Introduction

How should one now relate to Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (WCWP) from a sociological and historical sociological perspective on structural change? In its time, WCWP was a pretty radical project. It took the difficult path by attempting a dynamic theory of change rather than a static one of continuity. It attempted a grand synthesis by combining Waltz’s then fresh neo-realism with world history and a large dose of international political economy (IPE). It was not afraid to combine holistic, sociological, structural approaches with reductionist, economistic, rational choice ones. It was a landmark in the development of the neo-neo synthesis between neo-realism and neo-liberalism. And it anticipated by nearly a decade both Tilly’s argument about “war makes the state and the state makes war,” and Kennedy’s argument about overstretch and the rise and fall of great powers.

All of that said, looked at in retrospect, WCWP is very much a late Cold War book in terms of both its policy concerns and prescriptions. It centers around the US as an inevitably declining hegemon, and what if anything might be done to avert the dangers inherent in that position. For those inclined to think in this way, the question of US decline and hegemonic transition is still very much on the agenda, albeit in a rather different context from that of the early 1980s. Yet despite its impressive intellectual breadth, and sensitivity to IPE, the book accepts Waltz’s definition of structure in terms of the distribution of power, and remains captured by the quintessentially realist assumption that “the nature of international relations has not changed fundamentally over the millennia.” Although Gilpin’s definition of deep systems change is different from Waltz’s (the nature of the principal actors versus the organizing principle of the system), like Waltz’s it is defined in such a way as to exclude this type of change from the analysis. Just as this closure forced Waltz to focus on polarity, so Gilpin consequently focuses his analysis of change on the rise and decline of hegemonic powers, and the changes to international orders that occur in the context of an apparently endless cycle of hegemonic wars.