Abstract: The paper contends that political realists shrink the complexity of the political, confining it to macro-discussions of power, confusing realism with liberal legitimation principles, reintroducing the ethical concerns from which they sought to distance themselves, and overlooking the emotional and the vernacular. In particular, recent realists engage in prescriptive rather than interpretative analysis in which democratic and humanitarian ideals are regarded as the basis of a realist approach, ignoring the fact that a properly real understanding of the political cannot be reduced to those features.