The phrase 'Cold War' was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: 'We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity'. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was 'at once unconquerable and in [...]

This wide-ranging book is the first comprehensive history of the development of realist ideas in international relations throughout the last five hundred years. Jonathan Haslam focuses on the emergence and relevance of realist (or statist) thought, showing how it has shaped political thinking and in[...]