Human nature is the subject of Annette Freyberg-Inan's sustained attack on political realism. She argues that all realist theory shares a common set of assumptions about human motivations. In short, realists believe that humans are, and always will be, up to little good. We are fearful, self-interested, power-hungry, and “by and large, rational” (p. 94). Realists apply these psychological characteristics to nation-states, modifying them only to the extent that states and their leaders are likely to be more rational—in the sense of being strategic and utility maximizing—than average people. Such understandings of human nature are, however, simplistic and misleading.

What troubles Freyberg-Inan is not merely that realists get their facts wrong, but that realism's “prophecy” is self-fulfilling. The more the policies of states are influenced by realism, the more international actors will behave as fearful, self-interested, power-hungry rationalists. If we want to avoid creating the very world realists describe, we must recognize the plurality of motives and means in politics. In her conclusion, she classifies major current theories of international relations according to the basic motives they stress, their “motivational complex,” and the main foreign policy goals they isolate. For realists, these are fear, power, and security; for liberals: profit/self-interest, achievement, and prosperity/rights; for constructivists: honor/recognition, affiliation, and identity/membership (p. 163). She calls for an integrative approach, one that stresses “problem solving and the relevance of our research efforts” (p. 171).

If this all seems like familiar terrain, that would be because it is. There is little new in Freyberg-Inan's volume. Its main contribution to ongoing debates about realism is that it is a thorough, well written example of synthetic exegesis. The author collects, and provides an often lucid examination of, many of the major arguments about realist microfoundations, their descriptive accuracy, and the possibility that realism might create the very world it claims to describe.

The volume is least persuasive when Freyberg-Inan turns from “classical” to contemporary realism. For the last few decades, realists have eschewed psychological reductionism; they rely on claims about social and political dynamics that are, from the perspective of conceptualizations of human nature, multiply realizable. To assume, for example, that anarchy imposes particular constraints on political communities and their leaders does not require a view of human beings as inherently “selfish schemers, usually wickedly rational, at times dangerously irrational; they are asocial, untrusting, as well as untrustworthy” (p. 95).

Freyberg-Inan argues that the difference between earlier, human-nature realism and contemporary realism is simply a matter of levels of analysis: The psychological dispositions realists once attributed to individuals they now attribute to states. She also suggests that, even if they deny it, contemporary realists still assume that human beings are pretty nasty by nature.

The problems with this sort of argument become very clear if one looks closely at Freyberg-Inan's treatment of Kenneth Waltz. She twice quotes (p. 10 and 73) Waltz as arguing, in the Man, the State, and War (1959), that “the root of all evil is man, and thus he himself is the root of the specific evil, war.” This is not Waltz's argument. He is, in context, describing the tenants of first-image pessimism. Freyberg-Inan does admit that Waltz believes “human nature is too indeterminate to be considered the primary cause of war” (p. 73). I have trouble understanding, therefore, on what grounds she justifies elevating Waltz's discussion of views he does not share into an “implicit first-image foundation for systemic international relations theory” (p. 10).

In her treatment of his seminal Theory of International Politics (1979), Freyberg-Inan notes Waltz's emphatic rejection of psychological accounts of systemic dynamics as reductionist, yet still maintains that his theory depends upon a putatively realist account of human nature. To this end, she discusses how Waltz sees units as “rational ‘unitary actors who, at a minimum, seek their own preservation and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination’ ” (p. 74). If one skips to the bottom of the same page in Theory that Freyberg-Inan quotes, however, one finds Waltz rejecting the assumption of innate rationality, pointing out that some states may even choose to amalgamate with other states, and explaining that “the possibility that force may be used by some states to weaken or destroy others does, however, makes it difficult for them to break out of the competitive system” (Theory, pp. 118–19). This is an account of structural constraints and the functional requirements of systems, one that is consistent with a fairly broad range of claims about human nature.

Similarly, in Freyberg-Inan's account of the debate between offensive and defensive realism, the relevant disputes seem to have more to do with the imperatives of systemic structure than with essentialist claims about the perniciousness of human nature. Indeed, her major complaint in this context is the “rational actor” assumption frequently deployed in realism. Whatever the psychological merits of rational decision making, it is not, in any way, intrinsically connected to realism. If anything, the assumption of strong rationality is much more closely associated with the liberal tradition, as Freyberg-Inan's own discussion about Machiavelli and Hobbes, and her references to Hirschman, make clear. Regardless, the utility of arguments derived from rational choice analytics is a separate and much broader issue than the one raised by realist conceptions of human nature.

Thus, it would seem that a commitment to realism does not require strongly pessimist ideas about what moves man. In this light, perhaps the more important question raised by Freyberg-Inan is whether claims of human psychology ought to be at the very core of international relations theory. Whether or not What Moves Man adequately answers that question, it certainly provides a good starting point for addressing it.