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No complex thinker fits his adjective. Wight (2005)
Introduction
The tension between 'realists' and 'utopians' is one of the dominant legacies of early twentieth-century theories of international politics. Taking human nature as it really is and extrapolating the institutional significance of this presumed account of human nature for the collective ordering of humanity is one of the primary ways in which political realism invokes Reality with a capital 'R' to interpret world politics. Realist thinking on the nature of the discipline is distilled from traditions of grand scholarship that reach beyond time, space and place in order to reveal the reality of political actors and political systems, a reality that the actors may not themselves perceive. These traditions claim to proffer to the world eternal and immutable truths of international politics. Invoked selectively, they lend credibility to the narrative of political realism in which the state is the decisive political actor against the backdrop of systemic anarchy and its chronic insecurity. Despite the relative infancy of international relations theory it has sought to understand the past, present and future through a myriad of theoretical, historical and methodological formations: From the ancients to the moderns, from the scientific to the humanistic, from the religious to the institutional.
Collecting theories is part of the disciplinary landscape of international relations. As Kolakowski (1990) remarked, 'those who hate gardening need a theory' by which he meant that a theory adds depth and profundity even if it adds nothing more. Although our subject is not gardening, we note that there is a gardening book that uses Niccolò Machiavelli's name (Crick, 2011), one example of how widely and freely his name is used. We do, nonetheless, hope to evoke a similar concern expressed by Kolakowski about the ideological status of theories for making sense (or lending credibility) to particular accounts of world politics. Should one have the audacity to consult SparkNotes Editors (2002), so often consulted by students, there one finds that Machiavelli 'advised rulers to use deceit and violence as tools against other states'. Implicit in such claims is an assumption that Machiavelli has offered the discipline of International Relations just such a sensational (and accurate) account of human nature that his presence in the canon of international relations theory...