KENNETH WALTZ
AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
PAUL R. VIOTTI
INTRODUCTION
An Intellectual Portrait of Kenneth Neal Waltz
Kenneth Waltz was asked why it might take him as long as two weeks to work out a particular sentence or phrase in the book or article he was writing. Echoing Thucydides, perhaps with tongue deeply embedded in cheek, he answered simply: “Because I’m writing for the ages.” Indeed, realism has had a long shelf life, and Waltz did not believe its end was anywhere in sight.
Waltz’s wife, Helen, told Andrew Hanami, one of Waltz’s doctoral students (and a regular tennis partner of his), that her husband was extraordinarily meticulous. “Writing for the ages,” he’d spend two weeks working on a particular phrase.1 I raised this with Waltz’s youngest son, Daniel. Perhaps his father said this tongue-in-cheek, but there is also the sense that he may have thought his theory could have a long shelf life. When presented with what Daniel had heard from someone else—that his father was the “Adam Smith” of international politics theory—the senior Waltz did not challenge this claim. Though humble about such matters, he understood the substantial impact his work had already had within the international relations field.
To Waltz, so long as states remain the principal actors globally, power and the balance of power will continue to be the systemic characteristics we observe. What led him to such a conclusion? What are the sources of this realist understanding? To answer these questions, this book focuses on both the intellectual and the experiential sources of Waltz’s ideas. It is a biography that paints an intellectual portrait of this renowned scholar.2
INTELLECTUAL AND EXPERIENTIAL SOURCES OF WALTZ’S LEGACY
Throughout his professional life, Waltz focused on the “big questions,” as did many of his peers, other prominent international relations theorists whose works appeared in the last half of the twentieth century. What causes war? What explains the conduct of states in international politics? Do the number of great powers and the international system structure they constitute matter? How do we explain the making and implementing of foreign policy? Does the spread of nuclear weapons make their use in conflicts more or less likely?
Waltz’s answers to these questions often were different from those offered by others. A contrarian by nature, he let his mind go beyond the bounds set by conventional wisdom about such matters. Although his logical and empirical challenges to theoretical claims by other scholars were often biting, he did read and listen to their critiques of his work without taking it personally. He weighed in on contentious matters like the spread of nuclear weapons. Less concerned with the dangers others feared from their spread, he doggedly defended his positions to their logical extreme, much as a debater would. For those who disagreed with his argument, he buttressed his case by referring to empirical evidence: since 1945, all states acquiring nuclear weapons have avoided using them in conflicts precisely because doing so would be selfdestructively suicidal—an invitation to retaliation by adversaries, particularly those also possessing such weaponry.
His experience as a debater—and willingness to challenge his professors and classmates—at Oberlin College in his undergraduate years set the stage for later contrarian arguments. Opposed by many others, in the 1960s he described the world during the Cold War that emerged after World War II as bipolar and thus more stable than a multipolar structure would have been. In the 1970s, he challenged the empirical claim that the world was becoming more and more interdependent. He also challenged the notion that increasing interdependence would make international relations more peaceful. After all, he observed that interdependence among European states was at a high point just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. This understanding foreshadowed his opposition to later claims that democracies are inherently more pacific by nature than authoritarian regimes. He also challenged the claim that because democracies tend not to go
to war with one another, the spread of democracy would usher in a democratic peace in our time.
He did not mince words. His development of levels of analysis in Man, the State, and War (1959) was a major intellectual contribution to the international relations field, although, as he noted in the preface to the second edition of that book, he did not consider it a theory explaining war. Nor did he consider his findings a theory in Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics (1967)—his comparative study of U.S. and UK foreign policy that identified domestic structures as critical explanatory factors. In these earlier works, he acknowledged that many concepts or theoretical elements were present but that this was not enough to make them theories. Only in his Theory of International Politics (1979), preceded by his article “Theory of International Relations” (1975), did he see the way he related international system structure to the conduct of states as meeting the demanding requirements of theory.
Although Waltz did not call it “the theory” of international politics, he did not call it merely “a theory” among others either. Dropping the definite and indefinite articles put his work in a higher place, although still subject to both logical and empirical challenges (of which there were many) offered by others. Whatever his critics thought about his theory, few would deny that, as with his development of levels of analysis, his identification and development of systemic structure (the distribution of capabilities or power among states) was a major contribution to the international relations discourse.
In the pages that follow, I relate Waltz’s intellectual efforts to his life experiences in our search for the sources of the ideas that underlay his influential theoretical and policy-oriented work. I chart Waltz’s life chronologically, addressing his three books and other works at the times in his life when he wrote them. The story begins in boyhood, the focus of chapter 1. The Oberlin College, World War II, Columbia University, and Korean War years are the subjects of chapters 2, 3, and 4. Subsequent chapters address his years at Swarthmore College, Brandeis University, and University of California, Berkeley and, finally, his return to Columbia.
Born on June 8, 1924, Waltz was reared in a German American, Lutheran family in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His mother was strict, his father less so. Kenneth’s love of ideas—political philosophy, in particular—was informed by his immersion in theology at a very early age. It was also in church that he developed writing skills, required as he was as a boy to write weekly essays for
Saturday religious classes that assessed the meanings contained in the previous week’s sermon.
Waltz’s incorporating Augustinian thought in the first image in his doctoral dissertation at Columbia (1954) and in his first book, Man, the State, and War, is a result of this early immersion both as a boy growing up and in later discussions at Oberlin. It was there at age eighteen that he rejected organized religion of all kinds and declared himself an atheist. This secularism remained with him for the rest of his life,3 but the intense religious experience of his boyhood also left its imprint. Indeed, he later identified with the secular writings of Immanuel Kant on the importance of ideas, reason, and rational thinking, which he first encountered in a semester at the University of Texas just before entering basic training for U.S. Army service during World War II.
Although most observers saw his realism as rooted in the materialism of writers like Thomas Hobbes, Waltz saw himself as a Kantian. As he put it to me, how can one deal with or select from the infinity of material objects in the world around us if one is not driven by ideas about them?4 As a practical matter (and contrary to how most observers saw him), Waltz saw the ideational and material typically operating in tandem, but in his own understanding—his ontology—the material was necessarily secondary to the ideational.5
Waltz’s move from economics to international politics as a graduate student at Columbia, and his focus there on war and security questions, was informed by his World War II army experience in the Pacific theater (1944–46). He was on his way to Japan from the Philippines 1945 when the war ended with the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Returning to Oberlin after the war, in 1948 he finished his bachelor’s degree (AB) and was named both Amos Miller Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa. He then proceeded to Columbia for a PhD. Columbia conferred the MA degree on him in 1950, but his doctoral studies were interrupted that year as the U.S. Army recalled him to active duty during the Korean War (1951–52).
It is not hard to see the connection between Waltz’s wartime service (particularly his presence in the Pacific theater during the first use of nuclear weapons) and his later scholarly and policy-oriented work. Critical of U.S. armed interventions in the decades after World War II, he clearly understood the importance of war and the devastating consequences of using force in general and nuclear weapons in particular.
Just before leaving Columbia for the Korean War, Waltz had to prepare for his international relations comprehensive exam in a compressed period of time. Digging into the literature, he found many of the authors talking past one another— some writing about individuals, others about states, and still others about the system of states. Necessity being the mother of invention, he discovered a framework to help him make sense of what he was reading.
Combining three separate levels of analysis, which he later would call “images,” was the remedy he needed for getting through his doctoral exams. Upon his return from Korea, he developed these three images in his dissertation (PhD, Columbia, 1954) and in Man, the State, and War, published five years later. Few scholars achieve an intellectual breakthrough of this magnitude at age twenty-six merely in the preparation for an examination. Waltz later used these levels of analysis in his early to mid-thirties to understand how diverse factors can come together to cause the outbreak of war. Man, the State, and War, now a classic in the field, remains a Columbia University Press best-seller.
WALTZ’S ANTI-INTERVENTIONIST POSITION
Avoiding war was as much part of Waltz’s intellectual legacy as were his studies on the cause of war, the use of force, and how the horrific nature of nuclear weapons has discouraged their use. He was critical of a U.S. propensity to engage in armed interventions in the decades following World War II.
An often-overlooked influence on Waltz was William Graham Sumner’s late nineteenth-century writings that objected to the United States’ following the European example of becoming an imperial power with extensive overseas obligations.6 Waltz’s anti-interventionist position underlay his thesis on nuclear spread; he did not want the United States to engage in armed interventions to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, since he saw the net effect of their gradual spread as essentially stabilizing. Waltz’s thesis on nuclear spread is discussed primarily in chapter 8, with brief references to it in chapters 11 (Scott Sagan’s critique) and 12 (Waltz’s final statement in Foreign Affairs).
Also of concern to Sumner were the domestic political ramifications and social consequences if the United States became an imperial power. Although the United States did in fact later become a superpower with worldwide
interests, Sumner’s cautionary comments lest the United States overextend itself by engaging in unnecessary armed interventions became central to Waltz’s realism. The anti-imperial ideas advanced by Sumner resonated with Waltz, leading him to find fault with all U.S. armed interventions following World War II as overextensions that were essentially contrary to U.S. interests. Although Waltz never accepted the label defensive realist, his opposition to armed interventions by the United States led others to differentiate his work from that of other realists.7
Indeed, Sumner had argued in 1896 that “the notion that gain of territory is gain of wealth and strength for the state . . . is a delusion. . . . Colonization and territorial extension are burdens, not gains.” To become an imperial power would be outside the vision of the country’s founders—the “territorial extension” of the United States to the West Coast at the time of Sumner’s writing having “reached limits which are complete for all purposes.” Aware of the financial and other resource demands of military preparedness, Sumner saw that taking on an imperial role “will force us to reorganize our internal resources so as to make it possible to prepare them in advance and to mobilize them with promptitude.” Doing so “will lessen liberty and require discipline” as well as “increase taxation and all the pressure of government”—all of which “will be disastrous to republican institutions and to democracy.”8
Notwithstanding Sumner’s anti-imperial position, the United States engaged in a war with Spain (1898) and took Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In a clever turn of phrase, Sumner wrote an article on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” (1898); with that victory, the United States had replaced Spain as an imperial power and thus had become very much like imperial Spain, burdened with military and other costs that also challenged American governance as a democracy. It was an application of his earlier argument in “The Fallacy of Territorial Extension.” In “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” Sumner underscored the downsides of imperial expansion: “war, debt, taxation, [increased need for diplomacy], a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, [and] political jobbery”—the vested interests officials have in conducting what has become a global foreign and national security policy.9
For his part, Waltz was highly critical of what he saw as excessive U.S. defense spending during and after the Cold War. It was Sumner who anticipated what became the military-industrial complex (or, as President Dwight Eisenhower’s
earlier draft of his farewell address put it, the military-industrial-congressional complex) that would impose extraordinary levels of military spending.
WALTZ’S INTELLECTUAL IMPACT
Waltz already has had an enormous impact on international relations scholarship. The common claim by both intellectual followers and critics, based on conversations with many of them, is that at the end of the twenty-first century, Waltz will be among the very few twentieth-century international relations theorists still cited by scholars not yet born. Whether or not this prediction proves to be true, Waltz had a profound understanding of the impact his project might have on future generations, sometimes taking two weeks to work out a particular phrase, which is why he labored so hard at using the English language to convey precisely and efficiently what he had in mind. It was in this context that, when asked about this, he responded humorously with tongue-in-cheek that he was “writing for the ages”—a phrase also used by the ancient Greek theorist Thucydides.
Indeed, Waltz told his students the importance of clear, concise writing. As Christopher Layne, one of Waltz’s doctoral students, recalls: “Waltz not only wanted us to take on ‘big’ topics [but also] stressed the importance of writing in a way nonspecialists could understand. [As Waltz put it]: ‘What is the point of writing about big issues if you do it in a way people cannot understand?’ And over and over again, [Waltz insisted]: ‘Don’t use jargon!’ ”
Waltz’s most significant intellectual contributions begin with the levelof-analysis framework in his dissertation and first book, Man, the State, and War. As he was studying for his doctoral exams at Columbia, Waltz was frustrated by the scholars he read who were talking past on another. Some wrote of individuals who mattered, others of states, and still others focused on the relations among states. In this early formulation, then, Waltz saw these three levels of analysis (individuals, states, and the relations among states) as important to understanding international relations and the politics among states.
The absence of central authority, or anarchy, in the international system of states was a permissive cause of war; there was nothing to stop states from using force in efforts to accomplish their purposes. Efficient causes of war could be identified at all three levels, as in, for example, the decisions made by leaders and
their advisers, the bellicose or peace-oriented character of certain states, or the system-level arms races.
Waltz was the first to admit that he had not produced a theory explaining war, although he acknowledged that the elements of such a theory were there. Combining the three levels of analysis, attentive to both permissive and efficient causes of war, was the theoretical challenge he left to others, as he also did any theory that would explain foreign policy.
What he did undertake in the 1970s was a system-level explanation of international politics. In this regard, he identified systemic structure—the distribution of power among states—as the core independent variable in explaining the conduct or behavior of states as systemic actors. As he put it in a mid-1970 comment to me at Berkeley: “Numbers matter!” Whether the distribution of capabilities or power is multipolar, bipolar, or unipolar has direct consequences for the state behaviors we observe. Although unipolarity was not part of his Theory of International Politics (1979), he dealt with it at the end of the Cold War as an unstable, transitional phase that would be overtaken, as another balancer (or other balancers) likely would emerge.
In this regard, he reasoned that bipolarity was the most stable systemic structure—informed as it was during the post–World War II Cold War by the calculations of just two major powers, or superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union). Each had its eyes on the other, much as other states with lesser power had their eyes on both. A bipolar world was less complex than a multipolar one with three or more major powers, in which coalitions and countercoalitions were commonplace. The economic, military, diplomatic, and other capabilities of just two major powers in a bipolar world more easily kept one another in check.
In 1964, while teaching at Swarthmore, Waltz wrote that the world was bipolar,10 and in 1967, then at Brandeis, he refined this core structural argument.11 These articles produced a firestorm of critiques from colleagues claiming the world was multipolar (or at least becoming so) or challenging Waltz’s claim that a bipolar world was more stable. In a widely used reader at the time, James N. Rosenau reprinted the second of Waltz’s articles along with one by Karl W. Deutsch and J. David Singer and another by Richard N. Rosecrance that joined the structural debate initiated by Waltz.12
Waltz saw the unipolar world of American dominance that emerged in the 1990s after the Cold War as likely to be short-lived. In lectures I attended in late
1991 and early 1992 at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Waltz predicted that other powers would emerge to balance the United States. Unipolarity was not a stable structure. Other balancers would emerge.13
Such balancing behavior in diplomatic positions taken at the United Nations and other forums by France and other allies was apparent in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Absent at the time, however, were the diplomatic and military capabilities of the Soviet Union, which in 1992 had broken into its constituent republics. Invading Iraq during the Cold War was not a realistic option when doing so would have brought the two superpowers into conflict. By contrast, the Russian Federation (the principal survivor of the Soviet Union) did not have the capability at the time effectively to challenge U.S. actions on the global chessboard.
Waltz reasoned that at the end of the Cold War, with the demise of the USSR, the NATO alliance had lost its principal raison d’être. He expected that the alliance eventually would disband. As he put it in conversation with me in 1992: “If NATO’s days are not numbered, its years certainly are.” Be that as it may, given post–Cold War Russian weakness, Waltz was not alone in his opposition to expansion of NATO into countries previously within the Soviet sphere of influence. George Kennan—usually credited as the author of the containment policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that ultimately led to its dissolution—cautioned:
Bluntly stated . . . expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.14
The fear both Waltz and Kennan shared was that expanding NATO would provoke Russian resentment, which, if not problematic in the short run, would negatively affect security in future years. This observation later defined the presidency of Vladimir Putin, who, quite apart from his anger at encroachment from the West, was bent on reestablishing Russia’s standing as a European great power—an irredentist vision of the Soviet and, before that, the czarist empire. For their part, the Baltic states and former members of the Warsaw Pact that had been within the Soviet sphere saw joining NATO as core to their security, should the Russian Federation try to reestablish its dominance. Joining NATO
as a means to enhance their security was also high on the wish lists of Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet republics that suffered from Russian aggression under Putin.
More than two decades into the twenty-first century, one does find other balancers emerging to challenge any unilateralism by the one remaining superpower. China is asserting itself not just in East Asia but also economically in other parts of the globe—an emerging bipolarity reminiscent of the Cold War. No longer having the economic and other capabilities of the Soviet period, Russia under Putin has acted as if it still is a superpower, sometimes brandishing its nuclear weapons to threaten the United States and any other state challenging its assertiveness on the world stage. Using “active measures,” the Russian leadership also has infiltrated electoral systems in the United States and other countries in a strategic effort to undermine American dominance.
The behaviors we observe from China (a rising power) and Russia (a declining power) are consistent with Waltz’s balance-of-power theorizing. Waltz’s two large contributions to the theoretical discourse were contained in Man, the State, and War—developing the levels of analysis—and in Theory of International Politics—identifying structure as the key variable explaining state behavior at the system level. He underscored that the latter was decidedly not a theory of foreign policy. Nor was his lesser-known comparative study of American and British foreign policy, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics. Certainly systemic structure would be part of such a theory, but other factors at the individual and state levels would also have their place in efforts to explain the foreign policy of a state. As with the problem of explaining war, Waltz left this challenge to others who would follow him.
PAINTING AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT
This book is an intellectual portrait that takes account not only of Waltz the man and his work but also of Waltz the lightning rod that drew critics, much as the realist Hans Morgenthau had done before him.15 Waltz readily entertained critical views even as he sought to counter both logical and empirical points of opposition. As a contrarian himself, he readily accepted that others might well be critical of his own work.
Were they still alive, Waltz and his generation of late twentieth-century international relations theorists likely would be disappointed that fewer scholars today pose “big questions,” much less offer answers to them.16 The field has moved—much as economics has—to “smaller” questions, particularly if they lend themselves to quantitative methodologies. Quite apart from the quantitative and nonquantitative, positivist approaches of which Waltz was a part, critical theory and postmodern understandings have become more prominent in international studies.
What Waltz and his generation did accomplish was to put in place a conceptual and theoretical foundation that encourages further inquiry. In this regard, I asked virtually all of the persons I interviewed for their lists of late twentiethcentury international relations theorists likely still to be cited at the end of the twenty-first century. Even among his critics, Waltz was at or near the top of every list. His remains an enduring legacy.
Praise for KENNETH WALTZ: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
“During the twentieth century’s last four decades, Kenneth Waltz towered over the field of international relations theory. In this must-read intellectual biography, Paul R. Viotti—a Waltz student and an accomplished scholar—provides insight into Waltz’s formative life experiences and traces the evolution of Waltz’s thinking about international politics.”
CHRISTOPHER LAYNE , author of The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present
“Not since Hans Morgenthau has an individual done more to shape the discipline of international relations, as taught both in America and around the world, than Kenneth Waltz. While many of us know his work, few knew him as a person, and as Viotti’s deep exploration of Waltz shows, Waltz’s life experiences shaped him as both a person and a thinker. Any student of international relations should read this book in order to understand how and why Waltz defined the field.”
PAUL POAST , author of Arguing About Alliances: The Art of Agreement in Military-Pact Negotiations
“Viotti traces Waltz’s early wartime experiences and formative intellectual engagement with the theories of Kant and Rousseau in showing how he became the pivotal international relations scholar of our era.”
JACK SNYDER , author of Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times
