Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

From realism to neorealism
The very term neorealism is somewhat contentious, because many realists
regard the ideas it conveys as containing nothing that would merit the prefix
‘neo’; nonetheless most observers disagree, and feel that something did
change with realism in response to the pluralist challenge and neorealism is
one way of noting this change. In any event, there is general agreement that
the most significant realist/neorealist work is Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of
International Politics (1979). Waltz is a scholar with a classical realist back-
ground. His first major work, Man, the State and War (1959), is still a
starting-point for modern thinking about the causes of war and, for the most