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Correspondence Peter D. Feaver Gunther Hellman Randall L. Schweller Jeffrey W. Taliaferro William C. Wohlforth Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?) To the Editors (Peter D. Feaver writes): In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the ªeld is crowded with apostates .1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike. 165 Peter D. Feaver is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He thanks Christopher Gelpi, Hein Goemans, Joseph Grieco, Ole Holsti, Robert Keohane, Stephen Krasner, Jeffrey Legro, Andrew Moravcsik , and David Welch for their helpful comments and suggestions on reªning the letter. Gunther Hellmann is Professor of Political Science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany. He is grateful to Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik as well as to Rainer Baumann and Wolfgang Wagner for clarifying comments on a ªrst draft, and to Ulrich Gross for editorial assistance. He alone is responsible for any remaining distortions. Randall L. Schweller is Associate Professor of Political Science, The Ohio State University. He is the author of Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). He would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments: Jeffrey Legro, Edward Mansªeld, Andrew Moravcsik, and Amy Oakes. Jeffrey W. Taliaferro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. He thanks Bernard Finel, Benjamin Frankel, John Gould, and Jennifer Sterling-Folker for comments on various drafts. William C. Wohlforth is Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Jeffrey W. Legro is Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. Andrew Moravcsik is Professor of Government at Harvard University. They thank Peter Feaver, Gunther Hellmann, Randall Schweller, Jeffrey Taliaferro, and William Wohlforth for extended exchanges, which led to important revisions of earlier drafts of this reply. 1. Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 5–55. International Security, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 165–193© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brieºy, Legro and Moravcsik fail to understand that realist theories are as much about the consequences of behavior as about the determinants of behavior. Legro and Moravcsik can be forgiven for missing this, because most realist analyses jump to how the distribution of power causes some outcome and gloss over the prior question about the consequences for a state of ignoring the distribution of power. But the probability that “unrealistic” behavior will suffer adverse consequences is the key causal mechanism that makes the “realist” behavior predictable in the ªrst place. Legro and Moravcsik are right that realists have been notoriously sloppy about specifying how this causal mechanism works, but sloppiness is no reason to jettison it altogether. Realist theories cannot work without it. Realists expect that some states will act for all the reasons that Legro and Moravcsik wish to credit to the liberal, institutional, or epistemic alternative theories. Realists simply expect that those states that persist in doing so, provided that this leads them to act in a way contrary to power-dictated interests, will suffer for it. The acid test of most realist theories is not whether states conform to realpolitik principles but whether those states that do not conform are worse off than those that do. This at least is why Thucydides, Hans Morgenthau, and others are still realists even though they clearly embrace what Legro and Moravcsik declare to be blasphemous claims for realists: (1) the possibility that domestic...

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