Is ‘Realism’ to blame for the escalating global conflict? | A response to Pratap Bhanu Mehta
As the global order shakes under the weight of the war in West Asia, Pratap Bhanu Mehta laid blame on ‘realism’ in international relations, which prioritises national interest over morality and international law. But does ‘realism’ truly capture the decay we face today?
Bhanu Pratap
Published on: 23 March 2026, 02:27 pm
THE EMINENT SCHOLAR Pratap Bhanu Mehta in a recent column in Indian Express launched a scathing attack on the recent turn of political events. In the passionate article, the bone of contention was the realist approach to international politics. By citing Czesław Miłosz’s ‘The Captive Mind’, Mehta went on to criticise ‘realism’, associating it with conformity and obedience.
The ‘realist’ approach to international relations, usually associated with the pursuit of national interest on the international stage, receives a serious epistemic backlash from Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He lists the following characteristics of the realist school:
It is antagonistic to morality.
It allows one to adapt to the new imperial realities of the world.
It is a ‘manlier’ approach to politics.
It makes citizens conformists in the name of practicality.
It portrays power as truth.
It facilitates imperialism and authoritarianism.
It follows a “ suck up, kick down” philosophy.
Yet, despite its passion, Mehta's work suffers from certain conceptual errors. An attempt, therefore, shall be made to analyse and clarify the content of the realist philosophy in international relations. To start with, the piece will resort to Post- Structuralism that argues in favour of the multiplicity of meaning, and Wittgenstein’s ideas in ‘Philosophical Investigations’, which argues that language is context-driven.
Yet, despite its passion, Mehta's work suffers from certain conceptual errors.
The term ‘realism’ has various avatars. In philosophy, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ are two competing schools vying to capture the nature of human cognition. Brilliantly summing up the contrast between the two, Jadunath Sinha interprets ‘idealism’ as the school of thought that objects cannot exist independently of human cognition. In contrast, ‘realism’ recognises the independent existence of objects and argues that external objects are not merely objects of perception but the very cause of human cognition.
Another variant of ‘realism’ is found in legal philosophy in the form of American Legal Realism and Scandinavian Realism. American Legal Realism was the legal offspring of a societal-cultural movement called Progressivism, which began in the US in the 1890s and lasted until the advent of the First World War. The movement was a reaction against laissez-faire economics and was instrumental in the cultivation of Pragmatism, which was, in turn, a pluralist view of the world that rejected any dogmatic view of life and focused on the ‘practical-cash value’ of all the concepts, including truth and God.
Recently, Professor Prashant Shukla called ‘pragmatism’ an ‘exit from philosophy’. Urban life required a pluralistic approach to meaning, and the world's ancient truths were no longer infallible. American Legal Realism, in turn, rejected the formalist-logical nature of law and criticised the capitalist-friendly interpretations of property as handed out by the Supreme Court of the U.S., particularly in the Lochner v. New York (1905) decision. The ‘realities’ of law could not be divorced from the societal and economic quotients. What the school proposed was legal indeterminacy, an idea that attacked the very notion of fact establishment and strict adherence to the stare decisis formula.
