Abstract
International Realism is widely interpreted as hostile to international human rights. “Realist” thinkers like Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Waltz, and Danilo Zolo are typically relied on in order to discredit attempts to defend and better institutionalize human rights. In fact, major “classical” Realists (e.g., E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr) cautiously defended emerging conceptions of international human rights. Their views overlao in revealing ways with contemporary Cosmopolitanism. Like many contemporary Cosmopolitans, they sympathized with ambitious models of global legal and political order. Despite this overlap, mid-century Realism can be employed to developed a sympathetic yet powerful critique of Cosmopolitanism, which sometimes closes its eyes to power inequality on the global scale and the many dilemmas raised by inequality for the attempt to achieve a normatively acceptable institutionalization of human rights.
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Notes
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Think, for example, of longstanding US political hostility to social and economic rights.
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Many contemporary Cosmopolitans, I should add, still tend to downplay them.
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It does, however, quite correctly dispense with traditional socialist theory’s economistic view of power.
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As Craig (2003) perceptively shows, however, Waltz’s theory rests implicitly on many normative – and oftentimes institutionally conservative – preferences of its own. Because Craig misses some of the ways in which Realists tried to theorize supranational or world society, his view of the Waltzian revolution remains incomplete.
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See also Coates (2000) for a critique of Zolo.
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Scheuerman, W.E. (2012). Reconsidering Realism on Rights. In: Corradetti, C. (eds) Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2376-4_3
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