Notes on Waltz Waltz’s book belongs to an important style of theorizing, in which far-reaching conclusions about a domain—in this case, the domain of international politics—are derived from a very spare set of premises. The classic example of this style of political theory is Hobbes’s Leviathan. There, Hobbes claims that a minimal and plausible set of premises about human nature implies a large conclusion about political society. In particular, he makes two claims: first, he argues that if people are concerned with their own preservation and future well-being; uncertain about the motives of others; relatively equal in natural capacities; interdependent, in the sense that their preservation and happiness depend on the conduct of others; concerned about their own sense of self-worth; and prone to various passions (including fear, pride, envy, and jealousy) that can lead them to act against their own long-term interests, then it follows: first, that in anarchic conditions (with no authority), there would be a state of war, in which everyone is prepared to fight (and knows that others are too), and as a result life would be nasty, poor, brutish, and short, and our interests in preservation and future well-being would not be advanced; and second, that the only stable solution to the problem of anarchy and conflict is common submission to the will and judgment of an absolute political authority. Moreover, second, he argues that the various conditions in the antecedent of the conditional I just stated are truths about human nature: not truths that about whathuman beings are like in some circumstances, but simply about what human beings as such are like. Now, there are certain important substantive analogies between Waltz’s view and Hobbes’s, but I am not here interested in those points of substantive overlap. I am interested instead in the fact that both draw sweeping conclusions from an apparently spare set of assumptions—in Hobbes’s cases, assumptions about people; in Waltz’s case, assumptions about the position of states—and that they take those assumptions to be very broadly true. Correspondingly, in evaluating their arguments we need to ask two questions: (1) do their conclusions follow from the premises? So, in the case of Hobbes we want to know whether the assumptions about people, once they are reasonably precisely stated, really do imply that the state of nature would be a state of war, and that the only stable alternative is political absolutism. At least one strand of Lockean criticism of Hobbes says that you can, arguing from basically Hobbesian premises, defend a more limited, constitutional government; (2) second, if the conclusions do follow from the premises, then we want to know whether the premises really have such broadly applicability. So one strand of Rousseauean criticism of Hobbes says that, while it may be true that political absolutism is required to preserve a stable peace among Hobbesian agents, nevertheless, Hobbes has not described human beings as they are by nature, but rather as they have become—as their many possibilities have been expressed—under one possible set of social conditions.The two lines of criticism are different: the first suggests that the premises themselves are less constraining of political possibilities than the argument supposes; the second allows that the premises may be very constraining, but then argues that the premises themselves are more historically specific than they are presented as being, and need not be taken as fixed. But the two lines of criticism converge in suggesting that the range of social and political possibilities is wider than the theory tells us. That is an important result. So in exploring Waltz’s theory, we want to know three things: (1) what are the central claims he defends about the conduct of international politics; (2) what are his premises about states and their relations; and (3) do his premises lead to his conclusions? The reason for pursuing the exercise is not to quibble about logical gaps, but to see whether the space of possibility is greater than Waltz’s argument might suggest. 1. What are some of the implications that Waltz draws from his structural/systems theory of international politics? Central claims about how states conduct their business in relation to one another. • International politics is a self-help system (principle of action), unlike domestic politics. This appears to have both an organizational and a motivational interpretation: (i) organizationally, agents (states) must be prepared to defend themselves, whereas in domestic system an organization provides protection against private force; (ii) motivationally, states “act for their own sakes” (112); “for their own interests” (113); “security is the highest end” (126). More particularly, states typically use the methods described by the idea of Realpolitik (117): (a) state’s interest provides the spring of action; (b) what states need to do is determined by the “unregulated competition of states”; (c) can work out policies that serve these needs by calculation; (d) test of success is survival and strengthening state. Question we want to ask is: is it true that international politics is a self-help system, and if it is a self-help system in theorganizational sense, then why do states use the methods of Realpolitik? What other methods for the conduct of policy might be used? • The state system tends to a balance of power: (i) as to the balancing part: we see balancing rather than bandwagoning (siding with the more powerful), or buckpassing that does not lead to balancing (not that there is no buckpassing, but that it happens when someone else can be expected to pick up the slack); (ii) as to the power part, states balance against power or capabilities (correct for imbalances of power), not against threats: the distinction is that an assessment of threats requires an assessment of intentions. So for example, growth rate in military spending will be greater in less powerful state/alliance than in more powerful, regardless of any assessment of intentions: worried about what others can do to you, not in the first instance about whether they are likely to try; (iii) the policies that lead to balance involve alliances with surprising allies (France/Russia) and the adoption of surprising practices (large military spending by US after WWII) • States emulate (127-28) each other and are