Tragedy, ‘Tragic Choices’ and Contemporary International Political Theory

Abstract

In popular discourse, ‘tragedy’ is a term commonly used to describe something almost unbearably sad, such as the death of a child in a road accident, the onset of dementia in a famous novelist, or, rather more absurdly, the loss of an important football match.¹ No one has the authority to say that such a usage is simply wrong, but what we can say is that it is somewhat impoverished and impoverishing; a better understanding of the history of the term adds to our capacity to make moral judgements. In origin, tragedy was a politico-aesthetic term to refer to a bad situation that grew out of a moral dilemma, rather than developing from something as meaningless, say, as a traffic accident or a disease — but here there are important distinctions to be made. Shakespearean tragedy involves the (essentially Christian) proposition that potentially good people are brought low by character faults — Othello is jealous, Macbeth ambitious — but while some Greek tragedies involve the same notion, others do not.² In one of the greatest of Greek tragedies, Antigone has done nothing to deserve her fate, she is simply caught between the familial duty to give a decent burial to her brother, and the edict of her uncle, Creon, who has forbidden such an act in the interest of the city.³ In the Greek moral universe, as in ours (or at least mine) but (mostly) not in Shakespeare’s, bad things do happen to good people, and with no possibility of redemption beyond the grave.