Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between tragedy and international political theory from the perspective of what I will follow others in calling the ‘tragic vision’.1 The tragic vision, I claim, is a specific kind of inspiration by tragedy, which shapes the very nature of a theory’s ethical and analytical makeup. Two paramount examples of such ‘tragic vision theorizing’ are Hans J. Morgenthau’s Scientific Man versus Power Politics2 and Richard Ned Lebow’s The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders3 — the two works this chapter explores in order to identify which aspects of theory are affected by tragedy, in what way, and to what effects. I put forth an argument that the tragic vision brings about particular theoretical outcomes and characterize the resulting theory as ‘vigilant realism’. This kind of realism gives expression to what is shared between the respective variations on (classical) realism of Morgenthau and Lebow.
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Notes
S. Wolin ([1960] 2004 ) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought ( Princeton: Princeton University Press ), p. 19.
J. P. Euben (1986) Greek Tragedy and Political Theory ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press ), p. 4.
R. C. Pirro (2000) Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy ( DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press);
J. P. Euben (2000) ‘Arendt’s Hellenism’, in D. Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 158–62
and E. Young-Bruehl (1982) Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World ( New Haven: Yale University Press ), pp. 451, 453–4.
M. Oakeshott (1996) Religion, Politics and the Moral Life (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 107; cited in N. Rengger, ‘Tragedy or Scepticism? Defending the Anti-Pelagian Mind in World Politics’, this volume, pp. 53–62.
M. Leslie (1970) ‘In Defence of Anachronism’, Political Studies, 18/4, 433–7; cited in Euben (1986) Greek Tragedy, p. 3. Leslie was the maiden name of the political theorist now known as Margaret Canovan.
H. Suganami (2008) ‘Narrative and Explanation in International Relations: Back to Basics’, Millennium, 37/2, 349–50. (Suganami draws on H. White (1973) Metahistory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 7–11.)
Suganami (2008) ‘Narrative and Explanation in International Relations: Back to Basics’, p. 350.
M. C. Williams (2005) The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. 83.
H. J. Morgenthau (1966) ‘The Purpose of Political Science’, in J. C. Charlesworth (ed.) A Design for Political Science: Scope, Objectives and Methods (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Sciences), p. 77; cited in Lebow (2003) The Tragic Vision, p. 239.
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© 2012 Kamila Stullerova
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Stullerova, K. (2012). Tragic Vision and Vigilant Realism: Progressivism without an Ideal. In: Erskine, T., Lebow, R.N. (eds) Tragedy and International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390331_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390331_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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