This paper examines an often-overlooked moment in the history of neorealist thought, and it does so with respect to recent attempts to incorporate religion within the neorealist paradigm. The moment is Waltz’s (1979, 2001) recognition of the crucial importance of the image and the imagination for theory building. This recognition gives rise to Waltz’s notion of theory/image as mental picture, which he contrasts to the inductivist notion of image as mirror copy of reality. The attempts to incorporate religion within neorealist thought follow two paths. One is to open space for investigating how religion influences the nature and behaviour of unit-level actors, whether from within the state or from without (Fox & Sandler 2004; Sandal & James 2011). Another seeks to integrate religion at the structural level by opening space for investigating how religion might constitute the ordering principle of the international system itself (Snyder 2011). Both approaches, claim the scholars who advance them, can be achieved without any significant alternations to the core premises of neorealist theory.
This paper argues that without a shift away from the notion of image both as mirror copy and as mental picture towards a notion of image as fiction, neorealist thought will be unable to engage to any significant degree with religion as a structure of meaning. A notion of image as fiction is advanced by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1991, 2007). It couches an understanding of theory within a broader theory of the imagination that recognizes the image as both referring out of and reshaping the horizons—what might also be called imaginaries—within which the theorist is always already embedded. Accordingly, a notion of the image as fiction challenges the dichotomy between theorizing subject and religion-as-object indicative of neorealist attempts to integrate religion.
