Kenneth Waltz’s Epistemology and Ontology of International Politics: A Marxist Critique

The discipline of International Relations has had confused intellectual beginnings. Debates regarding the origins of the field have culminated in a scholarly consensus of three great debates which defined the subject matter, methodology and object of analysis of the discipline. Scholars among whom the notion of ‘great debates’ has wide purchase see the first debate as being the so-called idealist/utopian–realist debate. The debate was triggered by real-world events, for instance, the occupation of Manchuria, British appeasement at Munich and the League of Nations being a hapless observer (Wilson 1998). E.H. Carr’s famous book, The Twenty Years Crisis, shook the intellectual foundations of the seekers of what ‘ought to be’.