How does realpolitik work

If Realpolitik has been much maligned and mangled, what exactly did it mean in the original sense? Rochau lived to see German unification accomplished, though he died two years later, in , after having become a member of the Reichstag. According to Bew, to understand Realpolitik accurately one must begin with the historical milieu in which Rochau wrote. Intellectuals and leaders who remained fixated on ideal outcomes and were unable, intellectually or temperamentally, to settle for an equilibrium based on partial solutions emanating from compromise would fail, but each in their own way.

The former would be unable to grasp the real nature of politics—unfortunate, but tolerable, the effects likely being limited. The latter, however, would blunder—and with serious, even deadly, consequences because they wielded power.

Rochau offered a number of observations on how politics should be understood and practiced that Bew enumerates. He believed that power rather than sweeping ideals was decisive in producing outcomes. He believed that ethical principles were important but had to be compromised in the face of contingent power-based realities rather than clung to dogmatically.

He warned that states that failed to identify rising social forces and bring them into politics—coopt them in other words—would fail and that multinational polities were inherently susceptible to instability, even fragmentation. He believed in the Zeitgeist , defined as an idea whose veracity had been proven by time and that defined an epoch, warning that rulers pushed against it at their peril.

Moreover, much of what Rochau believed other theorists did as well. That raises the question, which Bew does not really answer, of why Rochau deserves to be hailed as a seminal thinker. These include the centrality of power, the destructive effects of absolutist ideologies and utopian thinking, the importance of judicious compromise, politics as a struggle among rival forces and stability as an equilibrium based on accommodations among them, and the importance of savvy statesmanship.

Fair enough. In the end, Bew excels in explaining the misconceptions about Realpolitik a la Rochau and the evolution of the concept across time and space but does not reach the same standard in explaining what it was. His final chapter offers pithy maxims that are derived from Realpolitik and designed to convey its distinctiveness. But they amount to commonsense generalities that even those who have never heard of Rochau would find intuitively obvious.

John Bew offers a lucid, learned account on the origin, historical context, and evolution of an important concept. His book rests on a foundation of prodigious research and traces deftly the varying interpretations and reception of Realpolitik over the past years. He reveals the changes that Realpolitik underwent as it moved from Europe to the United States and the ways in which it has been misunderstood, even misrepresented.

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