[Richard H. Steinberg is Professor of Law at the University of California. Los Angeles; Visiting Professor of International, Comparative & Area Studies at Stanford University; and Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project.]
I am grateful for Ian Hurd’s thoughtful comment on my book chapter partly because it supports my claim that that everyone borrows from the realist tradition. Moreover, Hurd’s comment inadvertently recapitulates a narrow structural realist view of international law (recalling the associated dysfunctional debate of the 1980s) that I intended my chapter to supersede, offering me the opportunity here to underscore the approach of my chapter, which sees the utility of employing a longer-lived realist tradition for understanding international law . . .
First, Hurd expresses apparent disappointment that most of my claims are completely acceptable to him and constitute orthodoxy among international relations scholars. My claims are “so encompassing that there is little to disagree with.” For example, Hurd agrees with me that analysts of international politics should take into account states, state power, and state interests, and that states strive to use their power to create a legal order that favors their interests. Apparently, my clear restatement of concepts rooted in the realist tradition, going back two and a half millennia, is not disagreeable—except to the extent that Hurd thinks my restatement is not realism. “The problem here,” Hurd writes, “is that few scholars of any stripe would deny these premises or empirical patterns” and so Hurd is “doubtful” that “this is ‘realism.’” But the fact that these premises and patterns are broadly accepted does not negate the fact that they are rooted in the realist tradition—the mode and level of analysis common to people like Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Morgenthau. These premises and patterns are certainly not the preoccupation of the liberal tradition, with its focus on individuals and nonstate actors as drivers of state interests and action, nor of constructivism, with its focus on the social roots of epistemologies, norms, and interests.
Hurd’s declaration that these realist premises and patterns are broadly accepted is gratifying to those who have identified themselves with the realist tradition in their understanding of international law—but who in the last thirty years have been intellectually flogged for doing so by those who have attacked a straw-man version of realism described in my chapter. For Hurd, the shortcoming with my chapter seems to be that a correct distillation of the realist tradition offers little to disagree with. Sorry to disappoint. As stated in the last line of my chapter: Perhaps everybody is still a realist.
So, what does Hurd disagree with?
