The balance of power revisited

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Abstract
In 1962 I published Power and International Relations, a book in which I undertook to analyse, criticize, and compare balance of power, collective security, and world government, treating these as the three leading theoretical approaches to the management of power in the global arena. Each of these approaches had its band of adulators and advocates who doubtless found my efforts at critical appraisal offensive. For a young American scholar of that era the adoption of an irreverent attitude toward balance of power was particularly problematic, because that approach figured prominently in the prevailing orthodoxy of Political Realism. It would have been safer to assume, rather than to examine, the merits of balance of power. I gave balance of power, like its two competitors, a mixed review.

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