Bounding Power

All too often the foreign policy debate is divided between “realists” who favor power politics and “idealists” who want the United States to act as a missionary nation exporting democracy or human rights. In his ground-breaking and controversial new book Bounding Power, Daniel Deudney, one of America’s leading students of international relations, transcends this stale debate and shatters the categories in which we think about U.S. foreign policy. Deudney revives and modernizes republican security theory, a way of thinking about both international and domestic governance with deep roots in history and American tradition and with startling relevance for today.

In Foreign Affairs John Ikenberry, one of America’s leading international relations scholars, writes:

A long-awaited and truly brilliant book, "Bounding Power" presents nothing less than a major new vision of world politics -- while, along the way, reinterpreting the classic philosophical traditions in international relations, providing striking portraits of the evolving logic of order in major historical eras, and illuminating possible global futures. With its scope, imagination, and scholarly mastery of theory and history, it has few peers among the offerings of recent decades….Just as Montesquieu and James Madison saw republics as polities with institutions designed to neutralize coercive rule through the dispersal of power and mutual restraint, Deudney argues that global governance institutions across history have followed a similar trajectory….[Few] books on world politics have ever looked so searchingly at the past to see the future.

Participants

• Daniel H. Deudney
  Associate Professor, Political Science
  Johns Hopkins University
  Author, Bounding Power
  
  
• Michael Lind
  Whitehead Senior Fellow
  New America Foundation
  Author, The American Way of Strategy