According to a widespread view, all realists share the same set of core beliefs, which originated in the works of Thucydides. This view implies that realism is a sui generis historical tradition. The present chapter critiques this view from three related vantagepoints. Its first section illustrates that realism had emerged during the inter-war era, and that it has since then evolved as a disarrayed tradition. A disarrayed tradition entails conscious membership and participation in an ongoing common discourse that has produced fundamentally different, even opposing, methodologies and theories about the same or related phenomena under the same appellation—in our case “realism.” The second section of the chapter further buttresses this argument by illustrating that the alleged core beliefs of realism do not amount to its differentiae specifica. As the third section demonstrates, the consensus view itself had emerged gradually in the 1970s and early 1980s to serve the presentist needs of certain IR scholars. The concluding section suggests that an accurate understanding of the actually-exiting realism requires abandoning the consensus view.