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Power politics and war cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

W.B. Gallie
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Extract

Much as I admire E. H. Carr's work in the international field, I intend to question the main assumption upon which it is based: namely, that it is power which always has decided and always will decide major political issues. In this respect my argument points in the same direction as two earlier lectures in this series, although my method of approach is different from theirs. My aim is to show with some precision why power, as used in political theorizing, is not only an inadequate but a confusing and even a deceiving notion. And I will begin by indicating the three main areas in which the confusions and deceptions arise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1988 , pp. 17 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1988

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References

1. Fox, W. T. R., ‘E. H. Carr and Political Realism: Vision and Revision’, Review of International Studies, xi (1985), pp. 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Claude, Inis L. Jr, ‘Myths about the State’, Review of International Studies, xii (1986), pp. 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Russell, Bertrand, Power: A New Social Analysis (London, 1938).Google Scholar

3. Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 2nd edn, 1946).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. See Russell, op. cit., especially pp. 9 ff.

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13.

6. Carr, op. cit., p. 132.

7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, chap. 1, section 28. I have here altered the order in which Clausewitz presents his three aspects of war.

8. The incremental interpretation of fighting is implicit in the opening sections of chap. 1 of On War.

9. Carr, op. cit., p. 109.