2009/01/01 by Jeanne Morefield · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #International Relations and Foreign Policy
paper · doi:10.1057/9780230101739_11
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
T he international relations theory of G. Lowes Dickinson has long puzzled both critics and admirers alike because of what appears to be its complicated amalgam of “idealist” and “realist” sensibilities. For decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have attempted to identify Dickinson as one or the other. Thus, for E. H. Carr, Dickinson represented all that was most willfully ignorant about those League of Nations reformers he associated with the “utopian edifice.” 1 Other realists such as Kenneth Waltz, by contrast, embraced Dickinson as a fellow realist and sympathetically tut-tutted the manner in which Dickinson was “blasted by liberals and socialists alike for reversing the dominant inside-out explanation,” that is, the idea that the behavior of states is best understood by looking at their form rather than at the power arrangements of international politics. 2 More recently, Mearsheimer, has resuscitated Dickinsons work as an embryonic form of “offensive realism.” 3 Scholars of the history of international thought, while taking a slightly more nuanced approach to Dickinson, continue to locate his notion of “international anarchy” along some point on the idealist/realist continuum. David Long, for instance, argues that Dickinson’s understanding of the current system of armed states best resembles an unalloyed form of “Hobbesian idealism.” 4 Andreas Osiander, however, argues that aside from the “overtones of moralism and voluntarism” implicit in Dickinson’s analysis, there is little there that characterizes it as “IR Idealist if that label is to denote a specific type of IR theory.” 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.