Rethinking the World

Stunning shifts in the worldviews of states mark the modern history of international affairs: how do societies think about—and rethink—international order and security? Japan's "opening," German conquest, American internationalism, Maoist...

Jeffrey W. Legro is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II and Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order, both from Cornell.

Legro makes a compelling case that strategic beliefs cannot be reduced to strategic circumstance. He ends by reflecting on the future of the Bush 'revolution' and argues that, absent further terrorist attacks, U.S. foreign policy is likely to tack back to the post-World War II mainstream.

Rethinking the World is sure to stir up controversy. No book that reinterprets some of the most important events in world history, offers an overarching argument for all of them, and calls both realism and liberalism into question can do otherwise. One of the hallmarks of this book is caution. Legro is even-handed in his evaluation of the evidence, cognizant of the methodological problems that he faces, and reticent about claiming too much for the role of ideas. In fact, the argument is a synthetic one in which ideas, power, and domestic politics all have a place. One of Legro's key contributions is an account of how ideas, power, and domestic politics combine in explicit and predictable ways to generate outcomes.

Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University:

What explains fundamental reorientation of the grand strategy of great powers? Jeffrey Legro moves beyond conventional accounts stressing immutable adaptation to the balance of power, random response to external shocks, or normative persuasion by inherently attractive ideas. He argues instead that big changes in how states view the world reflect domestic struggles to redefine the national interest, which are in turn shaped by contingent yet explicable interactions between ideas and events. This subtle theoretical synthesis marks an important advance in our understanding of the role ideas play in international relations, from which Legro draws important implications for the contemporary foreign policy of the United States and China.

Jack L. Snyder, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Columbia University:

The rapid pace of change in the fundamental features of international politics demands that scholars develop better theories of change. In recent years, many scholars and activists have argued that the force of new, persuasive, principled ideas can lead to fundamental change in the world. Jeffrey W. Legro's Rethinking the World looks at dramatic new departures in the thinking of great powers—America's and Japan's emergence from isolationism; Gorbachev's 'new thinking' that ended the Cold War; Germany's break with its Nazi past—and shows how external shocks combined with domestic politics and the pre-existing stock of ideas about the world to determine whether change would happen and whether the change would stick. This book's fruitful, balanced approach will be a welcome addition to my syllabus on international relations.

Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University:

Jeffrey W. Legro delivers a thoughtful and very clearly written account of the conditions under which major powers change or don't change their visions of their status and role in international society. The book is yet another nail in the coffin of realist theory as it shows that power relationships, unfiltered by prior, collectively held ideas about cause and effect in international relations, tell us little about major power behavior. The book guides us in looking for and theorizing about important instances of 'new thinking' in world politics, and thus helps problematize the persistence of 'old thinking.'.