Abstract
[1] The word fortune describes the most ancient and fundamental experience in politics—the politician’s consciousness that men and happenings are recalcitrant to purposeful guidance, that the results of political action never square with intention, that he never can have command of all the relevant material.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Il Principe, ed. Arthur Burd, introduction by Lord Acton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), chapter 25, p. 358.
[Elsewhere, Machiavelli’s sentence has a slightly different appreciation: “A quaint quantitative estimate of the role of decision within the framework of necessity”; Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory. Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant & Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 22–3. “We may take this careful statement … as earliest attempt at experientially based philosophy of I(nternational) P(olitics)”; Martin Wight, “Fortune and Irony in International Politics,” Chicago, March 13, 1957, MWP 3.]
Albert Sorel, La Question d’Orient au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Plon 1889), 2nd. ed., p. 99. Cf. p. 77 and note. [“The more one gets older, he often said, the more one is persuaded that His Majesty the Chance makes three-quarters of the work of this miserable universe.”]
De Monarchia, II. 10, as translated by Donald Nicholl, Monarchy and Three Political Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), p. 53.
Donoso Cortes, “Lettres politiques sur la situation de la France en 1851 et 1852”, in Oeuvres (Paris: Vaton, 1858), II. 428. [“Moreover, these forecasts and all those of my previous letters can be deceived: all the calculations can be foiled by one of these coups d’état of Providence that common people call strokes of fortune. Everything I announced must happen, according to the natural order of things; but generally what must happen in this way does not happen. There is always a point of pernicious fever, an armed revolt, a bold stroke by an audacious man, a sudden change of opinion, which suddenly destroys the hopes of some, the fears of other, the wisdom of the wise, the ability of the skilled, the prudence of the prudent, and the calculations of all.”]
[The last chapters of Robert Herrera, Donoso Cortes: Cassandra of the Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1995) treat Cortes’s predictions. One of the most famous, and failed, is a forecast of the eventual fusion between socialism and Slavic nationalism. On this figure, see John T. Graham, Donoso Cortes: Utopian Romanticist and Political Realist (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974).]
[Edmund Burke, “First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796),” in The Works of the Right On. Edmund Burke (Boston: John West and O.C. Greenleaf, 1807), 4:312–13.]
[Ibid.]
Machiavelli’s knowledge of Polybius is a matter of controversy. On the one hand, Machiavelli nowhere mentions Polybius by name; on the other hand, the Discorsi, book I, chapters 1–15, paraphrase Polybius, book VI, and sometimes reproduce it almost verbatim. On the one hand, Machiavelli probably did not read Greek; on the other hand, though the first five books of Polybius had been translated into Latin, no translation of Book VI is known to have existed at the time the Discorsi were written. See The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), II. 289–91; John H. Hexter, “Seyssel, Machiavelli, and Polybius VI: The Mystery of the Missing Translation,” Studies in the Renaissance 56, no. 3 (1956): 75–96.
Polybius, book I, chapter 63; book II, chapter 38; book XXXVI, chapter 17; book VI, chapter 2. On Polybius’ concept of Tyche in general see Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), appendix II. Cf. Frank W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 16–26. [“This confirms the assertion I ventured to make at the outset that the progress of the Romans was not due to chance and was not involuntary, as some among the Greeks choose to think, but that by schooling themselves in such vast and perilous enterprises it was perfectly natural that they not only gained the courage to aim at universal dominion, but executed their purpose”; I. 63.] [“How is it, then, that both these two peoples and the rest of the Peloponnesians have consented to change not only their political institutions for those of the Achaeans, but even their name? It is evident that we should not say it is the result of chance, for that is a poor explanation. We must rather seek for a cause, for every event whether probable or improbable must have some cause. The cause here, I believe to be more or less the following. One could not find a political system and principle so favourable to equality and freedom of speech, in a word so sincerely democratic, as that of the Achaean league”; II. 38.] [“For my part, says Polybius, in finding fault with those who ascribe public events and incidents in private life to Fate and Chance, I now wish to state my opinion on this subject as far as it is admissible to do so in a strictly historical work. Now indeed as regards things the causes of which it is impossible or difficult for a mere man to understand, we may perhaps be justified in getting out of the difficulty by setting them down to the action of a god or chance, I mean such things as exceptionally heavy and continuous rain or snow … But as for matters the efficient and final cause of which it is possible to discover we should not, I think, put them down to divine action … But in cases where it is either impossible or difficult to detect the cause the question is open to doubt”; XXXVI. 17.] [“Now the chief cause of success or the reverse in all matters is the form of a state’s constitution; for springing from this, as from a fountain-head, all designs and plans of action not only originate, but reach their consummation”; VI. 2.]
[In the twenty-first century, an anthology gathered together for the first time Machiavelli’s writings on international politics; see Machiavelli on International Relations, ed. Marco Cesa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).]
John Dryden, The Twenty-ninth Ode of the Third Book of Horace, paraphrased in Pindaric verse, IX, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. John Sargeaunt (London: Oxford University Press, 1913).
[In 2015, Johns Hopkins University researchers have found that “bad luck” plays a major role in determining most types of cancer, rather than genetics or risky lifestyle. Then, there has been much debate against this notion of biological bad luck in cancer etiology; see Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, “Variation in Cancer Risk among Tissues Can be Explained by the Number of Stem Cell Divisions,” Science 347, no. 6217 (2015): 78–81.]
Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), pp. 69–70.
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958), p. 214. [Strauss’s thoughts present an elaborate reflection: “She is indeed not a creator and she concentrates entirely on the government of men … She certainly is not always malevolent. She certainly is, if not all powerful, at least so powerful that men cannot oppose her designs. The practical consequence is not quietism. As we have seen, the end which Fortuna pursues is unknown, and so are her ways toward that end. Hence, Machiavelli concludes, men ought always to hope, men ought never to give up, no matter what the condition into which Fortuna may have brought them. We need not discuss whether Machiavelli is consistent in drawing this sanguine conclusion from his quasi-theology. His conclusion from his assertion regarding Fortuna is certainly consistent with the conclusion which follows from his assumption regarding the intelligences in the air: man has no reason to fear superhuman beings … Fortuna is a part, and not the ruling part, of the whole. The whole is ruled by heaven … Heaven leaves room for human causation, for action, for prudence and for art. Fortuna belongs to the same domain to which art and prudence belong. Fortuna is thought to be the cause of men’s good or ill fortunes. But if one looks more closely, one sees that in the most important cases ‘the cause of (good) fortune’ is not Fortuna but human virtue and good institutions, i.e., the work of prudence or art”; pp. 214–17.]
See Georgi V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), p. 43; Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. William H. Temperley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 61; John B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 303–4. Bury’s argument is criticised by Michael Oakeshott, Modes of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 133–41.
Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia. book VI, chapter 4. [“But alas. How vain and fallacious are the projects of men. The Pope, in the eight of his aspiring hopes, is unexpectedly carried home for dead to the pontifical palace, from vineyard near the Vatican, where he had been at supper, to regale himself in the time of the Summer heats; and immediately after him his son brought a long in the same expiring condition. The day following, which was the 18th of August, the Pope’s corps, according to pontifical custom, is carried into St. Peter’s Church, all swelled, black, and monstrously frightful, sure marks of poison.”] William H. Woodward, Cesare Borgia (London: Chapman Hall, 1913), pp. 323–4, 330–2.
William H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, new impression (London: Longmans, 1907), I. 202, no. 3; Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. ed. Francis E. Ball (London: G. Bell, 1910–14), II. 214. Cf. George M. Trevelyan, The Peace and the Protestant Succession (London: Longmans, 1934).
Saburov Memoirs, or Bismarck and Russia. Being Fresh Lighton the League of the Three Emperors, 1881, ed. James Y. Simpson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 136. [Ambassador Holbrooke wrote about the “distorting effect of perfect hindsight,” after the Dayton agreement (1995): “My own government experiences over the last thirty-five years have led me to conclude that most accounts of major historical events, including memories, do not convey how the process felt at the time to those participating in it. This derives, in part, from historian’s need to compress immensely complicated and often contradictory events into a coherent narrative whose outcome reader (unlike the participants at the time) already knows”; Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1998), p. xvi.]
Il Principe, chapter 25, ed. Burd, p. 365. [“For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.” Chabod wrote a transparent comment on Machiavelli’s method and style: “So we have the plastic imagine of the woman beaten into submission, and the powerful climax that dispels all doubts—by forceful imagery, however, and not by logic. When the author’s enthusiasm runs high the dilemmatic method, the method of syllogism and disputation gives way, even in the matter of style, to a violent upsurging of emotion in which logic is replaced by imagery”; Machiavelli and the Renaissance, pp. 146–7. The image has probably reached its apogee of brutality in Oriani’s version (1908): “Fortune and history are women and they love only the vigorous man capable of raping them, who accepts the risks of the adventure to reach to the domination of love”; Andrea Oriani, La Rivolta Ideale (Bologna: Cappelli, 1943), p. 276.]
Barry J. Cork, Rider on a Grey Horse (London: Cassell, 1958), p. 61.
Letter to Nigra, January 1859, in Carteggio Cavour-Nigra, ed. R. Commissione editrice (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1926), I. 291, no. 218. [“Dans les temps de crise, il faut dominer la position; c’est qu’on obtient qu’autant qu’on déploie une énergie de fer et qu’on sait inspirer une entière confiance”; translation from French by Martin Wight.]
William K. Hancock, Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), pp. 264–5.
Speech at Tripoli, 11 April 1926, quoted in Survey of International Affairs 1927, ed. Arnold J. Toynbee (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 118.
Speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, XXVI. 328; Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, III. 580. [The same lines are cited in Wight’s “Germany,” in Arnold J. Toynbee and Frederick T. Ashton Gwatin, eds., The World in March 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), p. 347, where he infers that “the making of brutal decisions could become intoxicating, almost an end in itself.”]
Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March (London: Longmans, 1948), p. 138. Cf. Theodor Mommsen, History of Rome (London: Dent & Sons, 1911), IV. 428: “with him nothing was of value in politics but the living present and the law of reason”.
[In twenty-first century, this attitude has become part of mainstream social science: “Policy makers create history, and history unfolds in directions that scholars discover and debate.” Henry R. Nau, “Scholarship and Policy-Making: Who Speaks Truth to Whom?,” in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal eds., The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 640.]
Frederick A. Simpson, The Rise of Louis Napoleon (London: J. Murray, 1909), p. 233.
Preamble to the Statuto of 20 December 1929, in Michael Oakeshott, Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 171. [“‘I do not know why we are doing this’, said Hitler once, ‘I only know that I must do it. You lose the past and gain the future’”; Martin Wight, “Problems of Mass Democracy,” The Observer, September 23, 1951, p. 7.]
[Castro’s dictum “La historia me absolverá” is one of the most striking examples of this process of self-confidence. It is the concluding sentence of the famous speech which he made at the trial for the failed attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1953; Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975).]
Letter to Albert G. Hodges, 4 April 1864, in Life & Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Philip van Doren Stern (New York: Modern Library, 1942), p. 806; Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (Rutgers: University Press, 1953), VII. 282.
Speech of 16 April 1869, in Die Politischen Reden des Fürsten Bismarck (Cotta: Stuttgart, 1892–1905) IV. 192. [Translation from German by Martin Wight. According to Butterfield, Bismarck “was more emphatic on this subject than possibly any other statesman in modern history. He would say: ‘The statesman cannot create the stream of time, he can only navigate upon it’. When people urged him to hasten the unification of Germany he would argue: ‘We can advance the clock but time itself does not move any more quickly for that’. The year before Germany’s unification, he said: ‘An arbitrary and merely wilful interference with the course of history has always resulted only in beating off fruits that were not ripe.’” Butterfield concludes, “Yet in spite of his consistency in this kind of philosophy we should still hold, I think, that even Bismarck did not go far enough in this view—even he tried too hard on occasion to force the hands of Providence”; Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell, 1949), pp. 100–1.]
E.g., Charles G. Robertson, Bismarck (London: Constable, 1929), pp. 128–9.
Herbert Butterfield, The Peace Tactics of Napoleon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 274.
[“Gromyko relied on the impatience of his interlocutors to extract opportunities”; Henry Kissinger, “Foreword,” in Andrej Gromyko, Memoirs, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. vii.]
Plutarch, Caesar, XXXVIII. Cf. Thomas R. Holmes, Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 41, n. 3. [“At Apollonia, Caesar conceived the plan of embarking in a twelve-oared boat, without any one’s knowledge, and going over to today’s Brindisi. While the river Aoüs was carrying the boat down towards the sea, the mouth of the river was quelled by a strong wind so that it was impossible for the master of the boat to force his way along. He therefore ordered the sailors to come about in order to retrace his course. Caesar, perceiving this, disclosed himself, took the master of the boat by the hand, and said the cited words”; XXXVIII.]
Rex Warner, Imperial Caesar (London: Collins, 1964), p. 68.
“It was Bismarck’s deepest conviction that true opportunism consisted as much in creating opportunities as in seizing them when occurred”, quoted in Grant Robertson, Bismarck (London: Constable, 1918), pp. 220–1. [“International policy is a fluid elements,” said Bismarck, “which under certain conditions will solidify, but on a change of atmosphere reverts to its original condition”; quoted in Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946), 1978 ed., pp. 127–8.]
George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 93.
John Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1903), II. 240–1. [Caustic words are quoted in Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 162. “No British prime minister before Gladstone had used such rhetoric … To Bismarck, such views (morality, Christian decency, respect for human rights, a critique of the balance of power) were pure anathema. It is not surprising that these two titanic figures cordially detested each other … Writing to the German Emperor in 1883, the Iron Chancellor noted: ‘Our task would be easier if in England that race of great statesmen of earlier times who had an understanding of European politics, had not completely died out. With such an incapable politician as Gladstone, who is nothing but a great orator, it is impossible to pursue a policy in which England’s position can be counted upon’. Gladstone’s view of his adversary was far more direct, for instance, when he called Bismarck ‘the incarnation of evil.’”]
Arthur J. Whyte, The Political Life and Letters of Cavour, 1848–1861 (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 387. For a less favourable statement of the same point; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 103–4, 131–2, 152, 211, 436.
Pausanias, V. 14. 9. [Cf. Arthur B. Cook, Zeus. A Study in Ancient Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–40), II. 859–68. “Next come an altar of Concord, another of Athena, and the altar of the Mother of the gods. Quite close to the entrance to the stadium are two altars; one they call the altar of Hermes of the Games, the other the altar of Opportunity. I know that a hymn to Opportunity is one of the poems of Ion of Chios; in the hymn Opportunity is made out to be the youngest child of Zeus”; V. 14. 9.]
Speech of [sic] a meeting of industrialists, 20 February 1933, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, XXXV. 46. Cf. The World in March 1939, ed. Arnold J. Toynbee (Oxford: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), pp. 341–2. [Wight’s last reference is to his omitted “Germany,” an essay for Toynbee’s edited book.]
Address at the Flower Service at the Castle Street Welsh Baptist Chapel, London, 23 June 1918, quoted in The Times, 24 June 1918, a letter to the Manchester Guardian, 2 April 1945, by T. Lloyd Roberts; Cf. Chaim Weizmann, Trial & Error (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 260. [There is a remarkable analogy in Kenneth Pollack’s warmongering comment in “Next Stop Baghdad,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (2002): 42, written before the invasion of Iraq in 2003: “Today the shock of the September 11 attacks is still fresh and the U.S. government and public are ready to make sacrifices—while the rest of the world recognizes American anger and may be leery of getting on the wrong side of it. The longer the wait before an invasion, the harder it will be to muster domestic and international support for it, even though the reason for invading would have little or nothing to do with Iraq’s connection to terrorism.”]
Dulles, as reported in James Shepley, “How Dulles Averted War”, Life, 16 January 1956; cf. Coral Bell, Survey of International Affairs 1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 26 n.
Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan. A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946), scene III, p. 38.
Letter to Hammond, 25 November 1648, quoted in Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (London: Dent, 1861), letter 79.
Cf. Friedrich Schiller, Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Kriegs, book III, ed. Karl Bruel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1892), ad init.
Cf. John Morley, Life of Gladstone [Life of William Ewart Gladstone] (London: Macmillan, 1903), II. 252, 610, III. 1, 275–6.
John Nicolay and John Hay, Life of Lincoln [Abraham Lincoln. A History] (New York: The Century Press, 1890), VI, 155, 160.
Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein’s Tod. II. 3, lines 943–5. [The Death of Wallenstein, in Dramatic Works of Friedrich Schiller, trans. Samuel T. Coleridge et al. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1891), p. 187. “It would be difficult to grasp from Wallenstein a moral or political lessons,” wrote Mila. “There you have the reality, naked and real, unsolicited in any way.” Thus, the Schillerian characters “clash in a fight not because one is necessarily driven by a good will, and the other by an evil will, but because they relentlessly oppose this inextricable tangle of conflicting and conspiring forces who is life and history.” In the end, “what is lacking on purpose in this black and desolate tragedy is however, more widely and more exactly, the light of an ideal that survives”; Massimo Mila, “Introduzione,” in Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), p. viii.]
John K. Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 95, 164–5.
Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre: L’Appel (1940–1942) (Paris: Plon, 1954), p. 1. [Translation from French by Martin Wight.]
To confirm the negative statement, see Norman Knox, The Word Irony and Its Context, 1500–1755 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1951); Harold L. Bond, The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), chapter 6.
Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (Paris: Vrin, 1936), chapter 1.
Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, n.d.), p. 66. [“It is an irony of fate that the Russians, whom I have fought for twenty-five years, and not only in German, but in French and English, have always been my ‘patrons’”; Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, October 12, 1868, in his Letters to Dr Kugelmann (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934).]
Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, translated by F. P. B. Osmaston (London: Bell, 1920), vol. I, introduction, section 3, pp. 88–94.
Henry W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), s.v.
[Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Originally published: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.]
Wichkam Steed, The Doom of the Habsburg (London: Arrowsmith, 1937), preface, p. VII.
Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916 (London: Hodder & Stougthon, 1925), I. 325.
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 112.
Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), pp. VII, 112, 183, 252, 255. Cf. Lewis Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, 1938–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 63, 261 note.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed. Trotsky 1879–1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. VII. [It should be noted that Deutscher’s volume Ironies of History. Essays on Contemporary Communism was published in 1966. If Wight had worked on his own text after that time, he would probably have made reference to Deutscher’s book.]
Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure”, in Morton D. Zabel ed., Literary Opinion in America (New York: Harper, 1951), revised edition, p. 732.
[Although he does not mention irony, this is Carr’s position in his cogent argument on causation in history: “The historian distils from the experience of the past, or from so much experience of the past as is accessible to him, that part which he recognizes as amenable to rational explanation and interpretation, and from it draws conclusions which may serve as a guide to action”; Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 98.]
Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), p. 495. Cf. his Tacitus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), I. 379–80; “Time would show many a paradox.”
Frederick M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward. The Community of the Real in the Third Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), p. 730.
Charles K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830–1841. Britain, the Liberal Movement and the Eastern Question (London: G. Bell Sons, 1951), I. 211. The words irony and paradox are not in the vocabulary of this austerely positivist historian; it is the more strange that he says “strangely enough”[,] the ex-priest was more disturbed than anyone else at the occupation of Papal territory.
Contest of Empire and Papacy. Cambridge Medieval History, ed. Zachary N. Brooke et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), V, p. 319.
Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (London: Constable & Company, 1919), p. 3.
[This quotation is without any reference in Wight’s papers. Yet it seems true to say that it is the central part of Eliot’s Gerontion, a dramatic monologue first published in 1920, which presents the reflections of an elderly man after World War I; Thomas Eliot, Poems (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1920), pp. 35–45. According to Cleanth Brooks, from which Wight has extracted his definition of irony, “Gerontion has made no commitments, for he has not been willing to limit the complete freedom that he demands for himself; he keeps all options open until death puts an end to options”; see his “The Waste Land: A Prophetic Document,” in Cleanth Brooks, Community, Religion, and Literature: Essays (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 104.]
William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, chapter IV. [The words are from Morris’s narrative voice. He is hearing the speech by the rebel priest John Ball in Kent during the Peasants’ Revolt across England in 1381, which culminated in the march on London, the suppression of revolt, and the execution of the rebel leaders. Ball’s reported preaching should be valued “for the unique insight they provide into the radical Christian egalitarianism that constituted much of the ideology of the rebels”; Andrew Prescott, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, digital ed. According to Boos, “A Dream of John Ball asked the obvious painful question: Can there be any hope for future attempts to effect social change, when so many heroic efforts have failed?”; “Alternative Victorian Futures: ‘Historicism,’ Past and Present, and A Dream of John Ball,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), p. 26. For Bulla, “the subject of freedom, dignity and equality, and more specifically of the class struggle, is to Morris the standard by which to assess and evaluate human history above all else”; Guido Bulla, “Introduzione,” in William Morris, Un Sogno di John Ball (Cosenza: Lerici, 1980), p. 9. Morris published this prose writing in serial format in the socialist weekly The Commonweal in 1886–7, then in a book (London: Reeves and Turner, 1888). Llewellyn Woodward (1890–1972), quoted by Wight, was a historian and professor of International Relations at Oxford (1944–47). His main project (apart from editing the Documents on British Foreign Policy series) was to write a multivolume work, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, based on unpublished documents in the Foreign and Cabinet offices. Official objections delayed the project; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, digital ed.]
Copyright information
© 2016 Michele Chiaruzzi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wight, M. (2016). Fortune’s Banter. In: Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-52873-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-52873-5_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-70797-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52873-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)