Realpolitik: a history. By John Bew

John Bew places the origins of realpolitik firmly in Germany, in the failure of the revolution of 1848 and as a form of anti-liberal liberalism. Away Machiavelli and Guiccardini, hide your head Richelieu, this is an account of a political idea (Bew is anti-theory) in its political context. The book attempts, more broadly, to expose what history can tell us about political ideas, especially about the operative ones, as counters in deadly serious games. That Bew should have chosen this theme will not come as a surprise to those familiar with his Castlereagh (London: Quercus, 2011), and he acknowledges his own indebtedness to the Cambridge school of history for ‘ideas in context’. The foundation of realpolitik he places with Ludwig van Rochau, who analysed the fall of the 1848 revolutions as a failure of liberalism to understand the peculiar nature of politics. It was a ‘method of analysis’, which also provided trenchant criticism of Germany's autocratic traditions and the pretensions of its ruling class, but which equally paved the way for Treitschke and a fateful accommodation between liberalism and Bismarck. From there, Bew proceeds to realpolitik's transposition to England in the context of Anglo-German antagonism and thence to America, in the form of ‘old world diplomacy’.