Matthew Specter, Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought between Germany and the United States

Matthew Specter’s Atlantic Realists, a meticulously crafted, carefully examined, and powerfully contextualized seven-chapter study, stands as one of the most important recent contributions to the field of intellectual history, offering a compelling account of the origins of Political Realism. Specter’s central thesis is that “Realism” in the discipline of International Relations (IR) is not a theory that emerged as a reaction to the “traumatic” events of the 1930s (Nazism, war) or as a continuation of an “eternal” Western tradition (Thucydides, Hobbes). Instead, realism has its origins in the 1890s, in the “transnational” and “entangled” intellectual exchange (Fredrich Ratzel, Alfred T. Mahan, Paul Reinsch, Karl Haushofer, Isaiah Bowman, Edmund J. Walsh, Nicholas Spykman, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, William Grewe etc.) between the two rising powers of the fin de siècle era (late nineteenth-century decadence) , imperialist Germany and the United States (US).