizing them. Of course, that isn’t the case: the United States got into those wars out of concern for terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Regardless of one’s views of those wars, it hardly seems fair to blame them on a purported strategy of liberal hegemony.

Walt complains that U.S. leaders did not pursue hegemony “in order to protect the American homeland from invasion or attack. Rather, they sought it in order to promote a liberal order abroad,” (1136) later criticizing military deployments to “faraway places” (1143) such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, and others. Afghanistan was, of course, in direct response to an attack on America. Bosnia and Kosovo were related to European allies’ security. Iraq was (mistakenly) thought to be a threat to U.S. security because of weapons of mass destruction. But more importantly, the dichotomy between American security and liberal order is a false one. The heart of the case for a more engaged, internationalist grand strategy is that liberal order is the outer perimeter of American security, an argument Walt and Mearsheimer do not engage with.

Walt supports his claim about America’s expansionism by highlighting that the United States’ treaty commitments have grown. It is true that NATO has increased its membership, but the larger number of states in NATO did not increase the United States’ defense commitments; it simply moved the boundary line of the United States’ singular commitment to European security. Worse, Walt lists the 1947 Rio Treaty as another example of America’s overstretched defense commitments. The Rio Treaty, ostensibly a mutual defense treaty across the Western Hemisphere, is dead, having never made a single claim on U.S. resources or attention in 70 years. Several states have formally left the treaty in recent years, and no one treats it as a serious entity, much less a drain on U.S. defense.

Indeed, it is not even clear if Walt actually believes in his own boogeyman. He acknowledges the many ways in which the United States did not pursue liberal hegemony—but then ties his arguments in knots characterizing those policies as exceptions or aberrations to the broad pattern of liberal hegemony. Everything bad about U.S. foreign policy is because of liberal hegemony, and everything that is good is because the U.S. did not pursue liberal hegemony but actually exercised wise restraint instead. He treats the Cold War similarly: by and large, it was an example of wise offshore balancing—except Vietnam, which was liberal hegemony. Occam’s razor is useful here: a simpler way of reading the data is that the United States never actually pursued the elusive strategy of liberal hegemony in the first place.

Mearsheimer and Walt overstate the extent of American interventionism and bellicosity—sometimes dramatically—and consider none of the ways in which the United States has retrenched or held back from the many opportunities it had to further advance liberal ideals or American power over the past three decades. “Liberal hegemony” is a straw man concocted by Mearsheimer and Walt with which to pillory U.S. policymakers. It is a rhetorical exaggeration, a caricature of their opponents’ arguments in terms they would not recognize, designed to make their opponents’ arguments look extreme and theirs moderate by comparison. If this is “realism,” it is detached from empirical reality and offers little insight into the real successes and failures of American grand strategy in recent decades.

American Foreign Policy

Despite the problems with realism as a theory, Walt and Mearsheimer both use it as their main interpretive lens in long editorial commentaries on the Clinton, Bush, and Obama foreign policy records in which they make plain their disdain for American policy. In this, they are solidly in the tradition of Carr and his commentary on British policy in the 1930s. Mearsheimer asserts that the United States “helped start” the war in Syria (3144) and “played a central role in escalating the conflict” (3126); argues that “Washington has played a key role in sowing death and destruction across the Greater Middle East” (183); repeats his infamous claim that “American policymakers also played the key role in producing a major crisis with Russia over Ukraine” (2882); says the Bush administration created a “virtual gulag” at Guantanamo Bay (3447); blames the United States for interventions in Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria; and says the United States has waged seven wars since the Cold War (it is unclear what or how he is counting).

The only consistent thread in this list of accusations is that America is always to blame. The United States invaded Iraq in main force but refrained from doing the same in Syria, yet Mearsheimer counts them both as blameworthy “interventions” that prove America is on a crusade for liberal hegemony. The United States undertook nation building in Afghanistan and notoriously failed to do so in Libya, yet both are counted against America’s record. Bashar al-Assad gets no credit for the war in Syria nor Vladimir Putin for the one in Ukraine. In his eagerness to prove that America is addicted to war, Mearsheimer is apparently counting peacekeeping missions and airstrikes alike as “war.” It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this version of ‘realism’ is less scholarly analysis than dogmatic anti-Americanism.

Walt offers a similar list of American sins, with a similar double standard. The war in Ukraine? America’s fault for expanding NATO. ISIS? America’s fault because of the Iraq war. The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s hostility to the United States? America’s fault for pressuring Iran. Walt overemphasizes the United States’ agency to the exclusion of other world actors such that even their direct actions and choices, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are always explained as rational responses or reactions to American mistakes. He rarely considers the alternative: that the United States choices are rational responses to other actors’ threats.

Mearsheimer’s engagement with the Ukraine crisis is illustrative. He argues that “Western elites were surprised by events in Ukraine because most of them have a flawed understanding of international politics” (3316). I was not surprised, having accurately predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years before it happened. [21] More importantly, he blames the United States for antagonizing Russia by expanding NATO. “Ukraine serves as an enormously important strategic buffer to Russia,” he explains (3303). In Mearsheimer’s telling, Russia was justifiably upset by Ukraine’s tilt westward and NATO’s 2008 promise of eventual membership. In response to American policymakers’ insistence that Russia’s security perceptions are invalid, Mearsheimer replies that “It is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them” (3315).

So do the Ukrainians, of course, who figure nowhere in Mearsheimer’s analysis. Ukraine, understandably upset by Russia’s history of aggression, was just as entitled to seek security however and wherever it could, including from the West. For that matter, the United States is also entitled to its own security perceptions. Why can’t it decide that a Europe “whole and free” is essential to the peace and prosperity of its biggest trading partners? Mearsheimer’s analysis of the Ukraine crisis involves a double-standard. When Russia demands a sphere of influence in Europe as part of its security, Mearsheimer accepts its demand at face value. When the United States does the same, Mearsheimer argues that American policymaker’s claims are not only mistaken, but illegitimate. Mearsheimer carries water for the Russians but speaks truth to power to the Americans. And when Ukrainians define their security as not being under Russian dominance, Mearsheimer pays them no attention whatsoever. Given Mearsheimer’s endorsement of nationalism, it makes one wonder why Ukrainian nationalism does not figure in his arguments anywhere.

In truth, there is no moral equivalence between Russia’s expansionist view of its security requirements and the nesting of American, European, and Ukrainian security in liberal order. Superficially, both states define their security in extraterritorial terms, but Russia’s depends on the unilateral dominance of other states, while the liberal order helps secure the independent aspirations of those uninterested in belonging to Russia’s sphere of influence. Mearsheimer does not accept this and instead places the blame for the world’s conflicts solely at America’s feet. This sort of analysis of contemporary events leaves one with little confidence that realism can see clearly or offer meaningful insight into world affairs.

Walt goes further. He takes his criticism of U.S. foreign policy to the individual level, spending the bulk of his book on pointed criticisms of the American foreign policy elite. Walt does the work of an anthropologist or ethnographer, describing the ecosystem and the epistemic community of scholars, policymakers, think tankers, journalists, and others who make up America’s foreign policy establishment. His description is apt and the chapter could serve as a useful career map for aspiring foreign policy professionals (probably not what Walt intended). He damns the community for a culture of lax accountability, which is true, and he is dead on about the “activist bias” of the U.S (2118) foreign policy establishment, the inveterate need to “do something” in response to the headline of the day.

But he goes further. “Today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote” (1684). This, I think goes too far. In the most questionable accusation of the book, he argues that foreign policy elites support the strategy of liberal hegemony because it is a “full-employment policy” for themselves (285). The establishment “understood that [liberal hegemony] was very good for them. Open-ended efforts to remake the world in America’s image gave the foreign policy establishment plenty to do, appealed to its members self-regard, and maximized their status and political power” (281).

To be clear, Walt offers no evidence for this claim. Instead, he simply highlights the alignment of interest. He pays perfunctory lip service to foreign policy professionals’ patriotism and sincerity, but doubles down on the claim that liberal hegemony is attractive to the foreign policy elite because of the prestige, power, and employment opportunities it provides. (His argument is out of date: the job market has already moved in his direction more than he recognizes.) Certainly, this might be an unconscious motive for some in the “Blob,” but if it were systematically true of a preponderant portion of foreign policy professionals in America, we would expect to see evidence in private memoirs, letters, or emails; or in public sources, such as job postings, job training programs, university advertisements, think tank reports, and more. Walt provides none, in the absence of which his accusation is scurrilous and cannot be taken seriously.

Academic realists today advocate a strategy of restraint, offshore balancing, or retrenchment that pays much less attention to liberal ideals and the liberal international order that the United States has painstakingly constructed over the past 75 years. Their views ignore the reality of liberalism and depend on unrealistic assumptions about how the world works. In the alternative reality Walt sketches, for example, the U.S. exercised restraint after the Cold War, and in subsequent years, avoided every bad thing that has actually happened in the past quarter-century. Just one example: Walt argues that his strategy would have prevented terrorism from becoming a serious problem because restraint would have prevented the United States from getting involved with democracy promotion and military occupations abroad, thus avoiding the nationalist backlash that he thinks fuels terrorism. This makes sense only if he is talking about terrorism within Iraq and Afghanistan aimed mostly at other Iraqis and Afghans. The international terrorist attacks of the past three decades—for example, by Egyptians, Saudis, Pakistanis, Jordanians, Kashmiris, and Chechens—were not motivated by anger at democracy in their home countries, because there is none.

What is remarkable is that, despite decades of scholarship and centuries of change in global politics, today’s realists have revised or changed almost none of their views. Nationalism’s historical baggage and troubling fellow-travelers have not given realists pause. The straitjacket of Westphalian sovereignty, the paralysis it forces on the citizens and governments of the world in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing, is greeted by silence from academic realism. Even more, the rise of China, the return of multipolarity, and the emergence of cyberspace and artificial intelligence have not any updated ore revised conclusions in either Mearsheimer’s or Walt’s books. After the Cold War the United States cut its military and diplomatic budget and personnel and withdrew most of the troops it had stationed overseas (only slightly and temporarily slowed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan)—yet realists continue to call for more retrenchment. It is unclear just how far the United States should retrench to meet the demands of realists.

It is also surprising that realists have never offered a serious response to the longest-standing criticism against them: that amorality is unrealistic, that it is an inaccurate description of human beings, that it cannot serve as a sustainable basis of foreign policy, and that calls for amorality are, functionally, immoral. Mearsheimer, in fact, doubles down on this aspect of realism by developing a defense of moral equivalence—or, more accurately, moral relativism. “There are no universal truths regarding what constitutes the good life,” (216) he writes. Humans have divergent views of the good; we have never reached consensus; and so Mearsheimer concludes we should admit there is no such thing as an objective or universal good. That is why Mearsheimer’s arguments idealize a world of nation-states grouped around distinct cultures and competing visions of the good vying for power and wealth, without too much concern for which state has the better side of the moral argument. The various ideological explanations and justifications that states give for their policies are so much rhetorical window-dressing, epiphenomenal to the true underlying driving forces.

This leads Mearsheimer into an odd contradiction. “The fact that many people believe universal truth exists and that they have found it only makes the situation worse, as thinking in terms of absolutes makes it hard to promote compromise and tolerance” (853). Mearsheimer is here echoing a cliché that believing things to be true is tantamount to being a fanatic, a zealot, a theocrat, or a fascist—which is obviously false. But there is another difficulty. Mearsheimer very clearly holds up tolerance and compromise as goods. But within the framework he has advanced, he gives us no reason to prefer tolerance and compromise over their opposites. Why should we value tolerance and compromise as components of the good life if “There are no universal truths regarding what constitutes the good life”?

Why are realists so afraid of moral aspiration? The answer may lie in the age in which realism was born, or the ages in which it is reborn again and again. Hobbes blamed the Wars of Religion on ideological zealotry, as his successors would do for the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War. Realists in the twentieth century saw the initial failure of the Wilsonian project and attributed it to overweening moralistic ambition. But as importantly, they interpreted the rise of fascism as another example of moralistic crusading idealism. Fascism, after all, was a political religion, an example (realists thought) of how dangerous it can be to infuse politics with idealistic zealotry.

Realism, in this perspective, looks like a typical example of a movement taking shape in overreaction to something it opposed. Wilsonianism failed, and so we have to throw out liberalism forever; Nazism was evil, and so we have to throw out all political morality of any kind. Napoléon nearly conquered Europe, so we must turn our backs on the Revolutionary ideas that gave him birth. The War of Religion wrecked Europe, so we must banish religion to the “private” sphere and teach statesmen to act as if values do not (and should not) affect their decision-making.

Overreactions rarely have anything to commend them. Liberalism is obviously salvageable, having outlived Wilson’s failure and spread across the globe over the past century. As for political morality, it seems too obvious to point out that one can believe in morality without being a Nazi—but that obvious point seems lost on many realists, for whom any form of moral aspiration is a dangerous sign of incipient fascism. As constructivists would argue, political morality is inevitable: everyone carries a morality with them. What matters is the content of that morality. A liberal morality that says all humans have equal moral dignity and deserve a chance at flourishing is about as good as it gets—better, certainly, than a realist morality that counsels the singular pursuit of national power above all else.

In fact, there is at least as good a case to be made that the catastrophes of the past two centuries are due in part to realism’s success as its failure; that Napoléon and Hitler understood the ideology of state power too well; and that the solution should have been more liberalism, not less of it. It was precisely during the age when statesmen took least heed of conventional morality, when they took to heart the ideology of state power, that they involved themselves in foolish crusades for national glory. When you define political morality as the pursuit of political power, but refrain from defining what power is responsible for, you open the door to the untrammeled pursuit of power for its own sake—which is a pretty good description of the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the return to which is no rational person’s aspiration.

After almost a century of formal development in the academy, and four centuries in broader cultural currents, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that realism is polemic against moral aspiration masquerading as scholarship that takes little note of empirical data and whose analysis of foreign policy is riddled with double standards. Worse, realism cuts us off from the very moral resources we need to envision a better world. Students of international relations may be forgiven for fearing that realism has deteriorated from a viable research program into a dogmatic intellectual straightjacket. The field deserves better.

Dr. Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

©2019 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

[1] Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 : Reissued with a new preface from Michael Cox. (New York: Springer, 2016).

[2] For a record of Kennan’s views, see John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life . (London: Penguin Books, 2012).

[3] Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle For Power and Peace, 5 th ed., revised (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1978).

[4] John Bew, Realpolitik: A History . (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[5] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or, the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil , in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. III ., Sir William Molseworth, ed. (London: C. Richards, Printer, 1845), 85-86.

[6] Emer de Vattle, The Law of Nations, Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and Luxury , edited and with an introduction by Bela Kapossy and Richard Whitmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund: 2008), 496.

[7] Christian von Wolff, The Law of Nations Treated According to a Scientific Method. Carnegie Institute Classics of International Law 13:2, James Brown Scott, ed., Joseph H. Drake, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 173.

[8] John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). All references in text are to Kindle locations. See the H-Diplo/ISSF roundtable at https://issforum.org/roundtables/11-2-delusion . Some of this material is drawn from Miller, “Structural Realism Has No Clothes,” Law and Liberty , 15 April 2019. The material is reprinted with permission. https://www.lawliberty.org/book-review/structural-realism-has-no-clothes/

[9] Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (London: Hachette UK, 2018).

[10] Pew Research Center, “Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy,” 16 October 2017. https://www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/16/globally-broad-support-for-representative-and-direct-democracy/ .

[11] Pew Research Center, “Global Support for Principle of Free Expression, But Opposition to Some Forms of Speech,” 18 November 2015, https://www.pewglobal.org/2015/11/18/global-support-for-principle-of-free-expression-but-opposition-to-some-forms-of-speech/ .

[12] Paul D. Miller, “Non-“Western” Liberalism and the Resilience of the Liberal International Order,” The Washington Quarterly 41:2 (Summer 2018): 137-153.

[13] Freedom House, “Freedom in the World, 2018,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018 and “List of Electoral Democracies,” https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/List%20of%20Electoral%20Democracies%20FIW%202018.xlsx

[14] J. S. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18:4 (Winter 1988): 653-673, 662.

[15] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18.

[16] Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 2006).

[17] See, for example, Foreign Affairs , Special Section on “The Cold War’s Cold Cases,” 93:4 (July/August 2014): 1-42. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/issues/2014/93/4 .

[18] Uppsala Data Conflict Program, “Government of India—Government of Pakistan,” https://ucdp.uu.se/#statebased/422 .

[19] Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). References in the text refer to Kindle locations. See also the H-Diplo/ISSF roundtable at https://issforum.org/roundtables/10-31-walt . Some of this material is drawn from Miller, “To Hell and Back,” Law and Liberty , 20 August 2019. The material is repritned with permission. https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/08/20/to-hell-and-back-stephen-walt-good-intentions-review/ .

[20] Miller, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy . (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016).

[21] Miller, “I Predicted Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” Foreign Policy , 7 March 2014. https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/07/i-predicted-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/

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Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples Essay

Realism and liberalism are two main and contradictory theories explaining the interaction of participants in the political process. First of all, realists are focused on “geopolitical relations between states” (Bell, 2017, p. 1). The proponents of this theory argue that the war between all is a natural human behavior, which is reflected in the interaction of states on the global scale. Thus, the theory of realism assumes possible aggression and constant ideological struggle, emphasizing the competition between states (Antunes & Camisão, 2018). An example of such a worldview can be the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, when the two superpowers maintained exclusively competitive relations in all areas, especially weapons.

While realism considers the world pessimistically and implies the inevitability of conflicts between states, liberalism proposes methods of communication other than war. Liberal theory in International Relations focuses on establishing connections that could mitigate aggression. In particular, it underlines the “consideration of citizens and international organizations” (Meiser, 2018, para. 1). While realism puts the values ​​of the state at the forefront, for liberalism, the most important is human rights and freedoms. Thus, the main purpose of this system is to limit the political power of states to protect the liberty of citizens. An example of the application of liberal theory can be the United Nations, which contributes to the resolution of international conflicts, as well as the consolidation of resources for common purposes.

Antunes, S., & Camisão, I. (2018). Introducing realism in international relations theory . E-International Relation.

Bell, D. (2017). Political realism and international relations . Philosophy Compass, 12 (2), 1-16.

Meiser, J. W. (2018). Introducing liberalism in international relations theory . E-International Relation.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, August 13). Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/realism-vs-liberalism-differences-in-examples/

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IvyPanda . (2022) 'Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples'. 13 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples." August 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/realism-vs-liberalism-differences-in-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples." August 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/realism-vs-liberalism-differences-in-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples." August 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/realism-vs-liberalism-differences-in-examples/.

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