Originally published in 2013 and preserved as part of our archive project. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

R.J. Vincent dissuaded his students from treating classic IR thinkers, “like parcels at the post office.”[1] This is compelling guidance, since the works of great thinkers can be interpreted and classified in numerous ways and the fallacies of anachronism and reification often go hand in hand. Moreover, as the great pedagogue Zimmern argued, for the student, “the function of a book is to stimulate his intelligence, not to befuddle it, to serve as an instrument for his own thinking rather than as its lifeless substitute.”[2] In the study of International Relations, Kenneth Waltz and Martin Wight surveyed international thought perhaps most thoroughly and are its most celebrated systematizers. Waltz devised his famous three images and Wight his three so-called traditions.[3] How does a comparison of their thought stimulate our own thinking about international relations and world politics generally?

A comparison of Waltz and Wight’s taxonomies raises several interrelated observations. One, their taxonomies eschew the historicity of ideas. That is, they avoid questions concerning the changes and patterns of ideas across time and social location. Also, their taxonomies are derived from questions of a similar kind since they concern a similar thing, namely war. Furthermore, while both have immensely enriched our thinking, neither taxonomy illuminates a conclusively compelling answer to their authors’ questions, since their categories conceptually bleed into one another. These observations, at least to me, suggest certain alternative questions about international relations and world politics generally. These will be considered following a brief comparison.

In the first instance, Waltz and Wight’s taxonomies can be compared and contrasted by the questions they applied to international thought. Waltz’s question in Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis is: “Where are the major causes of war to be found?” or where is the major cause of war located?[4] Wight’s question in his published lectures in International Theory: The Three Traditions and ‘An Anatomy of International Thought’ is: What are the moral justifications for war and the international system generally? In comparing their taxonomies, Waltz can be said to have applied to the history of ideas the question of what is or are the causes of war and Wight that of what ought to be. In formal words, Waltz sought the efficient and permissive causes where Wight emphasized the final cause, in the Aristotelian sense. In the linguistic sense, Waltz sifted through the history of ideas for factual statements and Wight sought value statements.[5]

In this way, their taxonomies are different answers to different questions but they overlap because they are questions of a similar kind since they concern a similar thing, namely warfare. In this light, Wight’s traditions are consistent positions on Waltz’s images.

This above crude table is fashioned merely to demonstrate the overlap between the two taxonomies. This table shows how interpretations of Waltz’s question are made consistent across his images, depending on the world-view of a given tradition. While Waltz’s question of identifying the major cause cuts across epistemological world-views both Wight and Waltz’s questions concern the same social phenomena, warfare, and arguably the same social world where these world-views play out.[6]

An interesting point to support this observation is that both Waltz and Wight considered the image or tradition practitioners held in mind to be causally significant in international affairs. Waltz explicitly claims, “The practice of politics is greatly influenced by the images the politicians entertain.”[7] Wight argued, “political philosophy of international relations is the fully-conscious, formulated theory, illustrations of which you may find in the conduct of some statesmen, Wilson, probably Churchill, perhaps Nehru.”[8] For Wight, perhaps even more than Waltz, ideas influenced the international environment.[9] Both thinkers engagement with the history of international ideas were partly meant to free the minds of practitioners from prevailing dogmas or misconceptions.[10] Neither thinker discounted the causal role any of their categories played in international affairs and their taxonomies, in this way, can be seen as systematic attempts to clarify the questions practitioners confront.

However, neither Waltz’s nor Wight’s taxonomy illuminates a generally or fully compelling answer to their authors’ questions, since their categories conceptually bleed into one another. While Waltz admitted the, “vogue of an image [in practitioners’ minds] varies with time and place, but no single image is ever adequate”........

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