The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism 9781474423298

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The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism

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The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism

Edited by Robert Schuett and Miles Hollingworth

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Robert Schuett and Miles Hollingworth, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2328 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2329 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2330 4 (epub)

The right of Robert Schuett and Miles Hollingworth to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Contributor Biographies Introduction

viii 1

Part I: Political Realism and the Political 1. Political Realism and Human Nature Erica Benner

11

2. Political Realism and the Western Mind Zhao Tingyang

23

3. Political Realism and Strategic Theory Samir Puri

37

4. Political Realism and Realpolitik John Bew

49

5. Political Realism and Ideology David Martin Jones

61

6. Political Realism and Civil–Military Relations Lindsay P. Cohn

72

7. Political Realism and the English School Jodok Troy

85

8. Political Realism and Global Reform William E. Scheuerman

97

Part II: Political Realism and Political Thinking 9. Thucydides Neville Morley 10. Kauṭilya Stuart Gray

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11. Livy Ayelet Haimson Lushkov

137

12. Augustine of Hippo Miles Hollingworth

151

13. Niccolò Machiavelli Markus Fischer

164

14. William Shakespeare Tim Spiekerman

177

15. Thomas Hobbes Kody W. Cooper

189

16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Grace G. Roosevelt

202

17. Friedrich Nietzsche Paul E. Kirkland

215

18. Max Weber Christopher Adair-Toteff

227

19. Walter Lippmann Alan Chong

239

20. Reinhold Niebuhr Menno R. Kamminga

252

21. E. H. Carr Konstantinos Kostagiannis

265

22. Leo Strauss Robert Howse

277

23. Herbert Butterfield Kenneth B. McIntyre

290

24. Hans Kelsen Robert Schuett

303

25. Raymond Aron Christopher Adair-Toteff

317

26. George F. Kennan David A. Mayers

328

27. Hans J. Morgenthau Felix Rösch

342

28. Hannah Arendt Douglas B. Klusmeyer

355

29. John H. Herz Peter M. R. Stirk

368

30. Isaiah Berlin Joshua L. Cherniss

380

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Part III: Political Realism and Foreign Policy 31. Political Realism and Threat Perception John Mueller

395

32. Political Realism and Russia David Kerr

406

33. Political Realism and China Derek M. C. Yuen

417

34. Political Realism and Iran Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani

431

35. Political Realism and Israel Uriel Abulof

445

36. Political Realism and India Rashed Uz Zaman

458

37. Political Realism and Japan Masashi Okuyama

470

38. Political Realism and Regionalism David Martin Jones

481

39. Political Realism and Nationalism Peter Iver Kaufman

494

40. Political Realism and Religion Cecelia Lynch

507

41. Political Realism and the Environment Tom Switzer

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42. Political Realism and the Internet Richard Forno

528

43. Political Realism and Terrorism Alex S. Wilner

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44. Political Realism and the Open Society Todd Breyfogle

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Index

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Contributor Biographies

Uriel Abulof is a Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) at Tel-Aviv University’s School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs, where he directs the graduate studies programme. He is also a research fellow at Princeton University’s LISD/Woodrow Wilson School and at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. Abulof studies the politics of fear and legitimation, social movements, existentialism, nationalism and ethnic conflicts. His recent books include The Mortality and Morality of Nations (2015) and Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism (2015); the latter received Israel’s best academic book award (Bahat Prize). He is also the co-editor of Self-Determination: A Double-Edged Concept (2016) and Communication, Legitimation and Morality in Modern Politics (2017). He is the recipient of the 2016 Young Scholar Award in Israel Studies and is currently working on another book for Cambridge University Press on ‘Political Existentialism and Humanity’s Midlife Crisis’. His articles have appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of International Relations, Ethnic and Racial Studies and International Politics. Christopher Adair-Toteff has published extensively on German philosophy and especially on classical German sociology. He is author of Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (2016), Fundamental Concepts in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (2015) and Sociological Beginnings (2005). He is editor of The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch (2017) and The Anthem Companion to Toennies (2016), and is co-editor with Stephen Turner of a book on Edward Shils, due to appear in 2019. Adair-Toteff is completing a book on Raymond Aron’s political philosophy, scheduled to be published in 2019. He has published numerous articles on Toennies, Troeltsch, Simmel and especially Max Weber. His articles on Weber have been published in such journals as Max Weber Studies, Journal of Classical Sociology, History of the Human Sciences, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, Revue Internationale de Philosophie and Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften. His ‘Max Weber’s Charisma’ (Journal of Classical Sociology) has been cited more than 100 times. He is the author of numerous entries in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2017), The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001) and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). He has published on Carl Schmitt

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and is English Language Editor of Carl Schmitt-Studien. He was Honorary Senior Researcher, University of Kent, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Social and Political Thought, University of South Florida, since 1993. He has taught in the US and Europe, and is currently teaching at Zeppelin Universität in Germany. Erica Benner is the author of Really Existing Nationalisms (1995 and 2018), Machiavelli’s Ethics (2009), Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (2013) and Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom (2017). She has written widely on the ethics and intellectual origins of nationalism and on Machiavelli. She received her D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1993 and taught for many years at Oxford and the London School of Economics, before becoming Fellow in Political Philosophy at Yale. John Bew is Professor in History and Foreign Policy in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. In 2015, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Politics and International Studies, and in 2013–14, he held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy at the John W. Kluge Center at the US Library of Congress. He is the author of five books, including Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (2017), which won the 2017 Orwell Prize and Elizabeth Longford Prize, and Realpolitik: A History (2016), a Times book of the year in 2017. He has also served as Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Todd Breyfogle is Director of Seminars for the Aspen Institute, overseeing and moderating humanities-based executive leadership seminars in the US and Europe, including the flagship Aspen Executive Seminar on leadership, values and the good society. Breyfogle has published and lectured widely on the great books, political philosophy, theology, literature, music and liberal education. He is the editor of Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern (1999) and co-editor of Philosophy, Politics, and the Conversation of Mankind (2016). His latest book is On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law (2017). Before joining the Aspen Institute, Breyfogle directed the Honors Program at the University of Denver, taught as a visiting professor at the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Tulsa, and was a fellow at the Liberty Fund. He has received research and curriculum grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK) and the Templeton Foundation, and is editor emeritus of the quarterly journal The American Oxonian. He has lectured at universities or institutes in the US, Europe and India. He chairs the board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, serves on the board of the Alliance for Liberal Learning and is a Senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Breyfogle studied at Colorado College, attended Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (as a Century Fellow and Javitz Fellow). Joshua Cherniss is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He previously taught at Harvard University and Smith College, and has been a graduate fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard, and visiting faculty fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton. He is the author of A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (2013) and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin. He has published articles

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and chapters on Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Weber, Stanley Hoffmann and Albert Camus, and is completing a book exploring the connection between the defence of liberalism and questions of political ethics in twentieth-century political thought. Alan Chong is Associate Professor at the Centre for Multilateralism Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He has published widely on the notion of soft power and the role of ideas in constructing the international relations of Singapore and Asia. These ideational angles have also led to enquiry into some aspects of ‘non-traditional security’ issues in Asia. His publications have appeared in The Pacific Review; International Relations of the Asia-Pacific; Politics, Religion and Ideology; The Review of International Studies; The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Armed Forces and Society; The Journal of Strategic Studies, Global Change, Peace and Security; The Asian Journal of Comparative Politics; and The Japanese Journal of Political Science. He is also the author of Foreign Policy in Global Information Space: Actualizing Soft Power (2007) and co-editor (with Faizal bin Yahya) of State, Society and Information Technology in Asia (2014/15). He is currently working on several projects exploring the notion of ‘Asian international theory’. His interest in soft power has also led to investigation of the sociological and philosophical foundations of international communication. In the latter area, he is currently working on a manuscript titled ‘The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalising World’. In tandem, he has pursued a fledgling interest in researching cyber security issues and international discursive conflicts. He has frequently been interviewed in the Asian media and consulted in think-tank networks in the region. Lindsay P. Cohn (PhD Political Science International Relations/Theory, Duke University, 2007) is Associate Professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the US Naval War College, where she has taught Strategy, International Security, US Foreign Policy, Civil–Military Relations and Military History. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center for International Peace and Security Studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She has held fellowships from the Center for Transatlantic Relations (Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Free University Berlin and Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. As a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, she spent a year working in the office of the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism. Her research and publications focus on Civil–Military Relations, primarily in the areas of personnel management, cross-national comparison, democratic theory and public opinion. She has been invited to speak on issues of military manpower, civil–military relations, and international law of armed conflict at Princeton’s Security Studies Colloquium, the Bundeswehr University Munich, the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for War Studies, the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (Paris), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and West Point’s Modern War Institute. Her other interests are international security, comparative political economy, international law and terrorism/insurgency. She is fluent in German and reads French, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.

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Kody W. Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Dr Cooper received his MA and PhD in Government from the University of Texas–Austin in 2014 and has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University and the University of Missouri. He also spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge University. His research interests lie in the areas of natural law theory, political philosophy, the history of political thought, American constitutional law/theory, and jurisprudence. He is the author of Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law (2018). Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani is a Teaching Fellow at Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs. She received her PhD in 2017 from the same university. Her research focuses on Iran’s foreign policy, particularly its regional policy in the Middle East and South Caucasus. She is the chief editor of the book Nuclear Politics in Asia (2018). Prior to joining Durham University, she held different posts in the Iranian private sector and non-governmental organisations, including the International Centre for Dialogue among Civilizations and Tehran International Studies and Research Institute, where she managed the establishment of Iran’s first web-based digital library of Politics and International Relations, undertook research and hosted several national and international events. Markus Fischer is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton. His work encompasses political theory and international relations theory, in particular Machiavelli’s political thought and political realism. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, Fischer has published with a variety of journals and presses, including Dao, Review of Politics, Security Studies, International Organization, Cambridge University Press and MIT Press. Richard Forno is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country (UMBC), where he directs the UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program, serves as the Assistant Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, and is an Affiliate of the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS). Prior to academia, Forno’s twentyyear career in operational cybersecurity spanned the government, military and private sectors, during which time he helped build a formal cybersecurity program for the US House of Representatives and served as the first Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions (then, the global centre of the internet domain name system), where he helped design and manage the global information assurance program for one of the Internet’s most critical resources. He has been a technical and/or executive consultant on many projects related to cybersecurity, information operations and critical infrastructure protection. As a technologist and student of national security studies, Forno has a strong interest in the influence of technology upon national security, individuals and global society. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in international relations from American University and Salve Regina University, and completed his doctoral work at Curtin University of Technology. He is also a graduate of Valley Forge Military College and the US Naval War College. Stuart Gray is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University, and formerly a Charles and Amy Scharf Post-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

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He specialises in Indian and cross-cultural, comparative political theory, addressing issues concerning the meaning of rule, political realism, human–non-human relations, and contemporary reinterpretation and use of the historical past. His work has been published in journals such as Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics and Philosophy East and West. He is the author of A Defense of Rule: Origins of Political Thought in Greece and India (2017). Miles Hollingworth lives in Northern Italy. He is the author of several books, including Saint Augustine of Hippo (2013) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (2018). Robert Howse received his BA in philosophy and political science with high distinction, as well as an LLB with honours, from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor-in-chief of the Faculty of Law Review. He also holds an LLM from Harvard Law School. Howse has been a visiting professor at, among other institutions, Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne). His books include Leo Strauss Man of Peace (2014), The Regulation of International Trade (with Michael Trebilcock and Antonia Eliason; 4th edition, 2013) and The WTO System: Law, Politics, and Legitimacy (2007). He is also co-translator and principal author of the interpretative commentary Alexandre Kojeve, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (2000). Howse has been a frequent consultant or adviser to government agencies and international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has also been a consultant to the investor’s counsel in a number of investor–state arbitrations. Howse is a member of the Board of Advisers of the NYU Center for Law and Philosophy. He serves on the editorial advisory boards of the London Review of International Law, The Journal of World Investment and Trade, Transnational Legal Theory and Legal Issues of Economic Integration. He is co-founder of the New York City Working Group on International Economic Law and is currently chair of the Executive Committee, Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Economic Globalization and Governance Section. David Martin Jones is Honorary Reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland and Visiting Professor and Teaching Fellow in War Studies at King’s College, University of London. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and has taught at the Open University, National University of Singapore, University of Malaya and the University of Tasmania. His works include Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (1995), Political Development in Pacific Asia (1997), The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (2001), ASEAN and East Asian International Order (2007), The Rise of China and Asia Pacific Security (2013), (with M. L. R. Smith) Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age (2014) and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counter-Insurgency (2015). His essays on aspects of regional political development have appeared in a wide range of academic and policy journals. Menno R. Kamminga is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and International Organization at the University of Groningen. He studied agricultural and environmental economics at Wageningen University and theology at

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Utrecht University. He received his PhD at the University of Groningen for a dissertation on ethics, nationalism and religion. Kamminga’s research and teaching interests broadly concern the tensions between ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ and between ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’, and include the ethics of foreign policy and global society, international relations theory, and methodology of international relations. He has published, among other things, many theoretical and philosophical academic articles (in English and Dutch) on a variety of topics, including Kenneth Waltz’s neorealist theory of international politics, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, John Rawls’s Law of Peoples, Thomas Pogge’s ethics of world poverty, Amitai Etzioni’s socio-economics and communitarianism, global distributive justice, international political theory, Europatriotism, cosmopolitan Europe, freedom of religion, ritual slaughter, carbon commodification, moral diversity in climate politics, normative prudence in international politics, humanitarian intervention and development assistance. Peter Iver Kaufman is Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and holds the George Matthews and Virginia Brinkley Modlin Chair at the University of Richmond. He is the author of, inter alia, Redeeming Politics (1990) and Politically Incorrect: Augustine and Thomas More (2007). David Kerr received his PhD on China–Russia relations from the Institute of Russian and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, in 1995 and subsequently worked as a post-doctoral researcher on Chinese relations with the Russian Far East. From 2002 to 2017 he was Lecturer in the International Relations of China at Durham University, where he was also Director of the Centre for Contemporary China Studies, 2009–14. He has published on the politics, political economy and foreign policy of Russia and China in journals such as Europe–Asia Studies, Review of International Political Economy, International Studies Quarterly and International Affairs and Critical Asian Studies. Two of his edited volumes are The International Politics of EU–China Relations (2007) and China’s Many Dreams: Comparative Perspectives on China’s Search for National Rejuvenation (2015). Paul Kirkland is Associate Professor of Political Science and Great Ideas at Carthage College. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Noble Aims (2009) and several articles on Nietzsche, Du Bois, aesthetics and other topics. He is currently working on a book on the role of tragedy in Nietzsche’s political thought. Douglas B. Klusmeyer earned both a PhD in modern European history and a JD from Stanford University. He was formerly an Associate with the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society and an affiliate faculty member of the History Department at American University, Washington, DC. He has published articles in an array of journals, including Criminal Justice Ethics, Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ethics and International Affairs, International History Review, International Relations, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Studies Review, Journal of Refugee Studies, Law and Humanities, Law, Culture and the Humanities and Publius. He is the editor of several published collections of studies on international comparative citizenship. He is also author of Between Consent and Descent: Conceptions of

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Democratic Citizenship (1996) and Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (2009). He has published a variety of articles on both Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau: most recently, ‘Morgenthau’s Vietnam Writings and the National Security State’, in Hans Morgenthau and the American Experience, edited by Cornelia Narvari (2018). His research interests include citizenship, legal history, migration, history of international political thought, and political ethics. Konstantinos Kostagiannis is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Peloponnese. He has previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Maastricht. He is the author of Realist Thought and the Nation-state (2017). Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the Roman historian Livy and his depictions of politics, politicians and political processes in the Roman republic, and more broadly on Latin literature and its reception. Her current project, a study of the literary mechanisms of historiographical citation, explores the poetics and politics of citation in Livy. In addition to articles on various topics in Classics, she is the author of Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic: Politics in Prose (2015) and You Win or You Die: The Ancient World of Game of Thrones (2017); and an editor of Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition (2012). Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on questions of peace and diplomacy, religion and ethics, humanitarianism, and interpretive/qualitative methodologies. She continues to work on questions of International Relations theory and the interwar period, but has also been researching the ethics of Islamic and Christian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in humanitarian work in Africa, the Middle East, and the centers of NGO power such as Geneva, London, New York and Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of three books and two edited volumes, including Interpreting International Politics (2014), Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (2007, with Audie Klotz) and Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (1999), which won two prizes; she co-edits the blog, ‘Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa’ (CIHA Blog, at www.cihablog.com), which brings religious and critical perspectives into humanitarian debates. She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council/MacArthur Foundation, American Association of University Women, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation, and her articles have appeared in Globalizations, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, Millennium, Ethics & International Affairs, Global Governance, International Journal, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and numerous edited volumes. In 2014, she was co-recipient of the J. Ann Tickner Award of the International Studies Association (ISA), in recognition of ‘bravery in pursuing high-quality, pioneering scholarship that pushes the boundaries of the discipline with a deep commitment to service, especially teaching and mentoring’ (ISA website). Kenneth B. McIntyre is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshott’s Philosophy of Civil Association (2004) and Herbert Butterfield:

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History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (2011). His research interests include the philosophy of history, the philosophy of law, ethics, British Idealism and classical liberalism. He is currently working on a book on value pluralism, negative liberty and the rule of law. David Mayers teaches at Boston University, where he holds a joint appointment in the History and Political Science departments. His principal books are George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy (1988), The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy (1995, awarded Douglas Dillon prize of the American Academy of Diplomacy), Wars and Peace: The Future Americans Envisioned, 1861–1991 (1998), Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (2007), FDR’s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis (2013) and America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945–1956 (2018). Mayers’s most recent journal article is ‘Crossing to Safety from Cold War America: The Collaboration and Friendship of John Paton Davies, Jr. and George Frost Kennan’, Diplomacy and Statecraft (June 2018). Neville Morley is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. He works on a range of topics in ancient history and its modern reception, in particular ancient economic and social structures, ancient and modern ideas of development, globalisation and imperialism, historiography and the representation of the past, and the relationship between ideas of antiquity and modernity. His books include Trade in Classical Antiquity (2007), Antiquity and Modernity (2009) and The Roman Empire: Roots of Imperialism (2010). He has a special interest in the ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his reception in modern historiography and political theory (including Thucydides and the Idea of History, 2014), and is currently working on books on Karl Marx and Classical Antiquity, Thucydides and Political Thought, and the reception of antiquity by Christa Wolf. He blogs on all these topics at http:/www.thesphinxblog.com. John Mueller is Woody Hayes Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Political Science, at Ohio State University. He is also a Cato Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. Among his books are War and Ideas (2011), Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (2010), Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989), Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (1999), The Remnants of War (2004), Overblown (2006), War, Presidents and Public Opinion (1973) and, in collaboration with Mark Stewart, Are We Safe Enough? Measuring and Assessing Aviation Security (2018), Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (2016) and Terror, Security, and Money (2011). He is also the editor of a set of case studies, Terrorism Since 9/11: The American Cases (2018), and has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and academic journals. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Hoover Institution and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. In another field, he is the author of Astaire Dancing (1985) and of two musicals, and provides the DVD commentary track for the 1936 film, ‘Swing Time’. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and has received several government grants. In 2009 he was given the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award, which ‘recognises a person whose singular intellect, assertiveness,

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and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organisational complacency in the international studies community’. Masashi Okuyama has a PhD from the University of Reading and is a senior fellow in the International Geopolitical Institute Japan and a lecturer at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. He regularly teaches at the Staff Colleges of Japan’s Self Defence Forces. His publications (in Japanese) include Geopolitics (2010); he has also translated into Japanese several dozens of books, such as John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2017). Samir Puri is Lecturer in the War Studies Department at King’s College London, a position he has held since 2015. Previously, he served with the UK Foreign Office (2009–15). His assignments included counterterrorism policy, and a secondment to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)’s monitoring mission in east Ukraine. His career began as a Defence Analyst at RAND (2006–9). At King’s, Puri has published books and articles on terrorism, insurgency and the challenges posed by revanchist powers like Russia. His PhD, which he completed at Cambridge University, examined different strategies for engaging non-state armed groups around the world. He is currently writing a book on the lingering impact of yesterday’s empires on today’s security and foreign policy challenges. In 2017, he also served as an academic advisor to the Commonwealth Secretariat, writing its strategy for countering violent extremism. He remains a Research Fellow with RAND. Grace Roosevelt’s research interests have focused on the political and educational thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, bridging the academic fields of political theory and educational philosophy. In the 1980s, Roosevelt discovered a coherent order for the until-then puzzling manuscript pages of Rousseau’s unpublished fragments on ‘L’État de Guerre’. She published the results of her discovery, together with her translation of the text, as ‘A Reconstruction of Rousseau’s Fragments on the State of War’, in History of Political Thought, vol. 8, no. 2. In Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (1990) and in ‘Rousseau vs. Rawls on International Relations’ (The European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 5, no. 3), she developed her interpretation of Rousseau’s international relations theory more fully. Her recent work on Rousseau’s educational writings include a chapter on Rousseau in Philosophy: Education (2017). Among her other interests are the French Enlightenment, eighteenth-century peace projects, American progressivism, and the history of the idea of liberal education. She recently retired from teaching as an Associate Professor at Metropolitan College of New York. Felix Rösch is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Coventry University. He works on encounters of difference in transcultural and intercultural contexts at the intersection of classical realism and critical theories. Amongst others, he has published with the Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Perspectives and Ethics & International Affairs. His most recent books include The Concept of the Political (2012), Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of International Relations (2014), Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview (2015) and Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations:

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Encountering Difference in Japan since the 19th Century (2018). With Hartmut Behr, he edits the Global Political Thinkers book series. William E. Scheuerman’s primary research and teaching interests are in modern political thought, German political thought, democratic theory, legal theory and international political theory. After teaching at Pittsburgh and Minnesota, he joined the Indiana faculty in 2006. Scheuerman’s most recent book is Civil Disobedience (2018). He is also the author of Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (1994), which won two prestigious awards, as well as Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (1999), Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (2004), Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law (2008), Hans J. Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (2009) and The Realist Case for Global Reform (2011). He has edited (with Peter Caldwell) The Rule of Law Under Siege (1996), From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Legal and Political Thought in the Weimar Republic (2000) and (with Hartmut Rosa) High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity (2009). Scheuerman has published in many professional journals, including Constellations, History of Political Thought, International Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics & Society, Review of International Studies and Social Research. Robert Schuett lives in Vienna. He is the author of Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations (2010). Tim Spiekerman teaches politics at Kenyon College. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Political Realism (2001). Peter Stirk is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Durham. His publications in recent years have focused on German political thought, including international political thought, especially the work of John Herz and Carl Schmitt, and the history and politics of military occupation. His monographs include Twentieth-Century German Political Thought (2006), The Politics of Military Occupation (2009) and A History of Military Occupation from 1792 to 1914 (2016). Tom Switzer is Executive Director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. He is also a columnist at Fairfax Media and a presenter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. Zhao Tingyang is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, working on political philosophy, metaphysics and ethics. His main theories include the political theory of the ‘Tianxia system (all-under-heaven)’, the ‘metaphysics of possibilities’ and the ‘ontology of coexistence’, as well as the theory of ‘credit human rights’. He has published many books in Chinese, such as On Possible Lives (sixth printing since 1994), An Introduction to All-under-Heaven System (fourth printing since 2005), Studies on Bad World (third printing since 2009), Politics for Everybody (second printing since 2010), First Philosophy: from Cogito to Facio (second printing since 2013), A Possible World of All-under-Heaven System (fourth printing since 2016), The Making and Becoming of China (second printing since 2016) and Forking Possibilities (2017), as well as books in French, such as Tianxia tout sous un meme ciel (2018) and (with Régis Debray) Du ciel à la terre (2014).

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Jodok Troy works at the University of Innsbruck and has been a visiting scholar (2016–18) at the Europe Center at Stanford University, held a research fellowship (2007) at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, and has been an affiliate scholar of the Swedish National Defense College. His international relations research focuses on religion, ethics, the English School, and classical Realism. For more information see https://uibk.academia.edu/JodokTroy. Alex Wilner is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA), Carleton University, Ottawa. He teaches classes on terrorism and violent radicalisation, intelligence in international affairs, cybersecurity and blockchain technologies, strategic foresight in international security, and a capstone course on Canadian security policy. Past capstone partners have included Public Safety Canada, Global Affairs Canada, Policy Horizons Canada, Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, and the Bank of Canada. Wilner’s research focuses on the application of deterrence theory to contemporary security issues, like terrorism, radicalisation, organised crime, cyber threats and proliferation. His books include Deterring Rational Fanatics (2015) and Deterring Terrorism: Theory and Practice (as editor; 2012). He has published articles in International Security, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Comparative Strategy, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Journal for Deradicalization and International Journal. In 2016, he was awarded a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant from the Government of Canada to study state and non-state cyber deterrence. In 2017, he was given funding by a number of Canadian federal departments to organise a workshop on strategic foresight in national security policy. Prior to joining NPSIA, Wilner held a variety of positions at Policy Horizons Canada (the Government of Canada’s foresight laboratory), the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, and ETH Zurich. Derek M. C. Yuen has a PhD in Strategic Studies from the University of Reading. He is the author of Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read ‘The Art of War’ (2014) and is currently working on a book manuscript on the strategic thought of Mao Zedong. Based in Hong Kong, he has been working on the synthesis of Chinese and Western strategic thought and Taoist strategic thinking. Rashed Uz Zaman has been teaching at the Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, since 1998. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in International Relations from the same university. He also obtained a master’s in Security Studies from the University of Hull, and a PhD in Strategic Studies from the University of Reading. In 2009–11, Zaman was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in 2012. Zaman works on strategic and international security issues. Recent publications include a chapter on Bangladesh and United Nations peacekeeping missions in Paul Williams and Alex J. Bellamy (eds), Providing Peacekeepers: The Politics, Challenges and Future of United Nations Peacekeeping Contributions (2013). A chapter titled ‘South Asian Regionalism and UN Peacekeeping Missions: A Case of “and Never the Twain Shall Meet”?’ has been published in Brendan Howe and Boris Kondoch (eds), Peacekeeping and the Asia-Pacific

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(2016). His piece ‘Strategic Culture in South Asia: Kautilyan Sempiternity’ in Arvind Gupta, P. K. Gautam and Saurabh Mishra (eds), Indigenous Historical Knowledge: Kautilya and his Vocabulary, Part 3 (IDSA) came out in August 2016. A special issue on Commonwealth Armies and Peacekeeping carried his article, ‘The Contribution of Commonwealth Armed Forces in UN Peacekeeping Missions: The Case of Bangladesh’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, vol. 106, no. 4 (August 2017).

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Introduction Political Realism, liberal democracy and world politics Miles Hollingworth and Robert Schuett

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orld politics seems to be accelerating to somewhere new and as yet undefined. We are in a moment in which old certainties and old rivalries are giving way. Political Realism used to be a mainstay of the former way of seeing things. It revolved around the maxim that power is all that can truly count in the final analysis – and, accordingly, it reached its heyday in the nuclear age, when that final analysis could shimmer on the near horizon of every citizen’s waking experience. Political Realism was a theory of international relations that reverse-engineered itself from the atom bomb, and in just the same way that Thucydides had once seen fit to reverse-engineer his version of political reality from the power and fact of the Athenian fighting machine. One could go further back than that – right the way back to the first time that man took up arms against man to settle the outcome of a dispute. Political Realism is therefore as old as the hills, or at any rate, as old as human nature itself; which means that it is, in this its long tradition, an essentially negative doctrine. That is to say, it is not interested so much in the content of political discourse in any particular moment but rather in the fact that it can always be found to be taking place beneath some looming threat. If there were only two people in the world and a rock, then Political Realism would already have all it needed for its fundamental belief, even before those two people had had a chance to open their mouths. The sheer existence of the rock would mean that one of them could be the first to pick it up and raise it over the other’s head. The conversation that would then ensue would be a conversation – or a politics – taking place within the meaning of Political Realism. The antidote to this depressing picture was meant to be democracy, or more to the point, modern Western liberal democracy. If the original democracy was the plan to stymie the would-be tyrant or mob with the irreproachable imposition of the impartial procedure, then the new liberal democracy was the acknowledgement of all that had happened in between, and which Plato had warned of anyway. That is to say, if pure, procedural democracy was a logical response to the problem of someone who would otherwise be able to muscle their way into a polity and rule for as long as that muscle lasted, it harboured a long-term problem, this being its accidental relationship to goodness and virtue. It was not of itself a way of determining who might be fittest to rule. For long periods of European history, this obvious problem kept it in the shadows, and meant that it would have to wait until the great nineteenth-century experiments in rights and suffrage to really flourish. Once again, it found itself to be the only fair alternative to the bogie of aristocratic rule. And then, in an industrialising West, with the first flashes of social justice and the welfare state, the problem of its accidental relationship to goodness and virtue was something that could be handed over to the great

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new question of the betterment of the citizen – of the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’. This was, strictly speaking, illogical, but the illogicality of it went unnoticed. In fact, so readily did the advantages of an improved citizenry sweep the popular mind that it was altogether forgotten that the underlying illogicality might at any moment bite back to undo all the intervening good work – that you could not insert an identity sign between democracy and anything else because democracy was, like the identity sign, merely a function. Thus, democracy came to be equated with all the good and virtuous things that it was said to be bringing about, when really these were the products of wider efforts. Fascism was a sharp and nasty reminder of what could happen if those wider efforts were relaxed. A discontented modern citizenry could turn out to be horribly easy prey to manipulation and short-term hope. The post-1945 remedy for this was the launching of gargantuan projects to cultivate an ultimate class of citizen: pacified and prosperous, and in relationships of irreversible interdependence with her fellow citizens and her state. Versions of this were also enacted between states in the international system. But we notice that, by this means, the problem of determining ‘who might be fittest to rule’ was simply handed over again – and on the grandest scale yet – to the objective of bringing about such wide and general peace and happiness that the problem itself could pass unnoticed and moot. It is instructive in this regard to notice how communism was forced into doing the same. Regimes that, on the face of it, were totalitarian and repressive could hope to pass beyond all such criticism by delivering their citizens into the ultimate state of peace and happiness. Correspondingly, this peace and happiness would come to mean the same thing as the ‘wisdom’ of the citizenry – that is to say, their wisdom in continuing to love and uphold the system. On these terms (and ironically), liberal democracy could only hope for the same – that is, it could only hope that such an eventual state of affairs in its own realms would turn around and become the final answer to Plato’s challenge. And that to top it all, its ‘eventual state of affairs’ would be of an altogether higher category than communism’s, so that it could smoothly and persuasively win that argument, too. What do these observations have to do with The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism today? Quite simply this: if Political Realism has, by its very nature, been a ‘negative’ doctrine – disengaged and aloof from this discourse of wisdom in the state – then those very qualifications might now equip it to play a larger, more active, even more ‘positive’ role, given liberal democracy’s new and apparently perilous position in the West. This demands some explanation. As our example above was intended to show, Political Realism is a logic that holds only so long as its view of human nature holds. Moreover, it always makes you, the reader, the ultimate proof of its appeal. In our example above, it says to you, Sure, there is always the romantic and utopian scenario, in which neither of you reaches for the rock, or even considers reaching for it (the same state of enlightenment that liberal democracy aims to create). But would you really have the nerve just to sit there and trust your life to that hope? Would you? Think about it. What do you really know about your fellow inhabitant of planet earth, other than that they must be running through the same thoughts in their head. The utopian spirit may be strong in you. Fine; congratulations. Maybe you will always be able to hold your nerve. But what about the other? How could you ever be 100 per cent sure of the same in them? Come now, be honest – even 1 per cent of doubt in this direction must abolish the

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utopian dream! So, what to do next? Do you go for a pre-emptive strike and wipe them out? Possibly. But you love your fellow humankind. Fine. Then how about this? How about you agree between the two of you to break the rock in half, and then each take a half? Now, you both possess the equal capacity to destroy one another. Perfect! You can now go about the business of life secure in the knowledge that you have taken the maximum possible measure to protect yourselves from each other. If you do decide to fight it out, neither of you will hold a decisive advantage; and it might just end in mutual destruction. That’s a sobering thought. Best, then, simply to make sure you always have your half-rocks in your pockets, and to go about your daily lives peacefully in the knowledge of that. Here it is plain to see that when Political Realism manipulates you, it manipulates you by means of your self-interest. If you were a nation-state instead of a person, we would say that it was doing so by means of your national interest. In both cases, interest means ‘survival’, while your desire to survive at all costs is taken to be self-evident. Survival, as far as Political Realism is concerned, is the quantum of all rationality. It should now be clear why Political Realism has prospered at the level of international relations while at the same time being resented everywhere else for its gloomy, almost gleeful reductionism. The international system of nation-states remains crude, and therefore crudely continues to prove Political Realism’s claim; because if the linchpin of the international system is the inviolable right of every recognised nationstate to absolute sovereignty within its own borders – if every nation-state is, in this sense, permitted to be ‘closed’ to the others, with a corresponding inviolable right to guard and protect its inner thoughts and motives – then it is logically possible only for nation-states to know each other and to interact at the level of their perceived national interests. It is as though a man and wife were to put aside their long, complex, historical and emotional knowing of each other and continue solely on the basis of their shared mutual commitment to survival. On one level, this would be horrifying. On another level – the level of theory and analysis – it would be deeply preferable because it would have reduced what was infinitely subjective and particular to what could now be traced out easily and accurately with a few basic tools and inputs. This is the reason behind Political Realism’s long-term fascination with ‘systems’ and ‘structures’, for systems and structures are all that it can see through its analytical lens. Once again, we stress that it is in this sense a negative doctrine. Its sole traditional role has been to listen patiently to the world’s great utopian dreams and then to shatter them with a few quick moves. ‘That is all very well, but . . . ’. In other words, Political Realism is its logic; it has only ever been its logic. And it has embraced and made a virtue of that logic. Hence its bullet-proof track record, if only you first accept its terms. That is to say, if you accept seeing the world of international politics through the lens of ‘interest’ and ‘survival’, then you will not be disappointed in the results, in the same way that Charles Darwin was not disappointed when once he applied the principle of natural selection to Nature. In both cases, you are committing yourself to seeing what is already there to be seen. And how different this is to that other commitment that it is possible to make as a human being, which is the commitment to making a new and better world in which to live. Of course, Political Realism, like Science, has an immediate retort here, or a ‘work-around’. If Science must first observe and document the laws of the universe before it can apply them creatively so as to improve the material conditions of humankind, then Political

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Realism can claim to be doing the same. Yes, it is ‘negative’. Yes, its sole initial purpose is to present you with what is really, empirically there in the politics before you. But from then on up, it can, like Science, make its legitimate claim to be using the real to bring about qualitative improvements to human wellbeing. What is more, these improvements, because they are based so stringently upon the real, can be relied upon not to disappoint. In this regard, it is often forgotten how the projects of even the most notorious Realists like Machiavelli and Hobbes were triggered by the sincere conviction that they should engineer a peace and a stability that might actually last because it would be designed to work with humans as they really are, not as they might one day become. In contrast to this, liberal democracy has not been able to fall back on its logic in the same triumphant way. In fact, all that its logic can supply to it in any particular moment are the concepts of fairness and equality. Make no mistake, though, these are mighty concepts and a triumph all of their own. Liberal democracy says, Here is a procedure for determining who should rule, which cannot afterwards be questioned. Here is a procedure that brooks no alternative. You cannot have a democratic politics one day and then abandon it the next. Well, you can – but then that would be bad, evil, wrong. It would be all of those things because democracy supplies the very definitions of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ in decision-making scenarios from which recourse to Divine Wisdom/Supreme Truth/The Super Man has been excluded. If we say that the question of who should rule us cannot be a matter of discovering The Leader and giving them carte blanche over us – if we say that the questions of leadership in the state cannot be settled by telephone calls to the heavens – then democracy is all that can remain to us as the way forward. And as the way forward, it really must then be that its concepts of fairness and equality cannot be challenged. For they have, by that stage, instated themselves not as principles with arguable moral content, but as the clearest and most demonstrative way of counting out people like numbers. The liberal democratic society is thus the society that has made its chief triumph and virtue out of this conclusion. It says that everything that was wrong with ages past was the way in which people could be classified, graded and discriminated against. Fairness and equality in such societies really could only mean that ‘philosophers should be kings’. But now, in the democratic age, political wisdom does not require that we open people up and peer inside their brains for what is or is not there. It does not require that we seek systems and methods of finding out the philosopher kings. It requires the opposite of that. It requires that we treat all people fairly and equally as numbers. No more than numbers. One citizen, one vote. And as for the rest, we hold to the belief that it will somehow just work itself out, in a freewheeling, unregulated progress similar to the market forces of capitalism itself. In this sense, democracy today meets Plato’s challenge in the same way it always has. It swaps the self-evident truth of the philosopher king for the self-evident truth of the identical worth of humans qua humans. But please note that our purpose in pressing these distinctions is not to raise the one above the other. Far from it! It is simply to show how very interesting matters become when one compares these two styles of political argument at this level. For example, if liberal democracy can only work if the societies it is working with are already and automatically working – if the citizenry en masse are of one reasonable and enlightened mind, and if their chosen leaders at each election time are representatives of the same, and if the standard of living is high and universal, and if the nation-state

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suffers no threats from abroad – then it must find itself in immediate and desperate straits if things start to move in the opposite direction. As we have indicated, its very logic simply cannot support movement in the opposite direction. Democracy simply is what you have when you do not have dictatorships and their versions. We repeat, ‘Democracy is the self-evident truth that stands against those systems’ self-evident truth.’ We repeat again, ‘If all is well in society and state, then you can afford to treat citizens impartially and objectively as numbers, but if substantial enough divisions start to occur in that citizenry, then this method can start to produce destructive results.’ In this way, liberal democracy is committed to the idea that there can be no ‘bad apples’ – just ‘apples’, and ‘one apple, one vote’. In fact, the very definition of a ‘bad apple’ would be an apple who believed in the ontological possibility of a ‘bad apple’, for that would then make that apple a discriminating bigot apple. Our point is that all of this works out just fine if it really is the case that the first-world system of life has triumphed and all apples are now much of a muchness. But what if that has not happened, and they are not? Well, the depressing news is that democracy qua democracy can do absolutely nothing about this situation – can indeed speak nothing into it – because long ago it staked everything on the supreme virtue of the numbers game and of keeping silent on what inwardly separates citizen from citizen. What is more, democracy today is, thanks to technology, returning at a pace to the pure form of its classical roots. The single-issue referendum, made swift and expedient by mobile and online culture, will increasingly take over the big decisions in the state. After all, it was only ever the technological obstacles to direct democracy in the expanding nations of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries that gave us democracy as we have known it until recently, with the citizens’ power being filtered through representatives of their interests. If democracy is all about that power, and if there is now a technical way to deliver it pure and unfiltered, then it simply must be pursued – because there is absolutely nothing in democracy’s own logic that can stand against it. And catching up with the referendum even, is the device of the online petition: the twenty-first-century version of the street protest – a quick and simple way to deliver the power of the plain force of numbers. Once again, we want to point out that we are not pursuing a partial line here, but simply following the facts of the moment to where they would lead us. And as we stressed above, fairness and equality are mighty concepts and a critically important triumph of their own, as is the power of the plain force of numbers. Has there been anything more stirring in recent political history than the way in which these numbers and the solidarity movements brought about the end of the communist bloc? We think not. But the point from which these examples will still not allow us to escape is what we called above the ‘accidental’ relationship of democracy to goodness and virtue. They are examples of when the power of numbers was able to coincide with the high moral content of the moment. Yet if the moral content of the moment had been low, or even monstrous, then the power of numbers would have delivered that instead. There have, of course, been some ingenious attempts to overcome this disconnect between the numerical majority and the high ground. But generally speaking, these have involved contriving ways to make the logic of democracy hedge against itself. These so-called ‘original position’ arguments – the most famous recent example being that of John Rawls – attempt to overcome democratic logic’s moral blindness after the fact by developing hypothetical original positions that would come before the fact.

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That is to say, if democracy is at bottom a logical function imposed upon a pre-existing society – like the function of counting imposed upon a barrel of apples – then original position arguments attempt to give that function a beginning in history. Logic is thus made to vote on itself, or for itself, by contracting humans who, being humans, supply the moral intention and eyesight that it would otherwise be impossible to impute to mere functionalism. If Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first to show systematically that logic can never be wrong, for the reason that it can never conceive or construct an interest for itself (a self-interest), then Rawls was the first to show systematically that you can appear to get around this obstacle by contriving the circumstances in which humans cannot but act logically each time. If logic can have no awareness, or pleasure, in the knowledge that it is being logical, then at least the human animals now replicating it can. Rawls’s thought experiment therefore makes you, the reader, do for logic what it cannot do for itself. The ‘principles of fairness’ that are arrived at in this way are as irreproachable as if logic really did step out of its infinity (its infinite constancy) and give itself a political beginning in time. It is as though humans had, once upon a time, voted the law of gravity into existence, or the second law of thermodynamics, rather than that these laws, along with all the other laws of nature and number, had merely existed all along. Here we see isolated and magnified the great strength, but also the great weakness, of democratic logic. On the one hand, it has absolutely nothing to do with the existential and ethical business of human life in association, save that it is a law of the universe brought down to settle a decision once it has been decided that it shall not be settled by recourse to the wisdom of the better human, or the better god. But on the other hand, because it is a law of the universe, once brought down and entrenched, it becomes irresistible – to the extent that it must, by definition, make every alternative to it seem like political evil. Once again, to resist it would be like resisting the law of gravity or the second law of thermodynamics. And like the second law of thermodynamics, democracy therefore also slips into becoming political thought’s ‘arrow of time’. It points from left to right, from the past to the future, such that there can be no turning back, because the future must always be qualitatively better than the past if democracy is to answer Plato’s challenge with the manifest evidence of a universally improved – of a universally wiser and more ethical – citizenry. There are many today who would say that the unimagined is happening: that the arrow is starting to point in the opposite direction, and that liberal democracy is starting to turn up results that challenge the idea of a universally improved citizenry. Once again, we wish to stress that we are not taking a position on whether or not this is the case. We are simply noting the feeling in the air, and noting it, we are trying to say that there has never then been a better moment to rehabilitate and rediscover Political Realism. Not because Political Realism is on one or the other side of this development, but precisely because – as we pointed out above – it is ‘disengaged and aloof’ from this problem of ‘wisdom in the state’. That is to say, it offers a political lens and language that does not make democratic logic’s normative and transformative demands on the human element, but which makes it its business to investigate that element as it really is. We repeat, if the rhetoric of Liberal Democracy runs simultaneously with the concept of the citizen that it positively forms and educates, then the rhetoric of Political Realism looks to the psychological hard-wiring that has allowed that citizen to be

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a zoon politikon in the first place. If liberal democracy has had to look to history to see the proof of concept that its plain logic cannot otherwise supply it with, then Political Realism does not now find itself under the same burden. For it has only ever sought to identify the internal and external structuring that makes it possible to speak sensibly – and at all – about the self-interest of the human animal and the national interest of the state. It does not therefore look into history in order to see a narrative that points in any particular direction, but seeks to find there only new and amplifying material for its science of the human condition. What we are saying, then, is that Political Realism cannot be inherently conservative or liberal or anything on that scale. It can be worked up to be, of course, and has been. But at base, it looks to do only what liberal democracy and other such programmes of reform cannot do for themselves, which is to furnish the foundational logic of human nature that their later logics must rely upon at second hand. Now there are, of course, inevitable historical reasons why Political Realism has had to look like the chief antagonist of all that would be positive and idealistic in world politics; we have referenced these above. They can be summed up as the idea – still held to in Western political thought – that all political thinking can be reduced to the belief that human nature is either plastic or adamant. Whole histories of the subject have been written on this idea that you divide by the denominator of human nature in order to arrive at one or the other belief – with ‘plasticity’ standing for the progress of the species, and ‘adamance’ for the arbitrary and elitist opposition to it. What we are now saying in response to this is that human nature cannot be – and has never really been – the result obtained by performing this calculation. It is not a quantity of positive or negative integers, for it does not in fact exist within the logic that makes those very calculations and arguments of political thought possible. It does not because it is that logic. Think of it like this, if you like. It really does not matter whether you believe that human nature has always been plastic and go on to argue a theory of politics that exemplifies plasticity (or vice versa), or whether you believe that it has always been adamant and go on to argue a theory of politics that exemplifies that (or vice versa), for in both cases you commit yourself to a logic of political truth and political meaning that must settle itself at the biological level of the human animal. Political truth and political meaning thus refer to the fact that the human animal has ‘always been this’ or ‘always been that’, where what is significant is not the this or the that but the always. This is exactly analogous to the realisation that would lead Sigmund Freud to have to start speaking of ‘metapsychology’. It became obvious to him that for psychology really to be psychology – for it really to be able to provide total, scientific explanations of events involving humans – then it had better find a way of locating the always outside and apart from the mental processes being documented. In other words, if the always is going to be that which makes possible the mental processes as processes – if it is going to supply the principle in relation to which they can be infallible (in relation to which they can be logical) – then this principle cannot itself be such that it could ever come under the jurisdiction of the human mental apparatus. Or what is the same thing: it cannot itself be a judgement of value. Rather, it must be such as makes judgements of value possible in the first place. We repeat, judgements of value become what they are and logical, only once they can be seen in relation to a principle that is so self-evident that it can unquestionably stand as the first impulse to human thought. We are back to the language of the opening paragraph, in which we noted that Political

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Realism concerns itself with what can be ‘reverse-engineered’ from the point of view of a single incontrovertible fact. In the stark and forensic lands of psychology, the point is seen clearly. For Freud, it was the ‘pleasure principle’: the principle that ‘dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start’ (Freud 1930: 76). But in the charged and emotive lands of political theory, in which obstacles to progress and enlightenment must acquire an instant anathema, the very idea of an always – and let us not put too fine a point on it, the very idea, then, of the Christian doctrine of original sin – must at once be pounced upon and discredited. Of course, Political Realism has itself generated a nomenclature and a discipline, and a history of that discipline’s development and reception. It has been a leading school of thought within the study of international relations; and you will see its history of scholarship referenced and illuminated in many of these essays. But what we have tried to do, on the whole, is to come in with a clean cut. If the trouble and confusion that world politics is in today are down to the fact that its lens and language now stretch across some 2,000 years of intervening history and emotion, then a plain basic Realism – such as we have depicted it above – may now offer some much-needed cleansing. It is precisely because Political Realism does not play for a team, and never has, that it can be so useful to us now. You will accordingly see many essays here that have not been written by card-carrying Realists. Some will even show their authors engaging with Political Realism for the first time. What is more, we have tried to snap the elastic that has held the tradition of Political Realism to the Western, nation-state view of the world. For one of the consequences of globalisation and the breaking down of walls has been the natural turn towards the universal human person as the touchstone of analysis and dialogue – such that it simply can no longer be assumed to be the case that people will remain to be counted and theorised as units of their native cultures and nations. Yes, the world is fast becoming a domain through which people do move freely and expect to be able to do so. And this turns up a situation that Political Realism is perfectly adapted to address – arguably, the only situation that it ever really was adapted to address. This is its special subject: Homo sapiens. You will therefore also discover here chapters that seek to identify and explain the sense in which Realism can be observed in different parts of the globe, as well as chapters that seek to take the measure of our new and accelerating situation on some of its hot-button issues; and then chapters that ask what a realistic response to these issues should look like now. Because while Political Realism has so often had to exist in hindsight, as the retroactive justification of unpopular action, these chapters show it to be just as capable of initiating viable and visionary solutions for the future.

Bibliography Freud, Sigmund (1953–1974) [1930], Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 vols, London: Hogarth, p. 76 in vol. 21, pp. 64–145.

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1 Political Realism and Human Nature Classical and modern arguments Erica Benner

Chapter Overview

T

hree authors are most often named as founding fathers of Western realism: Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes. All three take the study of human nature as a basis for examining the possibilities and limitations of politics, pay close attention to sources of conflict that stem from basic human drives, and consider human beings at their worst, not just their rational or pacific best. But attempts to make classical authors speak to more recent realist concerns have often carried high costs, for both the quality of realist thinking and the history of political thought. Modern realists tend to read the classics in a highly selective way. Focusing on arguments that they could use against ‘idealist’ or ‘moralist’ ideas and projects, they often give short shrift to others that have some whiff of idealism or moralism. In the interests of balance, this chapter looks at three realist positions that are frequently traced back to classical thinkers: pessimism about human nature, structural determinism, and the idea that political prudence and morality involve separate kinds of reasoning that often conflict. It asks how far so-called classical realist authors in fact defend these views, and tries to illustrate the richness of classical arguments about human nature and its considerable moral potential. *

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Realism claims to identify the most basic realities that drive political action and limit what it can achieve. All political theories and doctrines, of course, do this to some degree. But writers who explicitly defend realism treat the notion of reality – rather than principles of justice, ideas of the good life and the best state, or religious precepts – as their main guide to explaining political life and prescribing ways to deal with it. Realists have widely diverse views about what should count as basic political realities.1 For the past century or so, many have focused on structural and social facts – the ‘autonomy of politics’ as a field of action, the competitive logic of international relations, or the plurality of human values – rather than physical or psychological facts about human beings themselves. Yet it is hard to distinguish structures from the people who create and sustain them. Even when factors like topography or geography seem to shape politics in fundamental ways, politics always involves distinctively human responses to natural and social environments, and unique human aptitudes for forming, sustaining or sabotaging relations with other people.

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Unsurprisingly, then, the old-fashioned concept of ‘human nature’ has never vanished from realist discourse. Political scientists are fond of pointing out that older accounts of human nature are speculative, tendentious or steeped in archaic prejudices and moral judgements. Realists of a more historical and philosophical bent, however, still draw freely on very old ideas about human nature, defying efforts to supplant them with the harder sciences of psychology or neurology, for though the term ‘political realism’ is a rather recent invention, its exponents trace their main ideas back to the dawn of history-writing and political philosophy. Three authors are most often named as the founding fathers of Western realism: Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. All of them take the close study of human nature as their starting point for examining creative possibilities and limitations of politics. They pay close attention to sources of conflict that stem from basic human drives, place the analysis of such conflict at the centre of their political thought, and refuse to shy away from scrutinising human beings at their worst, not just their rational or pacific best. Attempts to make ancient and early modern authors speak to more recent realist concerns have been both fruitful and problematic. The writers who began describing their own positions as realpolitik, and later ‘realism’, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw themselves as warriors in high-stakes political battles. They lived in times of virulent ideological strife, when republican and communist ambitions to reshape the world crashed against stubborn traditionalism, national rivalries, and disagreements over political values. Modern realists called on classical writers to support their arguments about the imprudence of pursuing such idealistic programmes. But they often read the classics selectively, highlighting ideas that they could use against opponents while neglecting others that had some whiff of idealism or moralism. Such selectivity has carried high costs for realism, and for the history of political thought. This chapter tries to provide a taste of the richness of classical arguments about human nature, and its very considerable moral potential.

Political Pessimism What I call ‘modern’ realism and its close relative realpolitik were born in response to the French Revolution and Napoleonic invasions of German lands.2 Revolutionary rhetoric trumpeted high hopes that the decadent old orders of Europe could be swept away forever, to be replaced with the universal rights of man and brotherly republics. The revolution’s critics, including some whose views have come to be associated with realism, doubted that radical measures could bring about permanent progress in human affairs. The basic obstacle was the change-resistant, imperfectly rational nature of human beings. Instead of seeking to found perfect republics in haste, the German–Austrian thinker Friedrich Gentz wrote, in 1805–6, that one should move slowly to reform corrupt political systems, and never expect to achieve perfect harmony within states or in international relations (Gentz 2010: 56). Anti-perfectionist and anti-rationalist realism gained momentum over the next two centuries with the flowering of allegedly ‘utopian’ politics, especially revolutionary communism and internationalist idealism after the two World Wars. In the first decades of the twentieth century, realism emerged under that name as a distinct ‘school’ of thought in academic studies of international relations and later politics.

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From the outset, founders of modern realism looked for, and easily found, supportive arguments in the works of Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes. All three men lived in times of violent contrasts between soaring political ideals and catastrophic realities. Thucydides recounts a wartime oration in which Pericles, leading statesman of Athens, praises his city’s military, political and cultural greatness to the skies – at a time when many thousands of Athenians were dying from plague or in battle, and when the city’s supposedly free democracy was run ‘like a tyranny’ by Pericles himself (Thucydides 2003: II.35–46, II.65). In late fifteenth-century Florence, Machiavelli witnessed the divisive effects of a crusading, ascetic politics led by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, whose sermons urged Florentines to build a city of angels on earth.3 To Hobbes, whose first published work was a translation of Thucydides’ history, there were few greater threats to peace than the Christian millenarian utopias and democratic excesses that fuelled the English Civil War. These classical writers give readers good reason to doubt that human nature is, or can ever be made, fit to sustain societies free from division and strife, at domestic or international levels. Conflict and disagreement, they suggest, are rooted in human beings’ physical and psychological make-up, and thus inescapable. Even if a supremely wise legislator were to design a perfectly rational constitution, or temporarily convert whole cities to angelic virtue through force, persuasion or prayer, unruly humanity would soon find ways to corrode the perfection. Egoistic ambition, short-term thinking, excessive regard for one’s family and friends and irrational fears of strangers, capacities for deceit and self-deception: these are the essential realities that politics must address. As Machiavelli put it, anyone who wants to design laws and institutions must ‘presuppose that all men are bad [rei], and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have a free opportunity for it’ (Machiavelli 1996a: I.3). If legislators assume that most people are good or fully rational, they usually find that their constitutions quickly collapse, or wind up as idealistic facades covering rampant corruption. Hobbes agrees that it is prudent to adopt a general attitude of suspicion towards one’s fellow humans, especially in times like his own when there was widespread confusion about what qualities ought to be called ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Even if ‘there were fewer evil men than good men, good, decent people would still be saddled with the constant need to watch, distrust, anticipate, and get the better of others, and to protect themselves by all possible means’ (Hobbes 1998: Preface). Passages like these give the impression that classical realist views of human nature are thoroughly pessimistic. Yet modern realist readers often focus too one-sidedly on earlier authors’ pessimism while showing less interest in other arguments that temper it. On the one side, for example, Machiavelli’s reputation as a human nature pessimist seems deserved if we read some of his best-known lines out of context. The generality of men, he declares in his Prince, are ‘ungrateful, fickle pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain’ (Machiavelli 1998: 17). On the other side, in The Prince and other works, Machiavelli spends a great deal of time examining human capacities that allow people to contain corruption and to build far better – even excellent – political orders. Among these are abilities to think far ahead and consider the consequences of present actions; to consider how one’s unchecked desires can harm oneself and others; to study the world and other people, and understand how they necessarily constrain one’s own projects; and to foster creative capacities to think beyond what is and what has been, and imagine ‘what can reasonably exist’ (Machiavelli 1996b: 257–60).

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Machiavelli associates these self-critical yet constructive capacities with the qualities he calls virtù.4 They are not entirely innate but have to be developed through education and hard work. His understanding of virtù is anti-perfectionist and antiaristocratic. He treats very few historical or contemporary individuals as paragons of virtuoso excellence, and even they are far from perfect.5 The most important kind of virtù is that found among ordinary citizens or whole peoples, fostered with the help of well-crafted institutions and laws. Though legislators should ‘presuppose that all men are bad’ by nature and assume that human ‘malignity’ is a constant threat to political life, their aim should be to reduce the degrees of badness in people’s outward actions. This, for Machiavelli, is the work of laws that help ‘make men good’ by placing limits on each person’s freedom (Machiavelli 1996a: I.3). And the capacity to make self-improving laws is as much part of human nature as malignità. Far from supporting a draconian approach to legislation, Machiavelli uses the presupposition of badness to call for moderate punishments for most crimes, and to stress the value of rigorous, transparent judicial procedures. A prince who studies human nature well and knows his own limits, we read in the Prince, will ‘be slow to believe and to move’ when dealing with people accused of crimes; ‘nor should he make himself feared, and he should proceed in a temperate mode with prudence and humanity’. And ‘if he also needs to proceed against someone’s life, he must do it when there is suitable justification and manifest cause’, or his subjects’ natural indignation will rise against him (Machiavelli 1998: 17). Machiavelli’s desire to encourage human nature’s constructive potential gives even his dark-toned Prince an upbeat air, leaving readers with an exhilarating sense of humanity’s creative political potential. Hobbes’s account of human nature contains a similar mix of pessimistic and constructive elements. On the bleaker side, he posits as ‘a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’, and sets out three main ‘causes of quarrel’ in human life: competition, diffidence and the desire for glory (Hobbes 1996: 11, 13). On the other side, ‘Reason is no less of the nature of man than passion, and is the same in all men’ (Hobbes 1994: 15). Though people’s passions too often overpower their reason, Hobbes insists that most individuals are able to distinguish desires that are rational – above all, ‘life, health, and . . . so far as it can be done, security of future time’ – from those that aim at merely apparent or fleetingly attractive goods (Hobbes 1991: 2, 6). He holds out some hope that efforts like his to throw a spotlight on rational or ‘real’ goods might move people to take bold peace-seeking measures. Hobbes’s moderate optimism is mainly rooted in his account of human reason, but it finds further support in his view that most people have ‘desire of good to another’, or what he calls benevolence, good will, charity and kindness (Hobbes 1996: 6). Contrary to a common misperception, Hobbes does not see human passions and desires as altogether egoistic. He does see Christian love-thy-neighbour teachings as ineffectual unless they are allied with purely rational motives for seeking peace: chiefly, the desire for self-preservation. But natural dispositions to seek good for others can give support to peace-seeking efforts, even if the others one cares most about are only close friends and relations. Since Thucydides’ only known work is a history of a war that ended disastrously for Athenians and all of Greece, it is tempting to read him as a thoroughgoing pessimist.

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Viewed from one side, his history of the Peloponnesian War is a fine-grained study of the many decisions – some reckless, others seemingly brilliant, or at any rate couched in brilliant rhetoric – that drove Greeks to fight other Greeks for more than two decades, to the detriment of all concerned. As a portrait of human nature seen through the prism of war, Thucydides’ work shows how ambitious cravings and fears can produce terrible conflicts out of seemingly trifling quarrels, and then become so grotesquely magnified in the course of conflict that they blot out peace-seeking reason. Politics here seldom looks like a rational or constructive activity. Inside democratic Athens it is effectively the rule of one overconfident leader, Pericles, then after his death a nasty, brutal competition between rabble-rousing demagogues. Warring Greek states continue to observe customary protocols and laws governing their relations but interpret them in self-serving ways or find pretexts for violating established norms. Soon, common standards of conduct have been so badly shredded that the Athenians stop paying lip service to them, declaring to a conquered people, the Melians, that might is right and winners need not take account of justice. ‘You know as well as we know’, Thucydides has them say, ‘that what is just is considered in human arguments only when the necessity on both sides is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, while the weak yield what they must’ (Thucydides 2003: V.59). Human drives that destroy peace – especially philotimia (ambition) and pleonexia (the quest for more than one’s share of power, wealth or other goods) – triumph over all the better parts of human nature that Thucydides lets readers glimpse from time to time. Yet he shows just enough of these parts, struggling harder to reverse the rot as the war goes on, to temper his history’s pessimistic overtones. His first pages tell us that after centuries of war and disunity, the Greeks had, not long ago, started calling themselves ‘Hellenes’, acknowledging with this common name a sense of community or koine that was rooted in shared language, religion and customs but also had strong affective dimensions. However hard-won and fragile this common Greekness was, Thucydides suggests, it had proved beneficial for a time, and could perhaps be recovered (Thucydides 2003: I.2–19). He has a handful of individuals try to stop the onset of war, and later the decay of humane standards under pressure of war. Sparta’s king, Archidamus, ‘a man reputed to be both sagacious and prudent’, anticipates clearly its long-term costs, while an otherwise unknown Athenian, Diodotus, reminds vengeful fellow-citizens that conquered people will keep revolting and weaken their conqueror’s position if they are treated too harshly (Thucydides 2003: I.80–5, III.42–51). Though pleonexia defeats the old Greek virtue of sôphrosunê (wise temperance) in the end, Thucydides’ history reveals as much about human beings’ extensive – if deplorably underexercised – capacities for self-restraint as it does about their talent for self-destruction. For Thucydides and his translator Hobbes, nothing epitomises the ambivalence of human nature more than language or logos, a word often translated as both ‘speech’ and ‘reason’. Human speech is both a basic cause of strife and the essential means of moderating it. Language is the greatest and most dangerous of human inventions. On the one hand, as Hobbes writes, language is the principal means through which people ‘devise errors’ and spread them far and wide. With its power to seduce, abuse logic and misrepresent reality, speech ensures that ‘man errs more widely and dangerously than can other animals’; he can ‘teach what he knows to be false’ or ‘lie and render the minds

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of men hostile to the conditions of society and peace’ (Hobbes 1991: 10, 3). On the other hand, ‘the most noble and profitable invention’ of human ingenuity was that of Speech . . . whereby men register their Thoughts . . . and declare them to one another for mutuall utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Common-wealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves. (Hobbes 1996: 4) In their different ways, Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli all try to warn readers about the many ways that language can deform perceptions of reality. At the same time, they insist on the need for people to agree on the meanings and proper uses of words. Without them, we could scarcely speak of reality or truth at all. But we need these words and concepts to remind us, at minimum, of the need to seek some common ground in intellectual and political discussions, even if we dispute their exact content.

Determinism and Unilateral Realism But if classical realists are not as pessimistic as some modern realists suggest, there is another kind of human nature pessimism that may seem to capture their positions more accurately. Instead of stressing human ‘badness’ or conflict-making qualities, it says that even if human beings happened to be rational peace-loving creatures, they could not always seek peace because the pressures that make for conflict are stronger than human wills. One version of this argument is what political philosophers call value pluralism. It claims that political conflict is inevitable because people have irreducibly diverse and conflicting values and conceptions of the good (Berlin 1991). A more specifically political kind of determinism gained popularity from the early nineteenth century on, particularly in the wake of Napoleon’s incursions into Germany. Deploring his divided country’s military helplessness, the young philosopher G. W. F. Hegel urged Germans to shake off their pacific provincialism and realise that, unless they armed themselves, playing the same power-political games as the greater powers around them, they would soon lose their last scraps of independence (Hegel 1999). Later realists tend to describe the pressures of realpolitik as ‘structural’: the inherently competitive nature of politics or interstate relations makes conflict a constant threat to individual and state security, and makes the pursuit of ideals of the good life a luxury that few can afford. To modern realists looking for a classical thinker who advances something like structural realism, Hobbes seems the most obvious candidate. For one thing, his philosophy of man is mainly determinist: he treats material bodies and their motions as the most evident human realities, and states outright that people have only a narrow margin of freedom in their actions. His political theory too lends itself readily to a structural determinist reading, especially at the international level. Rational people, Hobbes declares, have no choice but to seek peace, and the only way to secure it is by agreeing to submit to an absolute sovereign. Since Hobbes seems to favour plural sovereigns over any form of ‘universal monarchy’, some readers infer that relations among sovereign states must have the same features as relations among individuals in his state of nature: endless mutual suspicion, treaty violations and struggles for advantage, with each party claiming that they have no choice but to act like egoists.

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Yet this kind of rigid determinist account ignores one of Hobbes’s key points: namely, that to escape the state of nature, as reason requires them to do, people have to make several important choices between more and less collaborative political arrangements. First, people who inhabit a state of nature have to take the biggest step of deciding whether to keep up their state of war or to escape it by contracting for peace. If they choose peace, they then have to decide what form of sovereign to create: a monarch who rules them as subjects, or an assembly that governs them as citizens. After that, the sovereign, whether human being or assembly, has to make hard choices – on a daily basis – about whether to legislate and govern in accordance with the laws of nature or to follow his or her own inclinations, passions, desires, aversions. While Hobbes takes no strong sides on the choice between one-person sovereign or sovereign assembly, he could not be clearer in stating that there is only one sensible choice regarding the other two options. Reason commands people to put aside their conflicts and covenant for peace; and it urges sovereigns to take the laws of nature as their own higher law, commanded by reason and God. The laws of nature enjoin individuals and sovereigns constantly to seek peace, put aside demands for a greater share of liberty than they would allow others, honour agreements, strive to accommodate themselves to the rest, avoid showing hatred and contempt to others, and conscientiously seek arbitration to resolve their quarrels (Hobbes 1996: 14–16). These laws strongly discourage the kinds of unilateral, me-first realism that seem unavoidable when people imagine that they have no choice but to put their own advantage ahead of others’ reasonable concerns. The laws view the needs of peace from a non-egoistic standpoint, without allowing individuals or states to abandon concerns about self-preservation. They imply, in fact, that a politics of unilateral self-help is a singularly unrealistic means of securing the basic human goods of life, health and future security. Hobbes calls the laws of nature ‘Immutable and Eternall’ rules, ‘dictates of reason and Theorems . . . delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things’ (Hobbes 1996: 15). Since those laws are not the product of human agreements, they lack the material force of civil laws; there is no political body that can enforce them. But this does not mean they are toothless, for Hobbes says it is patently self-destructive to ignore them. A sovereign’s daily decisions to obey or disregard the laws of nature are momentous, then. The commonwealth’s long-term safety and wellbeing depend on them, far more than on the initial decision to form an absolute sovereign. If sovereigns choose wisely and let the laws of nature guide them, they will do their fallible best to devise civil laws and policies that are clement rather than harsh, and founded on transparent justice and equity rather than tyrannical self-will. In international relations they will practise self-restraint, keep their promises, conscientiously use diplomacy and arbitration before resorting to force, and respect other states’ freedom, aware that these are the most realistic ways to preserve the general benefits of peace. The necessity to choose and take responsibility for one’s choices, then, is at the heart of Hobbes’s theory. This belies the supposedly Hobbesian notion that individuals and states are locked in a vast, mechanical system where units struggling to survive have no choice but to look out for themselves, cooperating only in situations where this helps their own cause. While human beings’ physical make-up and natural inclinations make them act in predictably egoistic ways, they also have a small measure of freedom to choose not to act on all their impulsions. It is another question whether

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people are likely to use their modest freedom well. As a close student of Thucydides and observer of his own times, Hobbes was inclined to think that they seldom do. Nevertheless, if cunning orators and religious fanatics do not lead them too far astray, their natural reason gives them the basic resources they need to improve their political conditions.6 Many modern realists have also read Thucydides as a structural determinist.7 Extrapolating from various passages, they think he implies that all political bodies, whether small Greek poleis or large modern states, are forced to be wary of all other states and to calibrate their relative power constantly. If any state grows too powerful, the structural realist Thucydides implies, it poses an existential threat to others, even if they share culture and interests or have no history of conflicts. But interpreters who scour Thucydides’ pages searching for structural causes of war overlook the general, anti-determinist tenor of his history. No writer more vividly describes the unforced choices that led to a war that Athenians were eager to provoke, while the Spartans, ignoring the cautionary counsels of their king, Archidamus, let themselves be provoked. Later attempts to make peace were thwarted not by structural necessities but by collective and individual decisions, often spurred by dazzling speakers like Pericles and his nephew Alcibiades, who persuaded voters to back their ambitious war aims. By taking readers straight into the action, letting them hear leaders’ speeches and witness citizens’ reactions, Thucydides implies that things might have gone differently, had one speaker been a little more (or less) persuasive, or if the fickle fortunes of battle had been other than they were. All this makes Thucydides’ narrative far more sensitive to contingencies and choices than most structural realist arguments. He is outstanding at describing the mentality of people who behave and speak like structural realists but does not suggest that they are right to do so. Athenians and other Greeks frequently declare that they are under a natural necessity to acquire as much empire as they can. Sparta’s Archidamus warns his countrymen not to adopt this deterministic mentality in opposing the Athenians and spells out options that remain open. Move slowly, he tells his hawkish council. Use diplomacy and long-established methods of arbitration, and do not let anger, fear or pride force you into a costly and destructive war (Thucydides 2003: I.80–5). Hobbes’s laws of nature generalise much the same advice. Thucydides’ account of the urgent, escalating competition between Athens and Sparta vividly evokes Athenian ambitions and Spartan fears of falling behind, as well as widespread Greek fears of being ‘enslaved’ by other Greeks or foreigners. With understated empathy, the historian probes the deeper reasons for these fears. Fifty years before the Peloponnesian War, Athenians had been forced to fight the Persians alone after the rest of Greece had been conquered or paralysed with terror (Thucydides 2003: I.89–117). The trauma of the Persian Wars made a policy of unilateral self-help seem reasonable to many Athenians, as did the afterglow of their unexpected victory. And yet, Thucydides’ narrative implies, the unilateral efforts of Athens to build a formidable navy and the city’s sudden outburst of imperial expansionism were neither necessary nor prudent. Of our three classical realists, Machiavelli is most explicit about the role of free choice in human affairs. Like Hobbes, he admits that human beings have, at most, a tiny margin of freedom in politics and other fields of activity. Pondering the uncontrollable

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powers of fortune and the constant upheavals in political life, he is often inclined, he tells readers of The Prince, to doubt that deliberate action can achieve anything at all.8 But having indulged these gloomy thoughts, Machiavelli says, he decides that human beings have powers of their own that can limit fortune’s worst effects. For ‘it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide’ against fortune’s floods ‘with dykes and dams in such a mode that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so harmful nor so licentious’ (Machiavelli 1998: 25). The modest powers of free will enable humans to make order where nature provides none, and to ‘regulate’ fortune without pretending to master her completely (Benner 2013: Ch. 25). Freedom can, of course, be used badly or well, in accordance with virtù or not. Virtuous people do not wait for disaster to strike but think and work ahead, building dykes and dams. People who underestimate their freedom let themselves be carried away by the floods and call them ‘necessity’; people who overestimate their power lash out violently when trouble strikes, though their arrogance helped fuel it. The idea that human beings always have choices, even under harsh necessity, is also the introductory message of Machiavelli’s Discourses. The most realistic way to deal with pressures or obstacles that human beings cannot entirely master is to use one’s small freedom judiciously and impose new, manmade necessities on unruly nature. The best necessities, Machiavelli suggests, are not imposed aggressively on yielding matter. They are orders and laws (ordini e leggi) that work with their raw material to form lasting political arrangements where people enjoy freedom and security (Machiavelli 1996a: I.1 and II.2; see also Benner 2009: Ch. 4). Manmade necessities cannot transform the raw material of a geographic ‘site’, or that of human nature, into something else. Human virtù only regulates; it cannot magically eliminate natural harshness from landscapes or badness from humans. Machiavelli’s most realistic legislators and leaders – Aeneas, Camillus, Fabius Maximus, Hiero – respect the human nature they seek to regulate and know their own limits.9 They seek to draw the best out of difficult terrains, to check bad ‘humours’ without violently repressing them, and to motivate virtuous deeds and dispositions in people they know are only human, like themselves. This anti-determinist position seems to make Machiavelli inhospitable to any kind of structural realism. His works do contain memorable lines that might seem to gesture in that direction. Since human nature has so many bad qualities, he says, ‘a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good’ and must therefore learn to be not-good as well (Machiavelli 1998: 15). If we observe that political life tends to have a surfeit of not-good conduct, we might conclude that Machiavelli is hinting at the ‘autonomy of politics’ thesis: the view that the structure of political competition and bargaining forces people to engage in more brutal types of conflict than is necessary outside politics.10 But this goes well beyond what Machiavelli ever says or implies, and runs against the anti-determinist thrust of his thought. He generally says that human nature operates in exactly the same way in domestic politics, international relations and every other walk of life.11 His most thoughtful arguments further say that the surest way to build lasting power is by making ‘partners’ or ‘confederates’ with consenting others to defend common freedoms, and to make laws and institutions that give everyone a fair share of authority, rather than seeking unilaterally to dominate.12

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Political Prudence and Morality Following closely on this last point, a common realist claim is that morality and political prudence are two very different things. Some forms of morality concern what is good for one’s own soul, whether in Plato’s sense of psychic health or the religious sense of ‘what pleases God’. But for Plato, most traditional religions and other moral philosophers, moral reasoning is primarily concerned with the correct treatment of others, whether by actively pursuing their good or simply treating them with respect and justice. Many modern realists argue that politics is not, at bottom, about the health of either one’s own or one’s city’s soul, or about treating others well. Its priorities are the safety and welfare of a particular polity and its citizens. Sometimes, these priorities are best served by treating others as moral principles of justice, or by seeking to liberate, enlighten or save the souls of others. But sometimes, such moral imperatives conflict with the needs of security and other distinctly political interests. When this happens, realists argue, hard choices have to be made between doing what is needed for safety or advantage and what morality requires. The more responsible choice for people acting in a political capacity, they say, is to put the safety and welfare of one’s own state or political cause ahead of morality. Some realists are happy to call this rational egoism; others call it the ‘morality of partiality’ or, borrowing from Max Weber, the ‘ethics of responsibility’ (Weber 1992). It is unclear, however, that any of our classical realists sees political prudence as an essentially different kind of practical reasoning from morality. Hobbes might appear to do this when he distinguishes sharply between civil laws established by the sovereign and the moral laws of nature, and acknowledges that they often conflict. Even if subjects judge that the sovereign’s civil laws violate the laws of nature, Hobbes says, civil laws have absolute authority over the outward actions of subjects. This seems to affirm the realist view that political rationality and moral reasoning are separate, and the further view that the latter must give way to the former in politics. But in this potential clash of two basic realities – the moral reality of the laws of nature and the manmade, political reality of civil laws – Hobbes is quite clear about which is more profoundly real, more in accord with ‘Immutable and Eternall’ truths about human existence. ‘For Injustice, Ingratitude, Arrogance, Pride, Iniquity . . . and the rest, can never be made lawfull,’ even when politicians declare them necessary and rename them as virtues; since ‘it can never be that Warre shall preserve life, and Peace destroy it’ (Hobbes 1996: 15). The artificial authority of the sovereign and civil laws is necessary for peace and safety, but that authority is only rational and robust if sovereigns make their civil laws conform to the laws of nature. They fail to do this at their peril, and to the harm of their commonwealth. Clashes between laws of nature and civil laws are not clashes between two equally valid kinds of law that belong to different spheres; nor are they clashes of incommensurable values. One is more fully law-like than the other, more rational, more eternal – and a far better guide for dealing with the most basic political realities. Thucydides and Machiavelli too make readers reflect on the deep connections between morality and political prudence. Unlike more obviously ‘idealistic’ theories, they do not set out timeless moral principles then express hopes that politics everywhere will strive to satisfy them. Starting from historical situations of political stress and moral confusion, they try to view political choices from the standpoint of people

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desperate to survive or to win. Thucydides shows how political rhetoric can debase tried-and-tested moral standards until they come to look useless or resemble their opposites: ‘reckless audacity came to be regarded as courageous loyalty to party, prudent hesitation as specious cowardice, moderation as a cloak for unmanly weakness’, and the like (Thucydides 2003: III.82). Machiavelli often seems to treat each person’s or state’s advantage as the ultimate touchstone of political prudence. The quickest and easiest way for princes to increase their power, he says in The Prince, is to know when to put aside moral scruples, practise strategic deception, be prepared to break oaths and generally be ‘not good’ (Machiavelli 1998: 15–18). But his colourful examples of princes who followed this easy road – notably, the infamous Cesare Borgia and his father, Pope Alexander VI – present a spectacle of high-flying, hard-crashing political disasters. As Machiavelli says quite clearly, amoral shortcuts may help you acquire power ‘easily’ but cannot help you secure it (Machiavelli 1998: 7; see Benner 2013: Ch. 7). In fact, they make you more vulnerable because no one trusts political leaders who put their own yardsticks of prudence above common standards of conduct. Such people make enemies at home and abroad. If they respond by adopting ever more ruthless measures, they end up ruining their states. Political actors who want to secure their state do better to follow maxims that are suspiciously close to moral standards. ‘Victories are never so clear’, Machiavelli writes in The Prince, ‘that the winner does not have to have some respect, especially for justice’ (Machiavelli 1998: 21). In political thought and practice, of course, morality and prudence can come apart. But politics and human life are far better off when they stick together.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

For recent discussions, see Williams (2005); Philp (2007); and Geuss (2008). See Ch. 4 (Bew) in this volume. See Benner (2017a: Ch. 6); McQueen (2017: Ch. 3). See Benner (2013: Chs 1 and 6). Here Machiavelli followed Greek and Roman writers, notably Plutarch’s Lives. On orators misleading peoples, see Hobbes (1990; 1996: 7, 17). See Ch. 9 (Morley) in this volume. This is often interpreted as no-structure determinism rather than the structural kind; it seems to suggest a world in constant flux, where human beings are the playthings of larger, arbitrary forces. See Benner (2013). See Philp (2007: Ch. 2). On the international implications of Machiavelli’s arguments about human nature, see Benner (2017b) and Benner (2009: esp. Ch. 12). See Machiavelli (1989) for one of his less well-known arguments about this.

Bibliography Benner, E. (2009), Machiavelli’s Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benner, E. (2013), Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benner, E. (2014), ‘Machiavelli’s ironies: The language of praise and blame in the Prince’, Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 2.

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Benner, E. (2017a), Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, London: Penguin/Allen Lane. Benner, E. (2017b), ‘The necessity to be not-good: Rethinking Machiavelli’s Realism’, in Nadia Urbinati, David Johnston and Camila Vergara (eds), Liberty and Conflict: Machiavelli on Politics and Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berlin, I. (1991), The Crooked Timber of Humanity, London: Fontana. Gentz, F. (2010), ‘Über Politische Freiheit und das Verhältnis derselben zur Regierung’, in Hans Jörg Hennecke (ed.), Revolution und Gleichgewicht, Leipzig: Manuscriptum. Geuss, R. (2008), Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1999), ‘Die Verfassung Deutschlands’, in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Frühe Schriften, vol. 1, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 451–620. Hobbes, T. (1990), Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. and introduction by Stephen Holmes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hobbes, T. (1991), Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), ed. and introduction by Bernard Gert, Indianapolis: Hackett. Hobbes, T. (1994), Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1996), Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T. (1998), On the Citizen [De Cive], ed. by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machiavelli, N. (1989), ‘A discourse on remodelling the government of Florence’, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works, ed. by A. Gilbert, vol. 1, pp. 101–15. Machiavelli, N. (1996a), Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Machiavelli, N. (1996b), Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, translated and ed. by James B. Atkinson and David Sices, DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press. Machiavelli, N. (1998), The Prince, 2nd edn, translated and introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McQueen, A. (2017), Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, New York: Cambridge University Press. Philp, M. (2007), Political Conduct, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Thucydides (2003), History of the Peloponnesian War, vols 1–4, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, M. (1992), Politik als Beruf, Stuttgart: Reclam. Williams, B. (2005), In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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2 Political Realism and the Western Mind Exploring an alternative based upon ‘relational rationality’ and ‘Confucian improvement’ Zhao Tingyang

Chapter Overview

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ere, Zhao Tingyang develops a meta-political reflection on political realism, arguing, in effect, that political realism does not work well unless it is idealistic, which is the same thing as saying that political idealism cannot work unless it is realistic; this leaves us to conclude that political realism should be better understood methodologically, regardless of its values. Furthermore, he delivers a ‘detective study’ that casts suspicion on the very concepts of ‘rationality’ and the ‘political game’, showing us that individual rationality does not in fact fulfil the possible applications of human reason, and that the making of the rational political game qua ‘game’ logically preceded the taking of any rational strategy in an irrational game of the ‘non-cooperative’ or zero-sum. Finally, Zhao claims, first, that politics should be the art of changing hostility into hospitality; second, that relational rationality, based upon the Confucian conception of circulating relationship, is the more reasonable application of human reason, given that it is more strongly risk-averse in how it puts the minimisation of mutual hostility above the maximisation of self-interests; and third, that relational realism, based upon the use of relational rationality, theoretically anticipates an optimistic ‘Confucian Improvement’, which works to the benefit of each and everyone. And how much better this must be than ‘Pareto’s Improvement’, which can only seek to lessen the reduction in each person’s welfare. *

*

*

A political realism without some measure of idealism would be shortsighted, while a political idealism without any grounds in reality would be useless. The idea of identifying a pure realism, then, would appear to be flawed from the outset. And yet it is in the very meaning and popular understanding of realism that it must be idealism’s opposite. Nothing is quite as it seems, then, and if we are to continue to speak of and apply realism in the world, then we must have good reasons to do so. For example: Does a political realist always rationally sacrifice his or her ideal for a realistic interest? It depends. And it depends on how we understand ‘interest’ and ‘rationality’.

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The Puzzle of Political Realism Political realism is linked, though not directly so, to the metaphysical realism that believes in a reality independent of subjectivity. It is interesting to note that metaphysical realism can itself only ever really be the subjective conception of the independent reality-in-itself, for it is in the very nature of its conceptual status that it cannot offer objective knowledge of that reality. In the same way, political realism has always had to stand at a distance or remove from the objective comprehension of political reality, for its realpolitik must inevitably tell a much thinner story than the living reality of our experiences, knowledge and possible strategies. Ontologically speaking, and notwithstanding whether it is beyond us or with us, reality is always so much more than simply that which is. Rather, it is the becoming that always implies the not-yet – the implied and uncertain futures, and the possible worlds. And possibilities are the ontological components of reality. Admittedly, political realism might boast of its lucid insight into the problem of power, yet because it will not at the same time offer any effective solutions to power, it tends only to encourage hostilities and deepen disputes and clashes. The point is that the interactive complexity of live political reality means that it is always outstepping the reduction and causal analysis that would pin it down. Instead, it is in the peculiar nature of a political problem that it expects and invites a plurality of solutions rather than only one correct answer. This is the same as saying that the political must be the creative art of making order of the human world rather than the unreliable application of science’s ‘one way’. In fact, the very concept of ‘political science’ has an odd sound to it, when you think about it. Given all of this, we would probably do better to add a question mark straightaway to political realism. What is political realism? Or what is it not? In its usual configuration, the Realist ‘tradition’, as it runs from Thucydides to Machiavelli, and from Hobbes to Morgenthau, indicates that it should be considered apart from – and in opposition to – the ideology-oriented tradition of political idealism, to include most prominently liberalism, Marxism, radicalism and constructivism. Yet who would deny that Karl Marx or Carl Schmitt could be somewhat realistic, although they were essentially idealists in their pursuits? Certainly, Kant would prove an idealist for his unrealistic idea of perpetual peace, which never had much chance of success; and then Habermas, too, for his utopian communicative rationality, which was never going to be much help in reducing any Huntingtonian clashes of civilisations. And it would be even more confusing to try to measure Confucianism by the concepts of realism or idealism, for Confucianism is very realistic in practice yet at the same time decidedly idealistic in its pursuit of the ideal harmony of all peoples in terms of a universal familyship – a best possible world that ever seems too far away to reach. It would be better to say that we keep to the terms of realism and idealism because we have become used to them, even though they may muddle and misdirect the motives of our thinking. Perhaps, then, it would be best of all for us to give up on trying to identify a ‘pure’ political realism and turn instead to a methodological political realism: that is, to a political realism defined in terms of its methodology rather than its values. This methodological political realism would generally suggest that: 1. Political agents or actors are selfish by nature. 2. The world has been an anarchy, which recognises no authority above the sovereignty of a nation.

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3. Political agents or actors are exemplifying rationality when they seek to maximise their exclusive or privileged self-interest, such that 4. This rationality is displayed in the logical consistency with which these political agents or actors can be seen to rank their preferences, so that 5. They must all ultimately struggle to dominate the means and execution of power in order to ensure their survival and greater interests. At this point it might amuse us to notice that methodological political realism therefore shares its survivalist logic with the animal kingdom at large, except that the human mind is so much more complicated and troublesome than that which we find in a ‘nonrational’ animal. It will so often confuse itself with attachment to conflicting desires or inconsistent but equally dear goals. We might be tempted to say that, from the practical point of view, the human mind is actually a good deal less consistent in its ranking of preferences than the other animals, whose minds are simpler but more realistic and rational. No wonder, then, that political realism has always reminded us of the Hobbesian state of nature! This does not mean, however, that we are accusing political realism of theoretical poverty. On the contrary, political realism is more robust and – one has to admit – more honest (more true to itself) than any other doctrine. Consider American President Trump’s ‘America first’ slogan, which, although apparently vulgar, childish and alienating, is none the less the truthful articulation of the kind of political realism that considers the national interest to be of the first importance. Political realism is not a political fallacy, but it can certainly become the proof of what too close a commitment to the logic of individual rationality will lead to. This kind of radical political realism has always been notorious because, by taking to itself the right to use all and any means to hold power and pursue self-interest, it seems to put itself beyond, and even contrary to, the concept of morality. Machiavelli’s famous – and famously clear – separation of politics from morality might, for all of its cold, hard dispassion, be the explanation of some essential truth of the political. Yet whatever it achieves in this direction must then come at the expense of a final justification of its infamous use of power and strategies, for the plain fact is that Machiavelli’s gleeful abandonment of morality runs counter to what we can surmise about its eonsold relationship to politics. Machiavelli can seem convincing in the moment of reading him, but only because his schemes and suggestions describe the immediate and indisputable advantage to be had from abusing the morality of others around you – as if you were invited to dinner at a friend’s home and made off with the cutlery. Yet the political strategies and discourses with which the world has become familiar very clearly could not have begun and prospered in this way, which is suggested, in any case, in the fact that they had to antedate Machiavelli in order for him to be able to turn on them. No, they could have endured and developed into custom and law only because they were the strategies and discourses that met fewest problems when coinciding with morality in the long run. It is an interesting fact, then, that the universally respected moralities of the world usually do coincide with the rational strategies of best efficiency (of course, there are exceptions but notably few). In other words, most of the widely recognised moralities can also be shown to be Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS)1 because they are based upon the long-established common sense or the repeated experience of gain and loss, reward and revenge, and security and risk across the long history of civilisation. Some very early moralities proved ineffective on these grounds and were abandoned, while others flourished and developed into normative rules.

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To recap: because the method of methodological political realism is always to give primacy to individual rationality, it can ironically and paradoxically fall foul of the wider, universal moralities of human community and association, and because of the inevitable push-back and resistance that this must then generate, we can say that this kind of realism must actually become unrealistic with regard to how it hopes to operate. Yet, in my opinion, this is still not as disastrous overall as what happens when pure and fundamental idealism struggles militantly for religious or ideological values. In some cases, it becomes rather difficult to tell realism apart from idealism. For instance, if we are to say (following on the above) that a great power like America has been ‘unrealistically’ pursuing its realistic interests, are we then talking about realism at all? Or if a big country like China has been making realistic efforts for its idealistic concept, should it then be called idealism? It is hard to say, mainly due to the vagueness of the key words ‘interest’ or ‘rationality’, which have never been clearly defined. For example, consider how ‘interest’ indicates that we pursue our lives according to either ‘wants’ or ‘needs’. If defined in terms of wants, then interest inflates to become equal to all things (because humans are greedy!), which renders it useless as a term of political analysis. By the same token, if defined in terms of needs, interest comes to refer to the basic goods necessary for survival, which drops it far short of a term that would help us to explain the meaning of life. It seems we have rather to let the concept of interest remain open or flexible. This is not to mention the deeper, epistemological paradox that underlies our knowledge – something like what Plato presented in his dialogue, Meno: that we can never know what we really want since we can never know it a priori. Short of possessing this a priori knowledge of what would truly and finally satisfy us, the human conception of ‘interest’ cannot but become the full list of every conceivable want, past and future. But that is understandable because who does not want everything? If this is not to become an impasse, then, we must say instead that the problem that really matters is the rational ranking of preferences. The vagueness of ‘interest’ rather pales in comparison to the problem of how we should deploy reason in order to arrive at the optimal, political and economic ranking of preferences. We are all humans, so we supposedly share a common reason, yet the question of how best we should use that reason – the question of rationality – is one that may admit of different answers. In light of game theory, to cite one prominent answer, political realism could be defined as the rational–strategic thinking as we find it approved in the theory of ‘the game’.2 Yet, as I see it, some serious problems underlie this theory. Consider, for example, its chief operating premise, to the effect that every player will think and act rationally – if he or she is not insane. The problem here is not its arbitrary exclusion of any irrational actions, as has often been criticised (consider how many of the players will simply act imprudently, and how that will have the same net effect against rationality as outright insanity), but rather the reduction of the possible rationalities to the individual rationality. This makes me greatly suspicious! In my opinion, it would be a failure akin to Russell’s reduction of mathematics to logic: that is to say, to delimit the concept of human rationality to the calculus of individual rationality is to disregard the relational rationality that has been making individual rationality possible all along. This relational rationality is based upon traditional wisdom in its long and rich history. It reminds us that the true meaning and origin of rationality is not the isolated, calculating mind (the computer or the machine) but the fact that we can never know for certain what the other mind is thinking. Thus, we are

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forced into hedging; and so are they; and we enter into a game that afterwards (and only afterwards) comes to be the definition of individual rationality. Unfortunately, this signal truth is habitually neglected or even rejected by modern individualism. I can explain this further in the following way. Suppose that we accept the concept of individual rationality as well as Socrates’ proposition that ‘no one errs knowingly’. We would likely then be trapped in a paradoxical situation: our ranking of preferences can be rational ‘if-and-only-if’ we have good knowledge of their weighting, yet to have this knowledge would be tantamount – on David Hume’s argument – of having knowledge of the future, which we patently do not have. Our true situation, and dilemma, is much more like what Jorge Luis Borges described as the ‘forking paths of time’,3 in which we are doomed to discover that our supposedly rational choices were made blindly – that they amount to the sum of what ‘yesterday’ cannot know about ‘tomorrow’; or, to adapt Socrates’ language as stated above, that we can only err ‘knowingly’. And so it proves to be beyond our capacity to decide a consistent or rational ranking of preferences, and we must wonder whether our supposedly realistic understandings of interests and strategies are merely ambiguous or illusive imaginings. Our rational calculation of costs and payoffs seems to be something that works better in mathematics than life, for in mathematics (and mathematics alone) the future is certain. For instance, one may either support Brexit or not but no one can be sure of its payoff in the future. A more serious example concerning our common future is the development of artificial intelligence, in so far as it might bring about unbearable disaster or the most brilliant success, and no one can thus be confident that it is a rational choice. The paradox is that we are forced into making meaningful calculations of the incalculable payoffs of tomorrow’s day. To my knowledge, then, there have been only two philosophers who can be called true realists: Hume and Lao Tzu. Both of them were fully cognisant of the uncertain future that implies unknowable infinity. As yet, neither empirical nor transcendental knowledge has brought us closer to knowing infinity (I am afraid Immanuel Kant has not yet solved Hume’s problem), but what we do have instead are the rational ways or approaches for dealing with the infinite future. As Lao Tzu suggests, the best rational way must be to move on like ‘water’, which always finds its flexible course. I think Hume would appreciate this metaphor. I am saying that to be rational, then, is to be rational to infinity, which is the same thing as to be reminded that it is the other mind – and what we cannot know of it – that becomes the infinite future before us. In this sense, to be rational is to be rational in relationship with others, all of which throws us back upon political realism, and the question of how realistic or unrealistic it must then become.

The Western Mind? Political realism is often thought of as being particularly characteristic of the Western mind. However, I hope that what I am saying here can cause us to question that assumption. Why should political realism not be found in other cultures, too? The British mind does admittedly seem noticeably realistic, partly due to the Scottish tradition of empiricism. But then the Western mind does not always issue in realistic strategies. On the contrary, it can be decidedly idealistic, if we consider how the two sides of the Western mind – namely, science and religion (or in place of religion, modern

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ideologies) – are both essentially idealistic. I hope it is not too strange for you to hear me say so of the sciences. Let me explain. What seems to be unique to the Western mind is its pursuit of absolute knowledge, or the pure episteme of the ideal object. Such an epistemological effort is idealistic. And it has become a dominant tradition of the Western mind, in spite of the parallel tradition of scepticism. Of course, sciences are also realistic, in that they strive to be practically verifiable. Yet it should be remembered that the sciences have been developed as such based upon the idealistic epistemological schemata consisting of the conceptions a priori, beyond experience, as well as the transcendental categories valid for experiences, including the ontological presupposition of the perfect Ideas (Platonic eidos as well as Euclidean geometry), formal (read therefore idealistic) logic (Aristotelian term logic as well as modern propositional logic), the general epistemological categories a priori (Kantian arguments), and the axiomatisation of mathematics, as well as algorithm and the computing of everything, etcetera. All these epistemological schemata underlying scientific thinking are, without question, idealistic, even if they work so well as to have an apparently transcendental efficiency. The sciences are thus rational but far from realistic. In other words, our knowledge is true of us, rather than true of reality in itself, since we do not have the omniscience of the infinite, as God does. And in practice, we do actually confine our knowledge to the knowable, seeing that infinite reality is too complicated to be known. The amazing thing, given all of this idealism (or ‘subjectivism’, as it is often called), is that science can work so well. Why? It is because it benefits from a great, but hidden, piece of ‘epistemological luck’. This epistemological luck comes from the fact that the only word available to physical nature in relation to our (self-conscious) search for the truth is ‘yes’, in the sense that the natural world appears to express a silent ‘yes’ whenever a scientific proposition has been proved valid in correspondence with it. No wonder, then, that the metaphysics of reality cannot abandon its questioning of being qua being or the is-ness of everything. Political realism is supposed to be the realistic political science but it cannot be an exception to this idealistic character of the Western mindset. This is something that we see, if we consider that political realism will, on occasion, take the simplified perspective of realpolitik to deal with the complicated reality of the human world in all its political, ethical, economic, religious, cultural, psychological and historical coloration. To make such a sweeping reduction is, at the very least, ambitious, if not downright idealistic. Clearly, it is not so easy to make a definite differentiation between the realistic and the idealistic. I am not playing at dialectics here. The truth is that we care more about what is true of us than of reality, which means that idealism is our first and natural inclination, and realism is something that we move to only if we can see no alternative. What is more, political realism would be found hopelessly idealistic if ‘strictly’ defined as the ‘struggle for power’ by any means (Morgenthau), with its assumption that almost all competitions are zero-sum games. The most interesting thing is that, no matter how ‘rational’ political realism is, it is unlikely to attain a scientific measure of success since it prefers hostile strategies. The secret for its bad luck (re: the epistemological good luck of above) is that the key word of human reality is ‘no!’.4 Think of it like this. There had never been any problems of life before the human mind invented that magic word ‘no!’. With the advent of that word, human life was liberated from its hitherto natural course, for it is this word of negation that produces free will and free

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will’s problems. I mean that all political or social problems have come from the initial problem that the other began to say ‘no!’. Metaphysically speaking, it is the word of negation, the ‘no!’, that has ontologically introduced possibilities beyond natural necessity (beyond law and process and instinct) into human life, so that human beings have been able to develop divergent and diverse lives, thereby creating a future that is (to use Borges’s phrase again) ‘forking’ and uncertain, rather than linear and continuous. In fact, we might even say that the future as we know it could not, by definition, have existed before this ontological enlightenment caused by the word ‘no!’, for without it, we could have no concept of a ‘future’ that might at any moment ‘swerve’ from the natural line of natural happenings. Therefore, the ontology of the human world should be focused on the ‘no!’ or the not-ness, for the reason that all manmade problems in the human world – and especially, then, in the political world – can be reduced to the very basic problem that others will disagree with us. It suggests a completely different ontology to the metaphysics of reality, in the sense that, in the latter, Being is less a question to be answered than a reconfirmed tautological answer for the world, whereas the negation, the ‘no!’, is the ontological origin of all the problems of life. Let me say, then, that within political realism as we see it in its traditional form, from Thucydides to Machiavelli, and from Hobbes to Morgenthau, we could see an ontological fallacy in that the political realists have been misled into applying the metaphysics of reality to the human world: that is, fallaciously taking the ‘yes’ for their own theories while ignoring the ‘no!’ coming back at them from their opponents. They say ‘yes’ to all that they want, then, claiming and fighting for their self-interest with unilateralist thinking, all the while ignoring the inevitable, disastrous revenge implied in the others’ disagreement. This typical, unilateral political realism has made for itself an unsolvable problem by its definition of the others as ‘negative externalities’ – a profound terminology for enemies. Its mind is thus correspondingly limited within the scope of hostile strategies to ‘win’, including war, deterrence, sanction and domination, as well as balancing, if no hope to win emerges (which would more likely lead to failures in the end because of the obvious fact that the reacting others are not passive objects, who would copy the realists’ hostile strategies or invent ‘obedient’, ‘copy-cat’ retaliating strategies). (Just consider today’s terrorism, which defeats the traditional rationality of protection and security with the ‘irrationality’ of, for example, the suicide attacker or the ‘unpredictability’ of the lone-wolf operative.) I would rather say that war is simply the failure of the political instead of the misleading statement that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’ (Karl von Clausewitz). The political should be an art of ‘changing hostility into hospitality’ (to quote a traditional Chinese saying). This need not imply that war can be dispensed with altogether but rather that war cannot be the solution, since its continuation would lead to more wars. In other words, hostility has little chance to be the solution to the problem of life. Could we none the less find a way to call the rational strategies in pursuit of irrational goals the ‘rational strategies’? That is a serious question. Experts have developed profound analyses of the dominating rational strategies in the non-cooperative games. Should we not say, though, that the non-cooperative games are by definition irrational? At the very least it would seem unlikely for such unilateralism and non-cooperative thinking to be rational. In respect of religion – and let us take Christianity as the example here – we are no doubt talking of high idealism. If my understanding is correct, Christianity has become

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the most important gene of Western culture, as strong as science, although this does not imply that every Western mind should be considered religious. Now there would be those to point out that Christianity is fading from modern life, yet I would say that its mindset, or methodological Christianity, still remains in force. In any case, it has clearly had its effect on all the major Western political schools up to now, including liberalism and most definitely including realism, in the more or less idealistic characterisation that I am giving it here. As far as I see it, four political inventions of Christianity have exerted a far-reaching influence on modern politics. The first of these is propaganda (from the injunction to spread and preach), which has developed into modern political discourses, advertisements and the media; the second is the institutionalisation and self-institutionalisation of the mind (from the sermon and from confession); the third is the mass common mind (from the believers); and the fourth, and most distinctive, is the concept of the absolute enemy (from the pagans). Before Christianity, you could talk only of temporary enemies, understood as rivals in occasional competitions. From these four political inventions of Christianity have flowed what afterwards came to be called ideologies, which are all idealistic fictions yet of great practical utility for changing the reality of the human world (take the Cold War, for instance). These political inventions have become, at least partly, the basis of nationalism, universalism, imperialism and the use of soft power in modern politics. Particularly, the nervous recognition of ‘the enemy’ has increased hostilities in the world. To be fair, it seems that liberalism as a sort of idealism has led to more international conflicts or clashes of civilisations than realism. The Europeans have produced even more amazing political inventions in modern times, such as subjectivity, sovereignty, the nation-state, nationalism, individualism and human rights. In all of these, the contribution of Christianity to the overtly ideological and idealistic mindset is clear. It has left almost no room for sheer political realism to be an exception. Compared to the pure political realism of Thucydides or Hobbes, we see now only an impure political realism that takes the cool and neat realist strategies and uses them to deal with ideologically defined enemies as well as unrealistic zero-sum games. For this reason, I repeat again that it is hard to pin down contemporary political realism since its realistic approaches are too often balanced by its unrealistic, ideological goals. Therefore, I find that I hesitate when I try to think of political realism exclusively in relation to the typical Western mind. And I want to insist that modern political realism should be better understood as nothing more than methodological realism.

Relational Rationality and Relational Realism Clearly, we now need to broaden our horizon, if we are to explain and understand political realism better. I want to suggest that a discussion about an alternative concept of rationality, as well as an alternative, non-Western political realism – let us say, the Chinese alternative – would help us to ascertain the theoretical capacity of political thinking better. Do note that what follows is meant to be an investigation into the best possible solutions to political problems instead of comparative analysis. So, I will go straight to the questions of what political rationality should be; which political game is more reasonable; and what are the ontological preconditions for the best political strategies – all of this after a brief introduction to Chinese political conceptions.

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It is awkward to define Chinese political doctrines or schools, either the traditional or the contemporary, in terms of the strict label of political realism or idealism. Almost all the Chinese political schools share the common pursuit of an idealistic order of the world: namely, the Tianxia Peace – literally, the peace of all-underheaven. It goes back to the unusual fact that Chinese political thinking began in the eleventh century bc with the special problem of world politics – that is, the problem of making a world – instead of the usual starting point we take today of state politics (that is, the polis). It was an extraordinary historical phenomenon, which has brought the Chinese mind to think about the political in the worldwide framework of Tianxia, meaning a politically constituted world. Therefore, Chinese political thinking cannot resist the appeal of the idealistic conception of the world order in terms of the Tianxia system rather than the international system. It means the ideal world (supposed to be good and beneficial to all peoples) should be so made to be the all-inclusive political entity, inclusive of all nations (at least in theory). In other words, the task of the political is to internalise all places of the world to make a world of all peoples, shared by all peoples and good for all peoples. The internalisation of the world, or the eradication of externality, has become the basic principle of the political, leading to strategies that seek to change hostility into hospitality, which is all a far cry from the Western recognition of absolute enemies. In this sense, the general character of Chinese political thinking could be said to be rather idealistic. Yet most of the Chinese political schools are, practically speaking, very realistic in their prudent efforts and rational strategies. They are, in fact, much more risk-averse than is usual for political realism but there were certainly two Chinese political schools that could be considered closer to typical political realism. One was the school of military strategists represented by Sun-Tzu (545 bc to 460 bc): actually, an early proponent of game theory, who was probably the first to have discussed the ‘common knowledge’ aspect of non-cooperative games, as well as the priority of the use of ‘soft power’. Military strategist that he was, Sun-Tzu claimed that war is the worst and the last strategy. Another realist school called Legalism (prevailing from the fourth to the second century bc) was indeed realistic, almost in league with Hobbes. It would develop most interesting studies on political games and social trust. One of its extremely cool doctrines claims that, no matter how immoral the rules of a game may be, it will none the less be played with eagerness and efficiency so long as its rewards and punishments are clearly defined and institutionally guaranteed. This is because the majority of people will blindly and gladly chase the accessible and reliable interests or rewards, regardless of values and ideals. The outstanding figures of the legalist school had served the Qin state as ministers or generals, and one of their policies was defined as stating that every promotion should depend only on battlefield achievements. As a result, the Qin state’s army became unbeatable. As the dominant school in ancient China, Confucianism has been the best example of the mixture of political idealism and realism. Should it be called the example of ‘realistic idealism’ or ‘idealistic realism’? It looks forward to the idealistic political project of a shared world of the familyship of all peoples, yet it works towards this project with very practical and realistic approaches. It might, therefore, be said that it promotes idealism on the condition of reality. I want to add a word more here on the Confucian discussion of the original situation by Xun Tzu (313–238 bc), which, because it so greatly predates Hobbes’s discussion,

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will be most interesting for Western readers. Xun Tzu believed that the original situation was a societal state (instead of a ‘state of nature’), on the reasoning that the cooperation of people must be a necessary condition for the survival of any individual. His inspiring insight is known as ‘Xun Tzu’s paradox’: in other words, cooperation is necessary for everyone, but on the other hand, it could bring about conflicts. That is, cooperation could spoil itself if the distribution were to become unreasonable. ‘No one could live alone,’ says Xun Tzu, ‘so people have no other choice than to cooperate.’ Unfortunately, insatiable greed comes to spoil cooperation when ‘the unfair and unjust distribution and division have developed to the point where they actually put people to flight [from the state]’. In response, then, he sees the natural development of rites, or social disciplines, which would in effect impose relational rationality by means of a fairer distribution of goods, proportional to citizens’ contributions or status. As a matter of fact, this proportional justice proves more or less idealistic (even if the goal of Xun Tzu’s reasoning is realism). For what follows, I want to suggest that we think of Confucianism, then, as an ‘idealistic realism’, and that we let it represent the mainstream of Chinese political thinking. Now, let me go on to explain its political efficiency. Confucianism has played a significant role in allowing China to be a continuing great power for more than 2,000 years. It does indeed rise to be a political miracle, when you compare it to those once-dominant empires or imperialist systems that have now disappeared or shrunk to be nation-states. And the only superpower that can rival China today – the USA – seems unlikely to stay the world leader for long. Typical political realism, as a mixture of methodological realism and ideological idealism, must be partly responsible for the ups and downs of the Western empires or imperialist systems. These empires and their imperialism, with their aggressive realistic strategies, could be dominant and successful in the game of power only while they enjoyed the advantage in technology and industry (guns versus spears). Afterwards, they were almost bound to suffer failures due to unrest and retaliation. In contrast to these hostile and aggressive strategies, the enlargement of ancient China would take an alternative yet more efficient strategy in the long run. It might be best to preface my analysis of the growth of ancient China by noting that not only is our choice of effective strategies determined structurally, by the form of the games we play, but also by the fact that our strategies themselves also create and define games as such, as well as determining how long a game will last. The point is that it is the starting strategies that constitute the ontological conditions for a game to be this or that. And the original strategy that starts then defines how a game goes on will determine practically the possible subsequent strategies, thereby accounting for all the consequences. For instance, the original strategy of hostility – say, an aggressive war or hegemonic policy – would have launched the non-cooperative game by means of antagonism. In this case, it must then go on to explain the inevitable subsequent counterstrategies. I think, then, that game theory should focus on the original situation – on how the initiating strategies define a game – more than on the smart rational strategies followed out in the game. That is, it should devote more study to how games in themselves become rational, rather than to which strategy will be the dominant and victorious one. The example that now lies before us is that of ancient China, which has started to play a unique political game, in which it succeeds in becoming larger and larger, but not in the manner of imperialist expansion.

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My theory for interpreting the historicity of China5 is that it ran a game with a ‘vortex pattern’, instead of the usual pattern of imperialism or colonialism. Contrary to the outward spiral of imperialist adventure – the conquering of the seas and the far-reaching domination of the world – the vortex pattern had the effect of drawing inward many nations to join and receive in the Chinese system by means of the inward attraction of interests, power, honour, arts, knowledge and even the altogether greater shared history to be had by all-in-union, as we do indeed see when more water is constantly drawn into a vortex by a centripetal force. The story of the China vortex was just like that. For about 2,500 years, up until the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty after its defeat by the Western powers, many nations had in turn been trying to seize control of China, but all had volunteered to become Chinese in the end, adopting Chinese civilisation when on the throne of China. The obvious reason for most of the nations to do so was that, at that time, Chinese civilisation was the most brilliant one they had ever met, so that they were willing to become part of it, and thereby to share in its profound knowledge and arts, its honourable tradition and history, and of course its well-developed economy. But the deeper reason was that Chinese civilisation possesses an innate generosity of character and a capacity to welcome all foreign cultures, thanks to its ever-lasting political ideal of an all-inclusive world system – the Tianxia conception; so much so that it has never recognised other nations as ‘unacceptable others’ or ‘absolute enemies’. This is not only idealistic, but also truly rational, in that it has produced fewer religious conflicts or clashes of civilisations than other imperialist systems of multi-ethnic societies. It should be mentioned here that the terms ‘empire’ and ‘civilisation’ hardly do justice to ancient China’s true status and achievement. This status remains hard to define – at least according to the popular categories of Western knowledge – but the effort must be made because a true understanding of the uniqueness of China’s past is the key to a true understanding of its present-day approach to politics, both practically and theoretically. As I have been arguing, China has been a ‘world-pattern country’, in the sense that it has been the microcosm of the Tianxia constitution of the world. One of its distinctive institutional commitments has been to the format of multiple systems integrated inside one country, or ‘one country, multiple systems’. This was invented by the Han dynasty (202 bc to ad 220), and creatively reapplied most recently by Deng Xiaoping in Hong Kong in 1997 as a new model to deal with the modern situation of different political ideologies, called ‘one country, two systems’. Deng’s reapplication is new at the point that it involves an ideological divergence that did not appear in ancient times (ideology is a modern invention with roots in Christianity’s political inventions, as I have argued above). By his example, we see, then, that instead of a nation-state, an integrated China of multiple systems becomes the epitome of a world that operates (to borrow an image from propositional logic) as something of a ‘function’, for which the determining variables are left open to be filled by whatever seems best. Before being challenged by British power in 1840, China really had been working effectively as the vortex that I described above, inviting nations to join with it rather than making overseas adventures and conquests. It kept its distance from colonialism and imperialism. In the sense of outright world domination, then, historical China has been less successful than Great Britain (as the largest empire) or the USA (as the most powerful imperialist force in history), but in

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its long-continuing duration as an entity-in-itself, China has been more successful. This suggests that Chinese political thinking relates to an alternative concept of rationality or political realism. I want to suggest now that Chinese political thinking should be defined in terms of relational realism6 (as I have often called it). Its main principles would be described as follows: 1. Internalisation of the world, a notion based upon the concept of the all-inclusive world as Tianxia. It hinges on the rational strategy of neutralising all ‘negative externalities’ until only peaceful and tolerable differences remain. By this means, conflicts and clashes of civilisations are reduced and ‘hostility is changed into hospitality’. This then leads to compatible universalism, meaning that only what is compatible between people is universalised. All unilateral ideologies or values are shunned. In other words, universal values come to be defined in terms of reciprocal relationships rather than religion or any such supervening systems. 2. Imperfectionism, a principle from the philosophies of Lao Tzu and I Ching (The Book of Changes). It teaches that ‘the better is better than the best’, so is a decidedly realistic dictum, in that it criticises the pursuit of the perfect, or the ideal, as a risky if not downright unfeasible undertaking. And correspondingly, it suggests that the concept of the ideal should function as changing reality’s constant measure, rather than as the end of history. 3. Relational rationality, the most important principle because it is based upon the ontological realism that places coexistence prior to existence, or existence presupposing coexistence.7 The ontological telos of everything is nothing but to be for good, while to be for good implies to be well. And this wellness has to be if-and-only-if let be (by the other), and let others be, and to be improved if-and-only-if let to be improved by others (and to let others be improved); otherwise it will suffer from unbearable retaliations. This ontological truth has been concentrated as the Confucian concept of Ren: literally, ‘the best relationship of any two persons’. It makes for the foundation of relational rationality, indicating that coexistence is the necessary condition for any existence. We could say that relational rationality is innately far more risk-averse than individual rationality. Briefly, the basic concern of relational rationality is the priority of the minimisation of mutual hostility and its maximisation over self-interests. It is most realistic in its rational expectation that coexistence is the ontological and political guarantee for every existence. Relational rationality could be further defended by what I call the ‘test of imitation’.8 Let us begin the test with the typical game of self-interest, or the Hobbesian original condition. Every player is imagined to be smart enough to learn and imitate any more successful strategies played by the others. As a result, none of the successful strategies can remain dominant for long, since all of them will soon become common knowledge and copied by others. The stable equilibrium of strategies will finally come about when all players have learned all available successful strategies and become equally smart or equally stupid. It is the phenomenon of ‘all donkeys’. Now, the point is that a universally imitated and therefore stable strategy could either be that of hospitality or that of hostility. If a universally imitated strategy were to bring about a circulating negative retaliation, it would be a disaster for all players,

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so to pursue it would be irrational; that is to say, a strategy leading to self-defeating consequence when universally imitated would be irrational in the game. We should therefore expect instead a never self-defeating strategy – or just such a one as we find in the Confucian Ren, in which the first consideration is coexistence, the only strategy that will not incur any retaliation, and which can therefore successfully stand the challenge of the others’ imitation. In other words, a strategy can prove to be completely rational only so long as it continues to be positively rewarded when copied by other players. Confucius was the first to have studied this kind of strategy, and the first to lay claim to the principle of being improved if-and-only-if let improved. Really, then, we could call it the ‘Confucian improvement’, and we could define it further as the ‘non-exclusive improvement’ and compare it to Pareto’s improvement of everyone. We should, however, bear in mind that Pareto’s improvement only requires at least one to be improved, and how far that is, then, from the Confucian universal improvement of everyone.

Conclusion Many believe: be more powerful, be safer! This is partly true but is not always true, so it cannot be regarded as an unbeatable strategy. Therefore, we should very seriously consider the more rational Confucian strategy. A Confucian follower, Mencius (372–289 bc), has further explained the secret to relational rationality: The great man is undefeatable, not because he has defeated all enemies but because he has made no enemy. I have, then, returned us to where we began: Realism does not work well unless it is idealistic, while idealism will not work unless it is realistic.

Notes 1. Cf. John Maynard Smith (1982). 2. By theory of game, I mean that theory firstly claimed by John von Neumann, and later greatly developed by John Nash and a long list of experts, including many Nobel Prize winners. In this paper, my discussion relates only to the situation of non-cooperative gaming based upon Nash’s theory and the problem of evolutional games based upon John Maynard Smith and Robert Axelrod. In short, I focus on the problem of ‘if’ and ‘how’ cooperation could be possible under the given conditions of non-cooperative gaming. 3. In Borges’s famous fiction work, The Garden of Forking Paths, there is a garden of very complicated forking paths that would make you always confused and lost. The forking paths symbolically represent the forking of time, in its presentation of divergent or even contradictory futures. And what is more, Borges states that the garden has been designed by a Chinese architect to display Chinese philosophy. 4. See Zhao Tingyang (2016a). In this paper, I argue that the word of negation is the first philosophical word, and that one of the primary pieces of evidence for this comes from logic. Briefly, the word of negation, the ‘not’, could be called the basic ‘gene’ of logic, which makes all logical connections meaningful. Logic usually adopts five basic connectives: negation (¬), conjunction (∨), disjunction (∧), implication (→) and bi-implication (↔). If simplified into only two connectives, none of the acceptable combinations of two connections can dispense with negation (¬): that is, the negation should be one of the two. Furthermore, these two connectives can be reduced to just one, the Sheffer connective, which has two forms: the alternative denial (∣, ‘nand’, or not-and) or joint denial (↓, ‘nor’,

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5. 6. 7. 8.

zhao tingyang or not-or). It is clear, however, that the negation is always there, for in these two forms we are speaking of either the unification of the negation (¬) and the conjunction (∨), or of the negation (¬) and the disjunction (∧). Cf. Zhao Tingyang (2016b). See Zhao Tingyang (2015). For more details, see Zhao Tingyang (2016c, especially the Introduction and Ch. 3). See also Zhao Tingyang (2012: 27–36). See Zhao Tingyang (2015).

Bibliography Axelrod, Robert (1997), The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Confucius (1998), The Analects [孔子：《论语》], translated by D. C. Lau, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Han Feizi (2003), Basic Writings [韩非子：《韩非子》], translated by Burton Watson, New York: Columbia University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster. Lao Tzu (2006), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version [老子：《道德经》], translated by Stephen Mitchell, New York: Harper. Morgenthau, Hans J. (2005), Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Olson, Mancur (1980), The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schelling, Thomas C. (1980), The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, Carl (1996), The Concept of the Political, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, John Maynard (1982), Evolution and the Theory of Games, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sun Tzu (1994), The Art of War [孙子：《孙子兵法》], translated by Ralph D. Sawyer, New York: Basic Books. Xun Tzu, The Works of Xun Tzu [荀子：《荀子》] (no English editions available). Zhao Tingyang (2009), Studies on the Bad World/Huai-shijie-yanjiu [赵汀阳：《天下的当代性： 世界秩序的实践与想象》], Chinese edn, Beijing: Renmin University Press. Zhao Tingyang (2012), ‘The ontology of coexistence: From cogito to facio’, Diogenes, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 27–36. Zhao Tingyang (2015), ‘Redefining the concept of politics via Tianxia: The problems, conditions and methodology’, World Economics and Politics, no. 6. Zhao Tingyang (2016a), ‘The first philosophical word’, Philosophical Research (Zhexueyanjiu), Chinese edn, no. 11. Zhao Tingyang (2016b), The Making and Becoming of China: Its Way of Historicity/Hui-cizhong-guo [《惠此中国》], Chinese edn, Beijing: CITIC Publishing Group. Zhao Tingyang (2016c), A Possible World of All-Under-Heaven System: The World Order in the Past and for the Future/Tianxia de dangdaixing [《坏世界研究》], Chinese edn, Beijing: CITIC Publishing Group.

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3 Political Realism and Strategic Theory Operationalising realism’s pursuit of the national interest in an age of terrorism, civil war and proxy war Samir Puri

Chapter Overview

I

f classical realism sees the world as driven by competitive self-interest, then strategic theory considers how to navigate this situation to advance one’s interests. As such, strategic theory can be thought of as ‘operationalising’ some of realism’s tenets. It shares with realism certain assumptions around, for example, the centrality of power, and how the unique moral codes of a particular polity will render fallacious any notion of universal moral laws. As with realism, strategic theory has been derided for its pessimistic reading of human nature. Strategic theory’s association with nuclear deterrence is emblematic of this critique. Since the Cold War’s end, the state-centric study of strategy has also lost favour to the broader ‘security studies’ approach, which is seemingly better attuned to grasping insurgency, terrorism and similar threats that do not necessarily emanate from states. However, all theory must be reinterpreted for contemporary conditions. Insights of enduring relevance must be disentangled from more dated epochal concerns. With adaption, strategic theory can retain explanatory power for modern scenarios that typically mix state and non-state actors. As this chapter explains, realism and strategic theory are far from the same thing, but in how they overcome such critiques as amorality, state-centrism and outright obsolescence, a reinterpretation of each can hold lessons for both. *

*

*

It is sensible to begin with a definition. Strategic theory offers a lens through which to view the interplay of force and diplomacy between actors, and to understand how power is leveraged in pursuit of objectives. Strategic theory does not prescribe what ought to be done – this is dependent on the values, means and goals of an actor. Thus, strategic theory is a conceptual elucidation of strategic behaviour in general, rather than a prescription to follow any particular strategy. It is important therefore to distinguish strategic theory from more general notions of strategy. To do so, and to structure this section, strategic theory’s six precepts are discussed in turn. This draws on M. L. R. Smith and John Stone (2011: 27–30), who define strategic theory as comprising six rules of understanding:

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samir puri the study of ends, ways and means interdependence of decision-making the study of the political actor as the central unit of analysis; the assumption of rationality the understanding of value systems and preferences the observance of moral neutrality.

These propositions constitute an intellectual scaffolding of sorts, and one that is available to frame the study of strategy in particular instances by making sense of the actions and interactions of the protagonists concerned. Each of these six precepts is expanded on with a view to explaining the origins, claims and criticisms surrounding strategic theory, and to tracing areas of overlap with realism. After working through each precept, an interim conclusion will set up the chapter’s second section, which will examine the challenges of adaption facing strategic theory in the twenty-first century.

What is Strategic Theory – and Do its Precepts Overlap with Realism? 1. To study strategy means to examine ends, ways and means. Etymologically, ‘strategy’ originates from the Greek denotation of a general’s plan of action to accomplish a particular goal. As such, it is the realm of military activity with which strategy has tended to be synonymous, and from where such ubiquitous definitions have emerged as ‘the employment of battles to gain the end of war’ (Clausewitz 1832: 177) and ‘the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy’ (Liddell Hart 1967: 321). Different definitions of strategy have entered the politico-military lexicon at different times, based on their utility in helping express the most pressing strategic dilemmas of the day. Understandably, those quoted above wrote of strategy in terms that made sense of the interstate wars waged between national militaries, with Liddell Hart’s writings touching on the post-1945 nuclear era. Over the decades, and from one century to the next, the nature of interstate war had evolved dramatically. As the notion of the ‘state’ modernised and spread from Europe across the globe, the ideologies that bound states together also diversified, while the war-making technologies that states commanded evolved from musketry to, in some cases, nuclear weapons (Paret, Craig and Gilbert 1986). Thus, there is no such homogenous phenomenon as ‘interstate war’. The form and shape of war always vary. They are idiosyncratically constructed as per the time and the space within which war unfolds. Amongst its only true perennial features is the dynamic interaction between ends, ways and means. When ends (which tend, for states, to be enunciated as policy) become misaligned with ways and means (which refer to the manner in which military and other tools are employed), war becomes purposeless. Misalignments arise when policy ends are too expansive or unrealistic, and when the tools are inadequate, badly chosen or poorly employed. The essence of strategy as practice is therefore relational. That is to say, strategy involves the dynamic relation between the ends sought and the manner of attainment.

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Today, the word ‘strategy’ is routinely detached from its military origins and has been appropriated for other areas of human activity. Business and personal life decisions can all merit a ‘strategy’. Strategy has become a generically understood word for linking means and ends when planning for the long term. This has led to a lament for ‘the lost meaning of strategy’ (Strachan 2005: 33–5), and to a contrast between the meanings that strategy has gained in military, political and business realms (Freedman 2013). All strategy is about means and ends, but it is also about opposing forces.

2. Interdependence of decision-making, with potential or actual opponents in mind, sets the practice of strategy firmly apart from the act of planning. An expectation that other actors will attempt to subvert, undermine or attack you – this is the realm of strategic behaviour. The anarchical society that is posited by realism, leading to mutual suspicion and the security dilemma, accords well with this sense of threatbased action. Game theoretic elucidations of interdependence, so fundamental to strategic theory’s development during the Cold War, indicate a divergence with realism. It is here that strategic theory also diverts from more general notions of strategy. Strategic theory, as it developed during the Cold War, was born during what was then the latest phase of successive eras of interstate confrontation. Developed by scholars seeking to inform US Cold War security policy, deterrence and compellence were exposited as ways to link means and ends amidst the strategic concerns of the day. Deterrence explored how the USA could pursue its security interests without provoking nuclear war with the USSR. It encouraged the superpowers to balance their nuclear arsenals by guaranteeing retaliation in the event of a first strike by either party, thus dissuading either from mounting a surprise attack. The logic extended to notions of extended deterrence, and of security guarantees offered to allied states – a crucial feature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact alliances (Kaplan 1991). Compellence was a term coined by Thomas Schelling to convey the inducing of an adversary to concede over a disputed issue by gradually raising the costs of non-compliance, and calibrating the punishment dealt to them in terms proportionate to the concession that was being demanded (Schelling 1960; Schelling 1966). There is friction between classical realism and game theoretical understandings of actor interaction. Hans Morgenthau was of the mindset that in international politics, practitioners more closely resembled gamblers than scientists. As such, ‘he cautioned against the Pentagon’s adaptation of Thomas Schelling’s theories of game-theoretic bargaining to the coercive bombardment of North Vietnam’ (Porter 2016: 256). The key point is that conceptions of interdependence do not hinge on game-theoretic models. ‘Strategy is about choice. . . . It is the interdependence of choice that provides the essence of strategy and diverts it from being mere long-term planning or the mechanical connection of available means to set ends’ (Freedman 2006: 9). This qualitative insight is from where strategic theory derives its influence. The deductive and abstract modelling of interdependence is not essential to strategic theory – rather, this approach reflects a certain US Cold War-era defence planning logic.

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3. The study of the political actor as the central unit of analysis is a key tenet of strategic theory. It is an ontological claim that brings it in line with realism. Both place predominance on the state as the principal unit of analysis. Whether it was using quantitative or qualitative data, the academic study of strategy based its insights on the range of choices open to, typically, a state actor in light of its expectation of how others would respond. Lawrence Freedman elucidates: The study of strategy . . . requires examining political affairs from the perspective of those involved . . . it requires an interest in the ways in which units shape a system, rather than in how the system shapes the units. . . . It is not bothered about long historical cycles or attempts to discover regularities in political behaviour. Research into these matters can inform the approach, but the key to the effort lies in the attempt to explore the range of choice available to given actors at particular times. (Freedman 1998: 15) Herein exists a contrast with neorealism: it inverts the claim by Kenneth Waltz that relative power distributions in the international system exert an ordering impact on the units of which it is comprised. Systemic imperatives and constraints impose themselves upon states and influence their decisions to balance others (Waltz 1979). This contrast should not distract from the centrality of the state in the evolution of realism. Jonathan Haslam has traced the origins of realist thought since Machiavelli. He writes that, in England, the Elizabethan formulation of ‘statist’ duty conveyed security interests to be of the very highest priority in political life. Realism emerged during the late medieval and early modern period in Italy and reflected an attempt to rationalise statecraft. ‘Reasons of State emerged to articulate the primacy of the state over the medieval vestiges of universal empire, to argue that no value, whether moral or secular, should stand above the security of the state’ (Haslam 2002: 12–15). Strategic theory is a progeny of this line of reasoning. It is the exercise of choice by actors – typically, states – as they arrange their capabilities and plan for action that has commanded the attention of the strategic theorist. This does not negate the study of contextual conditions but emphasises the importance of studying decision-making at crucial moments of choice. This is expounded next.

4. The assumption of rationality is crucial to strategic theory’s understanding of decisionmaking. It implies that strategic theory’s explanatory power will grow if the choices of the actors in question are open to examination. Rationality refers to how actors rank their preferences in pursuit of their goals. Deductive and game-theoretic interpretations of strategic theory duly used simplifying assumptions regarding utility maximisation, akin to those found in economics. States possess a comprehensive grasp of their options, and their leaders methodically select courses of action to maximise advancement of the national interest. Such rigid and unrealistic portrayals of decision-making ought not to distract from what a nuanced understanding of rationality can offer:

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The word ‘rational’ here has a technical and fairly limited meaning. It does not mean ‘reasonable’ . . . . . It means only that the choice is in some sense controlled by the actor’s current expectation of the outcomes of his actions, and by his preferences. Those expectations and preferences themselves may seem highly ‘unreasonable’. . . . A good deal of ‘insane’ behaviour, in other words, might be ‘rational’ in this technical sense, whereas habitual or unreflective responses, though perfectly normal and reasonable, might be classified as ‘non-rational’ behaviour. (Ellsberg 1968: 14–15) Assuming an adversary to be rational can help explain how it perceives a given situation – a rational actor chooses actions where potential benefits outweigh potential costs. By assuming rationality, strategy becomes a matter of understanding the interactions between the preferences of different actors, and manipulating these preferences over time by making certain choices preferable to others by attaching to them pain and reward. By portraying politico-military affairs as conducted by rationally calculating states, strategic theory has faced similar criticisms levelled at realism for portraying the international system as made up of ‘billiard balls’. To charges of oversimplification, strategic theory offers a rejoinder.

5. Understanding value systems and preferences is strategic theory’s counter to its critics. Indeed, modern strategic theorists place so much emphasis on this precept as to allude to comparisons with constructivism (Smith and Stone 2011: 27). Strategic theory aims to consider an actor’s worldview as determined by ideology, culture and the degree of importance it places on the issue at hand. This imbues strategic theory with a historicity and context that are firmly at odds with the deductive path it once trod during the Cold War. Ideology and culture are understood to shape how an actor determines its objectives and how it assigns capabilities to accomplishing its goals. To decode the behaviour of an actor, such practical details as organisational structure and material capabilities can be interpreted only with a concomitant grasp of the ideational and the attitudinal, such as value systems, cultures of decision-making, and subjective attitudes towards matters like secrecy, violence and injustice (Bozeman 1992: 88–9). Fathoming the value systems and preferences is especially challenging if it is culturally alien or is organised esoterically, but it is essential to try. Strategic theory has tended to attract criticism for an inadequate grasp of the ideational dimensions of actor identity. Richard Ned Lebow derided strategic theory as ahistorical and monocultural (since it originated largely from the USA), and for lauding a deductive study of cost–benefit calculations over identity and culture. Lebow derided Schelling: ‘his work is emblematic of a more general American approach to the world that seeks, when possible, to substitute a combination of technical force and military muscle for political insight and diplomatic finesse’ (Lebow 2007: 255, 277–91). While it is true that strategic theory was associated with ineffective US actions in Vietnam, this ought not to invalidate the enterprise as a whole. Indeed, while coercive strategies have likely been practised since the dawn of humanity, it would be mistaken to succumb to the impression that US strategic theorists of a certain vintage had monopolised these concepts (Gray 2001: 15). Strategic theory has

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moved on: ‘With its focus on understanding value systems and their interaction with other actors in the wider environment, strategic theory might be considered a form of constructivism avant la lettre’ (Smith and Stone 2011: 27). This is a bold claim. Strategic theory asserts that identities and interests are not fixed. However, it does not carry any normative expectation that identities and interests should be manipulated towards moralistic humanitarian values. This matter – the subjectivity of values – is explained next.

6. The observance of moral neutrality means strategic theory does not subscribe to any one worldview. It assesses actors on the basis of how well their chosen means advance their own idiosyncratically constructed goals. Coercion, for example, could be employed for good or for nefarious purposes, and this discussion must be had on a case-by-case basis. There is nothing automatically immoral about coercion: like any other mechanism for exerting power, it can result in suffering that is unwarranted and disproportionate, but in other cases may create order out of chaos and avert even greater suffering. Moral judgement hinges on each actor’s norms and values as to whether ends justify means. The moral neutrality professed by strategic theory separates it from these judgements – unless morality becomes central to the calculations involved in constructing effective strategy. One can envisage how waging war in a manner deemed morally unjustifiable by a key ally, whose objection could call the war to a halt, would be detrimental to advancing war aims, for example. Such apparent amorality leaves strategic theory open to biting critique. By detaching itself from advocating any particular outcome, and in principle being open to countenancing any means that advance a defined set of goals, strategic theory seems to operate in a moral void. Its rationalisation of nuclear deterrence, and the sanctioning of threats of mutual annihilation to hold, in effect, rival populations hostage, reflects this (Lebow 2007: 185–219). Strategic theory rationalises exertions of power and provides an operational handbook to do so without accompanying moral qualification. Realists may be able to relate to this, at least in the criticism they attract for advocating the pursuit of the national interest based on calculations of material gain rather than being guided by an explicit moral compass. To take stock, depending on one’s perspective, to describe strategic theory and realism as flowing from the same intellectual tradition is either curse or compliment. It is a curse if one understands strategic theory to operationalise some of the basest and most self-interested elements of realism. It is complimentary if one sees strategic theory as bringing to life an action-oriented sense of some of realism’s theoretical precepts. There are important differences between these bodies of theory, not least in the focus placed by strategic theory on the mechanics of politico-military affairs, whereas realism exists squarely within international relations theory. Most importantly, one need not be a realist to be a strategic theorist. Strategy ‘is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power’ (Freedman 2013: xii). This focus on power accords with

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realism. Realism, in its classical formulation, believes politics to be governed by objective laws rooted in human nature, which remain consistent throughout history. Interest is defined in terms of power, and the practice of power rationalises the international system (as opposed to personal or ideological preferences). Realism is cognisant of the moral significance of political action but highlights the tension between abstract moral principles and the requirements of actual policy. At first glance, therefore, realism is a ‘temperament to which strategic theorists have been presumed to be susceptible because of their relentless focus on power and their presumption that self-interest best explains behaviour’ (Freedman 2013: 30). However, ‘In traditional realist views of the international system, power appears as both ends and means, measured in terms of the more blatant indicators of military and economic strength’ (Freedman 2006: 27). Power is certainly a means for strategic theorists but less prescription is placed on ends, given the idiosyncratic manner in which actors formulate their goals. Theory evolves over time. Whereas, once, strategic theory employed simplifying assumptions in pursuit of a parsimonious analytic framework, even then, its influence derived from its qualitative observations. Strategic theory has bequeathed to statecraft a conceptual language for understanding uses and threats of violence. Today, coercive diplomacy and deterrence remain useful concepts for grasping interstate relations. The question in the twenty-first century, however, is whether one should refer to a body of thinking that has such strong associations with the Cold War, and especially when so many threats now involve complex interactions between states and non-state actors that do not appear to fit naturally within its framework.

‘Full-spectrum Strategic Theory’ – Explaining State and Non-state Actor Threats The end of the Cold War, the fragmentation of Balkan and African states during the 1990s, and the post-9/11 era fundamentally challenge state-based threat planning. One of the most pervasive problems faced by strategic theory – and, indeed, by practical statecraft – relates to the complexity of attribution in matters of war and peace today. Unitary actor theories – that is to say, theories that conceptualise states as the principal unit of analysis – struggle to account for the sheer range of protagonists that are likely to populate modern security scenarios. Modern wielders of organised political violence may just as readily be, on one hand, non-state armed groups, and on the other hand, states that back these groups. This is not to suggest any equivalence between scenarios and actors. Every armed group is unique in terms of its genesis, ideology, organisation, size and style of violence employed, and the extent to which it is state-backed. The point here is that contemporary security scenarios tend not to involve confrontations between national militaries of states. Civil wars in collapsing states, and insurgent and terrorist campaigns that pay little heed to sovereign borders, are now the chief realities. It should be noted that the collective term ‘non-state armed group’ circumnavigates debates on the nomenclature of ‘terrorist’, ‘guerrilla’ and ‘insurgent’ that, while important, are less relevant to this argument. With the end of the Cold War, strategic theory fell from favour as a lens through which to explain war and peace (Strachan 2005: 48). It had been developed outside of universities and driven by its policy relevance during the Cold War, and ‘academics

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were never able to impose a scholarly framework for [strategic theory] that could survive shifts in the policy framework’ (Freedman 2002: 329). An alternative approach – security studies – was advanced as offering a holistic view of security problems that could range from war to terrorism to pandemics to refugee crises, and hence more encompassing of the diverse sources of insecurity in a globalised world. Strategic theory was derided for its concern with state-centric military affairs (Krause and Williams 1997: 33–61; Barkawi 2011: 29). This criticism is misplaced, however, since strategic theory is not identical to the narrow study of the use of national military force. Contemporary strategic theorists insist that it ‘has universal application across the sphere of human activity as Thomas Schelling, himself a political economist, demonstrated in much of his work’ (Smith and Stone 2011: 29). Moreover, if strategic theory has been accused of being too narrow and dated in the scope of its analysis, then security studies attract the inverse criticism of being too broad. Accordingly, the latter runs the risk of conceptual drift: Strategic studies have been replaced by security studies. At times they embrace almost everything that affects a nation’s foreign and even domestic policy. They require knowledge of regional studies – of culture, religion, diet and language in a possible area of operations; they require knowledge of geography, the environment and economics; they concern themselves with oil supplies, water stocks and commodities; they embrace international law, the laws of war and applied ethics. In short, by being inclusive they end up by being nothing. (Strachan 2005: 48) This is a valid concern. National security thinking has, in some countries, evolved to an ‘everything is relevant’ approach, facing such overlapping phenomena as terrorism, migration, minority rights, fragile states, ungoverned territory and rogue or revisionist states. The overlap of such a plethora of phenomena is certainly not a priori – it is likely to be purely accidental or opportunistic. In a given crisis, a unique blend of phenomena will cohere in hitherto unseen combinations. A multidisciplinary and ‘whole-of-government’ approach may well be eminently sensible in such conditions. The UK, for example, has established a national security strategy and a national security council to allow all relevant departments to contribute to the framing of and response to security crises. This encompasses security institutions like the armed forces, intelligence services and police, plus development aid, border control and domestic ministries (National Security Strategy 2015: 15–22). Ensuring the functionality of interdepartmental cooperation is a bureaucratic matter. It is quite another to grasp, in conceptual terms, the dynamics that underpin matters of war and peace in a given era. In ‘Classical Realism and National Security’, Patrick Porter examines the UK national security strategy’s failure to accommodate what he describes as ‘non-linearity’: Classical realism . . . counsels that governments should go beyond attempts to improve foresight. Those making decisions should insure against the fallibility of their assumptions, marshal their power more conservatively, and prepare for the likelihood of predictive failure by developing the intellectual capability to react to the unknown. (Porter 2016: 239)

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Behaviours pertaining to war and peace are characterised by cunning, deception, surprise and the play of chance. Confounding the expectations of rivals and enemies is the essence of strategic behaviour. The actors may change but these dynamics may not. Caution is in order whenever a ‘perennial truth’ is suggested. Theory is useful only while it allows us to interpret and explain reality. Given the complex ecosystem of phenomena involved in modern security threats, strategic theory may be ill suited to understanding the atomised and factionalised nature of such groups as the Taliban, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. However, strategic theory retains utility in explaining rising or revisionist state threats, such as presented by Russia, China or Iran and their standoffs with the USA and its allies. Even then, problems of attribution arise when Russia and Iran have waged war in superficially deniable fashion through proxies to destabilise neighbours or to tip the scales of civil wars. Pertinent examples are Russia’s backing of east Ukraine’s separatists in a war that began in 2014, and Iran’s backing of Lebanese-based group Hezbollah in Syria’s civil war that began in 2011. In such scenarios, attribution is distributed between state and non-state actors. The state itself operates as a network to obfuscate its associations with its chosen agent of violence. This means that strategy, in its conceptualisation as well as in its practice, must routinely deal with both hierarchies and networks. That is to say, strategy must deal with states that have hierarchical leadership structures and with amorphously arrayed armed groups that may be less centrally ordered. Because of the contrasting nature of these undertakings, understandings of strategy have bifurcated. Classical compositions of strategic theory are appropriate for interpreting a resurgent Russia or a rising China, but ill suited to grasping the Taliban insurgency, which is split between many warlord factions, or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Bereft of a leader, committee or politburo to parley with, threaten and influence, strategic theory may well struggle to contend with diffuse actors who coalesce in ad hoc fashion around their cause. Let us begin outside strategic theory’s comfort zone. As the Cold War ended, Martin Van Creveld was an early herald saying that coming wars would be fought amongst the people, a point he made by using the example of Israel, which was adapting after decades of wars with Arab states to facing Palestinian insurgent and terrorist groups as its primary threat (Van Creveld 1991). During the 1990s, complex civil wars involving factions divided along ethno-religious lines became a new norm. Argument was made for ‘bottom-up’ approaches to place less emphasis on states and statesmen, armies and arsenals, and more emphasis on the political economy of violence as waged by gangs and warlords, and on human security (Kaldor 1999). Post 9/11, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become predominant frames for dealing with the waves of violence that have ensued. Counterinsurgency literature locates the key axis as being the population over which insurgents and states compete for influence (Kilcullen 2009). Counterterrorism literature focuses on the indoctrination and dispersal relied on by globalised terrorist groups, with ameliorative measures involving the interdiction of terrorists by security forces, as well as counterideology work to erode the sense of alienation from peaceable culture that can leave people vulnerable to terrorist recruitment (Nuemann 2009). This variegated literature, the accumulation of twenty-five years of post-Cold War scholarship on the many modern manifestations of political violence, cannot be spoken of collectively. It can, however, be surmised that notions of decisive victory, as

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might have made sense for those attending the Congress of Vienna in 1815, or drafting the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, or dividing Germany in 1945, or proclaiming the end of the USSR in 1991, or expelling Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait that same year, have ceded the field to those concerned with living with prolonged risk, and who place much greater focus on the grass roots of violence. And yet, the global system is in the throes of an evolution that may naturally restore to prominence strategic theory’s explanatory power. A slow drift is under way from the unipolar age of US hegemony, towards a more multilateral system in which several influential states jostle for influence (Tessman 2012). Signalling between states to avoid misunderstanding is returning to prominence in statecraft. Three of the biggest interstate crises of the twenty-first century have involved Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, Russia’s destabilisation of Ukraine, and China’s maritime assertiveness. Such moves can be interpreted as straightforward power plays and analysed via a realist lens. Doing so risks decontextualising these gambits from other facets of the foreign policies of these countries. Iran, Russia and China see their present regional roles as in some ways incommensurate with their stature and desire for greater respect. To redress this balance, they face choices. The crises they have stoked have had worrying escalatory potential, leaving these countries at loggerheads with the USA. While seeking to avoid war with the USA, these states have attempted to pull off selective revisionist moves at the regional level. Strategic theory has much to offer in the analysis of how threats and uses of force have been wielded in these scenarios. And, when nuclear weapons feature in these scenarios, whether implicitly or potentially, the precepts of strategic theory apply almost in their orthodoxy (Puri 2017: 307–23). It is at the point of intersection between state-based threats and non-state actor threats that strategic theory can find fertile ground to evolve. States have to engage routinely in cooperative action against non-state actors, pooling their military resource to do so. The unwieldy global coalition against the Islamic State, involving seventy-five countries as of 2018, is a case in point. States also routinely trade in claim and counterclaim over culpability and responsibility for the actions of non-state armed groups. Pakistan is an example, since it has been blamed by states ranging from the USA to India for stoking groups like the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba (culpable for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai). Pakistan’s statecraft has involved a measure of brinkmanship, to appease the USA with selective action against the Islamist militants that also pose a threat to it, while hedging against its regional rival, India. When one set of interactions involve states that threaten and cajole one another, but when the stakes of their interactions hinge on the actions and existence of nonstate armed groups, then a web of interactions arises that encompasses both hierarchical and networked entities. The modern statecraft of war and peace often hinges on these complex, multi-level, multi-actor type of interactions. To expand another example, Russia has been at pains since 2014 to insist that eastern Ukraine’s separatists, who fight under the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ banners, do so due to a sense of alienation from Kyiv’s sovereign authority. As a cover story for a state-backed intervention, it relies on a narrative of bottom-up local disgruntlement. States continue to find innovative ways in which to wage war, even if they wish to avoid a declared interstate war.

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Conclusion War always varies in its shape and form, and in the cast of actors that appear in each new manifestation of it. Where strategic theory retains relevance is in the fact that war, whatever the form it takes, is always inherently political. Changing complexities around actor identity, attribution and other factors cannot be excused away, but too great a focus on the micro-level drivers of war can risk losing the wider political frame. Strategic theory should not seek to supplant the bodies of literature that have come to prominence in more recent years to explain modern political violence from the bottom up. Instead, a reassertion of the political parameters within which ends, ways and means relate, and within which actor interdependence unfolds, is vital. To take one example, during the USA-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘COIN’ (counterinsurgency) gained traction as a way of framing the drivers of non-state actor violence, and of guiding a proportionate response. These were laudable goals but, in its articulation, COIN ended up far closer to doctrine than strategy. COIN emphasised a technical evaluation of how efficiently state security forces could break the hold of insurgents over the populace and restore government services and credibility – but the wider national, regional and international political contexts were neglected (Smith and Jones 2015). Moreover, the primary focus of COIN doctrine did not extend to the process of negotiation with former insurgent groups to facilitate their entry to politics, or the consequences of their marginalisation from political processes (Puri 2016: 119–21). Without due consideration to the play of politics, what is tenable in terms of both means and ends is relegated in prominence. Moreover, consequences arise from having discrete bodies of ideas to explain how states deal with armed groups, and other ideas to explain how states tussle with each another. Multiple games are at play in modern conflict scenarios. This demands deftness in conceptualisation so as to retain a holistic conception of strategy. Strategic calculations must account for the behaviours and responses of many kinds of actor, whether governments or armed groups, in all of their varieties. To close, this chapter sees realism and strategic theory as, at most, synonymous but not truly identical. Common to both is that neither can survive simply by asserting a ‘common-sense’ approach that reflects unchanging truths. So-called ‘perennial truths’ must adapt and be justified anew whenever political and technological contexts shift decisively, and when violence is being used or threatened in a radically different setting to past times.

Bibliography Barkawi, Tarak (2011), ‘From war to security: Security studies, the wider agenda and the fate of the study of war’, Millennium, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 701–16. Bozeman, Adda (1992), Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays, Washington: Brassey’s Intelligence & National Security Library. Clausewitz, Carl von (1832) [1976], On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ellsberg, Daniel (1968), Theory and Practice of Blackmail, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Freedman, Lawrence (ed.) (1998), Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Freedman, Lawrence (2002), ‘Where next for strategic theory?’, in John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen and Colin S. Gray (eds), Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freedman, Lawrence (2006), The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, International Institute for Strategic Studies Adelphi Series No. 379, London: Routledge. Freedman, Lawrence (2013), Strategy: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gray, Colin S. (2001), ‘Deterrence and the nature of strategy’, in Max G. Manwaring (ed.), Deterrence in the 21st Century, London: Frank Cass. Haslam, Jonathan (2002), No Virtue like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kaldor, Mary (1999), New and Old Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaplan, Fred (1991), The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kilcullen, David (2009), The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, Oxford and New York: Hurst. Krause, Keith, and Michael C. Williams (eds) (1997), Critical Security Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lebow, Richard Ned (2007), Coercion, Cooperation, and Ethics in International Relations, New York: Routledge. Liddell Hart, Basil (1967), Strategy, London: Faber. ‘National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015’ (2015), London: TSO. Nuemann, Peter (2009), Old and New Terrorism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert (eds), (1986), The Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Porter, Patrick (2016), ‘Taking uncertainty seriously: Classical Realism and national security’, European Journal of International Security, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 239–60. Puri, Samir (2016), Fighting and Negotiating with Armed Groups, International Institute for Strategic Studies Adelphi Series No. 459, London: Routledge. Puri, Samir (2017), ‘The strategic hedging of Iran, Russia and China: Juxtaposing participation in the global system with regional revisionism’, Journal of Global Security Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 307–23. Schelling, Thomas (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schelling, Thomas (1966), Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, M. L. R., and David Martin Jones (2015), The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency, New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, M. L. R., and John Stone (2011), ‘Explaining strategic theory’, Infinity, no. 4, pp. 27–30. Strachan, Hew (2005), ‘The lost meaning of strategy’, Survival, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 33–5. Tessman, Brock (2012), ‘System structure and state strategy: Adding hedging to the menu’, Security Studies, no. 21, pp. 192–231. Van Creveld, Martin (1991), The Transformation of War, New York: Free Press. Waltz, Kenneth (1979), Theory of International Relations, New York: McGraw-Hill.

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4 Political Realism and Realpolitik German realpolitik and the contingent nature of Anglo-American political realism John Bew

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his chapter examines the origins of the German term ‘Realpolitik’ and traces its influence on the English-speaking ‘realist’ tradition of the twentieth century. It shows that the meaning of such terms has repeatedly changed, depending on historical context, to make the broader point that notions of ‘the real’ in international affairs are highly contingent on time and place. The chapter begins by tracing the emergence of the neologism ‘Realpolitik’ in the mid-nineteenth century at the hands of a liberal writer, August Ludwig von Rochau, in 1853. It then discusses the distortion of the word in Germany as it was purloined by the followers of Bismarck, then damagingly conflated with Machtpolitik and Weltpolitik. The second half of the chapter discusses the arrival of realpolitik into the English language during the Anglo-German antagonism, when it was treated with alarm, as the distinguishing mark of a dangerous new rival and a direct affront to the liberal internationalism of the early twentieth century. Too much has been made of the influence of Germanic realpolitik on the various tributaries that have flowed into American realism. In fact, postwar American realism has mostly been distinguished by its insistence on restraint and a tone of righteous despair that the American nation was fated to ignore its prescriptions. *

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Realpolitik remains one of the most loaded and contested terms in discussions of international affairs. It is frequently used in scholarly literature but resonates far beyond the academy too. As one prominent British newspaper columnist put it in May 2017, ‘For the school of realpolitik, policy is dictated by national interests, strategic and economic.’ In this rendering, it implies a transactional and value-free approach to international affairs, driven by an unsentimental approach to foreign affairs: that is, ‘to buy and sell, make strategic alliances with whoever is up for it and let the chips fall where they may’ (Aaronovitch 2017). At the end of the Cold War, just like at the end of the First World War, many hoped realpolitik would be eradicated from the international system (or, at least, from Western foreign policy). Due to the force of circumstances and the blunting of Western power, it has made

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a comeback. At the time of writing, the international scene is littered with so-called practitioners of realpolitik, from President Erdogan to President Putin, and the writing of its theorists-in-chief, from Niccolò Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger, are in vogue once again. As something born in the dark heart of Europe and imported from Germany, realpolitik has always had an odd place in Anglo-American political discourse. It began to seep into the English language in the era before the First World War. For that reason, despite the fact that it has been used frequently in foreign policy debates in Britain and America for more than a hundred years, it is still regarded as somewhat exotic. Consequently, even when realpolitik can be said to have been in the ascendancy in the UK or USA, it has caused discomfort. In the 1930s in Britain and the 1970s in America, in very different contexts, the critics of foreign policy often cried foul about the ingestion of realpolitik by their own statesmen and diplomats.1 Over the course of the last decade, realpolitik has been shorn of some of these negative connotations. The return of great power rivalries and the fraying of the international order have evoked comparisons with periods in our past when realpolitik was seen to provide a useful tool of statecraft. Indeed, realpolitik has been presented as a necessary antidote to the perceived excess of idealism in Anglo-American foreign policy of the post-Cold War era – a return to the ‘real’ over the ‘utopian’. Thus, even those on the left of the political spectrum have shown themselves to be more comfortable with the term. ‘Everybody always breaks it down between idealist and realist,’ remarked President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, in an April 2010 article in the New York Times. ‘If you had to put him in a category, he’s probably more realpolitik, like Bush 41 . . . you’ve got to be cold-blooded about the self-interests of your nation’ (Baker 2010). In May 2012, the German weekly Der Spiegel ran an article declaring that Obama was the ‘unlikely heir to Kissinger’s realpolitik’, quoting the editor of the National Interest to the effect that he ‘may even start speaking about foreign affairs with a German accent’ (Schmitz 2013). Yet realpolitik is still shrouded in ambiguity. It is one of those words borrowed from another language that is much used but little understood. In modern usage, it has come to denote a posture or a philosophical inclination, rather than anything more substantive (such as an approach to politics or a theory of international relations). The true meaning of realpolitik remains occluded by the partisan way the word has been used in Anglo-American political discourse. ‘The advocates of a realist foreign policy are caricatured with the German term Realpolitik,’ Henry Kissinger once observed, ‘I suppose to facilitate the choosing of sides’ (Kissinger 2012). But in the hands of others, realpolitik is sometimes used in a positive way – as an accoutrement of sophistication, intended to signify worldliness and historical depth, and to distinguish oneself from dunderheaded ideologues. ‘I will leave it to the selfdescribed realists to explain in greater detail the origins and meaning of “realism” and “realpolitik” to our confused journalists and politicos,’ remarked Robert Kagan in 2010. Kagan’s point – the corollary of Kissinger’s – was that such words were used as a way of dismissing one’s opponents as unrealistic, unsophisticated and ill informed (Hounshell 2010). Indeed, the history of realpolitik has been pockmarked with the existence of cultish devotees, overly impressed by the idea that they were the gatekeepers to reality.

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If few satisfactory definitions of realpolitik exist, it is mostly because scholars of international relations, with a few notable exceptions, have remained largely uninterested in its historical origins. For the most part, realpolitik has been used interchangeably with ‘realism’, ‘realist’ or raison d’état – all of which, of course, are contested terms themselves (Waltz 1979: 117). Realpolitik is not, as is often assumed, as old as statecraft itself. Nor is it to be confused with ‘realism’ writ large. As Jonathan Haslam makes clear in No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli, it does have a place within the ‘realist’ tradition (Haslam 2002: 184–5). Yet it is something distinct from raison d’état, pursuit of the ‘national interest’, or Machiavellianism – with which it has often been conflated. In fact, realpolitik has a distinctive history of its own. It was created by the German journalist and liberal activist August Ludwig von Rochau in his 1853 treatise Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (which translates as Foundations of Realpolitik, applied to the current state of Germany). A second edition of the book was to follow in 1859, in which Rochau added a new preface (von Rochau 1859). In 1868, he produced a second, much longer volume, in which he made more of an effort to define what he meant by his neologism and addressed some of the criticisms he had received (von Rochau 1868). Rochau was a publicist, journalist and radical participant in the Vormärz, the movement for liberal political reform in the German states. The efforts of this liberal movement – like those of its sister movements across Europe – culminated in the rebellions of 1848, which were intended to establish constitutional and representative government. Rochau, who had been forced into exile before the uprising, tried to attain a seat in the liberal Frankfurt Parliament, which was established that year. Although he failed, he became a well-known figure in the National Liberal Party and eventually became a deputy in the German Reichstag in 1871. After 1848, the liberal dream of a united Germany under the rule of law was thwarted. In the multifarious states and principalities of Germany, autocrats, monarchists and the landed classes quickly re-established their control and scattered the revolutionaries into prison or exile. Over the following two decades, Germany was indeed to be united but not by the means that the men of 1848 envisaged. Rather than constitutionalism and representative government, it was the ‘blood and iron’ of the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, that forged the creation of the German Empire in 1871. ‘The castles that they have built in the air have evaporated into blue mist,’ Rochau wrote of his fellow liberals. ‘A work that had begun with aimless enthusiasm and had been carried out with an overestimation of one’s capabilities ended in dishonour and injury.’ Thus, he invoked the need for something called ‘realpolitik’ as an antidote to the ‘idealpolitik’ that had inspired them but failed to yield any political success. As he was to elaborate in his second volume, realpolitik does not move in a foggy future, but in the present’s field of vision, it does not consider its task to consist in the realization of ideals, but in the attainment of concrete ends, and it knows, with reservations, to content itself with partial results, if their complete attainment is not achievable for the time being.

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Ultimately, the thing he called realpolitik was an enemy of all kinds of self-delusion (von Rochau 1868). Moreover, Rochau rejected both Gefühlspolitik (sentimental politics) and Prinzipienpolitik (principled politics) as the basis for a nation’s foreign policy. In essence, Rochau’s original text might be understood as a form of liberal realism. Rather than abandoning the goals of the German liberal nationalism, he urged his colleagues to be willing to make compromises along the way, and to recognise that power was the foundational force in politics. In this respect, Rochau was a critic of utopianism, not idealism – a crucial distinction, often missed by those who claim the mantle of realism today. He understood that ideology played the ‘role of a harbinger and trailblazer of events’. Realpolitik ‘would contradict itself if it were to deny the rights of the intellect, of ideas, of religion or any other of the moral forces to which the human soul renders homage’. Yet what mattered was the political power of an idea, rather than its ‘rationality’. It was commonly said that ‘the most beautiful ideal that enthuses noble souls is a political nullity’. When it came to ‘phantasms’ like ‘eternal peace’, international fraternity and equality, with ‘no will and no force’ behind them, ‘Realpolitik passes by shrugging its shoulders.’ On the other hand, ‘the craziest chimera’ could become the most serious matter. One could not ignore ‘those latent forces of habit, tradition and sluggishness’, such as ‘poverty, lack of knowledge, and prejudice’, and even ‘immorality’.2 Some of these subtleties were lost in the afterlife of realpolitik. Even before Rochau’s death, the neologism was being deployed in ways that its creator would not have recognised. Writing a century later, the Harvard-based historian of Germany, Hajo Holborn, wrote that the term should not be used, except in association with statesmen who entered the scene in the decade after 1848, and even then it needed exact definition. As use of the word proliferated after 1853, however, so its original meaning became simplified. It came to denote either a policy contemptuous of all ideas and ideologies or a policy exclusively employing power for the achievement of its ends (Holborn 1960: 84–98). Gradually, too, an understanding of the liberal context in which Rochau had written was extinguished (Trocini 2009). It was after this period that realpolitik, born on the left of the political spectrum, was to become chiefly associated with those on the right. One figure was more important than any other in keeping alive the notion of realpolitik, and equally responsible for distorting its meaning. This was Rochau’s fellow National Liberal politician and historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, later described as the ‘prophet of national socialism’. After reading Rochau’s work, Treitschke set out to show his fellow Germans ‘how brilliant Realpolitik is’. In truth, he began to pollute its essence by infusing it with racialism, anti-Semitism, chauvinistic nationalism and a cultish devotion to the national ideal. For some, Treitschke was the perfect emblem of the rightward drift of German national liberalism, as it slipped into worship of the Prussian state. It is telling that Bismarck himself never used the word to self-describe his actions. But for Treitschke, who became the official historian of the Bismarckian state, it was the Chancellor who was the most effective practitioner of realpolitik (Sontag 1939: 127–39). As Germany had been united by Prussian force, and by a series of acts of war, the dividing lines became blurred between realpolitik (the art of realistic political analysis) and Machtpolitik (the use of force for political ends). In fairness to Bismarck, he understood this difference better than most. While he had deployed the instruments of force to unify Germany, he had also recognised the dangers

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of a national strategy in which Machtpolitik alone was the driving force. Thus Bismarck’s foreign policy was a self-limiting one. He sought to secure the territorial integrity of the new German state and keep down its greatest enemies (most of all, France). Equally, however, he understood the dangers of diplomatic isolation within Europe, and feared, above all, fighting a future war on both the western and eastern fronts. Yet these self-limiting ordinances were increasingly ignored by Germany’s leaders after Bismarck’s fall from the Chancellorship in 1890. Use of the word realpolitik became ever more ubiquitous among discussants of German foreign policy and statecraft – in Germany and beyond – but ever more unmoored from its original meaning. More specifically, realpolitik was now used interchangeably with another word that increasingly came to distinguish German’s approach to international politics in the quarter-century between 1890 and 1914. Weltpolitik was an aggregate ideology that evoked the prospect of German imperial expansion beyond Europe – to give Germans a ‘place in the sun’ – by the acquisition of colonies and an empire to rival those of Britain or France. In essence, it was the expression of Germany’s desire to be a world power. Like realpolitik, Weltpolitik was, as one scholar later wrote, ‘one of those wellknown but ill-defined catchwords with which the vocabulary of politics abounds’. In the 1890s, in the post-Bismarck era, it began to proliferate among an influential group of journalists and advocates of economic imperialism. Within government, it was those officials who had helped engineer Bismarck’s fall who put forward the most detailed expositions of Weltpolitik. By the First World War, it had become regularly used in the German Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Deutsche Bank – and existed in the links between business interests and various strands of the bureaucracy (Smith 1996: 18–19, 52–63). In making its entry on the world stage with such naked ambition, Germany imposed itself on the consciousness of its new rivals. In trying to make sense of German foreign policy, observers of Germany looked to terms such as Weltpolitik as a possible explanation for, and predictor of, German behaviour in the future. In discovering Weltpolitik in the 1890s, they also encountered realpolitik for the first time, even though a generation had passed since its creation. In the process of discovery, realpolitik not only became conflated with Weltpolitik, but also became associated with a list of other ills that were to play a role in the winding road to the outbreak of European war in 1914. By that time, Ludwig von Rochau was long forgotten and realpolitik had taken on a life of its own. For the British, this bastardised version of realpolitik was a deeply disconcerting discovery. It was the distinguishing mark of a dangerous new rival but also, more broadly, it implied a menacing and uncivilised worldview – a new way of looking at politics and international affairs – that set itself against those views prevalent among the English-speaking peoples. For most in the English-speaking world, in the era before the First World War, realpolitik was to be seen in an almost entirely negative light. It was usually interpreted as an outgrowth of Prussian militarism and German imperialism. It was taken to imply dastardly conduct on the international stage, in diplomacy and war. In this interpretation, Weltpolitik, Machtpolitik and realpolitik all seemed to grow from the same poisoned mind. Not everyone accepted the implication that realpolitik was a uniquely German condition, of course. In 1902, J. A. Hobson, who had reported on the Boer War for

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the Manchester Guardian, published Imperialism: A Study, in which he argued that Germany’s realpolitik was just one symptom of a general gangrene in international relations. The scramble for Africa and Asia was a battle in which all the major powers were engaged. This had created ‘alliances which cut across all natural lines of sympathy and historical association’, had led to unprecedented spending on military and naval armaments, and had even drawn the USA into the great game. Imperial ambitions fed into ‘a calculated, greedy type of Machiavellianism, entitled “real-politik” in Germany, where it was made, which has remodelled the whole art of diplomacy and has erected national aggrandisement without pity or scruple as the conscious motive force of foreign policy’ (Hobson 1902: 12–13). What Hobson called ‘earth hunger’ – the scramble for markets and resources – had led to the repudiation of treaty obligations and a narrow focus on self-interest. The result was a gradual deterioration of behaviour by all states in the international system. This was reflected in the ‘sliding scale of diplomatic language’ and the prevalence of notions such as ‘hinterland, sphere of interest, sphere of influence, paramountcy, suzerainty, [and] protectorate’. These were used to veil imperial ambitions and to rationalise the forcible seizure or annexation of land and the garrisoning of foreign ports. While Germany and Russia were bolder in their ‘professed adoption of the material gain of their country as the sole criterion of public conduct’, other nations had ‘not been slow to accept the standard’. Hobson warned that there were perils in such behaviour. Although the conduct of states in dealing with one another had always been determined by selfish and short-sighted considerations, things were getting worse. The conscious and deliberate adoption of these standards by all the major powers was ‘a retrograde step fraught with grave perils to the cause of civilisation’ (Hobson 1902: 12–13). The story of the USA and its relationship with realpolitik followed a different course and was not so bound up with Anglo-German rivalry. It was in the period from 1900 to 1914 that America awoke to the realpolitik that was causing such a stir in Europe. Yet America’s discovery of this concept was distinct from Britain’s in a number of ways. Americans saw reason to be suspicious of all the major European powers, and Britain – for all its claims to hold itself to a higher standard – was certainly not exempt from the ways of ‘old world’ diplomacy. At the same time, however, while not abandoning their exceptionalism, a small but increasingly influential portion of Americans argued that their country had to confront uncomfortable realities about the way the world worked. For them, America could no longer escape the machinations of the other powers and would soon be drawn into the game. In arguing that the USA needed to engage with the rest of the world – in a more front-footed and assertive manner – there emerged what might be called an American version of realpolitik, which was distinct from the German. At the most basic level, it was taken to imply a new geopolitical consciousness in which America must shape the world, before the world imposed itself on America. This ‘new realism’, which built on the ideas of Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, began to develop as the war raged in Europe (Osgood 1953: 130–4). Three of the protagonists behind this robust internationalism made up a group of young editors at the New Republic: Walter Weyl, Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann. Walter Weyl had travelled in Germany and was well read in German writing about statecraft. From this experience, Weyl concluded that America’s best policy in Europe

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was to present itself as the champion of ‘international law and morality’. America had the advantage that she was comparatively free from the historical enmities that divided Europe. However, as the USA embarked upon a programme of rearmament, she had to be aware that European states watched her moves with interest and suspicion. Despite the fact that America disclaimed any selfish aims in Europe, it was not to be expected that ‘the astute gentlemen who conduct European foreign affairs will construe our motives with excessive charity or interpret our diplomacy in terms of our own history and primers’. Europeans thought of US political leaders as ‘concrete, prescient, and ruthless, if heavy-handed statesmen’. ‘They ascribe to us more foresight than we possess, not realizing how often we have happily blundered into success, how often we have pursued Realpolitik in our sleep,’ Weyl wrote. He recounted a conversation he had had with a German academic about America’s position on a visit to Berlin: “‘We Germans”, a Berlin professor recently assured me, “write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery.” “You Americans”, he added, I thought enviously, “understand it far too well to talk about it”’ (Weyl 1916: 140–6). Although Weyl was the first to use the term, it was his fellow New Republic editor, Walter Lippmann, who might be regarded as the true father of American realpolitik (notwithstanding his role in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918). Lippmann, who left Harvard in 1910, later described how it was no longer possible ‘for an American in those days to be totally unconscious of the world he lives in’. In the last week of July 1914, Lippmann travelled to Belgium. He had planned to spend the summer walking across Germany, only for the border to be closed on the eve of Germany’s invasion. Lippmann rushed back to London and was actually in the House of Commons lobby on 4 August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany (Rosenthal 1991: 21). As early as 1915, Lippmann began to build his case for America’s entry into the theatre of conflict, with the publication of Stakes of Diplomacy. In a chapter called ‘A Little Realpolitik’, he made the argument that peace could be secured if the Great Powers agreed to a humane and stable legal and administrative framework for governing unstable areas of the world. He derided pacifism and ‘peace-at-any-price propaganda’ as entailing not the abandonment of force, but its concentration in the least democratic empires. He also raised the prospect of ‘some coalition of the west’ to secure international order in the future, on the grounds that liberal democracies tended not to go to war with each other (Lippmann 2008: 111–26, 194–5). Seen another way, then, early American realpolitik was a case for robust internationalism, yet while a new era of international cooperation would be the long-term goal, the immediate situation required the USA to get its hands dirty. ‘If we are to grapple with the issues which distract the world, we have got to enter the theaters of trouble,’ Lippmann wrote. Investment and trade creation in backward countries would add weight to American diplomacy, but to be really effective, US foreign policy would ‘have to be weighted with armaments of sufficient power to make it heard by the Great Powers’. Moreover, Americans would have to abandon their traditional dislike of European alliances. More specifically, it would have to work with those powers whose interests, and approach to politics, were closest to its own. The prospect of America embarking on a global policy of its own was not one that Lippmann took lightly. He knew that it was likely to provoke serious opposition. Indeed, he spoke of his own discomfort at the prospect. Ultimately, however, isolationism had become

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untenable, and America’s only choice was between being the ‘passive victim of international disorder and resolving to be an active leader in ending it’. There were costs in abandoning isolation, of course, but one thing was certain: America would be safer by surrendering it deliberately than by allowing itself to be dragged unprepared and surprised into the melee of the nations (Lippmann 1917: 226–9). Later generations of realist writers have focused on Lippmann’s writing in the Cold War era. Those who have studied these earlier pronouncements are uncomfortable with the implications. According to T. J. Jackson Lears, Croly, Weyl and Lippmann ‘spoke a language pruned of hypermasculine excess, rhetorically pragmatic and tough-minded but as wedded to lofty purpose as ever’. This ‘lofty purpose’ was to use US intervention as a way to accomplish Wilson’s larger goal to remake the world on the American model. Lippmann and the editors of the New Republic were particularly fond of arguing that the USA had yet to reach consciousness about the fact that it had all the traits of an empire. For critics of American interventionism over the next hundred years, it has been argued that this ‘pattern of realistic rhetoric and unrealistic aims continued to characterize arguments for military intervention for decades to come’ (Lears 2012: 82–120). None the less, the importance of their legacy cannot be denied. One begins to see the tangled legacy of American realism in which realpolitik initially implied geopolitical awareness as much as anything else. After 1945, however, realpolitik was again to take on a different meaning in America, this time more laden with controversy. This was in the first decade after the Second World War – and in the early years of the Cold War – when those who described themselves as realists began to become more influential in American academia and diplomacy. For the most part, the self-described realists of the Cold War era eschewed the label. They understood that it carried negative baggage because of its Germanic origins. Those who had emigrated from Germany to the USA – from Hans Morgenthau to Henry Kissinger – were particularly sensitive to being dismissed in this way. None the less, the opponents of the realists – at the academic, diplomatic and public levels – began to cry foul about what they saw as the adoption of un-American political notions in the making of the country’s foreign policy. It is absurd to argue, as some did, that German realpolitik was mischievously inserted into American discourse by these German émigrés and that this somehow subverted the basis of American thought on international affairs. If anything, the opposite is the case; most residues of this concept were thoroughly Americanised. As early as October 1918, a young Protestant theologian called Reinhold Niebuhr – who was to become a key figure in America’s realist tradition – submitted an article to Walter Weyl of the New Republic on the ‘German–American problem’ (Weyl 1918). Rather than criticising his fellow German–Americans for dual loyalty, Niebuhr in fact argued that they did not have sufficient loyalty to the humanist and idealist traditions of German thought – that they had forgotten their heritage, failed to uphold European traditions of liberalism and therefore left the path clear for the aggressive foreign policy of Germany in this era (Merkley 1975: 18–19). The Germanic contribution to American foreign policy was not some sort of alien imposition, then; whatever remained of it only survived in so far as it resonated with existing strains of American political and theological thought. American realism did not entirely rid itself of traits that characterised German realpolitik. It

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was a different creed but one with some commonalities – not least a strong dose of Weberian pessimism. It was also similar in that it was shaped by the outworking of an internal moral and philosophical angst about the health of the nation and the challenges of modernity. This gave realist discourse a rather exasperated, impatient tone – reflected in its belief that the odds were stacked against it, or that the politicians in charge simply did not see what the realists could see. In a bourgeoning academic field of international relations, realist contempt for the illusions of others saw some of its proponents adopt an increasingly theologising or, in some cases, pseudo-scientific stance. Of all the German immigrants to the USA, the man to whom the label ‘realpolitik’ was most often appended was the jurist and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau. While he was familiar with the word and was an admirer of Bismarck, he barely used it himself. Morgenthau’s English-language work must also be understood in its Anglo-American context. He regarded himself as the latest exponent of a tradition of Anglo-American realism, alongside pioneers of this credo, such as E. H. Carr (Morgenthau 1953). He repeatedly stressed the ethical value of prudential statecraft over any cult of national interest (Russell 1991: 1–9). According to Morgenthau, there were four great evils in American foreign policy thinking, which needed to be confronted: utopianism, sentimentalism, legalism and neo-isolationism. No nation could ‘escape into a realm where action is guided by moral principles rather than by considerations of power’ (Morgenthau 1951b: 13). Morgenthau’s stated concern was that the English-speaking peoples would forget their own realist heritage. Relying heavily on the work of English diplomatic historians of the 1910s and 1920s (such as Charles Webster, Harold Temperley and William Alison Phillips), Morgenthau made an argument that had become commonplace in 1930s Britain, shared by E. H. Carr and Neville Chamberlain – that there was more wisdom to be found in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Typically, he praised Lord Castlereagh, in particular, for his ability to understand the ‘distinction and relationship between ideology and power politics’ and his ‘consistent refusal to be swayed by ideological preferences or animosities into embracing policies which can contribute nothing to the national interest of one’s country’. Others in this realist tradition included Alexander Hamilton, George Canning, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and – of more recent vintage – Dean Acheson (Morgenthau 1951b). The lessons for American foreign policy were clear. The USA must avoid ‘well-intentioned folly’ and focus on its national interest rather than vague liberal internationalist fantasies. Despite his best efforts, Morgenthau could not escape the allegation that he was trying to convert America to some form of realpolitik. The criticism that stung Morgenthau most was that offered by a British historian, A. J. P. Taylor, writing in The Nation. Most historians would agree that power is the determining factor in international relations, Taylor began his review by conceding, but it was dangerous to define power too narrowly. Ideas were also a form of power, and the national interest was best secured by having them on one’s side. As the Cold War took shape, Taylor argued that it was the ‘best form of realism to have superior ideals’. Another criticism that Taylor made was that Morgenthau’s reaction broke down at the point of policy. Citing his support for a new deal with the Russians in Europe, Taylor

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wrote that Morgenthau’s policies, in contrast to his theories, were like everyone else’s: ‘pious wishes’. Morgenthau, like Metternich, was ‘a system-maker’. But foreign policy would not satisfy unless it followed a script or a pattern (Taylor 1951). For Morgenthau, this was no less than a battle for the soul of the American worldview. In an odd way, then, the precise details of foreign policy were of secondary importance to its theological premise. Thus, Morgenthau was eager to cast the postwar debate on American foreign policy as the most significant that had ever taken place in the history of international relations (as a field of study). One might say that American realism set itself an unrealistic task – of flushing Wilsonianism out of the American mind, and the American political system, entirely. In its efforts to do so, it also began to develop something of an identity crisis – stuck between a theology and a putative science. Writing in memory of Hans Morgenthau just after his death in 1980, Robert Osgood (director of research at Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute in Washington, and a mentee) attempted to capture the realist mindset he represented. On the one hand, Osgood wrote, Morgenthau had ‘expounded the gospel of Realpolitik and exorcised the moralistic illusions nurtured during the nation’s isolation from the mainstream of international politics’. He had shown there was a moral dignity in the national interest, which lay in the responsible use of power. On the other hand, in a shrewd observation, Osgood also noted that Morgenthau ‘was more of a critic than a prophet’. Like many other realists, he was a critic inspired by a mission that was never fulfilled (Osgood 1980). As realpolitik experiences a return to fashion in American political discourse, it is ever more important to appreciate the different tributaries that have flowed into the contested versions of American realism, and how much they are shaped by the era in which they have been articulated. An important lesson from this historical record is just how contingent and ambiguous the meanings of such terms can be. The idea that they point to some fundamental truth about the way the world works – let alone a science of politics – is harder to support, the more they are put in context. In the hands of Walter Lippmann in the era of the First World War, realpolitik implied geopolitical readiness – a willingness to enter the great game. In the hands of the self-described ‘realists’ of the Cold War era, such as Morgenthau – whose ranks Lippmann later joined – realpolitik was a label that was consciously eschewed. This was so as to avoid the imputation that this was somehow a European – or, worse still, a German – way of thinking about international affairs, somewhat alien to the Anglo-American tradition. But this sensitivity over language spoke to a deeper truth. However insistent the proponents of postwar realism were that their version of international politics was the correct one and that their theories were the only true guide to policy, they remained conscious of, and deeply frustrated by, their status as outsiders. Thus, realism became primarily about restraint, attempting to put a harness on an untameable horse. In railing against the naivety of those who did not share their credo, many academic realists adopted a tone of righteous despair, even more frustrated by a political world that refused to follow their rules. And so we are confronted by the enduring irony that the torchbearers of realism seem engaged in an idealistic battle that can never be won, frustrated at every turn by some fatal providential flaw in the Anglo-American political mind.

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Notes 1. For a history of the concept, see Bew (2016). 2. All quotations from Rochau in these two paragraphs are from Bew (2016: Chs 2 and 3, pp. 31–46, 47, 60).

Bibliography Aaronovitch, David (2017), ‘Fighting for rights is what makes us human’, The Times, 18 May. Baker, Peter (2010), ‘Obama puts his own mark on foreign policy issues’, New York Times, 10 April. Bew, John, (2016), Realpolitik: A History, Oxford University Press: Oxford. Haslam, Jonathan (2002), No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Hobson, J. A. (1902), Imperialism: A Study, London: James Nisbet. Holborn, Hajo (1960), ‘Bismarck’s Realpolitik’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 21, no. 1 (January–March 1960), pp. 84–98. Hounshell, Black (2010), ‘George H. W. Obama?’, Foreign Policy, 14 April. Kissinger, Henry (2012), ‘The limits of universalism’, Speech of 26 April, The New Criterion. Lears, T. J. Jackson (2012), ‘Pragmatic realism versus the American century’, in Andrew J. Bacevich (ed.), The Short American Century: A Postmortem, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 82–120. Lippmann, Walter (2008), The Stakes of Diplomacy, New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction. Lippmann, Walter (2017), A Preface to Politics, New York, Henry Holt. Merkley, Paul (1975), Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Account, Montreal and Ontario: McGill– Queen’s University Press. Morgenthau, Hans (1951a), In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morgenthau, Hans (1951b), article in Saturday Evening Post, 11 August, in Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Box 115, Folder 5. Morgenthau, Hans (1953), letter to Kenneth Thompson, 24 December, in Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Box 56, Folder 7. Osgood, Robert E. (1953), Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Osgood, Robert E. (1980), ‘Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy impact’, Chicago Tribune, 27 July. Rosenthal, Joel H. (1991), Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power and American Culture in the Nuclear Age, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Russell, Greg (1991), Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Schmitz, Gregor Peter (2013), ‘Unlikely heir: Obama returns to Kissinger’s Realpolitik’, Der Spiegel, 22 May. Smith, Woodruff (1996), The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Raymond J. (1939), ‘The Germany of Treitschke’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1, October, pp. 127–39. Taylor, A. J. P. (1951), Review of Hans Morgenthau on the National Interest, The Nation, 8 September.

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Trocini, Frederico (2009), L’invenzione della ‘Realpolitik’ e la scoperta della ‘legge del potere’, Bologna: Mulino. von Rochau, Ludwig (1859), Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands, vol. 1, Stuttgart: Karl Göpel. von Rochau, Ludwig (1868), Grundsätze der Realpolitik, Angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands, vol. 2, Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr. Waltz, Kenneth (1979), Theory of International Politics, New York: McGraw Hill. Weyl, Walter E. (1916), ‘American policy and European opinion’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 666, Preparedness and America’s International Program, July, pp. 140–6. Weyl, Walter (1918), letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, 24 October, The Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Correspondence, Box 3.

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5 Political Realism and Ideology Scepticism and the politics of faith David Martin Jones

Chapter Overview

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t is only in international politics that political realism developed as a coherent political doctrine. Realism is not an ideology but a disposition. It distrusts human nature and considers international rules conditional rather than absolute. It considers states with a monopoly of military power the most important actors in international affairs whilst the global society in which these states coexist remains, as it always has, an anarchy. As a consequence, it tends to be sceptical rather than ideological. The realist deals with the world as it is, not as the idealist or abstract ideologist thinks it ought to be. This chapter explores the contingent and prudential character of the realist disposition and contrasts it with the rationalist, abstract and axiomatic understanding that informs the ideological idiom of international thought. *

*

*

1. From the realist perspective, there are only three verities in world politics: diplomacy, treaties and war. Abstract schemes founded on international law, global justice or universal ideological panaceas, realists aver, frequently disappoint. Interestingly, the realist disposition lost both diplomatic appeal and academic traction with the end of the Cold War. This was for two, not entirely related, reasons. Realism assumes that Great Powers do not die in their beds. Great power status is won, as it is lost, by violence. As John Mearsheimer argued, this is their ‘tragedy’ (Mearsheimer 2006). Yet somewhat inconveniently, the Soviet Union imploded, internally dissolving through the body political equivalent of a terminally metastasising cancer. Subsequently, the apparent world historical triumph of a liberal democratic order promoting universally shared norms inspired a wave of optimism across the mainstream left and right of Western democratic politics. The benefits of world trade in an increasingly borderless world seemed to form an almost visible hand, shaping a progressive, interconnected and increasingly integrated world order. No one caught this mood better than Francis Fukuyama, whose ‘End of History’ thesis, that history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, left an indelible trace on post-Cold War diplomatic thinking (Fukuyama 1992). Its influence reached a peak in the

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period leading up to the Iraq War of 2003. Fukuyama argued that Western liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and fascism, and thus constituted the final form of human government (Fukuyama 1992: 287–340). In Fukuyama’s account, capitalism and the free market ultimately triumphed over rival economic models and alternative ideologies. Following the collapse of communism in Europe, liberal market democracy appeared to be the ‘only game in town’ (Fukuyama 1992: 340).1 It also afforded the possibility of reforming capitalism’s more unjust and inegalitarian outcomes. History, in this progressive understanding, would witness capitalist democratic states transformed through their participation in cosmopolitan, postnational constellations such as the United Nations and the European Union. These state-transcending organisations and their norm entrepreneurs would facilitate transnational justice, economic redistribution and the observance of human rights throughout the international system. One consequence of this ‘ideological evolution’ was that large-scale conflict between the Great Powers was ‘passing from the scene’ (Giddens 1998: 140).2 The imposition of a liberal, democratic, rule- or norm-based global order appealed across party political lines and found enthusiastic adherents among key US allies. Ultimately, an abstract rationalism informed the ideological style of thought, whether in its Marxist, nationalist, communitarian, feminist or post-Cold War liberal internationalist manifestations. We shall therefore next explore the character of ideological rationalism before explaining how realism, understood as a form of prudential or practical reasoning in politics, differs from it.

2. Rationalism, as the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, emerged as a distinctive intellectual style in the early modern period of European politics (Oakeshott 1981: 5–6). It emphasised reason, though not as Aristotle or Aquinas understood it – namely, a faculty of the practical understanding – but as Bacon, Descartes and Kant came to view it – as theoretical or scientific. Rationalism promotes the sovereignty of technique with a view to the prospect of certainty. This possibility of certain knowledge, which a scientific method applied to the realm of politics promised, offered a technique that not only ‘ends with certainty but begins with certainty and is certain throughout’ (Oakeshott 1981: 12). From this perspective, traditional or practical knowledge was not really knowledge at all but mere custom and prejudice. As Oakeshott observed, ‘how deeply the rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our political thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which (particular) traditions of political behaviour have given place to ideologies’ (1981: 21). The rationalist concern with technique implied a politics of perfection, which welcomed the growing bureaucratic power of government to make politics conform to what Friedrich Hayek termed a ‘scientistic’ rational plan (Espada 2016: 67). More particularly, Oakeshott counterposed the experience of a particular, contingent tradition and a local grammar of self-disclosure and self-understanding with the rationalist who ‘reduces the tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles which he will then attack and defend only upon rational grounds’ (1981: 6). Cutting itself off ‘from the traditional knowledge of society’, rationalism combined the politics of perfection with the politics of uniformity. Political activity consequently ‘consists in bringing the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of society before the tribunal of the

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rationalist’s intellect. “The rest”, as members of the European Union currently find, ‘is rational administration’ (1981: 8). In its twentieth-century, non-liberal forms of nationalism, fascism or Marxism– Leninism, ideology was both historicist and hard-headed in pursuing a revolutionary end. Ideology was, as Kenneth Minogue, contended, intellectually devastating . . . because it spread the illusion that those in possession of ideological wisdom had found the secret of understanding society as a whole. . . . The remarkable illusion shared by both communists, feminists, many nationalists and lots of other advanced thinkers was created by imagining that the contingent world we actually inhabit with all its unpredictability was actually a system. (Minogue 2008: xix) A system acts in a scientifically explicable manner that the ideologist deems oppressive. Ideological parties thus sought power in order to ‘purify’ society in terms of race or class or some other abstraction. The end of history in 1989, however, represented an ideological watershed. The historic failure of totalitarian regimes meant culture and ethics appeared more ideologically interesting for world transformation than economics, and authenticity and alienation more effective for emancipation than exploitation and the labour theory of value. Ethical aspirations in the form of multiculturalism, environmentalism and global justice were advanced with an untoward confidence in their revelatory selfevidence. Ethical transformation brought about by transnational activists and international institutions offered a seductive invitation to join a movement bent on creating the better world to which all reforms must point. The new transnational, progressive ideological drive of the post-Cold War sought to achieve a world characterised by secularism, internationalism and equality. Secularism banished appeals to anything otherworldly; internationalism meant liberation from oppressive nation-states through submission to notionally ethical international bodies; while equality demanded redistribution and the demand that everyone lead the same life as everyone else (Minogue 2008: xxxiii). The rationalist ideological style is thus activist and Oakeshott contrasted its ‘politics of faith’ Oakeshott 1996), or the fanaticism of this secular religion, with that of a contingent political tradition informed by what Leo Strauss identified as the particular and prudential character of classical reason (Espada 2016: 54). The rationalism inherent in all ideological projects, whether liberal, socialist, feminist or identity-driven, is inimical to the politics of scepticism, central, as it is, to the realist disposition, which we shall now explore.

3. The millennial zeitgeist was clearly unsympathetic to realism and to its dourly pessimistic view of the human condition, which stressed the intractability of state interests, the inevitability of conflict and the dangers of life in a world of sovereign states. Consequently, the vice of much current thinking about international politics has been to take an excessively long view of the future and an excessively short view of the past. The contemporary understanding of both international law and international politics

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considers the use of both hard and soft power to be appropriate only for humanitarian ends that fulfil a set of predetermined rationalist axioms laid down either in the United Nations charter or by international courts. Western interventions post 9/11were preoccupied with an abstract rationalist model applied generally. Diplomacy lost sight of the particular. Yet a realist strategy, to be effective, requires a clear political aim, which might deviate from the general, axiomatically determined, rule. In the aftermath of Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the prevailing historicist teleology ran into unanticipated, countervailing forces. Unforeseen but immovable obstacles have appeared in the path of a rationalist and emancipatory transformation of the interstate system. The recrudescence of identity politics, Russian irredentism in the Caucasus, the civil war in Ukraine and China’s emergence on the world stage as a great but authoritarian power, together with the continued turmoil in the Middle East, including the rise of the so-called ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS), intimate not the end of history, but the ‘revenge of the revisionist powers’ and the ‘return of geopolitics’ (Mead 2014: 69–79). History, after a brief nap, has reawakened, requiring states to reassess how they conduct themselves in an uncertain, anarchic, international society. Faced with this changed reality, Western powers and regional institutions have appeared, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as distracted and weak. They have consistently been outmanœuvred on the international stage by Russia and China, states with an apparent capacity to assert their national interests without inhibition. In the context of the Ukraine crisis of 2013–15, European policymakers clung to the hope that dialogue, law and judicious sanctions could achieve a solution. Yet ‘to be credible strategy requires a full toolbox’; and European ‘diplomacy without arms’, as Frederick the Great observed, ‘is like music without instruments’ (Anon. 2015: 35). Consequently, while the European Union considered the whole notion of geopolitics old-fashioned and unappealing, geopolitics happened on its doorstep. As Charles Powell, former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, argued, the ‘false doctrine of soft power’ and ‘creeping legalism’ made it increasingly ‘hard to galvanise democratic societies to meet new threats’ (Powell 2014). While Russia’s violation of the integrity of the Ukraine threatened the regional legal order that governed Europe, the fallout from the Iraq and Syrian civil wars raised the problem of the internal and external security of European democracies in a different but equally acute form, not evidently amenable to internationally mediated legal solutions. Such new, and not so new, threats to the international order suggest a need not for abstract norms, but for a strategy conducted on a casuistic case-by-case evaluation of the merits of intervention, together with a careful assessment of its practical and moral limitations. In the light of the recent dramatic changes in the character and conduct of international affairs, the politically realist contention that ‘the concept of interest defined in terms of power’ might save us ‘from both . . . moral excess and political folly’ has dramatically resurfaced in international politics (Wight 1979: 111). Grand strategy, from this perspective, requires the systematic pursuit of objectives that reconcile economic and military means with a reasoned appreciation of what is feasible in a dangerous world. As Hans Morgenthau claimed,

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There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences. (Morgenthau 1978: 12) Only in the wake of the failure of the world to transform along ‘end-of-history’ lines and with the rise of the revisionist powers do we realise that, instead of emancipation, liberal international progressivism has abandoned us to an age of anger, stranded on ‘a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night’ (Arnold 1994: 86). It is in this mood that a return to a realism that recognises the inevitability of conflict, the intractability of interests, and the dangers of life in a world of sovereign states commends itself. The virtues it applauds are not those of global justice or abstract human rights but rather those of prudence, enlightened self-interest and vigilance as the basis of a political action that avoids ‘premature generalizations’ (Toulmin 2001: 117). Of these classical virtues of statecraft, the notion of ‘prudence’ has been one of the most prized in Western political thought and the most often misunderstood. As Aristotle explained in the Nichomachean Ethics, ‘prudence (phronesis) is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience’ (Aristotle 1985: 160). More precisely, phronesis referred to the practical political skill of managing city-states. The Latin prudentia is one possible translation of phronesis – the practical skill involved in moral and political agency. For Greek and Roman political thinkers concerned with the res publica (the public thing), it was the virtue most at home among statesmen. Yet, just as realism is a highly contingent notion, so prudence has always been an ambiguous term. This was in part because it not only constituted a virtue but also involved discrimination between incompatible virtues in particular circumstances. As Kenneth Minogue observed, Reflection on prudence reveals that all virtues do not constitute a single coherent system of the moral life, but rather exhibiting some virtues can be incompatible with acting on others. The man of honour, for instance cannot always be prudent. Prudence is a joker in the moral pack and its business, on occasions, is to trump its fellow virtues. (Minogue 2005: 36) This business, as it has applied to international politics, has evolved over the last 500 years and bequeathed us our ambiguous political language. Terms like prudence, honour and justice are neither rational unities nor fortuitous collections, but hybrid ‘historic compounds’ (Oakeshott 1996: 8). As such they are worth unpacking.

4. As the visitor enters Room 6 of the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square, their eye might find itself drawn to one of the more enigmatic paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. It depicts a curious three-faced figure of a mature man facing the viewer,

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profiled on one side by a wizened old man and on the other by the callow features of a youth. Beneath the three-faced figure sits a three-faced beast, a lion’s visage facing, profiled by a wolf on one side and a dog on the other. Across the top of the painting runs the maxim EX PRAETERITO PRAESENS PRUDENTER AGIT, NI FUTUREM ACTIONEM DETURPET; in English, roughly translated, it reads ‘From the experience of the past/The present acts prudently/Lest it spoil the future.’ Tiziano Vecelli’s (Titian) The Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence (1565) may be read as a depiction of both the three ages of man and the image of a wolf devouring the memory of the past, the lion demonstrating the fortitude necessary in the present, and lastly a dog bounding into the future. Painting the Counter-Reformation for Philip II, Titian saw allegorical representation as a vehicle for conveying political understanding. Like other Counter-Reformation thinkers and artists influenced by the Renaissance recovery of Roman and Greek political understanding, Titian and his patrons were profoundly aware of the need for what Aristotle had termed political prudence in all actions concerned with the art, not the science, of government. Political prudence and the foresight it offered to choose the correct means to a political end not only had occupied the classical world and returned strongly with the Reformation and the birth of the early modern state, but it had also concerned the greatest medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, whose Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae (II-II 47–50) is in part devoted to a synthesis of classical and Christian thinking on prudence. For Aquinas following Aristotle, prudence is a form of practical reason. It involves memory and shrewdness, and requires command leading to action. It is intimately concerned with euboulia, or ‘deliberating well’, and synesis, or ‘judging well’. Moreover, even a scholastic thinker like Aquinas recognised that political prudence concerned contingent matters of action, ‘where even as the false is found with the true, so is evil mingled with good’. The recognition of the distinctive character of the political realm became more acute at the Reformation as Christendom disintegrated and political elites, whether Protestant or Catholic, searched for a formula to address the devastating consequences of religious enthusiasm. The formula they discovered was that of prudent counsel, adapting practical political reason to contingent circumstances. The doctrine that evolved was raison d’état (reason of state), practised by the more successful rulers of the period, whether Catholic like Philip II, Protestant like Elizabeth or irenic like Henry of Navarre. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers who bequeathed us our ambivalent language of government and defined the modern understanding of sovereignty and the nature of political obedience had much to say about the relationship between the state and the strategic use of force to sustain external and internal peace, yet this aspect of their thought is largely neglected. These realist theorists clarified the identity of the modern state and how it maintained and defended its right to exist, offering a practical counsel that modern Western democracies, in their efforts to maintain internal order or conduct wars of choice, would do well to reassess. The century from the Counter-Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia was almost as bloody as the twentieth in terms of the devastation it wreaked upon Europe. Between 1550 and 1648, Europe suffered divisive internal as well as external war, and witnessed the often brutal severing of traditional political and religious allegiances from Prague to Edinburgh.3

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It was in the context of confessional division and internecine war that the modern unitary state emerged, unsteadily, from the disintegrating chrysalis of the medieval realm. With it arose a new scepticism about morality, law and order that came to be termed politique. The realist thinkers that outlined this political project, from Niccolò Machiavelli at the start of the century to the Dutch humanist, Justus Lipsius, at its end, were notably wary of abstract moral injunctions when it came to difficult questions of war and governance. Instead, they offered a distinctive counsel of prudence, or practical morality, when considering the use of force. Unlike the contemporary human rights lobby, practical sixteenth-century guides to statecraft offered maxims or aphorisms, not axioms, to address difficult cases like war. This practical advice to princes and republics on policy contrasts dramatically with contemporary international law and its application of an abstract, rational, moral and legal standard to all cases of the use of force. Yet a return to a prudent rhetoric of reasonableness, especially in foreign policy debates, could restore the balance that abstract theoretical rationalism, with its preoccupation with certain rules and systems, has disturbed. In a world of uncertainty and complexity, abstract rationalist rigour is less appropriate than the sixteenthcentury humanism of those like Michel de Montaigne, who exhorted his readers to live with ambiguity and without judgement. Indeed, as Stephen Toulmin has argued, an updated prudential and practical ethics, or casuistry, can still have value in resolving doubtful cases ranging from war to euthanasia in the twenty-first century (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988).

5. What, then, was the character of this practical case analysis, and what implications does it have for modern statecraft and strategy? To recover this prudential view, and what it means for contemporary strategic thought, requires first that we establish how a distinctive approach to difficult cases of obligation emerged in the sixteenth century, as a response to confessional division and political fragmentation. This evolved as humanist philosophers and statesmen adapted from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s De Officiis and the histories of Tacitus, Polybius and Livy, a practical case ethics and a set of maxims to address questions of war and peace. In the process of interrogating the classical world for advice on political conduct, they walked eyes backwards into a realist or more accurately prudential understanding of statecraft. Indeed, as Oakeshott again observed, Perhaps the greatest achievement of the period was to elaborate the practices and principles of a modern sceptical manner of diplomacy and the conduct of relations with other states – a manner which had no place for foreign policy as the prosecution of a foreign crusade. (Oakeshott 1996: 82) A prudent political engagement thus required an awareness of providence and necessity, together with a common interest in the pursuit of practical wisdom, rather than passion, religious enthusiasm and opinion. Prudential reasoning about the political and international condition that formed the basis of both early modern and much modern statecraft got lost in the Cold War era of ideological confrontation and the

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postwar one, where the ‘end of history’ intimated a condition governed by internationally agreed norms. To the extent that the dominant global power, the USA, considered prudence at all, it existed in a somewhat desiccated form as a concern with caution and restraint. We might finally consider, then, how this late humanist approach to prudent political reason might address contemporary problems in world politics. Ultimately, the sixteenth-century politique humanism that thinkers like Jean Bodin, Giovanni Botero and Justus Lipsius pioneered, evinced a preoccupation with prudence and utilitas at the expense of honestas. It addressed the evolving predicament that the early modern (as well as the modern) politician faced: namely, the problem of deliberating and presenting controversial policies in contingent circumstances of change and uncertainty. This practical philosophic approach to difficult cases differs from axiomatic international legal rationalism in its sensitivity to the difficulty of applying abstract norms to the particular experience of difficult cases. As Jonsen and Toulmin explain in The Abuse of Casuistry, for the rationalist, ‘general ethical rules relate to specific moral cases in a theoretical manner, with universal rules serving as “axioms” from which particular moral rules are deduced as theorems’. By contrast, for a prudent casuist, ‘the relation is frankly practical with general moral rules serving as “maxims” which can be fully understood only in terms of the paradigmatic cases that define their meaning and force’ (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988: 23). Such an approach emphasises practical statements and arguments that are ‘concrete, temporal and presumptive’ (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988: 27). In the practical field of international politics, unlike the exact theoretical or natural sciences, immediate facts and particular and specific situations affect the very different practices of deliberation, presentation and judgement. Contra its modern critics, statecraft and raison d’état, moreover, were not amoral, but evolved a ‘mixed’ prudential form that philosophical counsellors to statesmen and princes developed to address the predicament of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rule. Following this counsel, we would arrive at a different and perhaps more practical set of maxims for difficult and ambiguous cases, whether it be the international community’s response to Putin’s intervention in Ukraine or the failure of the international community to intervene in Syria. In such cases, a modern-day practitioner of prudent advice would contend that the counsel offered to a prime minister or president would recognise the necessity of a situational ethical practice that directed the prince to that ‘great goal that is the common good’.4 This is particularly the case in global politics, where opinion and passion, both transitory and unstable, influence the masses. Wise counsel must take into account popular credulity and fecklessness. This necessarily affects the conduct of the prince or president who, in order to maintain stability and peace, must, of necessity, have recourse to a mixed prudence that adjusts to a ‘reality that is changeable in every respect’ (Lipsius 2004: 4.1, 383). Such prudence makes use of both simulation and dissimulation to advance the common good. Indeed, while truth is better than falsehood, as the ancients acknowledge, ‘experience shows the dignity and qualities of both’. In difficult cases, prudent conduct might, in other words, ‘depart slightly from human laws, but only in order to preserve [one’s] position never to extend it. For necessity being a great defender of the weakness of man, breaks every law’ (Lipsius 2004: 4.14, 531).

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Hence, mixed prudence and virtue are the two leaders of civil life but prudence ‘is the rudder that guides the virtues’. In particular, it ‘offers insight’ into cases of war or peace and the state’s right in such decisions. Here, history and experience, rather than abstract norms, play a central role in determining a prudent course. History ‘is the fount from which political and prudential choosing flows’ (Lipsius 2004: 4.1, 385). Since the end of the Cold War, such a mixed prudential view of international politics has been honoured only in the breach by both US and European governments, as well as their idealist critics. By contrast, the prudent adviser to early modern monarchs recognised the danger of presenting advice in overly idealistic terms that could lead to a damaging loss of credibility. In the context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s eastward expansion and Putin’s reclamation of the Crimea, the prudent counsellor might observe that ‘the pretence’ of idealism often ‘ignites the fires of strife’ across Europe (Lipsius 2004: 3.2, 391). Ultimately, a prince in troubled cases like Syria or the Crimea would recognise, unlike President Obama, that he ‘must do not what is beautiful to say, but what is necessary in practice’ (Lipsius 2004: 4.14, 531). An early modern practical philosopher would be astonished at how little prepared the political class in the USA and Europe are for war. Lacking knowledge of military prudence, they are unlikely to deliberate slowly over the reasons for the use of force or the outcome of using it. Lack of attention to history (memoria) and examples (exemplum) leads to the problems encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a failure to appreciate Russia’s long-term strategic interest in the Crimea or China’s in the South China Sea. More particularly, the West’s conduct of international relations increasingly requires an awareness of the arcana governing all interventions and the need to practise a differential political morality. This would recognise the importance of Tacitean and Stoic advice on the difficulty of political action. It would also recognise, as Machiavelli observed, that ‘all courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible) but calculating risk and acting decisively’ (Machiavelli 1944: 21). Linking raison d’état to active Roman virtue rather than theoretically abstract rule consequentialism would, a sceptical realist might argue, offer a limited ethical practice more easily adjusted to our ‘troubled condition of confusion and change’.

6. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville recognised that foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses; and they require on the contrary the perfect use of almost all of those faculties in which it is deficient. . . . It cannot combine measures with secrecy, and it will not await their consequences with patience. . . . Democracies obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence and . . . abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice. (Tocqueville 2002: 1.13, 262) In the world’s twenty-first-century democracies, Tocqueville’s observation seems particularly apt. There is little patience for the ‘mature design’ needed for success in international affairs. Moreover, the pressures on leaders in Western democracies have only increased. They include a twenty-four-hour news cycle and unprecedented media

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scrutiny, the need to maintain public support for a policy against the backdrop of intensive polling, and the phenomenon of catastrophic breaches of secrecy, as we have seen in the case of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks. Such pressures lead to mistakes. Too often we have seen a rush to the media briefing in a way that negates the shrewdness, circumspection and search for consensus that the traditional practice of realist diplomacy requires. Megaphone diplomacy via social media can do irreparable harm. Cheapening the language of diplomacy to 140 characters renders it nasty, brutish, short and demagogic. Even off-hand or well-intended public statements can take on a life of their own when they enter the public domain. In such circumstances, a prudent counsel would advise the selective application of the material of deliberation about a particular policy to the requirements of media presentation. Too often, however, modern theorists of international relations have failed to appreciate the changing nature of diplomatic practice. The idea that international affairs follow certain historically determined rules fails to appreciate the contingent texture of diplomatic history and practice. Rather than setting the future on digital or high-tech diplomacy, or assuming, as liberal internationalism does, an inexorable global meliorism, it is perhaps time to reassess the traditional virtues of realism and statecraft. Yet, to mention ‘statecraft’ and ‘virtue’ in the same breath is, in certain academic quarters, to court derision or disbelief. We have been taught that politics is a dirty game, and diplomacy between self-interested nations its most perverse manifestation. ‘An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,’ the English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton is reported to have remarked on a mission to Augsburg in 1604. Yet few would deny the positive aspects of diplomacy – a willingness to compromise and seek compromise and, above all else, seek alternatives to conflict and war. In the modern era, our diplomatic habits might benefit from some readjustment to allow the older realist virtues to flourish. Prudence is a tradition that has been lost to rationalist theories of international relations. It still, however, continues to offer the possibility of a prudential grand strategy, predicated on the foundations of existing political thought, for the anarchic international society of the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

See also Linz and Stepan (1996); Friedman (2000). See also Held and McGrew (2000); Katzenstein (2005). See Greengrass (2016). Justus Lipsius, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589). All references are from Lipsius (2004: 2.6, 309).

Bibliography Anon. (2015), ‘A lurch onto the world stage’, The Economist, 28 February, p. 35. Arnold, Matthew (1994), Dover Beach and Other Poems, New York, Dover Thrift, p. 86. Aristotle (1985), Nicomachean Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett. Espada, João Carlos (2016), The Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe, London: Routledge.

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Friedman, Thomas L. (2000), The Lexus and the Olive Tree, London: HarperCollins. Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin. Giddens, Anthony (1998), The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Greengrass, Mark (2016), Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648, London: Penguin. Held, David, and Anthony McGrew (eds) (2000), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jonsen, Albert R., and Stephen Toulmin (1988), The Abuse of Casuistry, Berkeley: University of California Press. Katzenstein, Peter (2005), A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Linz, Juan, and Alfred Stepan (1996), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipsius, Justus (2004), Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, ed. by Jan Waszink, Assen: Royal Van Gorcum. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1944), The Prince, London: J. M. Dent. Mead, Walter Russell (2014), ‘The return of geopolitics: the revenge of the revisionist powers’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 69–79. Mearsheimer, John J. (2006), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: Norton. Minogue, Kenneth R. (2005), ‘Prudence’, in Digby Anderson (ed.), Decadence, London: Social Affairs Unit. Minogue, Kenneth R. (2008), Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1978), Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Knopf. Oakeshott, Michael (1981), ‘Rationalism in politics’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London: Methuen. Oakeshott, Michael (1996), The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Powell, Charles (2014), ‘The West will pay for losing its backbone in Iraq and Ukraine’, Daily Telegraph, 19 June. Tocqueville, Alexis de (2002), Democracy in America, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Toulmin, Stephen (2001), Return to Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wight, Martin (1979), Power Politics, London: Penguin.

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6 Political Realism and Civil–Military Relations Clausewitz and the meaning of war Lindsay P. Cohn

Chapter Overview

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undamentally, Clausewitz believes that the political nature of war makes it an intersubjective rather than an objective phenomenon, and makes it imperative that military logic inform political logic, but give way to political logic when the two are in tension. In short, he challenges both standard political realism and the standard US (Huntingtonian) narrative of appropriate civil–military relations at the top of the policy-making pyramid. Based on his claim on the very first page of On War, that law and morality are ‘self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning’, he has traditionally been considered a political realist along the lines of Thucydides and Machiavelli. However, while this attitude of his certainly excludes him from the idealist/ liberal camp, it does not automatically then make him a realist, as I will go on to show. *

*

*

Was Clausewitz a Realist? Colin Elman (2007) has argued that, among the various schools of realist thought, there are some common threads: namely, that the nature of international relations is constant (or, at most, cyclical) rather than progressive, and that human selfishness or lack of trust leads to competitive attempts to accumulate power. Beyond that, realists disagree on a fair amount. (Neo)Classical realism is sceptical about the constraints of law and morality – the classic statement being from Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, that right is at issue only between those who are equal in power. It is thus focused on the need to maintain relative gains and to focus on security or power as the ultimate value. Anarchy is a permissive element, and wars happen because flawed, powerhungry human beings make the decisions. Neorealism (or structural realism), on the other hand, basically argues that war can be explained without reference to individual leader motivations or the internal characteristics of states because, in an anarchic world of functionally like units, the only thing that matters for explaining their relations is the distribution of power (or capabilities). Waltz (1979) does not assume that state behaviour is actually rational, only that states

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that get into wars irrationally will be selected out of the system. Both forms of realism, however, privilege rationalist explanations of war. Given that Clausewitz is not trying to explain why wars happen or even why states interact with each other in the way that they do, but rather why war is the way it is and how to win one, assigning him to any school of international relations theory is going to involve extrapolation. Neorealists would have difficulty accepting Clausewitz because of his focus on factors internal to the state and on non-material elements of power (see below). The classical realists tend to claim him because of his stance that law does not constrain state behaviour, but constructivists have a fair shot at him because of his arguments about the critical role played by subjective values and the intersubjective meaning of victory. Clausewitz does fit the classical realist narrative in that he believes that the nature of war is unchanging and that states’ relations with one another will always involve force in some way. He does not comment on the specific causes of war, except to point out that war is a tool of policy and is generally undertaken in order to accomplish something that the political leadership does not think it can accomplish through negotiation devoid of the threat of violence. In fact, Clausewitz’s discussion of war sounds very rationalist and foreshadows the idea of war as bargaining. He notes that the two sides will stop fighting when they feel the costs outweigh the value of the object or the probability of achieving the object. He argues that actual fighting is not necessary if one side is able to evaluate the likely cost and determine beforehand that the fighting is not worth the object.1 Much of his discussion serves as a clear basis for the later theorising of Schelling (1966) on deterrence (see Clausewitz 91–4 on deterrence by punishment and denial)2 and Fearon (1995) on rationalist explanations of war (Reiter 2003).3 Clausewitz is not, however, a pure rationalist.

Clausewitz the Constructivist? The Intersubjectivity of War While Clausewitz is famous for calling law and morality ‘limitations hardly worth mentioning’, his further discussion acknowledges that, if both sides share the same standards of morality, that common morality is likely to limit their behaviour in war. This is where Clausewitz begins to look more like a constructivist: his arguments assume the internal characteristics of the state and the military matter, and frequently allude to the inter-subjective nature of war. All of his descriptions and analogies – the Zweikampf, the wrestling match – are of struggles in which both sides know what victory and defeat look like, and in which both sides know what behaviour follows appropriately upon victory or defeat. In short, while Clausewitz writes as though the nature of war were objective, he describes an intersubjective phenomenon. ‘War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’ (Clausewitz 1976: 75). The ultimate aim is to get the enemy to do/refrain from doing something we want. We cannot physically force that behaviour; all we can do is put the other in a position where he does it under his own will. In Clausewitz’s pure theory, this is supposed to happen because one side wins a fight and the other acknowledges defeat (77, 90–1). Implicit in this is that the winner and loser both agree what constitutes ‘winning’ and ‘losing’, and agree that the price one pays for losing is to do what the victor wants.

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This is clearly intersubjective reasoning. Unless the object of the war is to occupy territory – in which case the ‘military’ and ‘political’ objectives are identical (81) – there is no sense in which the meaning of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ is objective,4 or in which the fact that you ‘won’ and I ‘lost’ means I have to agree to all of your terms.5 For Clausewitz, the fact that war is quintessentially political makes it quintessentially both subjective and intersubjective. If war were merely a contest of brute strength – of Schelling’s ‘force’ and not of ‘violence’ – then it might be objective, and amenable to objective analysis in the way that structural realists prefer. Because Clausewitz considers state power to consist of both the state’s means (actual and potential) and the ‘strength of his will’ or the ‘moral element’ (77, 97), which is related directly to the value the state places on the political object, the nature of war cannot fail to be both subjective and intersubjective.6

Clausewitz on Civil–Military Relations It is largely because of this political nature, this intersubjectivity, that Clausewitz thinks of civil–military relations as important. It is because the nature of war and the meaning of violence are not objective that the interaction of the military and political logics matters. Many readers of On War have taken the discussion of the ‘logic’ of war as tending to ‘extremes’, and concluded that Clausewitz believed that if a state were going to wage war, the only sensible way to do it would be to engage in total war, mobilising the entire resources of the state and attacking with immediate and overwhelming force. But this is not what Clausewitz is arguing, at all. He is making the point that if war were merely a military activity – merely a contest of strength – then the logic of such a contest would demand such an approach. War, however, is not a merely military activity; it is the employment of violence for the purposes of bargaining for some other objective. He notes, we could . . . proclaim . . . that, since the extreme must always be the goal, the greatest effort must always be exerted. Any such pronouncement . . . would often result in strength being wasted, which is contrary to other principles of statecraft. An effort of will out of all proportion to the object in view would be needed, but would not in fact be realized, since subtleties of logic do not motivate the human will. (78, emphasis mine) In other words, while the logic of force (‘military logic’) always requires maximum effort regardless of the value of the object, this would frequently be a waste of resources, and would require a level of public support that simply would not be forthcoming for limited goals. Thus, it is not only unlikely to work, but also undesirable and wasteful. The state need only use enough force.7 How to calculate ‘enough’? The leader must estimate the will and force the adversary will be willing to engage for his most likely objective. This is where Clausewitz deviates from the Huntingtonian model of civilian control of the military that has long been accepted as common wisdom, and which argues that once the decision for war has been made, military logic should dominate (or risk failure). Below, I briefly discuss the discourse around civil–military relations (particularly in the USA), and then return to the issue of why Clausewitz’s views deserve attention.

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What are ‘Civil–Military Relations’? ‘Civil–military relations’ is the name we give to the complex of relationships among the government, the military and society. The field is inherently both normative and empirical. The original impetus for thinking about this is usually attributed to Plato, as he discusses the awkward relationship between the martial class and the philosopher king in the Republic. As Peter Feaver (2003) explains, this is an issue that arises in societies that have a division of labour in terms of who fights and who does not fight. Once there is one group in the society that has a strong dominance over the tools of coercion, the inherent problem is: how does the society ensure that this group employs coercion only on behalf of the whole society, and not in pursuit of that group’s own goals? In the best-known (English-language) treatment of this issue, Huntington (1957) argues that there are two ways to try to achieve control: subjective control, which involves treating the military as an interest group and a power player, and manipulating its demographic, ideological or religious make-up in order to align it with the ruling class;8 or objective control, which involves professionalising the military, such that it recognises its sphere of competence (fighting) and refrains from participation in politics out of a sense of duty and appropriateness. The idea is that the government – of whatever kind – has the legitimacy (if not the expertise) to run the country, while the military’s expertise is in the extremely circumscribed realm of protecting the country from foreign attack and protecting the government from internal threats. Since the government has the greater competency, the military is supposed to accept, willingly, a subordinate position in the running of the state. The US military officer corps has tended to accept and normalise the Huntingtonian view of objective control (Cohen 2002), not least because it instructs civilians to make their decisions about political objectives and then get out of the military’s way. It elevates the idea of military advice/expertise to something nearly unquestionable; indeed, Huntington argued that the only way a liberal state could survive a longterm contest like the Cold War was for the policy-makers to move closer to the military view of international affairs. Implicitly, Huntington believed not only that the military officer corps was, in fact, expert in the ‘management of violence’, but also that the logic of that expertise had to take precedence over politics, or the polity would lose the war. It is easy to see why this approach has appealed to generations of military officers. They are comfortable with leaving the ‘politics’ to the civilians; all they ask is a clear strategy and a clear set of parameters, and then full autonomy to do exactly as they see fit. Needless to say, politics and policy-making are never that simple or clear-cut. Clausewitz was fully aware of this and argued that the nature of war made the idea of ‘purely military’ expertise, advice or decision-making simply impossible.

Nature of War Clausewitz uses a dialectical sequence to discuss the nature of war, beginning with the essential nature of it, and then explaining the nature of the conflicting forces that move war away from its essence to the reality that we experience. Some have taken this as a normative argument and claimed that Clausewitz thinks war ought to be made to

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conform as closely as possible to its essential nature, but he never says any such thing. Clausewitz is no more an advocate for total war than Plato would have been an advocate for sitting only in an ideal chair. Clausewitz merely wants us to recognise that the only way to understand war as we experience it is to understand both its internal logic (leading to extremes) and how other factors affect that logic (leading to moderation). He does, however, mix the normative and the empirical together when he discusses the limiting factors. For example, the nature of time and space is an empirical limitation on the extremes of war. As it is nearly impossible for a state to gather all its strength at exactly one time and place, the war will become a series of engagements rather than one enormous, decisive clash. On the other hand, the extent to which political imperatives guide the military planning and execution of the war is something Clausewitz describes as a normative requirement. He makes it clear that it is possible for the people running the war to allow the military logic (that is, the logic of total war) to override the political logic (that is, the logic of matching costs and benefits and neither over- nor undershooting the goal). He claims that this would be ‘absurd’ and ‘can be damaging’ (607), and urges his readers to recognise that the essential nature of war is political. He argues that it is a misunderstanding to think that war is what happens when politics has failed or that war suspends the working of politics in favour of its own brutal logic.9 On the contrary: politics continues during war, and war is merely its instrument. The title of Book 1 Ch. 1.24 is frequently translated as ‘War is merely the continuation of policy by other means’, which is not an inaccurate translation but which has, I believe, led many to a misunderstanding of what Clausewitz was arguing. It is common for people to conceive of war as being the thing that states do when politics (or policy) has failed; the ‘last resort’ of just war theory or the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine; the thing states do when nothing else has worked and now it is okay to kill people and destroy things and operate by a totally different set of rules. This was not Clausewitz’s view. An alternative translation of the first sentence in that subchapter is: ‘So we see that war is not simply a political act, but a true political instrument; a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same thing by other means.’10 A political act is simply one that has political implications; a political instrument is one that is used intentionally with an objective in mind. This makes it clear that war is not the suspension of normal interaction; it is simply another form of bargaining, now involving violence or the threat of violence as a means of accumulating chips that can be used at a (peace) negotiation (see, for example, 526). One important implication of this is that politically driven limitations on the amount of effort, on when/where/with whom to fight and so on, are absolutely legitimate, so long as they serve the ultimate end of a favourable peace agreement.11 Thus there are many reasons why the purpose of an engagement may not be the destruction of the enemy’s forces. . . . In such a case, total destruction has ceased to be the point; the engagement is nothing but a trial of strength. In itself it is of no value; its significance lies in the outcome of the trial. (96) This is a clear acknowledgement that even fighting a losing action can be useful and intentional if it convinces the enemy that the fight will cost more than they think it is worth. Clausewitz goes on to argue that

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[o]nce this influence of the political objective on war is admitted, as it must be, there is no stopping it; consequently, we must also be willing to wage such minimal wars, which consist in merely threatening the enemy, with negotiations held in reserve. (604) This is all directly opposed to the logic of the Weinberger–Powell Doctrine, which argues that force should be used only once things have come to the point where total victory is the goal. This being said, Clausewitz does not think that political ends are tyrants (86–7).12 He acknowledges that policy-makers will learn new information through fighting and notes that ‘the original political objects can greatly alter during the course of the war and may finally change entirely since they are influenced by events and their probable consequences’ (92). This is why it becomes important to understand the interaction between military and political logics, which has not been a focus of the war-as-bargaining literature. This requires an investigation into the nature of military expertise.

Military Expertise For Huntington, part of the essence of the military officer’s profession is his or her specialised expertise in the ‘management of violence’.13 The logic of Huntington’s objective control is that there are distinct spheres of real competency, and that military officers do not understand ‘political logic’, and policy-makers (presumably unless they had military careers) do not understand ‘military logic’. This is why their decisions need to be kept separated and why the civilians are not to interfere in the way the military runs things, once the civilians have indicated what their military objectives are (for example, eject Hussein’s forces from Kuwait; defeat the Taliban). For Clausewitz, this would have been an odd way to think about the issue, since he did not separate ‘the military’ and ‘the civilian’ as different people, but rather as different logics that could be followed by the same person, and between which that person could choose. This is probably because, in his reading and experience, military and political leadership was often combined in one person (such as Napoleon, Gustavus Adolphus or Frederick the Great). Even if Clausewitz were used to the current democratic idea that military knowledge and political knowledge reside in two discrete groups of people, he would not be satisfied with Huntington’s arguments. Clausewitz spends a significant amount of time discussing military ‘genius’; he practically never uses any term that might be translated as ‘expertise’. For Clausewitz, what makes a good commanding general is a rare combination of intellect, moral and physical courage, and coup d’œil – or the ability to take in a whole situation at a glance, understand its nature and see the best way to respond to it.14 Incidentally, these are the same characteristics that Clausewitz thinks make great statesmen, with the exception of the need for physical courage. Although he spends much of the book discussing how things ought to be done in war, Clausewitz does not seem to think that it is possible to have such a thing as ‘military expertise’ in any sense higher than the operational. Experience is important, but all experience does is improve one’s chances of good judgement.15 When Clausewitz talks about war as the realm of chance, friction and fog, he is essentially saying that no one can be an expert at it.16

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What the experienced military leader may have is a better understanding of how the military tool itself works, and therefore how the political logic is likely to interact with the military logic. This is key to successful bargaining but has generally been left out of bargaining models. Therefore, it is important that we understand the relationship between the military leadership and the statesman, when those functions are carried out by different people.

Military Advising The US military has long operated on a Huntingtonian normative model that says they are to give policy-makers their ‘best military advice’ and not try to anticipate the politics of the situation. They are supposed to explain what force can and cannot accomplish in a given situation, how much force would be required for different outcomes, and how much risk would be involved in each. Then the policy-maker is supposed to determine how much he or she values the various outcomes, weigh that against the risk, then pick a course of action for the military to implement.17 To a certain extent, this makes sense, as many policy-makers will have little personal understanding of how militaries function, what they can and cannot do, and how much risk/cost will be associated with various options. Clausewitz does note that political leaders who have little understanding or experience of war can easily make bad decisions, and that they need sound military advice. He says, [i]f war is to be fully consonant with political objectives, and policy suited to the means available for war, then unless statesman and soldier are combined in one person, the only sound expedient is to make the [commanding general] a member of the cabinet, so that the cabinet can share in the major aspects of his activities. (608) It is not quite clear what ‘sharing in major aspects’ of the commanding general’s activities might mean. Feaver (2003: 298; 2011: 117) has described two schools of thought on this: the professional supremacists and the civilian supremacists, the former of whom think that military judgement must dominate and the latter of whom believe in a civilian ‘right to be wrong’. The right to be wrong refers to the idea that, particularly in a democracy, it is the political and not the military leader who has the legitimacy and authority to make such decisions, and if the decision is wrong, it is not the military but the people who must judge and punish the political leader. Clausewitz makes it clear that if the military leader’s objection to a policy is simply that it does not follow military logic, then the objection is invalid. If, on the other hand, the military leader believes the policy is mistaken, in that it will not (by military logic) lead to the outcome that the political leader has stated he or she wants, then the military leader ought to explain this to the political leader. Clausewitz does not give any advice for the situation in which the political leader continues to insist on the objectionable course of action. This certainly leaves the door open for the professional supremacists, who argue that, while the policy-maker should have all the authority to decide when to bring the use of force into a political problem, his or her decision-making authority ends there because that is where his or her expertise ends. In short: the policy-maker makes the decision whether to fight, and the military gets to decide how to fight.

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Clausewitz does not seem to give the statesman the right to be wrong. He says, [i]f policy reads the course of military events correctly, it is wholly and exclusively entitled to decide which events and trends are best for the objectives of the war. . . . This is as it should be. No major proposal required for war can be worked out in ignorance of political factors; and when people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not really saying what they mean. Their quarrel should be with the policy itself, not with its influence. If the policy is right – that is, successful – any intentional effect it has on the conduct of war can only be to the good. If it has the opposite effect, the policy itself is wrong. Only if statesmen look to certain military moves and actions to produce effects that are foreign to their nature do political decisions influence operations for the worse. In the same way as a man who has not fully mastered a foreign language sometimes fails to express himself correctly, so statesmen often issue orders that defeat the purpose they are meant to serve . . . which demonstrates that a certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy . . . . (607–8) This might seem to come down squarely on the side of the professional supremacists by indicating that, in order to make good political decisions about the use of force, a statesman must himself have some good understanding of warfare. However, Clausewitz continues: We are far from believing that a minister of war immersed in his files, an erudite engineer, or even an experienced soldier would, simply on the basis of their particular experience, make the best director of policy . . . far from it. What is needed in the post [of policy-maker] is distinguished intellect and strength of character. He can always get the necessary military information somehow or other. The military and political affairs of France were never in worse hands than when the brothers Belle-Isle and the Duc de Choiseul were responsible – good soldiers though they all were. (608) This is a turn of events! Clausewitz certainly acknowledges that ‘policy, of course, will not extend its influence to operational details. Political considerations do not determine the posting of guards or the employment of patrols,’ but fundamentally political considerations ‘are the more influential in the planning of war, of the campaign, and often even of the battle’ (606; cf. 80).18 He finds the idea of ‘pure’ military advice unrealistic: We can now see that the assertion that a major military development, or the plan for one, should be a matter for purely military opinion is unacceptable and can be damaging. Nor indeed is it sensible to summon soldiers, as many governments do when they are planning a war, and ask them for purely military advice. (607) This point derives directly from Clausewitz’s point about the actual defeat of the enemy frequently being unnecessary to the accomplishment of a favourable peace negotiation. He notes:

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lindsay p. cohn It is easy to imagine two alternatives: one operation is far more advantageous if the purpose is to defeat the enemy; the other is more profitable if that cannot be done. The first tends to be described as the more military, the second the more political alternative. From the highest point of view, however, one is as military as the other, and neither is appropriate unless it suits the particular conditions. . . . We can see now that in war many roads lead to success, and that they do not all involve the opponent’s outright defeat. They range from the destruction of the enemy’s forces, the conquest of his territory, to a temporary occupation or invasion, to projects with an immediate political purpose, and finally to passively awaiting the enemy’s attacks. Any one of these may be used to overcome the enemy’s will: the choice depends on circumstances. (93–4)

He goes on to clarify his position: The only question, therefore, is whether, when war is being planned, the political point of view should give way to the purely military (if a purely military point of view is conceivable at all): that is, should it disappear completely or subordinate itself, or should the political point of view remain dominant and the military be subordinated to it? . . . Subordinating the political to the military point of view would be absurd, for it is policy that creates war. Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument . . . no other possibility exists, then, than to subordinate the military point of view to the political. . . . (607)19 This sounds less like Huntington’s separate spheres and more like Eliot Cohen’s (2002) ‘unequal dialogue’, which highlights the interactive nature of the relationship, and the fact that the military advice must always be subject to political judgement.

Why Scholars of International Relations Should Care about Civil–Military Relations Clausewitz recognised a fundamental truth: military victory does not automatically produce political success. Only politicians can do that. Even a recognised military genius like Napoleon – who won so many battles and accomplished so many incredible feats – eventually lost everything because he lacked a realistic political strategy. For Napoleon, victory was the goal. Unfortunately, ‘keep winning’ is a fundamentally apolitical strategy: it says nothing about governance. Most states that start wars do not end up with the peace they wanted, even if they ‘win’. Clausewitz might argue that this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between military victory and political success: if people believe that all they need to achieve is military victory, they will fail to produce a proper political strategy to guide the exploitation of the victory in peace negotiations. Only if both generals and statesmen recognise the role of violence as a bargaining tool can they strategise appropriately.20 This requires far more than the proverbial ‘exit strategy’ that most military members want. Usually, what is meant by ‘exit strategy’ is a description of the circumstances under which the state will remove its fighting forces, whether that be victory or cutting losses. But this is not the same thing as having an idea of how to use violence as part of an overall bargaining process, involving

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offers, counteroffers and tradeoffs. Such a strategy requires a deep understanding of what the adversary values, and this is something available only through political, not military, logic. Scholars of international relations already know how to think of war as bargaining, but some have treated the actual fighting of war as a lottery rather than an intentional part of the bargaining (Reiter 2003: 29), while others have simply failed to recognise how the bargaining is affected by the interaction of military and political logic. Scholars of international relations ought to care about civil–military relations because that is where the two logics interact and where decisions are made about what kind of activity the state is actually engaging in. Of course, there has been plenty of criticism about the USA lacking a strategy; my critique is that even those making that criticism frequently seem to misunderstand Clausewitz’s lesson about the role of military force in a political bargaining strategy. Fundamentally, there are three ways to get another actor to do something he otherwise would not have done: one can threaten him with harm if he does not do it; one can offer him something he likes if he does do it; or one can persuade him that it is an appropriate thing to do. In all three cases, the only way that such an exercise of power is possible is if one understands what the other fears, values and/or considers legitimate. The problem many states face is that they fail to understand their adversaries and to consider what they want. This contributes to the misapprehension that simply threatening violence will be effective coercion. Threatening violence works only if one threatens something that the adversary values more than what one is trying to get out of him or her. It also works better if accompanied by incentives and/or persuasion. Again, this is made more difficult by a widespread belief that when war starts, military logic must take over. Of course, those in the various Foreign Offices know that diplomacy does not stop, but their jobs are made significantly harder if elected officials make claims about how one does not negotiate with terrorists or how the other side is evil and must go. The realist in Clausewitz recognised that war was an inescapable part of human existence. The constructivist Clausewitz can perhaps teach us that violence without strategy – applying military logic without understanding what the adversary values – is essentially pointless.

Notes 1. ‘If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make’ (77); ‘When we attack the enemy, it is one thing if we mean our first operation to be followed by others until all resistance has been broken; it is quite another if our aim is only to obtain a single victory, in order to make the enemy insecure, to impress our greater strength upon him, and to give him doubts about his future. If that is the extent of our aim, we will employ no more strength than is absolutely necessary . . . if we are convinced that the enemy does not seek a brutal decision, but rather fears it, then the seizure of a lightly held or undefended province is an advantage in itself; and should this advantage be enough to make the enemy fear for the final outcome, it can be considered as a short cut on the road to peace’ (92); ‘It is possible to increase the likelihood of success without defeating the enemy’s forces. I refer to operations that have direct political repercussions, that are designed in the first place to disrupt the opposing alliance, or to paralyze it, that gain us new allies, favorably affect the political scene, etc. If such operations are possible

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

lindsay p. cohn it is obvious that they can greatly improve our prospects and that they can form a much shorter route to the goal than the destruction of the opposing armies’ (92–3). (All Clausewitz quotations are from the 1976 edition, unless otherwise stated.) ‘Inability to carry on the struggle can, in practice, be replaced by two other grounds for making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second its unacceptable cost’ (91). ‘Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow’ (92); ‘engagements do not always aim at the destruction of the opposing forces . . . their objectives can often be attained without any fighting at all but merely by an evaluation of the situation’ (96); ‘Combat is the only effective force in war; its aim is to destroy the enemy’s forces as a means to a further end. That holds good even if no actual fighting occurs, because the outcome rests on the assumption that if it came to fighting, the enemy would be destroyed’ (97). The other exception to this is genocide but Clausewitz does not discuss this. ‘Even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date’ (80); ‘the war . . . cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy’s will has not been broken: in other words, so long as the enemy government and its allies have not been driven to ask for peace, or the population made to submit’ (90). ‘The political object – the original motive for the war – will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires. The political object cannot, however, in itself provide the standard of measurement. . . . The same political object can elicit differing reactions from different peoples, and even from the same people at different times’ (81). Victory (in the engagement) consists of ‘1) The enemy’s greater loss of material strength; 2) his loss of morale; 3) his open admission of the above by giving up his intentions. . . . In lowering one’s colors one acknowledges that one has been at fault and concedes in this instance that both might and right lie with the opponent. This shame and humiliation . . . is an essential part of victory’ (234); ‘A government must never assume that its country’s fate, its whole existence, hangs on the outcome of a single battle, no matter how decisive. Even after a defeat, there is always the possibility that a turn of fortune can be brought about’ (483). See, for example, Clausewitz’s discussion of the approach of Frederick the Great on page 179. This is also achieved by having the political and military leadership united in one person. ‘[I]t is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse [between governments and peoples] and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own. We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’ because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. . . . Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic. If that is so, then war cannot be divorced from political life; and whenever this occurs in our thinking about war . . . we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense’ (605). Author’s translation from page 21 of Clausewitz (2006). ‘[W]ars can have all degrees of importance and intensity, ranging from a war of extermination down to simple armed observation’ (81); ‘First, therefore, it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of

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14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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policy. . . . Second, this way of looking at it will show us how wars must vary with the nature of their motives’ (88); ‘But the aim of disarming the enemy . . . is in fact not always encountered in reality, and need not be fully achieved as a condition of peace. On no account should theory raise it to the level of a law. Many treaties have been concluded before one of the antagonists could be called powerless’ (91); ‘War often is nothing more than armed neutrality, a threatening attitude meant to support negotiations’ (218). ‘War in general, and the commander in any specific instance, is entitled to require that the trend and [intentions] of policy shall not be inconsistent with these means. That, of course, is no small demand; but however much it may affect political aims in a given case, it will never do more than modify them. The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose’ (87). Note that Huntington is not using ‘violence’ in Schelling’s sense; he is distinguishing between knowing how to fight, oneself, and knowing how to plan, organise and direct those who are fighting. The latter is the realm of officer expertise, but in Huntington’s view, it is expertness in achieving military victory, not applying violence in bargaining. Coup d’œil ‘refers to the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection’ (102). ‘What one can reasonably ask of an officer is that he should possess a standard of judgment, which he can gain only from knowledge of men and affairs and from common sense’ (117); ‘Thus it is natural that military activity, whose plans . . . are so frequently disrupted by unexpected particular events, should remain largely a matter of talent, and that theoretical directives tend to be less useful here than in any other sphere’ (139–40); ‘A [commanding general] need not be a learned historian nor a political commentator, but he must be familiar with the higher affairs of state and its innate policies; he must know current issues, questions under consideration, the leading personalities, and be able to form sound judgments’ (146). ‘And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war’ (85). There has been a fair amount of push-back on the notion of ‘best military advice’ by, inter alia, Peter Feaver, VCNO VADM Bill Moran and Janine Davidson. ‘No one starts a war . . . without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its operational objective. This is the governing principle which will set its course, prescribe the scale of means and effort which is required, and make its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail’ (579). ‘To bring a war, or one of its campaigns, to a successful close requires a thorough grasp of national policy. On that level strategy and policy coalesce: the [commanding general] is simultaneously a statesman’ (111). ‘It cannot be the object of defense to protect the country from losses; the object must be a favorable peace. This is the aim for which one strives, and for which no temporary sacrifice should be considered too severe’ (471).

Bibliography Clausewitz, Carl von (1976), On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clausewitz, Carl von (2006), Vom Kriege, Erftstadt: Area. Cohen, Eliot (2002), Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, New York: Free Press. Elman, Colin (2007), ‘Realism’, in Martin Griffiths (ed.), International Relations Theory for the 21st Century: An Introduction, New York: Routledge.

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Fearon, James (1995), ‘Rationalist explanations for war’, International Organization, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 379–414. Feaver, Peter (2003), Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feaver, Peter (2011), ‘The right to be right: Civil–military relations and the Iraq surge decision’, International Security, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 87–125. Huntington, Samuel (1957), The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Reiter, Dan (2003), ‘Exploring the bargaining model of war’, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 27–43. Schelling, Thomas (1966), Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Waltz, Kenneth (1979), Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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7 Political Realism and the English School Is there really no international theory? Martin Wight and Hans Morgenthau on international political theory Jodok Troy1

Chapter Overview

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he common academic assessment of Hans Morgenthau and Martin Wight is that within their work and over time, they changed the perspective on what we can know and how we can know it in international politics. In other words, their understanding of theory was transformed, eventually influencing the wider academic perception of Classical Realism and the English School – the two theoretical traditions which they represented. However, contextualising the original writings of the two confirms that their theorising on international politics was, in fact, political theory which did not change in principal over time. ‘Is there really no international theory?’ is a question that all theoretical projects in International Relations have to deal with if they want to take political science seriously. This chapter shows that Morgenthau and Wight’s conceptions of theory did not change drastically in the course of their academic career and were, in fact, set at an early stage. What is more, the rereadings in this chapter illustrate that the notion of power, plus the understanding of the profession as ‘practical philosophy’ through the conduct of political theory, is a prevailing one of Realism and the English School. *

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To this day, the work of Hans J. Morgenthau and Martin Wight poses more questions than answers. This is not least because both address the question of why there is or needs to be a difference between international theory and political theory (Hall 2006: 158). The two men never clearly distinguished between the two since they saw no use in such a distinction, and because both remained sceptical of the possibility of an international theory making sense of social life. However, both are symbolic of the theoretical traditions they represent: Classical Realism and the early English School, also known as the ‘international society approach’. This article points out that Realism and the English School’s original scientific conduct is actually political theory and a form of political action (McQueen forthcoming; Levine 2012: 120–5; Oren 2009), which remains a realm of human conduct and open to change. This is not despite but because of Wight’s dictum that international politics ‘is the realm of recurrence and

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repetition’ (1966b: 26). This claim was confirmed by Morgenthau in his assumption of ‘objective laws’ (1978: 4) and his belief in the persistence of social and political problems over the common good and violence (Lang 2004: 15). I bolster this argument with a rereading of texts by these two seminal thinkers on political theory in the international realm. This brings theoretical limitations in terms of epistemology and certain simplifications, not to speak of the discussion on the general consistency in their work. Morgenthau and Wight were certainly not what one would consider ‘consistent’,2 but this article argues that they are worthy of being reread under the original assumptions of Realism: the prevailing notion of the importance of power, plus the understanding of their profession as ‘practical philosophy’ through the conduct of political theory (Molloy 2006; Shapcott 2004; Brown 2012).

The Institutionalisation of Realism and the English School For Classical Realism and the English School alike, international politics remain uncertain, contingent and consequential. A bedrock assumption of Realism – and, as it will turn out, for the early English School – is thus that forecasting political events is impossible (Kirshner 2014: 156, 160). Rather, what the discipline can do is to describe, understand and anticipate political events while avoiding falling into the trap of overdetermining events. Wight, criticising international relations’ theoretical conduct, argued for what we would today call a ‘philosophy’ of international relations. Morgenthau was more drawn to ‘theory’. In any case, both thought of theoria in the Greek sense of the term as descriptive and prescriptive (Shapcott 2004: 273; Wight 1991: 1) and explicitly understood international theory as the political philosophy of international relations and therefore as prescriptive. Morgenthau held the same views, although more disguised than Wight’s. ‘His’ Realism circles around practical reason, about what and why people do something, and how to attribute meaning to objects and events. Eventually, Morgenthau replaced the prescriptive theological characterisations of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with the descriptive ones of ‘interest’ and ‘power’ (Brown 2012: 452). Wight’s (1960) essay ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ is a cornerstone for what is today known as the English School. A central question the English School aims to tackle is ‘what can we know in international relations?’, rather than ‘how do we theorise?’: that is, scientifically explaining international politics (Wilson 2012). Despite various methodological insights, the latter is a point that research on the English School left unaddressed for a long time. Wight argued that ‘political theory’ – the domestic theory of the state – is a ‘theory of the good life’ due to the relation of the state to its citizens (1966b: 33; Jackson 2008: 355). ‘International theory’, however, is a residual of the ‘theory of survival’. Wight, the philosophical Grotian and Christian pessimist, tended to put away his personal pacifistic convictions. He thought of domestic conditions as a res publica – a community. Hence there cannot be a political theory of international politics because ‘there is no res publica there’. Wight thus defined international theory as the ‘speculation about relations between states, a tradition imagined as the twin of speculations about the state to which the name “political theory” is appropriate’ (1966b: 17). He deduced that if ‘political theory is the tradition of speculation about the state, then international theory may be supposed to be a tradition of speculation about the society of states, or the family of nations, or the international community’ (1966b: 18).

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Wight blamed the intellectual poverty of international theory on the all-embracing concept of the sovereign nation-state and the belief of progress in it (1966b: 20). Indeed, in International Theory, he observed that the concept of the sovereign nation-state is foremost an ‘inward’ one: in other words, concerning the authority of the ruler (1991: 2–3). The juridical expression that ‘every individual requires the protection of a state which represents him in the international community’ consequently leads to the ‘belief in the sovereign state as the consummation of political experience and activity which has marked Western political thought since the Renaissance’ (Wight 1966b: 21). Indeed, international society, as we know it today, came into existence and took shape in the seventeenth century. Surprising for Wight is the fact that various influences since then – Reformation, Counter-Reformation, French Revolution and totalitarian movements – have produced no ‘notable body of international theory; each has written only a chapter of political theory’ (Wight 1966b: 24). Only when Raymond Aron (1966) published his introduction to international relations, Peace and War, was Wight tempted to take back his harsh criticism on the state of the art in international relations theory. For Wight, Aron’s book was ‘philosophical in treatment, sceptical in temper’. It ‘asserts the indeterminacy of politics’ and treats ‘[d]iplomacy as the realm of the contingent and the unforeseen’, emphasising that the ‘statesman’s supreme virtue is prudence’ (Hall 2006: 110). Nevertheless, until this exception and even beyond it, political theory, for Wight, was bound to the sovereign state and the belief in progress within its scope. In the international realm, however, no equal progress can be observed. None the less, political theory always ‘is in a direct relation with political activity’ (Wight 1966b: 29). Wight closed his essay with the equation ‘Politics: International Politics = Political Theory: Historical Interpretation’ (1966b: 33). This is because the only acknowledged counterpart to political philosophers in the international realm is the work of the historian Thucydides. Wight answered his own question by concluding that ‘there is no international theory except the kind of rumination about human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philosophy of history’ (1966b: 33). In ‘Western Values in International Relations’ (Wight 1966a), published a few years after the first appearance of ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, Wight sounded more confident about the existence of an international theory. It provided one of the first instances of a more nuanced understanding of international society, a term that would later become synonymous with the English School. What is more, it is an early indicator of Wight’s active participation in shaping not only the academic discussion but also its practice (Hall 2014). Wight put forward a conceptual framework of international society that would become a persistent one. Second, it would become an enduring epistemological haunting since international society, for Wight and the English School, became a theoretical construct and a historically evolved ontological category (Navari 2011: 612). Wight was entertaining a moral dimension in international society because it: assumes that moral standards can be upheld without the heavens falling. And it assumes that the fabric of social and political life will be maintained, without accepting the doctrine that to preserve it any measures are permissible. For it assumes that the upholding of moral standards will in itself tend to strengthen the fabric of political life. (Wight 1966a: 130–1)

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After all, then, Wight attempted to construct ‘Western values’ in order for them to guide the practical conduct of international relations (Hall 2014). In 1956, Morgenthau invited Wight to Chicago, to teach classes and replace him during research leave. From the beginning, Morgenthau appreciated Wight’s thinking, opposing, as it did, mainstream behaviourist approaches (Epp 2014: 25–7). In his ‘The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory’, Morgenthau (1970: 248–61) introduced his thoughts on the issue with a reflection on Wight’s essay. He largely agreed with Wight, although he was hesitant to equate international relations with the philosophy of history. Morgenthau holds that theory is implicit in all great historiography. Both agreed on the historical orientation of international theory. Morgenthau (2011) made corresponding remarks in a meeting sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.3 It is this specific historical orientation, according to Morgenthau (1970: 251), which set them apart from other current fashionable theorising in international relations. This theorising is abstract in the extreme and totally ahistoric. It endeavours to reduce international relations to a system of abstract propositions with predictive function. Such a system transforms nations into stereotyped ‘actors’ engaging in equally stereotyped symmetric or asymmetric relations. Morgenthau shares with Wight the assumption that the purpose of international relations should be to shape politics rather than simply to describe or theorise on it. What is common to all great political theory, not only the one that directly influences politics, is the fact that it is always practical political theory too. That is true for Aristotle as well as the prophets of the Old Testament. Acknowledging those assumptions, the social sciences are at best ‘hypothetical possibilities, which of them will actually occur is anybody’s guess’ (Morgenthau 1946: 146). The ‘social sciences’, he proclaimed ‘cannot hope to master the social forces unless they know the laws that govern the social relations of men’ (Morgenthau 1940: 284). Reducing political science to measurable outputs proves to be a misreading of the Realist canon, as it has been widely acknowledged (Behr and Heath 2009; Parent and Baron 2011; Kirshner 2014). Rather, the first lesson Morgenthau has for students of international relations is that ‘the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible’ (1978: 21). In ‘Common Sense and Theories’, Morgenthau was more forthright on theorising politics (1970: 241–8). He noted that all attempts to capture international politics in terms of theory have been moral and philosophical in essence but not theoretical. That is true from Machiavelli’s Prince to Bismarck’s memoirs. It is the false promise of rationalism, claiming to capture the morally repellent core of the political – the struggle for power. What is more, it is a false promise because power cannot be completely dissolved by a rational scheme. Both elements only exist in a relational social sphere (Morgenthau 1962a; Morgenthau et al. 2012). At this point, Morgenthau’s relational view and Carl Schmitt’s essential view of the political (Pichler 1998; Scheuerman 2007) meet – in the sceptical examination of modernism – in order to see the political in the context of social life as an atavism. Modern international relations are repelled by the course of history, since history is the ‘realm of the accidental, the contingent, the unpredictable’ (Morgenthau 1970: 245). Morgenthau, often framed in historical and epistemological terms as an antipositivist (in other words, Weberian) sociologist (Turner and Mazur 2009; Smith 1986), and Wight, an anti-positivist in terms of a historian (Weber 1998; Bull 1976),

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meet at the point where they agree on the modern myth of international relations: ‘The cult of inevitability. Just because a particular event occurred does not mean it was fated to do so’ (Byman and Pollack 2001: 145). In this regard, they are united in their respective political theories as a starting point for international theory. This is even more so if we consider the history of Morgenthau’s (2006) Politics Among Nations. Although it later became a textbook – a book approaching theory as scientific enquiry – it was not meant to be of this kind. The famous ‘Six Principles’ have been added only in subsequent editions. Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau’s widely believed ‘theory’ of international politics, was intended as a political theory countering national socialism and fascism (Rösch 2013a: 8–9).

The Realist Research Agenda Now that we have compared these texts of Wight and Morgenthau, it becomes obvious that the main axioms of the English School, represented by Wight, also hold firm for Realism, represented by Morgenthau. These are Wertfreiheit, the rejection of behaviourism and scientism, a methodological (Weberian) approach of Verstehen (‘understanding’, rather than ‘explaining’), and a rejection of utopianism (Suganami 2003: 253; Devlen, James and Özdamar 2005: 179; Bain 2000). From a positivist perspective, it is equally true for Wight and Morgenthau, and consequently the early outlets of the English School and Realism, that both traditions lack a clear research agenda in terms of methodology and a clear distinction between dependent and independent variables and causal propositions (Little 2003: 458). The English School does not frame power as an independent variable – if it sees the analytical value of ‘variables’ at all. Second, the state is still assumed to be a ‘setting structure’ of international relations rather than a simple actor (Navari 2009: 9). Both Realism and the English School correspond with classical humanism, in attempting to understand human conduct rather than mere behaviour: hence the focus on norms as a standard of conduct and the notion of practice. ‘The notion of a “practice” serves, among other things, to point the researcher in the direction of the practitioner’ (Navari 2014: 213). Not least, therefore, Classical Realism, from Morgenthau onwards, holds a fundamental respect for human beings because international relations is dealing with the fundamental issues of life and death (Scheuerman 2011: 100). Consequently, Wight thought of international politics, just like the whole life, as a predicament: ‘one to be intelligently analyzed, where possible to be mitigated, but if necessary to be endured’ (Howard 1977: 364–5). Equally, Morgenthau was sceptical of behavioural social science conduct. The social sciences ‘can, at best, do what is their regular task, that is, present a series of hypothetical possibilities, each of which may occur under certain conditions – and which will actually occur is anybody’s guess’ (Morgenthau 1946: 130). Moreover, both Wight and Morgenthau show a sense of tragedy in politics. It is the content of tragedy that reminds us that, even though everyone might stick to ethical norms, there will be no rigid ‘positive’ outcome (Frost 2003). Yet both hold rationalism as a necessity for their starting point: ‘Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. The principles of scientific reason are always simple, consistent, and abstract; the social world is always complicated, incongruous, and concrete’ (Morgenthau 1946: 10).

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It seems hard to see why and how Morgenthau can be at the same time against positive theorising and yet argue, against Wight (1966b: 26), that there is an international theory because of the repetitive nature of the international realm. This is even more so since this repetitive nature makes the international system behave in some instances in a regular manner (as in the occurrence of the balance of power). What many scholars take away from this observation of Morgenthau is that it allowed him to build up his theory in a positivist mould. This seems to be even more underpinned by Morgenthau’s ‘objective laws’ of politics (1978: 4). There are at least two caveats to be inserted here. First, the assumedly mechanistic principle of the balance of power for Morgenthau (1982), and probably for Wight as well, is, in fact, a societal one. Second, what Morgenthau meant by the so-called ‘objective laws’ was not that ‘objective’ in a positivist sense after all. Rather, objectivity is understood here in the philosophical tradition of Nietzsche as an analysis based upon explicitly formulated conceptual distinctions in order to identify and analyse features and qualities of an object in question: qualities that form part of the object studied and reveal themselves from the object, becoming cognisable only by clear and elaborated concepts. (Behr and Kirke 2014: 28) In the same vein, the so-called ‘principles’ of Realism, laid out in the second edition of Politics Among Nations, are better understood as maxims rather than empirical applicable principles (Bain 2000: 462).

Political Thought Between Aristotle and Augustine Like his colleague Herbert Butterfield and his thoughts on international politics, Wight was guided by Christian morality. However, Wight’s thoughts were based on more outspoken theological foundations. He assumed the existence of original sin and aggressive instincts: in other words, a pessimistic perception of human nature (Thomas 2001; Nicholson 1981: 17). Like Augustine, Wight distinguished between the perfect city of God and the imperfect city of humans. Still, claiming that Wight was a moralistic thinker goes too far, since such an assumption does not distinguish between his private beliefs and his beliefs on the realistic necessities of international politics. An Anglican pacifist, he condemned Catholic thought on the just war doctrine (1936) and, because of his pacifism, denied that, in theological terms, an actual Christian Realism is possible. He backed up this claim with the horrible historical experience of national socialism (Hall 2006: 148–9). This is also evident in Power Politics (1979: 137): war is inevitable but particular wars can be avoided by means of diplomacy. In the long run, however, there is no doing away with the influence, measurable or not, of personal convictions on theorising, of influencing the conduct of political theory. Wight argued that domestic political theory is a ‘theory of the good life’. This is because of the relation, regulation and interconnectedness of the state and its citizens. International theory, on the other hand (and as we have already observed), is merely a ‘theory of survival’. Turning to Thomas Hobbes as a genuine source of international Realist thinking, one might argue that survival involves the greatest good and right: ‘the goodness of life as such, of being alive and enjoying life’ (Jackson 2008: 356). What is more,

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‘If there were no basis for the good life inside states, there would be no point in their survival.’ It is the ‘goodness of life as such’ that is the basis of what serious conduct of international politics is about. The state, in other words, is ‘an agent, not a principal’, as George Kennan (1984/6: 206) stated regarding the responsibility of governments. Governments must act in the interest of the national society. ‘Violating the assumption of the equal independence of all members of the society of states’, Wight says, in his thoughts on intervention in the international society, ‘is prima facie a hostile act’ (1966a: 111).4 In terms of a historical analogy, Wight and Morgenthau’s view of political theory can be broken down to a comparison between Aristotle and Augustine. Aristotle differs from modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau in so far as, for him, humans are political animals by nature (Morgenthau 1946: 168). Rousseau assumed that a constitutional society is what humans need for what they otherwise cannot achieve on their own. This was also a view to which Wight could subscribe. Morgenthau (1958: 239) tended to the view of Aristotle, counterechoing the first lines of Rousseau’s Social Contract: ‘Man lives in chains, but everywhere he wants to be free.’ It is structure that defines humans and, in the words of Rousseau, keeps humans in chains. On the other side of the spectrum, Aristotle emphasised agency, meaning that humans should supply themselves with structure in so far as the central question is how to live a good life. For the sake of the argument, I place Morgenthau in the Aristotelian rather than the Augustinian or Weberian camp where he is regularly put, although he never finally decided on this point for himself. Wight, as we have seen, sided with Augustine. This is regarding the Aristotelian emphasis on prudence as a prime virtue of agency, as acknowledged by Morgenthau (Lang 2007). This is also obvious in Wight’s (1979: 137, 292) description of the major motive for going to war: fear and the view that morality in international politics is a matter not of civilisation but of security. In terms of his fear of a materialist world state that would do away with religion, for Wight, nuclear war was not the worst thing that could happen (Hall 2006: 109). ‘Wight failed to find an adequate ground for international society because he could not escape the thickets of religion and its bearing on natural law’ (Bain 2014: 15). But for Morgenthau, the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse placed theoretical limits on international theory (Craig 2007). In his piece ‘Death in the Nuclear Age’, Morgenthau (1962b: 197–203) expressed his fear that the possibility of nuclear war alters the understanding of death as a meaning for life. The individual aspects of death (for example, sacrificial death), he argued, vanish in the face of the possibility of total destruction. It is the composite conception of human nature, Morgenthau (1956: 12) pointed out, that needs to be taken into theoretical account in social science conduct. The philosophy of rationalism, as he outlined in Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics (1946), fails to address all other conduct that falls out of the category of sober, enlightened rationalism. Equally, it was clear for Wight (Wight 1991: 105; see also Thomas 2001: 929) that there is no escape from the human condition. For Morgenthau (1946: 13), this is most evident in the rationalistic approach of equalising the rationally right and the ethical good. Herbert Butterfield noted that ‘only [the] individual exists’ (McIntyre 2004: 301). The majority of the academic endeavours of the English School, of which Wight was an important cornerstone, focus on intersubjective values of social actors and

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values (Reus-Smit 2002: 499). Establishing common rules of conduct (for example, international law), international norms, and institutions (for example, the non-intervention principle) is a foundational and persistent feature of international society. However, how we interpret them and give them meaning in different political contexts is another story, depending on which international political theory we subscribe to (Williams 2015). Facing possible nuclear war and a nuclear apocalypse, Morgenthau called for ‘a radical transformation of the existing international society of sovereign nations into a supranational community of individuals’ (1956: 470). His tragic view of the modern state is a persistent pattern of his thought from an early stage in his career onwards (Kostagiannis 2013). Wight (1991: 1) even called for a world society (Craig 2007). A religious submissive Augustinian, Wight speculated that nuclear war might not be the worst thing that could happen. For Morgenthau, the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse placed epistemological and ontological limits on international theory. Facing nuclear apocalypse, both struggled with a continuation of international theory as it was, thus ever more keenly stressing the political aspect of theory.

Conclusion Wight and Morgenthau’s political theory holds that international politics are the realm of human experience and conduct. Neither principally changed his view on theorising international relations under the auspices of political theory. International politics remain uncertain, contingent, tragic and consequential. Moreover, by framing power as a societal condition, the ‘power of power politics’ (Vasquez 1998) holds the potential to understand not only power politics but also all sorts of politics that emerge when humans interact and a political theory is therefore appropriate. International theory, in terms of Wight, ‘is concerned with Authority – the justification of Power, the moral bases of power, not with Power nakedly, or the description and analysis of the distribution of Power’ (Hall 2006: 135) – a view almost identical to Morgenthau’s (Williams 2004: 637). States, the setting structure of international politics and international society, are, in Realism’s view, assumed to be rational but not hyper-rational (Kirshner 2014: 168–77). However, that is only the starting point. State behaviour and conduct are also shaped by lessons of history, ideas and ideology, eventually forming an international society. That is perhaps the most illustrative advantage point of Realism, focusing more on agency than on structural constraints as their heirs do. Theorising international relations is ultimately about international political theory, since the objects and puzzles consist of human interaction and the interpretation we put on them. This brings with it the assumption that the human condition is a potentially political one, defined in terms of power: when humans pursue their interests, power inevitably comes into play. It is, however, not ‘force’ that is the core of power – it is a complex psychological relationship, as Morgenthau (1956: 26–8) holds. Both Wight and Morgenthau opposed the positivist and behaviourist research agendas. For them, international society (Wight) and politics (Morgenthau) are always the product of intersubjective understanding: hence the emphasis on conduct (and sometimes even ‘nature’) rather than behaviour, and thus still the Weberian focus on unattainable

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ideal-types. It is not only a question of what phenomena of international politics we analyse, and how. It also is a matter of how we give meaning to the objects and subjects, and that means thinking of theory as both descriptive and prescriptive: in other words, as political theory.

Notes 1. Acknowledgements: FWF project Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project P 25198–G16. This chapter was completed while I was a visiting researcher at Stanford University. I am grateful to the Europe Center for hosting me and to Stanford for providing a stimulating academic environment. 2. But which political thinker actually is consistent? Wight died early, so any claims about consistency in his work remain preliminary. There is also a dynamic discussion circling around the theoretical consistency in Morgenthau’s work. However, without going into detail, if we look only at his first and last books published in the USA, Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics (1946) and Science: Servant or Master (1972), we find more consistency than anything else. 3. Both Wight and Morgenthau put forward some of their most enduring insights at Rockefellersponsored meetings in the 1950s. The proponents there were largely driven by metaphysical and normative matters: ‘Celebrated under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation’s committee on theory, which included exponents of both traditions, the ideological merger of political theology and Christian realism set the discipline on a very specific course. In constantly mobilizing the theological premises of their political pronouncements and of their critique of secular liberalism, early realists proved to be legitimate heirs of Schmitt’s political theology’ (Guilhot 2010: 227). 4. That being said, Morgenthau’s conceptualisation of the national interest, one that caused much confusion among his critics, is a ‘fluid’ one (Lebow 2003: 245). Morgenthau considered the national interest as ‘an epistemological tool with which to bring the various potentially divergent interests into a “rational order”’ (Rösch 2013b: 10).

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Byman, Daniel L., and Kenneth M. Pollack (2001), ‘Let us now praise great men: Bringing the statesman back in’, International Security, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 107–46. Craig, Campbell (2007), Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz, New York: Columbia University Press. Devlen, Balkan, Patrick James and Özgür Özdamar (2005), ‘The English School, international relations, and progress’, International Studies Review, vol. 7, pp. 171–97. Epp, Rodger (2014), ‘The British Committee on the theory of international politics and its central figures’, in Cornelia Navari and Daniel M. Green (eds), Guide to the English School in International Studies, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 25–36. Frost, Mervyn (2003), ‘Tragedy, ethics and international relations’, International Relations, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 477–95. Guilhot, Nicolas (2010), ‘American katechon: When political theology became international relations theory’, Constellations, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 224–53. Hall, Ian (2006), The International Thought of Martin Wight, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Ian (2014), ‘Martin Wight, Western values, and the Whig tradition of international thought’, The International History Review, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 961–81. Howard, Michael (1977), ‘Ethics and power in international policy: The third Martin Wight memorial lecture’, International Affairs, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 364–76. Jackson, Robert (2008), ‘From colonialism to theology: Encounters with Martin Wight’s international thought’, International Affairs, vol. 84, no. 2, pp. 351–64. Kennan, George F. (1984/6), ‘Morality and foreign policy’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 205–18. Kirshner, Jonathan (2014), ‘The economic sins of modern IR theory and the classical realist alternative’, World Politics, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 155–83. Kostagiannis, Konstantinos (2013), ‘Hans Morgenthau and the tragedy of the nation-state’, The International History Review, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 513–29. Lang, Anthony F. (ed.) (2004), Political Theory and International Affairs: Hans J. Morgenthau on Aristotle’s ‘The Politics’, Westport, CT: Praeger. Lang, Anthony F. (2007), ‘Morgenthau, agency, and Aristotle’, in Michael C. Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 18–41. Lebow, Richard N. (2003), The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Daniel J. (2012), Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique, New York: Oxford University Press. Little, Richard (2003), ‘The English School vs. American realism’, Review of International Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 443–60. McIntyre, C. T. (2004), Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. McQueen, Alison (forthcoming), ‘The case for kinship, classical realism and political realism’, in Matt Sleat (ed.), Politics Recovered. Molloy, Seán (2006), The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1940), ‘Positivism, functionalism, and international law’, The American Journal of International Law, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 260–84. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1946), Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1956), Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1958), Dilemmas of Politics, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1962a), ‘Love and power’, Commentary, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 247–51.

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Morgenthau, Hans J. (1962b), Politics in the Twentieth Century, abridged edn, London: University of Chicago Press. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1970), Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–1970, New York: Praeger. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1972), Science: Servant or Master?, New York: New American Library. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1978), Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1982), The Purpose of American Politics, Washington, DC: University Press of America. Morgenthau, Hans J. (2006), Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Morgenthau, Hans J. (2011), ‘The theoretical and practical importance of a theory of international relations’, Appendix 2, in Nicolas Guilhot (ed.), The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 263–7. Morgenthau, Hans J., Hartmut Behr, Felix Rösch and Maeva Vidal (2012), The Concept of the Political, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Navari, Cornelia (2009), ‘Introduction: Methods and methodology in the English School’, in Cornelia Navari (ed.), Theorising International Society: English School Methods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–20. Navari, Cornelia (2011), ‘The concept of practice in the English School’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 611–30. Navari, Cornelia (2014), ‘English School methodology’, in Cornelia Navari and Daniel M. Green (eds), Guide to the English School in International Studies, West Sussex: Wiley–Blackwell, pp. 205–21. Nicholson, Martin (1981), ‘The enigma of Martin Wight’, Review of International Studies, vol. 7, pp. 15–22. Oren, Ido (2009), ‘The unrealism of contemporary realism: The tension between realist theory and realists’ practice’, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 283. Parent, Joseph M., and Joshua M. Baron (2011), ‘Elder abuse: How the moderns mistreat classical realism’, International Studies Review, vol. 13, pp. 193–213. Pichler, Hans-Karl (1998), ‘The godfathers of “truth”: Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s theory of power politics’, Review of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 185–200. Reus-Smit, Christian (2002), ‘Imagining society: Constructivism and the English School’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 487–509. Rösch, Felix (2013a), ‘Pouvoir, puissance, and politics: Hans Morgenthau’s dualistic concept of power?’, Review of International Studies, published online 23 April, pp. 1–17. Rösch, Felix (2013b), ‘The human condition of politics: Considering the legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau for international relations’, Journal of International Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–21. Scheuerman, William E. (2007), ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and beyond’, in Michael C. Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 62–92. Scheuerman, William E. (2011), The Realist Case for Global Reform, Cambridge: Polity Press. Shapcott, Richard (2004), ‘IR as practical philosophy: Defining a “classical approach”’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 271–91. Smith, Michael J. (1986), Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Suganami, Hidemi (2003), ‘British institutionalists, or the English School, 20 years on’, International Relations, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 253–71.

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Thomas, Scott M. (2001), ‘Faith, history and Martin Wight: The role of religion in the historical sociology of the English School of international relations’, International Affairs, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 905–29. Turner, S., and G. Mazur (2009), ‘Morgenthau as a Weberian methodologist’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 477–504. Vasquez, John A. (1998), The Power of Power Politics: From Classical Realism to Neotraditionalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Cynthia (1998), ‘Reading Martin Wight’s “Why is there no international theory?” as history’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 451–69. Wight, Martin (1936), ‘Christian pacifism’, Theology, vol. 33, no. 193, pp. 12–21. Wight, Martin (1960), ‘Why is there no international theory?’, International Relations, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 35–48. Wight, Martin (1966a), ‘Western values in international relations’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 89–131. Wight, Martin (1966b), ‘Why is there no international theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 17–34. Wight, Martin (1979), Power Politics, London: Pelican. Wight, Martin (1991), International Theory: The Three Traditions, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Williams, John (2015), Ethics, Diversity, and World Politics: Saving Pluralism from Itself?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Michael C. (2004), ‘Why ideas matter in international relations: Hans Morgenthau, classical realism, and the moral construction of power politics’, International Organization, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 633–65. Wilson, Peter (2012), ‘The English School meets the Chicago School: The case for a grounded theory of international institutions’, International Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 567–90.

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8 Political Realism and Global Reform How Realists learned to hate ‘the bomb’ – and desire world government William E. Scheuerman

Chapter Overview

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he standard view of international Realism is that it is congenitally sceptical about attempts to reform, let alone fundamentally restructure, interstate ‘anarchy’. Though the orthodox view accurately describes the positions of important, institutionally conservative representatives of Realism, it does a disservice to a major subsection of mostly mid-twentieth century, reform-minded Realists. In accordance with a growing body of recent scholarship that has tried to cast a fresh look on ‘classical’ Realists, this chapter highlights the surprising overlap between contemporary, reform-minded political cosmopolitanism and some strands within Realism. The nexus between reformist Realism and the ideas of Immanuel Kant, the key intellectual force behind many modern efforts to reorder the international system, proves more complex than the standard view infers. Retrieving Realism’s neglected reformist components is vital if we are to think creatively and productively about the political and intellectual challenges of the twenty-first century. *

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Realism and Reformism: Time for a Second Look? Most international relations scholars today who fashion themselves ‘Realists’ are profound sceptics when it comes to global reform. They even doubt that the European Union, a historically unprecedented experiment in postnational governance, challenges the orthodox Realist tenet that international anarchy makes up a necessary fact of political life (Mearsheimer 1994). Cosmopolitan ideas of a democratic system of global governance, as advocated by Daniele Archibugi, David Held and many others, allegedly represent little more than a stepping stone to aggravated global violence (Zolo 1997). The idea of a world state is a dangerous delusion that simply invites tyranny or global war (Waltz 1979: 112). When present-day international Realists bother to mention reform proposals being debated by colleagues in international law or normative political theory, they usually respond with familiar bromides about the dangers of ‘idealism’, ‘moralism’ and ‘utopianism’. In a closely related vein, jurists who claim inspiration from Realism rail against the ‘perils of global legalism’, selectively building on Realism to undergird their scepticism about anything beyond a narrowly circumscribed role for international law (Posner

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2009: xv). For their part, philosophers and political theorists animated by Realism vent against globalist legal and political models (Geuss 2015; Shapiro 2016: 103–30). Within the messy contours of twentieth-century Realism, to be sure, it is easy to identify precursors to such recent views. Politically and institutionally conservative Realists, such as Herbert Butterfield (1900–79), George Kennan (1904–2005) and Henry Kissinger (1923– ), regularly expressed contempt for proposals to overhaul the international status quo. Even within the writings of Realists of a decidedly less conservative political bent (for example, Hans J. Morgenthau [1904–80]), one encounters frequent polemical remarks about the perils of ‘moralism’ and ‘legalism’. Predictably, not only international Realists and those inspired by them, but also their critics within international law and political theory, have endorsed the orthodox account of Realism as endemically anti-reformist. For Charles Beitz and Michael Walzer, international Realism entails moral scepticism and cynical realpolitik (Beitz 1999: 15, 185–65; Walzer 2000: 3–20). Jürgen Habermas traces its roots to the fascist Carl Schmitt, allegedly an Ur-Realist and the main influence behind Morgenthau (2006: 116–17, 166–9). The cosmopolitan political philosopher Simon Caney (2005) targets Realism as well, as does a US international lawyer who now worries that Morgenthau’s (purported) preference for power politics over law has been installed ‘right in the building that ought to be most hostile to it: The Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building in Washington, D.C.’ (Ohlin 2015: 14). Even if we politely overlook the striking fact that those who view Realism as hostile to reform rarely provide sufficient textual evidence for their strong claims,1 why bother challenging what so many scholars have asserted? Why counter what apparently represents a well-nigh universal consensus? Finally, what might possibly be gained by doing so? In the last decade or so, a diverse group of scholars – including this author – has none the less tried to do just that.2 Pushing back against the orthodox account, recent scholarship suggests that it rests on a highly selective, and sometimes downright sloppy, intellectual history. The most obvious consequence is that contemporary political Realists often reinvent the wheel, oblivious to the ways in which their reflections reproduce prior Realist views along with their accompanying quandaries (Scheuerman 2013). Recent revisionist efforts, not surprisingly, have focused on telling a richer story about international Realism by highlighting its links to canonical figures (for example, Augustine, Hobbes) within Western political thought (McQueen 2017). Others have tried to offer a more nuanced interpretation of Realism’s ties to competing currents in what is widely dubbed ‘IR Theory’ (Bell 2009; Williams 2005). ‘Getting Realism right’ matters, both politically and theoretically. It matters, most importantly, because foreign policy elites continue, sometimes disingenuously, to justify unappealing and even irresponsible policies by appealing to Realism, even as they make mincemeat of its core tenets. The nexus between Realism and neoconservative foreign policy, for example, turns out to be rather messy (Scheuerman 2009: 193–5; Schmidt and Williams 2008). Getting Realism right counts intellectually and theoretically because many theoretical and programmatic divides within political science, international law and philosophy rest on simplified and sometimes caricatured views of Realism, idées fixes about a variegated theoretical tradition that stubbornly get in the way of productive intellectual exchange and possibly fruitful cross-fertilisation. Too often, this stock reading of Realism occludes vital political and intellectual challenges.

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Spurring much of the recent revisionist scholarship on Realism, the international theorist Campbell Craig (2003) systematically revisited the writings of Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) on nuclear warfare, showing how their Hobbesian inclinations cautiously undergirded the hope that fear of nuclear destruction might open the door to international institutional change. On Craig’s analysis, Niebuhr and Morgenthau envisaged the possibility that an eminently ‘realistic’ preference for self-preservation could potentially provide a basis for constructing a world state, a ‘new Leviathan’, an erstwhile utopian goal now, in fact, rendered politically imperative following the thermonuclear revolution. Building directly on Morgenthau and Niebuhr, Craig concedes that imposing impediments stand in the way of constructing a world state. None the less, he concludes, it remains an indispensable component of any ‘Realism aiming at long-term human survival’ (2003: 173). An alternative, more careful and supple reading of the Realist tradition, at any rate, proffers a valuable starting point for creative thinking about the exigencies of institutional change in the shadows of ‘the bomb’. In similar spirit, Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest have tapped a rich vein of what they call postwar nuclear realism, an interdisciplinary political tradition made up of luminaries as diverse as Günther Anders (1902–92), John Herz (1908–2006), Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). What nuclear realism’s otherwise diverse representatives shared was a commitment to the thesis ‘that liberal modernity could survive collective suicide’ in the nuclear era ‘only by radically rethinking and transforming its foundations’, including existing modes of legal and political organisation (van Munster and Sylvest 2016: 2). Not only did nuclear realists accordingly seek extensive legal and political change, but also they raised fundamental – and still alarmingly timely – critical questions about modern technology and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, Richard Beardsworth and I have highlighted the virtues of trying to move beyond the usual, yet increasingly counterproductive, political and disciplinary divide between Realism and cosmopolitanism (Beardsworth 2011: 227–37; Scheuerman 2011: 98–125; see also Beck 2006). For Beardsworth, the key lesson resulting from the ensuing theoretical Aufhebung (supersession) is that states should be expected to advance minimal cosmopolitan responsibilities: states remain the best existing vehicle for advancing cosmopolitan ideals (2011: 234). Though coming to somewhat different conclusions, my research has similarly explored how and why cosmopolitan-minded global reformers might build constructively on select elements of Realism. Mid-century Realists were right, I argue, to posit that a viable institutional reordering of global affairs will necessarily take the form of postnational and ultimately global stateness, not loose, decentralised, ‘global governance’ along the lines presently fashionable among cosmopolitans. Contemporary cosmopolitan reformers and global-minded progressive Realists, it turns out, represent possible political allies (Scheuerman 2011: 149–68; 2014). The ubiquitous juxtaposition of Realism to cosmopolitanism, at any rate, is badly overstated. Like contemporary cosmopolitans, Morgenthau and Niebuhr, in fact, endorsed a moral cosmopolitanism congruent with what the prominent present-day cosmopolitan philosopher Thomas Pogge calls ‘respect [for] one another’s status as ultimate units of moral concern’ (1994: 90). Morgenthau favoured a political ethics, according to which moral action demands respect for other human beings as ends in themselves, while Niebuhr defended what he openly described as ‘moral universalism’, justifying

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it – in some contrast to the more secular Morgenthau – on theological grounds (Morgenthau 1946: 196; Niebuhr 1944: 153–9). Even more surprisingly, prominent mid-century Realists also subscribed to elements of what cosmopolitans today dub ‘legal (and political) cosmopolitanism’, defined by Pogge as a ‘commitment to a concrete political ideal of a global order under which all persons have equivalent legal status and duties – are fellow citizens of a universal republic’ (Pogge 1994: 90). The mid-century Realist John Herz, along with others like Fredrick Schuman (1904–81) and Georg Schwarzenberger (1908–91), and even sometimes Morgenthau and Niebuhr, endorsed proposals for extensive global-level institutional transformation. Progressive Realists envisioned something like world government as a desirable eventual goal, seeing global reform as ultimately essential to peace and security. Though undeniably opposed to many mid-twentieth-century models of international reform, including what they viewed as premature efforts to establish full-scale world government, they ultimately sought to achieve the supposedly ‘idealistic’ goal of a novel global political order (Scheuerman 2011: 67–97). As Robert Schuett (2011) has argued in a related vein, Morgenthau was a principled advocate of moderate and graduate, albeit forward-looking, international reform. Institutionally reformist aims surface unambiguously in postwar Realist works like Herz’s brilliant International Politics in the Atomic Age (1959) and Schumann’s Commonwealth of Man: An Inquiry into Power Politics and World Government (1952). They emerge in earlier Realist contributions as well, including Georg Schwarzenberger’s Power Politics: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations and Post-War Planning (1941) and E. H. Carr’s (1892–1982) Conditions of Peace (1942) and Nationalism and After (1967 [1945]). They even appear in what arguably constitutes twentieth-century international Realism’s founding text, Morgenthau’s famous Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, a work in which the author bluntly declares that there is ‘no shirking the . . . conclusion that in no period of modern history was civilization more in need of permanent peace and, hence, of a world state’ (1954: 481). For Morgenthau, as for many other postwar Realists, Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that only a world state could ultimately secure lasting peace and human survival. Sceptical of attempts to use loose federal systems like Switzerland as positive exemplars for international reform, Morgenthau believed that sovereignty would eventually have to be concentrated at the global level, as previously at the national level, to secure global law and order. However, he vigorously opposed the claim that a world state could be realised in the foreseeable future. At present, Morgenthau quite sensibly observed, humankind possessed a ‘society of sovereign nations’, where norms and social practices (including international mores, ethics and customs) offered a social basis for interstate affairs. A prospective world state, however, would require both a more intensive and an extensive supranational society able to support far-reaching global decision-making (1954: 479). Unfortunately, overly ‘idealistic’ visions of world government conveniently downplayed existing political and social divides. Moreover, they suffered from a simplistic statism that overstated the sovereign state’s capacity for autonomously achieving political and social integration. Relying on John Stuart Mill’s classical discussion of the necessary preconditions of workable government, Morgenthau believed that humanity was not yet ready to pass Mill’s tests. Most people remained unwilling to accept world government, seemed unprepared to fulfil its basic purposes and were probably unable to defend it (1954: 478).

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In stable nation-states, Morgenthau pointed out, political and legal institutions typically translated public opinion into policy and sometimes achieved peaceful social change. Unless supported by public opinion and an underlying consensus, even there, well-designed institutional mechanisms might fail when confronted with the supreme test of effective government: ‘to change the distribution of power inside society without jeopardizing the orderly and peaceful processes upon which the welfare of society depends’ (1954: 415). Within existing liberal democracies, the interplay of social and political forces was typically responsible for altering public opinion, with its shifting currents sometimes producing legislative and judicial changes. The process worked only because political players were committed to the rules of the game. Rough agreement at the level of general principles, as well as a shared expectation that some modicum of justice might be realised, with all social groups possessing ‘a chance to make themselves heard’, was crucial (1954: 473). Direct recourse to coercive state power could be minimised because political actors usually heeded even those laws with which they disagreed. Parallels at the level of supranational or world society would some day have to emerge if a world state were to garner a sufficient social basis. Because any world state established at present would still necessarily lack the requisite social foundations, Morgenthau concluded, it could only take the form of ‘a totalitarian monster resting on feet of clay’, requiring ‘complete discipline and loyalty among . . . millions of soldiers and policemen needed to enforce its rule over an unwilling humanity’ (1954: 482). However, Morgenthau’s scepticism about world government’s imminent prospects hardly left him in despair. Responsible political and institutional actors could still actively pursue some steps to build supranational society: world statehood represented more than a vague long-term goal about which one might longingly fantasise, but not in fact do something meaningful to help realise. Though a neglected element of the story, Morgenthau turned to David Mitrany (1888–1975) for guidance. Mitrany – like Morgenthau, a central European Jew with a left-wing background – championed piecemeal international reform, as defended in his fascinating A Working Peace System (1946). Like the Realists, he worried about the tendency in the mainstream liberal discourse of international reform to downplay the salience of national identities. In contrast, he theorised, global reform could draw inspiration from leftleaning social and economic experiments. During an extended stay in the USA, he determined that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Dealers had sensibly avoided pursuing unwieldy formal constitutional changes to the US system, instead creatively building new decision-making constellations, inspired by down-to-earth social and economic needs, which ultimately transformed the political system’s basic operations. The institutional pragmatism of the New Deal, Mitrany believed, provided a template for international reform: ‘by linking authority to a specific activity’, international organisations could decisively ‘break away from the traditional link between authority and a definite territory’, the fundamental presupposition not only of the modern state system but also of many proposals for ‘either an association or federation of nations’ (1946: 6). Institutionalised cross-border cooperation on down-to-earth social and economic tasks ‘would help the growth of such positive and constructive common work, of common habits and interests’, ultimately making national borders anachronistic ‘by overlaying them with a natural growth of common activities and common administrative tasks’ (1946: 35).

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Morgenthau gave Mitrany’s functionalist toolkit a major role in his own narrative about the social preconditions of world statehood. As Morgenthau noted in a laudatory preface to the 1966 US reissue of Mitrany’s Working Peace System, ‘the future of the civilized world is intimately tied to the future of the functional approach to international organization’ (1966: 11). In a key section of Politics Among Nations, he applied Mitrany’s ideas to the problems of European integration (1954: 492–3). For Morgenthau, international functionalism represented a useful strategy for advancing the cause of social integration at the postnational level. If nation-states worked together to solve concrete (that is, economic and technical) tasks, inventing along the way creative but eminently practical supranational institutions, the building blocks of global order could be laid. Over time, such cooperation might generate supranational social practices, shared norms, and complexes of common interests; the necessary social presuppositions for global government, in the process, might be secured. In a 1964 essay on the European Community that originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Morgenthau praised functionalism for helping to supply ‘the indispensable material foundations for the political unification of Europe’. Functionalists in Europe had already successfully created common economic and technological interests, ‘protected and promoted by common institutions’. However, he tellingly added, [t]hese common interests, to be fully realized and to be protected from the ever present threat of disintegration, require common political institutions. The functionalists have provided the incentive for the creation of such institutions, but they have been unable to provide the institutions. (1970: 337) Functionalism, Morgenthau emphasised, should not be interpreted as mechanically ensuring that ‘the political unification of Europe will somehow take care of itself’, and that qualitative changes in European politics might automatically result from ‘the quantitative accumulation of functional European communities’. If Europeans were, in fact, to exploit the fruits of supranational functional organisation, the ‘jump from national to European sovereignty must be made by an act of will’, an express political decision that alone would make it possible to coordinate the divergent interests generated by functionalism and keep ‘recalcitrant members in check’ (Morgenthau 1970: 337). On Morgenthau’s gradualist model of international reform, functionalism was necessary yet ultimately insufficient, both within Europe and beyond. Though functionalism helped pave the way for new institutional complexes ‘beyond the nation-state’, only conscious political choices in favour of novel political entities would ultimately transcend the interstate system and minimise the nuclear peril. Conscious, institutionally creative political action could alone create continental or regional governments and then – some day, perhaps – world government.

Frenemies? Realists and Immanuel Kant International reformism has long come in different shapes and sizes (Claude 1971). Within international theory, it often draws on the complex political theories of the great Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Both liberal internationalists and recent cosmopolitans, for example, build on Kant, as have many defenders of a robust system of international law. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Realism is typically categorised as anti-Kantian, in part

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because present-day Realists vehemently oppose the neo-Kantian idea of a ‘democratic peace’ (Waltz 2008: 198–203). They also tend to rely on a consequentialist political ethics inconsonant with a strict Kantian account of morality (Coady 2008). When we take a closer look, however, the story, here as well, turns out to be both more complicated and surprising. An examination of mid-century Realism’s rendezvous with Kant and his legacy buttresses the more differentiated picture offered by recent revisionist scholarship. To be sure, one encounters only scattered references to Kant’s political writings among mid-century Realists. Occasional comments on Kant’s classic, Toward Perpetual Peace (1991), show, for example, that Realists associated his legacy with two ideas they rejected: first, the commonplace Enlightenment idea that international commerce is conducive to peace; second, Kant’s expectation that republics would typically pursue pacific foreign policies, and thus that the best way to guarantee peace was by means of some sort of loose confederate – or perhaps more demanding federal – republican system (Carr 1964 [1946]: 25; Morgenthau 1954: 365–6; Niebuhr 1959: 186). None the less, Morgenthau’s Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics (1946: 184) praised Kant’s insistence that genuine moral action required treating other persons as ends in themselves. Schuman’s magnum opus, Commonwealth of Man: An Inquiry into Power Politics and World Government (1952), also jettisoned Kant’s claims for the pacific contours of commerce and republican government, not because of their excessively ‘idealistic’ merits, but rather due to their institutional modesty: only a federal union, not a loose confederation, of states, where core governmental functions were exercised by global institutions outfitted with core elements of sovereignty, could preserve lasting peace. A global rule of law required government or statehood; anyone serious about preserving the peace globally would have to think seriously about how effective world government could be built. In fairness to Kant, Schuman conceded, ‘some elements of what we have come to call federalism are implicit in the Kantian formula, but its prime implication . . . is that peace can be kept by arrangements for the waging of war by states upon states’ (for example, collective security, or perhaps a loose system along the lines of the League of Nations) (1952: 350). Schuman interpreted the German Enlightenment thinker’s institutional programme as paradoxical and probably tension-ridden: while emphasising the indispensable role of the sovereign state to legality, and thus inferring the necessity of world government, Kant simultaneously associated world government with ‘lifeless’ despotism. If one were to realise Kant’s cosmopolitan vision successfully, Schuman insisted, reformers would have to discard his inappropriately sceptical assessment of world government. When push came to shove, effective global legislation and adjudication presupposed the construction of a world state outfitted with crucial rudiments of modern executive power. Mid-century Realists also engaged extensively with the ideas of the Austrian legal thinker Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), whose contributions to jurisprudence and international law still represent one of the most audacious recent efforts to reconstruct the Kantian theoretical legacy (von Bernstorff 2010). Morgenthau, Herz and Schwarzenberger, all refugees from Nazism, were trained in Weimar Germany as lawyers with a focus on international law, with the first two having worked closely with Kelsen, interwar Europe’s most important defender of a global legal system. Kelsen was Herz’s dissertation advisor, while Morgenthau’s Geneva Habilitationsschrift (that is, second dissertation, as standardly required in Central Europe for a university career) was approved only because of a timely intervention by Kelsen (Jütersonke 2010: 75–104).

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Despite substantial theoretical disagreements between Kelsen and his Realist Schüler, they remained very much indebted to him, as evidenced most obviously by Morgenthau’s eulogistic dedication in Truth and Politics, where he praised Kelsen for having ‘taught us through his example to speak Truth to Power’ (1970: v). Significantly, mid-century Realists in fact endorsed Kelsen’s political aspiration to a universal legal – and eventually political – system. After voicing apt criticisms of Kelsen, Herz, for example, concluded a critical discussion on his former mentor’s writings by declaring that [u]nless our era leads to the final doom of all, it must become a transition from the age of the multiple units called nation-states and their partly regulated, partly unregulated relations into a state of affairs which can no longer be regarded as utopian but must become the realizable objective of a group – mankind – which is one at least in one basic aim: the preservation of peace. Contemporary international law, he concluded, would need to make the ‘transition from jumbled, chaotic patchwork to a true and common law of man’ (1964: 117–18). In this reform-minded vein, Herz hoped for ‘a universalist “groundswell”, from which the feeling for the necessity to act in a common world interest would impose itself with compelling force upon people and people’s minds’ (1959: 331). Kelsen’s problem was not his noble dream of a global rule of law, but instead a tendency to overstate the degree to which the existing international order was capable of being successfully legalised. Kelsen’s court-centred model of international reform downplayed the decisive ways in which contemporary international law remained not only categorically different from most nationally based legal orders, but also still disproportionately subject to the whim of powerful states. Ours was not a unified global (that is, ‘monistic’) legal order, but still in decisive respects a ‘dualistic’ one, in which international law, though in many ways increasingly effective, lacked necessary attributes of legality. Kelsen’s theory masked the fact that appeals to law in the international arena too often served as a superficial cover for power moves that mocked a minimally acceptable model of law. In this vein, Herz and Schwarzenberger criticised Kelsen for offering a misleadingly legalistic interpretation of interstate violence. In Kelsen’s theoretical account, law was a coherent system of universal norms backed by sanctions. In actuality, the Realists responded, war and reprisals rested on unilateral measures directly subject to the discretion of individual states. Legal indeterminacy – that is, the reduction of law to highly particularistic interpretations, chiefly determined by fluctuating power constellations – ran amok in the interstate sphere, in contrast to the usual situation in national communities (Herz 1964: 97–101). For Schwarzenberger, self-help in international law had little in common with its domestic parallel. There, appeals to self-help were legally circumscribed to make sure they remained an exceptional state of affairs, whereas in international affairs a lacuna of basic legal safeguards meant that self-help served as little more than a cover for the ‘rule of force’: namely, political constellations typically favouring those with more de facto power (Schwarzenberger 1941: 130, 145–6, 176). Realists clearly rejected Kelsen’s gradualist, judiciary or court-centred vision of global reform: the judicialisation of international affairs hardly laid out a royal road to global law and order. At first glance, their criticisms of Kelsen’s ideas – a vivid theoretical crystallisation of mid-century liberal dreams for international reform – might

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be taken as corroborating Realism’s assumed hostility towards a reformed, law-based global order. This commonplace view, however, tends to miss the wood for the trees. Like Kelsen, Realists sometimes endorsed far-reaching reform at the global level as a desirable ultimate goal, towards which anyone suitably sensitised to the manifest irrationalities of the international status quo was obliged to work. Nor did they consistently reject the legalisation of interstate affairs as a long-term goal. Their views, in fact, at times reflected core components of Kant’s own original international theory. For example, Realists might readily have seconded Kant’s claim that ‘the depravity of human nature is displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain between the various nations’ (Kant 1991: 103) Like mid-century Realists, Kant offered a hard-headed interpretation of the Westphalian system, adamantly rejecting any claim that it had already taken on sufficiently legal attributes. His ‘idealism’ forthrightly acknowledged the harsh ‘realities’ of an international order in which political leaders periodically carved up independent states (for example, Poland) and regularly engaged in horrific acts of violence. For Kant, international law ‘cannot have the slightest legal force, since states as such are not subject to a common external constraint’ (Kant 1991: 103). Without a shared system of ‘external constraints’, any talk of ‘just’ (that is, legal) versus ‘unjust’ (that is, illegal) wars represented a premature – and potentially misused – anticipation of a prospective yet still unaccomplished legalisation of international affairs. Realist scepticism about the international–legal status quo reproduces Kant’s original views. His apt portrayal of the underdeveloped character of the Westphalian state system not only mirrors much of what mid-century Realists had to say about it; it also anticipates their scepticism about some features of international law in the context of a global order where the Great Powers still exercise disproportionate influence. Like few other political thinkers, Kant was also deeply appreciative of the virtues of the modern state, believing that ‘only an agency vested with the actual monopoly of force has any hope of being able to act in a coordinated fashion’ on anything beyond the smallest of scales in order to guarantee law and order (Waldron 2006: 194). His widely noted ‘statism’ was arguably reproduced by Realists who worried that Kelsen’s assault on the concept of state sovereignty threw the baby out with the bathwater, not only obfuscating the harsh realities of existing political life, but also impeding proper appreciation of the necessary role state institutions would play in achieving global legality. Although mentioning Hobbes, Morgenthau might just as easily have credited Kant with recognising the ‘profound and neglected truth’ that ‘[u]niversal moral principles, such as justice or equality, are capable of guiding political action only to the extent’ that a sovereign state has been established (1951: 34). One reason why Kant rejected a right to disobedience, for example, was his emphasis on the indispensability of effective state institutions not only to legality, but also to the possibility of a rich and flourishing moral existence. As Jeremy Waldron has accurately noted, ‘Kant is interested in the state as an institution that makes a systematic difference to what is morally permissible for ordinary moral agents to do’ (2006: 183). Here we cannot dig any deeper into the perennial – and probably irresolvable – debate among Kant scholars about the precise contours of the global legal order he sought (Eberl and Niesen 2011). Yet it seems worth recalling that one widely shared interpretation views Kant as positing that, ultimately, only a global sovereign state could provide for a binding system of global law able to protect the weak from the strong, and make sure that laws are enforced in a more than ad hoc manner (Easley

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2004). Realists’ advocacy for a world state, and also their insistence that it could be constructed, if at all, only via gradual means, mirror Kant’s reflections. They also shared with him what we might describe as a classically modern view of law, which conceives of modern statehood as a necessary yet insufficient precondition for the rule of law. Stated in the bluntest terms: in the absence of a state apparatus able to enforce general norms effectively against powerful as well as weak social actors, the modern rule of law’s fundamental aspiration to a modicum of legal equality cannot be realised. To the extent that the rule of law entails protecting the weak from the strong and guaranteeing basic protections to every member of the legal community, it necessarily depends on the existence of a ‘sovereign’ state. For this simple yet crucial reason, a viable as well as minimally attractive global legal system, like its national corollary, is likely to presuppose the creation of global statehood. Like Kant, first-generation Realists struggled to figure out how a world state could successfully circumvent many of its widely noted prospective perils. On this crucial matter as well, their reflections echoed Kant. While sympathising with the idea of world government, they worried, as already noted, that misbegotten quests to create it prematurely might culminate in a ‘lifeless’ despotism or a ‘totalitarian monster resting on feet of clay’ (Morgenthau 1954: 482). Such anxieties seem congruent with Kant’s own anxieties about the possible unrealisability of self-government and the rule of law in large and populous states. Yet these concerns encouraged neither Kant nor first-generation Realists to abandon all hope for the possibility of gradual reform able to move humankind closer to a global political community – and perhaps, some day, a full-scale world state.

Conclusion Let me be clear: Realists were hardly ‘closeted’ Kantians with secret affinities with his moral and political theory. However, a fresh look at their complicated relationship to the Kantian legacy helps counter the virtually universal consensus today that Realism necessarily opposes significant global reform. That view badly distorts a more complex and interesting intellectual history. We ignore such history at the cost of hindering an overdue intellectual and political exchange between Realism and recent, more constructive views about global reform among lawyers, philosophers and political theorists. Those hoping to move beyond international anarchy would do well to take a second look at Realism’s neglected reformist strands.

Notes 1. For example, Shapiro (2016: 110–12) simply dismisses my Realist-inspired defence of world government, without apparently having examined any of the classical Realists (for example, Carr, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Herz) on whom my argument builds. (At any rate, none is referenced in his discussion.) He then rolls out the usual stock arguments against world statehood, without giving even minimal attention to the substantial body of scholarship that has tried to counter them. 2. For some important precursors – and, in some cases, contributors – to this revisionist genre, see Bell (2009), Booth (1991), Jütersonke (2010), Lebow (2003), Schou Tjalve (2008) and Williams (2005, 2007).

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Bibliography Beardsworth, R. (2011), Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2006), Power in the Global Age, New York: Columbia University Press. Beitz, C. (1999), Political Theory and International Relations, 2nd. edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bell, D. (ed.) (2009), Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, K. (1991), ‘Security in anarchy: Utopian realism in theory and practice’, International Affairs, vol. 67, pp. 527–45. Caney, S. (2005), Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carr, E. H. (1942), Conditions of Peace, London: Macmillan. Carr, E. H. (1964) [1946], The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, New York: Harper & Row. Carr, E. H. (1967) [1945], Nationalism and After, London: Macmillan. Claude, I. L. (1971), Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, New York: Random House. Coady, C. A. J. (2008), Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craig, C. (2003), Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz, New York: Columbia University Press. Easley, E. S. (2004), The War over Perpetual Peace, New York: Palgrave. Eberl, O., and P. Niesen (2011), ‘Kommentar’, in O. Eberl and P. Niesen (eds), Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 89–357. Geuss, R. (2015), ‘Realism and the relativity of judgement’, International Relations, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 3–22. Habermas, J. (2006), The Divided West, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press. Herz, J. (1959), International Politics in the Atomic Age, New York: Columbia University Press. Herz, J. (1964), ‘The Pure Theory of Law revisited: Hans Kelsen’s doctrine of international law in the nuclear age’, in Salo Engel (ed.), Law, State, and International Legal Order: Essays in Honor of Hans Kelsen, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, pp. 107–18. Jütersonke, O. (2010), Morgenthau, Law and Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1991), Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by H. S. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lebow, R. N. (2003), The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McQueen, A. (2017), Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mearsheimer, J. (1994), ‘The false promise of international institutions’, International Security, vol. 19, pp. 5–49. Mitrany, D. (1946), A Working Peace System, London: National Peace Council. Morgenthau, H. J. (1946), Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgenthau, H. J. (1951), In Defense of the National Interest, New York: Alfred Knopf. Morgenthau, H. J. (1954), Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd edn, New York: Alfred Knopf. Morgenthau, H. J. (1966), ‘Introduction’, in D. Mitrany, A Working Peace System, Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Morgenthau, H. J. (1970), Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–70, New York: Praeger. Niebuhr, R. (1944), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Niebuhr, R. (1959), The Structure of Nations and Empires, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Ohlin, J. D. (2015), The Assault on International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pogge, T. (1994), ‘Cosmopolitanism and sovereignty’, in C. Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 89–122. Posner, E. (2009), The Perils of Global Legalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scheuerman, W. E. (2009), Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond, Cambridge: Polity Press. Scheuerman, W. E. (2011), The Realist Case for Global Reform, Cambridge: Polity Press. Scheuerman, W. E. (2013), ‘The Realist revival in political philosophy, or: Why new is not always improved’, International Politics, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 798–814. Scheuerman, W. E. (2014), ‘Cosmopolitanism and the world state’, Review of International Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 419–41. Schmidt, B., and M. C. Williams (2008), ‘The Bush doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 191–220. Schou Tjalve, V. (2008), Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Defense, New York: Palgrave. Schuett, R. (2011), ‘Peace through transformation? Political Realism and the progressivism of national security’, International Relations, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 185–203. Schuman, F. (1952), The Commonwealth of Man: An Inquiry into Power Politics and World Government, New York: Alfred Knopf. Schwarzenberger, G. (1941), Power Politics: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations and Post-War Planning, London: Jonathan Cape. Shapiro, I. (2016), Politics Against Domination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Munster, R., and C. Sylvest (2016), Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought During the Thermonuclear Revolution, London: Routledge. Von Bernstorff, J. (2010), The Public International Law Theory of Hans Kelsen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waldron, J. (2006), ‘Kant’s theory of the state’, in I. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. by P. Kleingeld, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 179–200. Waltz, K. (1979), Theory of International Politics, New York: McGraw Hill. Waltz, K. (2008), Realism and International Politics, New York: Routledge. Walzer, M. (2000), Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Examples, 3rd edn, New York: Basic Books. Williams, M. C. (2005), The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, M. C. (ed.) (2007), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zolo, D. (1997), Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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9 Thucydides Thucydides: the origins of political realism? Neville Morley

Chapter Overview

I

t is a well-established idea in mainstream International Relations theory that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was a Realist and the originator of some key Realist ideas. The crude version of this claim, relying on a simplistic reading of the Melian Dialogue as a straightforward statement of Thucydides’ views, is easily refuted but more sophisticated accounts have been put forward, and belief in a close connection between Thucydides and the real world long pre-dates twentieth-century political theory. Interpretations of Thucydides as a Realist take many different forms, depending on how his work is read and in what contexts: we can identify an empirical realism, as has been claimed by generations of historians who take him as model for constructing accounts of the past firmly grounded in critical source analysis; realism as a sensibility, shown by his willingness to observe unflinchingly the harsh truths of the world and of human affairs; and, finally and most controversially, a theoretical or doctrinal realism that argues for the possibility of learning useful lessons from the past and develops ideas about the workings of inter- and intra-state relations. All these aspects can be supported from plausible readings of his work; however, contrary to conventional political science interpretations, Thucydides’ realism does not offer invariable laws or consistent principles of human behaviour, but instead seeks to educate his readers in understanding complexity and uncertainty. *

*

*

to see reason in reality: not in ‘reason’, still less in ‘morality’ (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Thucydides the Realist? The idea that Thucydides was a Realist, and that key passages in his account of the Peloponnesian War represent the first statements of important Realist ideas, is a familiar one. Recently, it has become established in non-academic discourse, especially in the USA, through the success of Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme as a model for US–China relations, the habit of senior military figures of quoting

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Thucydides on state behaviour, and the ubiquity of the Melian Dialogue as a basis for interpreting the dynamics of any relationship of unequal power (for example, Allison 2017; Varoufakis 2016). This image rests on a longer tradition within international relations, again especially in the USA, of claiming Thucydides as an intellectual ancestor. This is implicit in the assertion of Robert Keohane that ‘even as long ago as the time of Thucydides, political realism . . . contained three key assumptions’, while Robert Gilpin claimed he found it difficult to conceive that anyone would deny Thucydides a place among the three great realist writers (Keohane 1986a: 7; Gilpin 1986: 306). Introductory textbooks on Realist theory present him without hesitation as the first Realist theorist, and the Melian Dialogue as the fundamental exposition of Realist ideas (for example, Boucher 1998: 29; Betts 2008: 53). It is widely assumed that Thucydides’ name can be evoked to legitimise any line of enquiry (‘Ever since the days of Thucydides . . . ’) (Ruback 2015a; Ruback 2015b). The line from the Melian Dialogue that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ (Thucydides 5.89) is presented as an encapsulation of realist thought, likewise the claim that states’ motives can be understood in terms of fear, honour and interest (for example, 1.75) – indeed, this may be cited to show the sophistication of Realism, emphasising the role of non-material factors besides the usual focus on rational ‘interest’.1 This crude account of Thucydides as a Realist is easy to refute, and has been regularly refuted (for example, Johnson 1993, 2015; Forde 2012; Crane 1998). It makes questionable assumptions about the nature of his text and his intentions, assimilating these to contemporary social science norms and occluding the ways in which they were radically alien (Ober 2001; Morley 2016). There is a plausible argument that Thucydides sought to identify general principles of human behaviour, rather than offering an account of the past as an end in itself – if we anachronistically associate him with a modern academic discipline, he was as much a social scientist as a humanistic historian – but his methods, assumptions and forms of rhetoric and representation were far removed from modern practices. Further, even if Thucydides was developing a normative theory of interstate relations, the ways in which modern readers have identified the contents of such a theory – since these are not stated explicitly anywhere – are highly dubious. The conventional Realist reading cherry-picks from a very long book, identifying just a few passages (above all the Melian Dialogue) as defining and exemplifying Thucydides’ theoretical ideas, and ignoring the fact that in most cases these claims are put into the mouths of characters, not presented as the author’s own opinions. The Melian Dialogue not only is the key text for Realist readings of Thucydides; it also most clearly problematises such claims. Its attraction is that it offers explicit statements about the anarchic nature of the world and the workings of interstate power relations – the calculation of advantage and interest, the dominance of might over right, and the irrelevance of ethics. Its unmistakably fictive nature (the dialogic form, and the impossibility of Thucydides having had any evidence for what was said) is less of an issue if it is read as a theoretical exposition rather than a conventional history. However, it is a dialogue, offering two different perspectives on the issues; there is no obvious reason for assuming that the Athenians ‘win’ or that we should favour their claims, unless a reader has a predisposition towards ‘might over right’ arguments. Extracting the passage from its wider context is problematic; the Athenians’ confident belief in their own power leads them immediately afterwards into the disastrous decision to attack Syracuse. If

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Thucydides believed the ‘Realist’ claims of the Athenians and intended his readers to accept them, his narrative places these ideas in question. It makes more sense to read him as a critic of this pathological worldview, constructing his account to show its dire consequences (cf. Ahrensdorf 1997; Rahe 1996). Within political theory and international relations, such critiques conventionally conclude not by rejecting Thucydides as an authority but by recuperating him for a different theoretical agenda. He may be presented as a different and more sophisticated kind of realist – tragic, classical, theoretical or complex – or as a different kind of theorist such as a constructivist, while Straussians read him as a political philosopher in their own mould (for example, Spegele 1996:14; Lebow 2001; Lebow 2003 Lebow 2012; Ahrensdorf 1997; Doyle 1990; Doyle 1991: 91; Jaffe 2015). The best of these readings draw on research in classical studies, on Thucydides’ intellectual context, cultural assumptions and literary techniques; but, while classicists generally historicise the work and emphasise its radical separation from contemporary approaches, political readings continue to treat Thucydides as a colleague and intellectual progenitor.2 It is striking that an article arguing that international relations theorists should stop reading Thucydides nevertheless concludes that this is unlikely, in part simply because such readers continue to find his work inspirational and relevant to their own concerns (Welch 2003).

The Genealogy of Realism The idea that Thucydides’ work has some special connection with reality long predates the second half of the twentieth century. For the first few centuries after his work was revived in Western Europe, readers focused on the correspondence between his account of events and what had actually happened (Morley 2014: 35–59). Thomas Hobbes, introducing his own translation in 1629, emphasised that, unlike his predecessor Herodotus, Thucydides chose subject matter about which he could inform himself properly, and showed both intelligence and integrity in giving an account of it (1629: 20–1, 24). More explicitly, in his Instructions pour l’histoire of 1677, the French historian René Rapin claimed that ‘nothing is more beautiful in history than that it is real’, and that Thucydides possessed ‘a kind of spirit needed to say things as they are’ (1677: 33, 36). Such claims were grounded in the imagined character of the writer (his integrity and love of truth), his experience and expertise, his biography (especially exile) and, increasingly, ideas about his critical methodology. These arguments converged and reinforced one another in establishing the image of a writer who offered a uniquely reliable account, and whose approach marked him out as a true historian. Many eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century accounts of ancient Greek history were little more than paraphrases of Thucydides, partly because of the lack of alternative sources, but above all because his claim to reliability was accepted with little question. This idea was developed further in Wilhelm Roscher’s 1842 book on Thucydides, which presented him as a model for critical ‘History as Science’ (Morley 2012). In his opening chapters, Roscher sought to establish contemporary historiography as both equal and equivalent to the natural sciences, by distinguishing between three ways in which humans engaged with the world: the philosophical, which takes experience of the world and derives higher truths from it; the poetic, which takes experience and

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turns it into art; and the scientific, both natural and historical, which makes experience intelligible – interpreting reality, rather than seeking a truth higher than reality (1842: 3–16). Roscher then presented Thucydides as a perfect example of the scientific mind, who grounded his account in the reality of experience. Further, like a true scientist, Thucydides sought not only to gather material about the past but also to analyse and interpret it, developing more general theories that were, unlike philosophical speculations, fully engaged with reality. The main impact of Roscher’s book was on Friedrich Nietzsche, who borrowed it several times from Basel library.3 Roscher’s account of the true scientific historian and the ‘historical artisan’ reappears in Nietzsche’s characterisations of critical and antiquarian history in his essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. More striking is the explicit association of Thucydides with a close engagement with reality, set against the abstractions and illusions of philosophy, in the late essay ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’: My recuperation, my predilection, my cure from all Platonism was Thucydides every time. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Prince are my close kindred because of their absolute determination to pre-judge nothing and to see reason in reality: not in ‘reason’, still less in ‘morality’ . . . . Nothing cures us more thoroughly of the wretched habit of the Greeks of glossing things over in the ideal, a habit which the ‘classically educated’ youth carries with him into life as the reward for his gymnasium training, than Thucydides. One must turn him over line by line and read his unspoken thoughts as clearly as his words; there is scarcely another thinker with so many hidden thoughts. In him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean realist culture, attains its perfect expression; this inestimable movement in the midst of the otherwise pervasive moral and intellectual swindle of the Socratic school. Greek philosophy as the décadence of Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great summation, the final manifestation of that strong, severe, hard matter-offactness that was instinctive for the earlier Hellenes. Courage in the face of reality distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, and so he flees into the Ideal; Thucydides has himself under control, and so he also has things under control, (Nietzsche 1988: 156) The association of Thucydides with Machiavelli is interesting, given how modern accounts present them as founding figures of Realism. Most importantly, Nietzsche depicted Thucydides’ temperamental and moral realism, a complete worldview with no time for illusions about reality. Historians like Roscher focused on the attitude and methodology required to uncover the reality of events, since people had misleading and confused beliefs that they failed to question. Nietzsche, however, believed that reality was a terrifying prospect, and therefore people developed misleading beliefs to protect themselves. His Thucydides possesses the awesome courage to face things as they really are. This insistence on stripping away all illusions about human motives and the nature of the world resonates with the claim of modern ‘realism’ to have uncovered the true dynamics of political behaviour, however unpalatable these might appear. This tradition influenced the developing disciplines of international relations and political theory through several routes. Echoes of Nietzsche’s characterisation are recognisable in Leo Strauss’s writings, especially the idea of the esoteric nature of

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Thucydides’ work and its deliberately hidden and unspoken thoughts (Strauss 1964: 139–241). Thucydides also offered a model for a historically grounded but presentfocused analysis of global politics that was attractive to figures like Alfred Zimmern, Gilbert Murray and Arnold Toynbee.4 However, the specific theory of Realism was apparently articulated without any such influence, since Thucydides is scarcely mentioned by either Hans Morgenthau or E. H. Carr (Keene 2015). Rather, he was identified as a founding figure for the discipline as a whole, and then read through the lens of Realism. He was ‘recognised’ as a kindred spirit and precursor, who established the antiquity and hence credibility of the theory – exactly as nineteenth-century readers had ‘recognised’ Thucydides as a modern scientific historian. This survey of reception is intended to make two points. First, the sense of recognition is, for all the problems with crude Realist readings, not a complete mirage or pure projection. There is something about Thucydides’ work that leads different readers to identify a special relationship to reality. In theory, we could explain this tendency through a tradition of reception, priming readers to look for such elements in his work – as certainly happens today. But such readings recur in quite different contexts, indicating that this is only a partial explanation. The second point is to emphasise the variety of interpretations of Thucydides’ ‘realism’, from a general concern with fact rather than fiction to a full set of explicit theoretical presuppositions. Sometimes these conceptions are deliberately opposed – Peter Ahrensdorf’s idea of Thucydides’ ‘realistic critique of Realism’, for example – but often they reinforce one another, with Thucydides’ reputation for objectivity subtly bolstering his status as insightful political theorist (Ahrensdorf 1997). ‘Realism’ lies at the heart of the construction of Thucydides as an authority, but in multiple ways. This is undoubtedly an important text for engaging with issues and problems under the general remit of ‘realism’, but we must be conscious both of the different ways of understanding that concept – the remainder of this chapter will consider three different aspects – and of the constant temptation to appropriate Thucydides as an authorising figure, to assimilate him to a single perspective.

Realism as Empiricism The first strand of Thucydidean realism, dominant in historiographical reception and central to his reputation for trustworthiness, is the grounding of his account in the reality of what really happened. This reading is based on the opening sections of his work, where he offered a brief but highly critical account of early Greek history and then set out the general principles of his own approach to the past (Greenwood 2006). Thucydides was not the first to recognise that Greek traditions about past events were permeated with mythology and not to be taken at face value; his predecessor Herodotus had expressed scepticism about earlier accounts, often presenting them without committing himself to their credibility, and distinguishing between mythical and historical individuals (Herodotus 2008: 3.122.2; on comparisons, see Hunter 1982; and Foster and Lateiner 2012). Thucydides went further not only in analysing the problems with these inherited stories – ‘In respect of the preceding period and the still remoter past, the length of time that has elapsed made it impossible to ascertain clearly what had happened’ (1.1.3) – but also in attempting to identify a historical kernel in such myths through a process of rationalisation. He reinterpreted the Trojan

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War in terms of Agamemnon’s political authority and command of a navy, rather than the myth of Helen’s suitors swearing an oath – but retained Homer as a historical source, arguing that references there to ‘the Achaeans’ rather than to ‘the Greeks’ were evidence that Greece was not yet unified (1.9–10, 1.3.3). Thucydides acknowledged the possibility of significant change over time, imagining how future observers of the ruins of Athens and Sparta would tend to overestimate the power of the one and underestimate the other, and offers the general principle that ‘one should therefore keep an open mind and not judge by appearances rather than actual power’ (1.10.3). These, then, are my findings about early history, though it is difficult to be sure of every detail in the evidence since people accept quite uncritically any reports of the past they get from others, even those related to their own country. . . . So little trouble do people take to search out the truth, and so readily do they accept what first comes to hand. From the evidence I have presented however, one would not go wrong in supposing that events were very much as I have set them out; and no one should prefer rather to believe the songs of the poets, who exaggerate things for artistic purposes, or the writings of the chroniclers, which are composed more to make good listening than to represent the truth, being impossible to check and most of them having won a place over time in the imaginary realm of fable. (1.20.1, 1.21.1) Such methodological statements, emphasising the problematic nature of the sources and the effort required to understand and evaluate them, establish Thucydides as an author who can be trusted. Unlike most people (an implicit dig at Herodotus, as well as his fellow-citizens), he refuses to accept stories at face value, and unlike other writers, he seeks only to discover the truth, not to entertain or flatter. He admits the limits of human knowledge – some things cannot be known in any detail – and claims only that events were ‘very much’ as he describes them, not that his account is complete or absolutely accurate. This insistence on the need for dogged enquiry, and the expressions of caution he utters even about his own account, are hallmarks of his critical sense and wish to ground everything in reality. As to the events of the war, I resolved not to rely in my writing on what I learned from chance sources or even on my own impressions, but [ . . . ] I investigated every detail with the utmost concern for accuracy. This was a laborious process of research, because eyewitnesses at the various events reported the same things differently, depending on which side they favoured and on their powers of memory, (1.22.1–13) Thucydides is unique among classical historians in his willingness to discuss methodology, and especially critical source analysis, as a means of legitimising his account. Later readers, especially from the Renaissance onwards, took these statements not only as grounds for accepting his narrative, but also as precepts that all historians should follow if they wished to serve truth rather than just tell entertaining stories (Morley 2014). Thucydides’ success in putting his stated principles into practice is something that has to be taken on trust; he presents an almost entirely seamless account of events, not citing any of the evidence or eyewitness accounts that, we have to assume, he

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collected, evaluated and combined to produce his final version. The problem for historians of ancient Greece is that there is little contemporary evidence to set alongside Thucydides; evaluating his narrative is often a matter of sensing that he is not telling us everything or is presenting things in a tendentious manner. For example, he says little about the Megarian decree of 432 bc (in which the Athenians excluded traders from Megara from their markets), although in the plays of Aristophanes this was presented as a major cause of the war. Acceptance of his account rests on faith in the competence and integrity of the historian. The obvious point is that every history is an interpretation, and so inevitably involves authorial choices in selection, arrangement and representation. Thucydides makes this explicit in his explanation of the set-piece speeches in his account; he could not always be certain of exactly what was said, even when he had been present (again, his honesty in admitting fallibility is taken as a sign of trustworthiness): ‘What I have set down is how I think each of them would have expressed what was most appropriate in the particular circumstances, while staying as close as possible to the overall intention of what was actually said’ (1.22.1). Precisely what these phrases mean has been much debated, but they clearly undermine anachronistic interpretations of Thucydides as a modern historical positivist (Greenwood 2006: 57–82). He sought an appropriate balance between what can be known on the basis of evidence and what can be deduced from the general situation – which naturally involved subjective interpretations of the situation and its dynamics. Modern studies of Thucydides’ rhetorical and narrative techniques – he has been characterised as an ‘artful reporter’ – reach similar conclusions: such techniques are legitimate (not least because unavoidable) means of communicating his understanding of events (Rood 1998; Hunter 1973). This does not contradict the idea that Thucydides’ account is a concerted attempt at establishing the reality of events. However, its rhetorical aspects should not simply be ignored, since they are important means by which Thucydides, with remarkable success, creates his ‘reality effect’, persuading the vast majority of his readers that his account does indeed offer a true and reliable account of the world it describes.

Realism as Sensibility The role of trust in evaluating Thucydides’ account – above all, trust that he carried through his programmatic statements – connects to a second aspect of his ‘realism’: his sensibility. This is based partly on circular reasoning – most readers come to Thucydides with presuppositions about his dedication to truth and willingness to face reality, and then find confirmation of this in the text – and partly on the impression created by the opening sections of the work. However, it is also derived from the strong contrast with most other classical historians and what we might have expected from his biography. Thucydides does appear to treat the different Greek states even-handedly, rather than favouring his home city (as other historians would do) or taking revenge on it for exiling him. His portrayals of the polarising Athenian politicians Pericles and Cleon are nuanced enough that debate continues about his personal opinions, especially whether or not he sought to celebrate Pericles and exonerate him from blame for the defeat of Athens, or on the contrary wished to show Periclean imperialism as the root of the eventual disaster (Foster 2010; Taylor 2010; Jaffe 2017). Thucydides treated his own

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actions in general as neutrally as everything else, even referring to himself in the third person (4.104–7); whether or not he had genuinely risen above his failure, he presented himself as someone committed to dispassionate truthfulness. Thucydides comes across as a man who refuses to accept anything at face value, whether the traditions of his own city, the evidence of his own eyes (Mycenae is a ruin today, so how can it ever have been great?) or even his own memories. He seeks to strip away comforting but unverifiable beliefs and explanations; he is a thoroughgoing rationalist, not only with myths and traditions but also with the supernatural, showing how individuals could be swayed by oracles, superstitions and portents without suggesting that divine forces played any role in human affairs.5 He drew complex distinctions between real and apparent causes, pretexts and true motivations (1.23.6), and constantly returns to the theme of the gap between words and deeds, language and reality – not only by showing how orators like Cleon and Alcibiades manipulated people, but also by providing set-piece episodes like the depiction of civil war in Corcyra: Men assumed the right to reverse the usual values in the application of words to actions. Reckless audacity came to be thought of as comradely courage, while farsighted hesitation became well-disguised cowardice; moderation was a front for unmanliness, and to understand everything was to accomplish nothing. (3.82.4) In many Greek cities, even Athens, language was distorted by factionalism, and any idea of a neutral, objective truth was lost. Not for Thucydides; he is someone who cannot be fooled, who sees past the layers of rhetoric and illusion to the world as it really is – and who is prepared to face it, however horrific, and describe it as accurately as possible (cf. Orwin 1994). The Corcyrean episode is one of a number of set pieces where social values and humanity are pushed to breaking point under extreme circumstances; there is also the description of the Athenian plague (which Thucydides himself lived through), the destruction of Plataea by the Thebans while the Spartans cynically washed their hands of responsibility, the moral bankruptcy of Athenian arguments in the Mytilene Debate and the Melian Dialogue, and the misery of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse. Thucydides describes it all in calm, analytical prose, avoiding overt emotional effects and leaving the horror of reality to speak for itself; comparisons are regularly drawn with the clinical precision of ancient medical writers. Thucydides’ character and style – the two become barely distinguishable – become a model for seeing the world as it is, not as we might like it to be.

Realism as Doctrine? In mainstream historical readings of Thucydides, these two aspects of ‘realism’ combine to establish the veracity of his account and its usefulness as a model. From the perspective of political theory, this raises the spectre of historicism. As Michael Doyle remarked, accuracy is a descriptive virtue and a theoretical vice; a focus on the detail of past events, emphasising their time-bound context, works against the possibility of wider understanding, let alone any relevance to the present (Doyle 1997: 46; generally, see Floyd and Stears 2011). Thucydides clearly stated that his account was intended to be useful. Reliability was a means to an end, not the end itself:

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[My account] will have served its purpose well enough if it is judged useful by those who want to have a clear view of what happened in the past and what – the human condition being what it is – can be expected to happen again some time in the future in similar or much the same ways. It is composed to be a possession for all time and not just a performance-piece for the moment. (1.22.4) The phrase rendered here as ‘the human condition being what it is’ has often been translated as ‘according to human nature’; the most literal rendition would be ‘because of the human thing’. Clearly, this makes a significant difference to our understanding of Thucydides’ claim that future events will tend to resemble past ones – is it because humans have a fixed and predictable nature, or just certain persistent habits and tendencies? – and hence what knowledge we can gain from his account, from normative covering laws to a richer sense of the variety of human experience (see Lee 2016 on ‘human nature’; Johnson 1993: 3071). The standard realist interpretation assumes the former, despite the fact that Thucydides nowhere elaborated the principles that his work supposedly sought to identify (hence the habit of identifying the law-like pronouncements of Thucydidean characters as expressions of his views). More ‘humanistic’ readings, from Hobbes onwards, make fewer impositions on the text but run the risk of falling back into historicism. Did Thucydides believe in the timeless utility of his work because of a deep understanding of the trans-historical dynamics of human politics, or did he assume that the institutions of fifth-century Greece would persist so that detailed knowledge of their politics would remain valid? Proponents of the theoretical Thucydides are sometimes too eager to move straight to the general, but remaining stuck in the particular is equally a misreading of his intentions. A good example is his brief overview of the causes of the war, recently elevated into (or appropriated for) the ‘Thucydides Trap’ model (Allison 2017). To explain why [the Athenians and Spartans broke their truce] I first set out the reasons they gave and the matters of dispute between them so that no one in future ever need enquire how it came about that so great a war arose among the Greeks. I consider the truest cause, though the one least openly stated, to be this: the Athenians were becoming powerful and inspired fear in the Spartans and so forced them into war. As for the reasons that were openly stated by each side for breaking the treaty and going to war, they were as follows. (1.23.5–6) Thucydides’ account is overtly focused on the causes of this war, rather than setting up a timeless model of the rising power confronting the established power; the subsequent narrative makes it clear that this Athens–Sparta dynamic was not the only cause, given the role of other actors, the importance of contingent events and individuals (Pericles urging Athens to pursue an aggressive expansionist policy), and the power of rhetoric and values in shaping decisions. At the same time, Thucydides clearly does intend his readers to reflect on wider themes and principles, rather than focus solely on specific events. The complexity and ambiguity of his language – again, there are significant issues of translation – may be deliberate, compelling readers to work through the ideas and their implications (Hunter 1982: 326–32; Shanske 2006; Jaffe 2017). He does not offer a theory; he pushes us to think theoretically.

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The same is true of other precepts and assumptions that the realist tradition has ascribed to Thucydides. These themes are not simply projections of modern preoccupations on to his account – but they are problematised there, offered as ways of thinking about the world that may or may not be useful or misleading, rather than clearly established as attributes of reality. We can consider three of the main tenets of mainstream realism (Keohane 1986b). First, the existence of international anarchy, where the only constraints on state behaviour are their power and capacity for action relative to other states; this is certainly the Athenian view of the world, especially but not only in the Melian Dialogue – but, as discussed above, there are serious doubts as to whether we should accept their claims at face value, let along adopt them as foundational principles. Other parts of Thucydides’ account showcase a variety of claims about the importance of treaties, religious beliefs, inherited relationships and ideas of justice as establishing norms of interstate behaviour; these are contested and often ignored, so one could claim that the ultimate constraints on state behaviour are material – but they are not shown to be irrelevant. Second, realism often represents states as the key political actors. Again, this is certainly found in Thucydides’ account; he frequently speaks in terms of the decisions, actions and perceptions of ‘the Athenians’ and ‘the Spartans’, and offers (via the Corinthians) accounts of their collective characters with the implication that these shape their behaviour. On the other hand, especially in the case of Athens, we are shown the processes by which states deliberate and reach decisions, making it clear that there are internal divisions and disagreements, and that individual actors can make a difference to the outcome. Interstate relations are not thereby reduced to internal politics or the decisions of individuals; rather, the interaction and feedback between different levels of decision-making and causation are emphasised. Third, political actors are conceived in realism as rational power-seekers. Once again, this is a view presented by Thucydides – and just as often interrogated. Not every state or individual seeks power, unless this is defined loosely enough to encompass a non-expansionist preference for security (Sparta and many smaller states). In staging the Melians’ dilemma between ‘surrender and survive’ and ‘freedom but death’, Thucydides raises the question of what the goals of a state should be. The notion of rationality is placed under still greater pressure; states and individual actors are shown to be driven by passion as much as calculation, and to have at best only a partial idea of where their interests lie. The Athenian decision to invade Sicily, presented by one speaker in the debate as the epitome of rational power-seeking, is unmistakably based on a deluded view of the world, and on irrational exuberance and overconfidence.

Conclusion In so far as Thucydides offers any sort of realist political theory, it is this: the world is complex, and people are bad at thinking about it. His ‘realism’ lies in recognising human susceptibility to passion, cognitive error, confirmation biases and manipulative rhetoric, and the consequences of this for trying to anticipate events and make decisions. Simply stated, such a theory appears trite; instead, Thucydides shows rather than tells, offering a series of case studies in the unpredictability of events and workings of ‘the human thing’, encouraging his readers to reflect on what happened and

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how it might have turned out differently. As Thomas Hobbes put it, ‘the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept’ (1629: xxii).

Notes 1. This standard version of 5.89 is from the old, largely discredited but still popular 1874 translation by Richard Crawley. Otherwise, translations of Thucydides are taken from the Cambridge edition by J. Mynott (Thucydides 2013). 2. For an extensive selection of recent research, see, for example, Rengakos and Tsakmakis (2006); Rusten (2009); and Tsakmakis and Tamiolaki (2013). On Thucydides as a ‘colleague’, see Loraux (1980). 3. On Nietzsche and Thucydides, see Zumbrunnen (2002, 2015); on Roscher, see Morley (2012: 131–2). 4. On these neglected founding figures, see Keene (2015). 5. On Thucydides’ rationalism and religious beliefs, see Morley (2014: 91–6).

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Hobbes, T. (1629), ‘To the readers’, in Eight Books of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thucydides the Sonne of Olorus, London. Hunter, V. J. (1973), Thucydides: The Artful Reporter, Toronto: Hakkert. Hunter, V. J. (1982), Past and Process in Herodotus and Thucydides, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jaffe, S. N. (2015), ‘The Straussian Thucydides’, in C. Lee and N. Morley (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell, pp. 278–95. Jaffe, S. N. (2017), Thucydides on the Outbreak of War: Character and Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, L. M. (1993), Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Johnson, L. M. (2015), ‘Thucydides the realist?’, in C. Lee and N. Morley (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell, pp. 391–405. Keene, E. (2015), ‘The reception of Thucydides in the history of international relations’, in C. Lee and N. Morley (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, pp. 355–72. Keohane, R. O. (1986a), ‘Neorealism and world politics’, in R. O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–26. Keohane, R. O. (1986b), ‘Theory of world politics’, in R. O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 158–203. Lebow, R. N. (2001), ‘Thucydides the constructivist’, American Political Science Review, vol. 95, pp. 547–60. Lebow, R. N. (2003), The Tragic Vision of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lebow, R. N. (2012), ‘International relations and Thucydides’, in K. Harloe and N. Morley (eds), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–211. Lee, C. (2016), ‘The power and politics of ontology’, in C. R. Thauer and C. Wendt (eds), Thucydides and Political Order: Lessons of Governance and the History of the Peloponnesian War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 95–130. Loraux, N. (1980), ‘Thucydide n’est pas un collègue’, Quaderni di Storia, vol. 12, pp. 55–81. Morley, N. (2012), ‘Thucydides, history and historicism in Wilhelm Roscher’, in K. Harloe and N. Morley (eds), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–39. Morley, N. (2014), Thucydides and the Idea of History, London: I. B. Tauris. Morley, N. (2016), ‘Contextualism and universality in Thucydidean thought’, in C. Thauer and C. Wendt (eds), Thucydides and Political Order: Concepts of Order and the History of the Peloponnesian War, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23–40. Nietzsche, F. (1988) [1889], Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, in F. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritischen Studienausgabe VI, ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter. Ober, J. (2001), ‘Thucydides Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor: Realist theory and the challenge of history’, in D. R. McCann and B. S. Strauss (eds), War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 273–306. Orwin, C. (1994), The Humanity of Thucydides, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rahe, P. A. (1996), ‘Thucydides’ critique of Realpolitik’, in B. Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, pp. 105–41. Rapin, R. (1677), Instructions pour l’histoire, Paris: Marbre-Cramoisy. Rengakos, A., and A. Tsakmakis (eds) (2006), Brill’s Companion to Thucydides, Leiden: Brill. Rood, T. (1998), Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Roscher, W. (1842), Leben, Werk und Zeitalter des Thukydides, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ruback, T. J. (2015a), ‘Thucydides our father, Thucydides our shibboleth: The History of the Peloponnesian War as a marker of contemporary international relations theory’, in C. Lee and N. Morley (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell, pp. 406–24. Ruback, T. J. (2015b), ‘Ever since the days of Thucydides: On the textual origins of IR theory’, in S. G. Nelson and N. Soguk (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics: Critical Investigations, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 17–34. Rusten, J. (ed.) (2009), Thucydides (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shanske, D. (2006), Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spegele, R. D. (1996), Political Realism in International Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, L. (1964), The City and Man, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Taylor, M. (2010), Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, New York: Cambridge University Press. Thucydides (2013), Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians, ed. and translated by J. Mynott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsakmakis, A., and M. Tamiolaki (eds) (2013), Thucydides Between History and Literature, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Varoufakis, Y. (2016), And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future, London: Bodley Head. Welch, David A. (2003), ‘Why international relations theorists should stop reading Thucydides’, Review of International Studies, vol. 29, pp. 301–19. Zumbrunnen, J. (2002), ‘“Courage in the face of reality”: Nietzsche’s admiration for Thucydides’, Polity, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 237–64. Zumbrunnen, J. (2015), ‘Realism, constructivism, and democracy in the History’, in C. Lee and N. Morley (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden, MA: Wiley– Blackwell, pp. 296–312.

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10 KauṬilya Centrifugal purism and the expansion of power Stuart Gray

Chapter Overview

K

auṬilya’s realism revolves around two distinct yet connected political goals, which can be attained to the extent that both are efficiently self-regulating: domestic security and foreign expansion. This chapter explores these two dimensions of his realism by tracing an analytical metaphor that pervades the Arthaśāstra: namely, the ‘body’ and its constituent parts, including the proper role that each part plays in securing internal order and external expansion. The chapter explains how the underlying logic of this realist stance is a response to natural ‘auto-tensions’ that follow from individual, political and economic complexities associated with different levels of embodiment. Consequently, Kauṭilya’s aim is not to eradicate this complexity but rather to hone and manage it as efficiently as possible, beginning with a unitary conception of ruling power at the top of the political order. Operating in both a top-down and an inside-out fashion, one can observe how a centrifugal, ascetic conception of ruling over oneself and others relies on a ‘layered purity’ through ritual self-discipline. This discipline requires the following: moral training designed to control a ruler’s potentially erratic emotions and desires; political and administrative pragmatism; and a multifaceted architecture of spying and surveillance. In sum, Kauṭilyan realism amounts to a totalising web of tightly controlled socio-economic and political relations at the macro-level, which aim to mirror perfectly his desired level of control and purity at the micro-level of the ruler and the ruler’s closest advisers. *

*

*

To outline a generally consistent strain of political realism in the Arthaśāstra, I examine the text as a single work, whose author scholars generally refer to as ‘Kauṭilya’. However, it is important to note at the outset that the extant text is a multi-layered, historically composite political treatise compiled and redacted by someone from a brahmanically orthodox background, dating to some time between the first and second centuries of the Common Era. In one sense, political realism will refer to an approach to politics that focuses on the everyday, practical problems a ruler confronts. In another sense, it refers to a conception of political bodies predicated on the assumption that they are ultimately self-interested and regard self-preservation as a basic good, which requires enhancing

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and effectively deploying power. Kauṭilya expresses a Brahmanical–theological realism that is influenced by and promotes various religious ideas, and it is essential to note that political realism in the sense that I use it does not entirely preclude non-secular ideals, normative beliefs or ideologies. In short, Kauṭilya’s realism displays a hybrid character. He is not a realist or a moralist; he is both. For Kauṭilya, political interest, power and preservation begin with the reality of human embodiment and the physical, emotional and psychological impulses that accompany the condition of embodiment. This includes the impulses and desires that tend to privilege self-interest over broader communal interests, and thus endanger the achievement of a stable, peaceful political community. Hence, the imagery of the body and its control through training and purification provides a useful frame for examining many of the realist elements found in the Arthaśāstra. An underlying logic of Kauṭilya’s position is that the self-destructive tendencies of human nature must be corralled and efficiently managed through statecraft in a centrifugal, ascetic fashion. His normative position operates under the assumption that proper rule is like a moral force or power that begins at the micro-level of the ruler and reverberates outwards to the ruler’s ministers, subjects and, if fully successful, other kingdoms or states. As Kauṭilya suggests, the ruler’s virtue and self-mastery in statecraft are a centre-fleeing force directed outwards from the centre of the kingdom. This outwardly directed force starting at the centre inevitably confronts the centripetal forces being exerted from objects at the outer rim. For example, subjects’ perception of the quality of the king’s rule places a counterforce to a potentially abusive, outwardly directed force. Theorising this push–pull relationship between such ethico-political forces helps clarify an integral component of Kauṭilya’s realism. In the first section of the chapter, I outline the most important concepts and terms for understanding Kauṭilya’s political thought within the conceptual framework of the Arthaśāstra. This section highlights the political significance of ‘purification’ and the cleansing or clearing of obstacles in order to enhance the ruler’s centrifugally oriented capacity to rule, monitor and punish. This logic pervades both the domestic and the foreign components of his realism. The second section surveys Kauṭilya’s domestic realism and explains how embodiment, tension and centrifugal control characterise his efforts to stabilise a peaceful, flourishing domestic sphere. He equates peace with strength, which is crucial for advancing domestic interests in foreign affairs. In many respects, the basic principles of his domestic realism extend to his international or foreign realism, thus forming a systematic approach to enhancing a political body’s interests as it confronts the interests of other political bodies in a natural environment of tension and violence.

Concepts and Terminology The term ‘artha-śāstra’ is composed of two Sanskrit terms. In this context, artha means material wealth and profit but can also refer to the art of managing such wealth, or ruling, which we can translate as ‘statecraft’. This term indicates one of the four major aims of human life, or puruṣārthas, with the other three being dharma (moral or sacred duty), kāma (sensual pleasure, desire) and mokṣa (spiritual liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth). These four aims comprise a rather holistic brahmanical account of human life, and it is essential to note that we do not observe familiar Western conceptions of a

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good human life based on concepts such as individual freedom or a system of negative and positive rights. The term śāstra indicates a genre of text that presents an authoritative treatment of a particular subject. The Sanskrit term means an ‘instrument of knowledge and instruction’ but can more simply be translated as ‘treatise’. The title Arthaśāstra thus means a ‘treatise on ruling or statecraft’ that presents knowledge about the management of material profit and loss. As Mark McClish argues, because it is a śāstra it is ‘not so much a “blueprint for the state”, but a tool for the production of expertise, less a source for practical action as a sign of erudition’ (McClish 2009: 314). While this is true, the text is also intended as a manual for statecraft that poses insights into the practical activity of ruling a state. The knowledge communicated in śāstras is understood as eternal, transcendent and acontextual – even if the instructions of a text such as the arthaśāstra suggest paying careful attention to context. The transcendent nature of the knowledge contained in a śāstra thus indicates a version of ‘metaphysical realism’. That is, concerning the subject-matter of artha, Kauṭilya holds that 1. The kinds of thing (for example, power relationships) described in this śāstra really do exist. 2. Their existence is not an artifact of our minds, language or conceptual schemes. 3. The text’s statements are accurate descriptions of artha and are made true or false by facts in the world. 4. We are able to attain truths about artha, and it is therefore appropriate to believe fully things claimed in the arthaśāstra (Blackburn 1996: 320). This realist aspect of the text connects to a number of additional concepts and terms. The first and perhaps most important is dharma, which refers both to the transcendent moral law and its structure and to the more specific, corresponding duties associated with this law at the individual level. Hence, a king or ruler (rājan, kṣatriya) possesses a specific dharma or set of duties associated with his social group (varṇa) status. The other three varṇas posited in the text include brahmin (priests and sacrificial officiants), kṣatriya (rulers and military functionaries), vaiśya (farmers and merchants) and śūdra (servants). While rule was the provenance of rāj- (ruling) and the rājan or kṣatriya (ruler) as the means by which artha was managed, Kauṭilya further specifies the ruler’s duties in book 1: ‘That [that is, the specific Law] of a Kṣatriya consists of studying, offering sacrifices, giving gifts, obtaining a livelihood through the use of weapons, and protecting creatures’ (AŚ 1.3.6). Such duties refer us to a broader category of rājadharma (royal conduct, duties of rulership), which is a central topic in both Arthaśāstra and Dharmaśāstra genres in the context of classical South Asia. Perhaps the most essential concept for understanding Kauṭilya’s realism is daṇḍanīti, which is a compound noun comprising two distinct terms. The concept refers to the administration (nīti) of ‘the staff’(daṇḍa) that is wielded by the ruler. The latter term, daṇḍa, indicates the ruler’s power to punish and engage in corrective and constructive forms of coercion. In my interpretation of Kauṭilya’s realism, this image of coercion relates to theological notions of cleansing and purification in various contexts. The primary term for political purification is śodhana, deriving from śudh-, ‘to purify’.1 The predominant political application of such purification applies to what Kauṭilya calls the ‘eradication of thorns’ (kaṇṭaka-śodhana) in Book 4, with ‘thorns’ referring

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to subversive elements in society. For example, he explains that corruption in prisons should be rooted out: ‘In this manner, he should discipline [or eradicate, śodhayet] officials in charge of money by means of fines; and, so disciplined (śuddha), they in turn should discipline (śodhayeyuḥ) the people of the city and countryside by means of punishments’ (AŚ 4.9.28). Here the terms can be translated as ‘eradication’, but elsewhere Kauṭilya uses the verb (śudh-) to denote the regular testing of ministers’ integrity (AŚ 1.10.1) and the purifying of metals such as gold and silver (AŚ 2.13.6/13). Such ‘testing’ is a method of purifying the ruler’s administration of any corrupt elements or vices. In a material sense, śudh- can also refer to the act of clearing away physical obstacles that obstruct proper rule, such as thieves and vicious animals (AŚ 2.1.38, 2.34.7), or to the ‘refreshing’ of material stocks and conditions for profit, such as timber, weapons, shields, fish, meat and produce (AŚ 2.4.28, 2.15.23). I emphasise the significance of purification not only because it has ethico-theological relations to bodily rituals and ascetic practices in brahmanical and early Hindu traditions, but also because it has interesting political implications that extend from the micro-political level of the body to broader ruling relations between the ruler and his subjects. This point brings us back to the centrality of the concept of rule (rāj-), especially since Kauṭilya is primarily concerned with the king as ruler (rājan) and kingdom (rājya). Each of these terms elicits the imagery of embodiment and purification or clearing of obstructions in Kauṭilya’s realism. Because the term rājya denotes both the king and kingdom, one can draw a conceptual parallel between the ‘thorns’ (kaṇṭakas) that represent domestic enemies and threats to the kingdom, and the group of internal enemies or vices (ari-ṣād-varga) that an embodied ruler confronts on the personal level.

The ‘Body Politic’ and Art of Rule: King, Kingdom and Domestic Realism Kauṭilya takes as his ideal model a small, regional kingdom called a janapada, meaning, ‘the territory inhabited by a people’. A kingdom is then composed of seven basic elements or constituents (prakṛtis) that supply the basis for a ‘seven-limb’ (saptāṅga) or ‘seven-constituent’ (prakṛti) theory of state. Each element plays an essential role in contributing to the kingdom’s domestic wellbeing and capacity for expansion: king or ruler (svāmin); ministers (amātyas); countryside (janapada); fort (durga); treasury (kośa); army (daṇḍa); and ally (mitra) (AŚ 6.1.1). Of the seven, the first six are internal while the seventh (ally) remains external. Kauṭilya explains that the svāmin is the most important because he serves as the ‘head’ of the kingdom, which must centrifugally oversee and control the other six elements. Kauṭilya explains that these elements are subordinate to the qualities of the ruler: ‘These constituents have been described as subsidiary elements of the exemplary qualities of the king’ (AŚ 6.1.15). In the context of Book 6, Kauṭilya takes this to mean two things. First, if the king does not possess the requisite qualities, then the importance of the remaining constituents who possess their respective qualities becomes irrelevant (AŚ 6.2.16). This is due to an interconnected ‘ripple effect’ in the various elements’ respective virtues. For example, if the king punishes too harshly, then even if his subjects are virtuous he will end up terrifying them, facilitating distrust and perhaps eventual rebellion (AŚ 1.4.7–16). Second, the king must set an example in exhibiting

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various qualities such as intelligence, generosity, moderation and bravery, which then sets a broader example for the remaining elements to cultivate their specific qualities and duties, including virtues that are common to all: ‘non-injury, truthfulness, purification, lack of malice, compassion, and forbearance’ (AŚ 1.3.13). In the figure and office of the king we also begin to observe an embodied mode of Kauṭilyan realism that operates in a centrifugal manner. As McClish and Olivelle (2012: liv) explain: the government, and its wealth, was not owned by the people: it belonged solely to the king . . . this government did not have as its primary purpose safeguarding the interests of the populace: it served first to increase the power and might of the king. This implies that the ruler and his kingdom comprise a single body, represented in the figure of the ruler, his self-possession and an accompanying centrifugal mode of disciplinary power. The first application of this centrifugal power entails the personal discipline and ritualised overcoming of internal enemies within the ruler. One of the most important concepts in Kauṭilya’s political thought is daṇḍa (punishment), which serves as the foundation for Kauṭilyan rule. Through an elaborate training regimen that begins in his youth, the king must learn how to control the destructive impulses that Kauṭilya explains are anathema to effective rule. One way that the ruler learns control is through training (vinaya, also ‘humility’) in three major knowledge systems that daṇḍanīti protects: 1. critical inquiry (anvīkṣikī), which includes various schools of rational enquiry and logical reasoning 2. economics (vārttā), which entails texts dealing with agriculture, commerce and other associated activities 3. ‘the Triple’ Veda, which includes the Ṛg-, Yajur- and Sāma-Vedas. In turn, Kauṭilya suggests that training in these systems helps the ruler cultivate exemplary qualities within the self: ‘For studying produces a keen intellect, a keen intellect produces disciplined performance, and disciplined performance produces exemplary qualities of the self (ātma-vattā); such is the capacity of the knowledge systems’ (AŚ 1.5.16). This high level of self-discipline aims at mastery over the senses (indriya-jaya) because the senses make human beings vulnerable to the first set of political enemies: passion, anger, greed, pride, conceit and excitement. As Kauṭilya tellingly adds, ‘For this entire treatise boils down to the mastery over the senses [because] a king who . . . has no control over the senses will perish immediately, even though he may rule the four ends of the earth’ (AŚ 1.6.1, 3–4). Here we glimpse a type of ‘political asceticism’. The ascetic aspect of Kauṭilya’s realism begins at the personal level, as we notice the politicised language of having these ‘enemies’ at the micro-political level of the self. Overcoming these vices exhibits the first layer of governance, and defeating enemies at this level is a precondition for overcoming enemies at the next two layers of domestic and foreign political relations. Kauṭilya even goes so far as to suggest that failure to conquer the ruler’s internal enemies will gradually lead to a slippage in governance and subsequent increase in conflict and cosmic chaos throughout the kingdom (AŚ 1.4.13–14). In short, Kauṭilyan political thought and realism literally begin with an individual ‘body politic(s)’.

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As Daud Ali explains, within the Arthaśāstra and Nītiśāstra genres, self-discipline and political policy are closely intertwined: the term vinaya was conceptually (and etymologically) related to concepts of ‘policy’ (nīti) and ‘directed conduct’ (naya) which formed the goal of the prince’s training. . . . As Kāmandaki put it, ‘self-discipline is the root (mūlam) of policy (naya)’. (2007: 13) Here we also note an interesting parallel between the six internal components of a kingdom and six internal enemies or afflictive emotions of a ruler, which must be subdued so that both micro- and macro-political bodies can become purified of enemies. Such parallelism helps capture the internalised, embodied connection between the person of the ruler, the kingdom and art of rulership. This notion of an embodied politics, whereby micro- and macro-level politics map on to one another in certain respects, also entails what I will call an ‘auto-tension’ that pervades Kauṭilya’s political thought. That is, applying daṇḍanīti is necessary because an automatic tension arises within both individual and larger political bodies that contain an internal complexity that naturally leans towards disorder and thus requires constant management (hence daṇḍanīti); and always confronts external forces and bodies that can exacerbate these natural tensions and lead to disorder. The seventh component of Kauṭilya’s ‘seven limbs of state’ theory evokes external forces on the international level in the form of allies and enemies. This centrifugal principle and ascetic application of daṇḍa starting at the microlevel of the ruler entails two additional components of note. The first is strict temporal control through a tight-knit daily schedule (AŚ 1.19). A ritualised schedule would help train and channel a king’s bodily habits, including the emotional and psychological tensions that accompany embodiment, such as lust and anger.2 While some flexibility is permitted, based on the ruler’s individual capacities, the ruler has a specific daily regimen, broken into eight parts, that begins before sunrise and continues after sunset. The schedule of activities includes: receiving reports from officials on revenue and expenditure; receiving public audiences to hear the petitions of subjects and try various cases; appointing various ministers’ respective tasks; consulting with defence counsellors, and inspecting troops and military weapons such as elephants; pondering strategies with military leaders; meeting with various spies and secret agents; meeting with his personal chaplain (purohita); engaging in Vedic recitation after bathing and eating at regular intervals; and ‘retiring to the sound of music’ at day’s end (AŚ 1.19.1–24). The second component of self-control is spatial in nature and relies on architecture. Interestingly, the architecture of the royal residence and its surrounding spaces mirrors Kauṭilyan realist precepts. The residence aims to parse and control the various constituents at the centre, and then to organise and connect subsequent elements of the city and countryside through a finely tuned system of boundary control. To start, the royal residence is partitioned into numerous chambers and living quarters, with Kauṭilya adding: All should reside in their own quarters and not visit the quarters of others; and no one living within should interact with anyone outside. Further, every article coming in or going out should be inspected and its entry and exit recorded. (AŚ 1.20.22–3)

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Kauṭilya further distinguishes those residing in a fortified city based on social group, identity and function (AŚ 2.4). Presumably, this division would help make the socioeconomic organisation of the city more efficient by allowing the ruler to survey and police the proper functions of various segments of society. A central idea behind such centrifugal temporal and spatial organisation follows: one must start with the primary source of political authority (the ruler) and purify his body, his mind and the spaces he occupies of any potential threats (AŚ 1.21.1–23), and subsequently extend similar disciplinary mechanisms as efficiently as possible. This method allows the ruler and his system of surveillance to identify deviations from social, political and economic norms better. The body can thus serve as an organisational metaphor, tying the complexities and tensions of rule together in a single, coherent vision of the kingdom. Moral training, temporal organisation and management of space through careful architectural design comprise only the first layers of defence against political disorder and promotion of foreign expansion. An additional layer of pervasive testing and surveillance is a crucial component of Kauṭilya’s realism, beginning with the ruler’s ministers. Kauṭilya explains that the ruler must secretly test the integrity of his ministers after they are appointed in the various departments (AŚ 1.10). A variety of tests must be employed to detect for righteousness, greed, lust and fear because each minister represents a potential weakness or threat to the ruler and must therefore be thoroughly tested and monitored. In one passage, we also see Kauṭilya employing the language of ‘purity’ (śuci) as necessary proof of a minister’s integrity (AŚ 1.10.7–8). Importantly, such testing and surveillance do not end with the ruler’s ministers and extends outwards through a large network of clandestine agents and spies, who operate in as many roles and social identities as exist in a kingdom, including students, householders, ascetics, tax collectors, doctors, merchants, entertainers, wandering nuns and widows. One reason for the variety of spies in a kingdom is the fact that credibility is an essential component of successful espionage. Effective spying and surveillance do not constitute a ‘one size fits all’ sort of activity, and conspicuousness must be avoided at all costs. Thus, Kauṭilya contends that a king must employ spies with ‘credible disguises in terms of region, attire, craft, language, and birth’ to spy on all administrative officials, from the counsellor–chaplain to the frontier commander and tribal chiefs (AŚ 1.12.6). People serving different posts must not be able to pick up on any potential ‘irregularities’ in one’s appearance, behaviour and presentation. A purported śūdra-agriculturalist spy must look and sound like what one comes to expect such a person to look and sound like. An additional detail to note in the above passage is the centrifugal nature of surveillance and espionage. That is, these covert activities start at the top/middle of the kingdom with the ruler and ministers, and spiral outwards towards the edges of the kingdom. As he explains later in Book 1, ‘Once he has deployed spies on high officials, he should deploy spies on the inhabitants of the cities and the countryside’ (AŚ 1.13.1). This network would thus create a web-like effect that could detect and punish anyone who was disturbing, or who might disturb, peace and order in the kingdom. Kauṭilya is also crafty in conceiving how covert agents should communicate with each other without revealing their respective identities. He defends a ‘double-blind’ system that prevents both the information gatherer and its transmitter from knowing each other’s precise identity by using an elaborate system of signs and coded writing: ‘The apprentices of clandestine establishments should communicate the secret

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information gathered by spies through signs and written messages. Neither they nor the clandestine establishments should know each other’ (AŚ 1.12.11). In cases where direct access for transmission is not possible, communication could entail passing information along through songs or recitations, or hiding it within musical instruments (AŚ 1.12.13–14). Kauṭilya explains the need for double agents (AŚ 1.11.17–25, 4.4.3) and testing them as well. Olivelle (2013: 481) further explains that if a double agent is disguised as a merchant, the ruler must employ another secret agent pretending to be a merchant in order to test his double agent’s integrity. Ideally, every spy’s identity as a spy must be concealed or disguised from all others. Concealing spies’ identities – and exposing the identities of enemy spies – reveals the thoroughgoing lack of trust Kauṭilya has in human nature. Even a ruler’s wife, for example, must be ‘inspected and cleared by elderly women’ before entering the inner chamber to sleep with the king (AŚ 1.20.14–17). Kauṭilya thus gives advice based on what he takes to be a realistic view of human emotion and psychology, and as the king is trained in the Itihāsa tradition (‘Traditional Lore’, such as the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata), he will necessarily be familiar with numerous examples of sedition in this tradition and expect seditious behaviour to come from every direction. Such surveillance was combined with severe forms of punishment and interrogation, including an elaborate system of ‘devious punishment’. These harsh methods could provide additional deterrents to subversive and criminal behaviour. For example, Kauṭilya outlines eighteen types of capital punishment and torture that can be deployed in a ‘righteous’ (dharmya) fashion because they have been ‘laid down in the śāstras of high-souled authors’ (AŚ 4.11.26; see 4.8.21–3) within the expert dharma tradition (see McClish 2009: 261–2). Regarding devious or secret forms of punishment, Kauṭilya acknowledges that openly executing someone such as a traitorous high official could have dangerous repercussions, particularly if he was popular with the public or had the support of other officials (AŚ 5.1.4). Therefore, Kauṭilya outlines a number of secret strategies for punishing traitors, such as sending ‘an agent working undercover as a physician, after establishing that a traitor has an evil or incurable disease, [and] should trick him by putting poison into the preparations of food and medicine’ (AŚ 5.1.35). Here we see a combination of kingly power (daṇḍa) and dharmic–theological justification that supplies a potent platform for ‘constructive coercion’. Such tactics would be understood as justifiable and even laudatory within a holistic worldview such as the one Kauṭilya expresses, wherein a ruler possesses a duty to engage in any form of daṇḍanīti that secures and maximises artha.

Other Political Bodies: International Tensions and Foreign Policy The Arthaśāstra also exhibits a realist position at the international level, as Kauṭilya views every kingdom as self-interested and primarily concerned with its own advancement, the success of which remains predicated on the effective use of force and subtle forms of coercive power. Military affairs, both covert and overt, are the lifeblood of a polity. Consequently, an essential aspect of the king’s position was to advance the kingdom’s interests and power whenever possible. This expansionism begins with what Kauṭilya calls the ‘Circle Doctrine’, which is a natural, interlocking system of concentric circles

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of political bodies characterised by what I have termed ‘auto-tension’ (AŚ 6.2.13–22). This automatic tension begins in the middle with the home king, whom Kauṭilya calls the ‘seeker of conquest’ (vijigīṣu), with enemy states surrounding the kingdom on all sides in a circular fashion. Immediate boundaries automatically create enemies in so far as these surrounding political bodies place limits on and pose potential threats to the kingdom’s expansion. The idea of a king as a seeker of conquest is essentially an ontological claim, and Kauṭilya’s position assumes something like a natural, normative tendency towards expansion at best, and prevention of being overtaken at worst. Surrounding the enemy was a second circle of allies who, following the above logic, were the enemies of the domestic king’s enemies and therefore considered natural allies. This circle doctrine extends outwards into numerous circles of enemies and allies, in both the front and the rear, thus creating an interlocking system that dictates foreign relations. Kauṭilya adds two additional types of kingdom as well. An ‘intermediate’ kingdom shares borders with the domestic kingdom and enemy, which is able to assist either and overpower them both when they are not united, and a ‘neutral’ kingdom is the strongest kingdom among those within a twelve-circle radius. This typology of foreign political bodies into four general categories supplies the basic spatial framework for Kauṭilya’s international realism. A key component of foreign relations were the home king’s envoys, who gathered information and assessed relations between the home and foreign kingdoms. They discussed strategy with the king beforehand, communicated with frontier commanders, and negotiated with other kings when abroad (for example, AŚ 1.2, 1.16.1–17). It is significant to note that these envoys, at least ideally, would have been brahmins because they were considered to be the most educated and morally pure members of society. Having brahmins as envoys would also serve tactical purposes. First, they would have been effective negotiators due to their learning and self-control. Second, due to their religious status they would probably have been treated with greater respect by rulers in surrounding kingdoms, and thus be in less danger of being harmed or killed. Finally, the moral authority associated with brahmins would supplement the authority of the king’s message (McClish and Olivelle 2012: 124). We might summarise the basic tenets of Kauṭilya’s realist approach to foreign relations in the following way. Any given political body cannot perpetually remain neutral or at peace because: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Political boundaries always exist. These boundaries mark off a kingdom’s identity. Political identities create self-interests. These interests will inevitably conflict with one another because power hierarchies naturally exist and continually emerge between political bodies. 5. Finally, these hierarchies lead to an inevitable push–pull relationship between stronger and weaker bodies.

Because foreign conflicts expose power hierarchies and resulting hostilities between political bodies, the ruler must possess intimate knowledge of both enemies and allies, which we see reflected in Kauṭilya’s six methods of foreign policy. The first two methods entail making a peace pact and initiating hostilities (AŚ 7.2.6–7), which are the most basic strategies. However, because Kauṭilya defends a

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contextualist position, he elaborates a few more methods based on circumstantial considerations: remaining stationary in a fortress, marching into battle, seeking shelter in another kingdom, and the ‘double stratagem’ of pursuing a peace pact while simultaneously initiating hostilities (AŚ 7.1.8–12). To revisit briefly the concept of purification (śudh-), in Book 10 Kauṭilya explains the necessity of clearing (śodhayitavyaḥ) dangerous routes when marching into battle from a military camp (AŚ 10.2.13), and the important task of the labour corps in clearing (śodhana) military camps. Again, purification and political fortification are conceptually intertwined. When explaining how to entice enemies to sedition, he contends that a seeker after conquest ‘should embolden his own faction and terrify his enemy’s faction by proclaiming omniscience and his intimacy with the gods’, and that backing this proclamation entails ‘discovering people who do what is inimical to the king through spies working for the agency for the eradication of thorns and exposing them’ (AŚ 13.1.1–2). Kauṭilya’s position allows for even greater nuance through the use of what he calls ‘strategic partnerships’. In Book 7, after outlining the sixfold policy, he explains how, after determining that a king should march into battle, he may need to establish a strategic partnership to be successful (AŚ 7.4.19–21). These partnerships display flexible, circumstantial strategies that are available to states, especially weaker ones, which are not available in the basic sixfold set of strategies.3 Such partnerships would be quite complex and involve a state in a number of political partnerships that require constant information gathering, negotiation and supervision, thus sustaining a fluid environment of auto-tensions. In short, these partnerships highlight how Kauṭilyan rulership and foreign affairs are actually more of an art than a science, even though the Arthaśāstra is often read as a rigid manual of predetermined rules and stipulations. Spying and ultimately ‘outwitting’ (atisaṃdhā) one’s enemies is a crucial aspect of eradicating obstructions to a king’s successful expansion. Kauṭilya’s foreign policy is not a sedentary one, as spying methods aim towards conquering other kingdoms. In classical South Asia, political expansion was understood as part of a ruler’s duty (rāja-dharma) and built into the nature of his identity as a kṣatriya. This point further highlights the auto-tension in Kauṭilya’s realism because not only does he posit natural tension between political bodies, but also he moralises a ruler’s role to engage in hostilities. In other words, his position does not merely amount to a claim about the brute reality of self-interest in foreign affairs but further claims that it is morally justified to engage in hostility and succeed in doing so. However, this fact should not lead us to conclude that Kauṭilya has little to no regard for other kingdoms’ or political bodies’ interests because he also defends a realistic degree of tolerance concerning the various customs and traditions confronted during expansion. When a ruler conquers another land, Kauṭilya advises him to extend as much magnanimity to a conquered people as possible (AŚ 7.5). One reason for this advice is the importance of gaining people’s trust and loyalty, and not causing ‘disaffection’ among the ruler’s new subjects: For . . . by discontinuing customary and righteous practices [disaffection is instigated]. . . . When impoverished, subjects become greedy; when they are greedy, they become disloyal; and when they are disloyal, they either go over to the enemy or kill their lords themselves. (AŚ 7.5.20, 27)

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In Book 13 he further explains how pacifying a conquered territory requires adopting habits, dress, language and conduct similar to those of the local population and demonstrating devotion at regional religious festivals and during recreational activities (AŚ 13.5.3–4/6–8). Therefore, Kauṭilya is not naive when it comes to the challenges associated with conquering another people, although he maintains that a ruler possesses the prerogative to eradicate whatever customs appear detrimental concerning artha, especially customs concerning the treasury and army (AŚ 13.5.14). The above reference to greed also reminds us of Kauṭilya’s earlier emphasis on overcoming vices at the domestic level, beginning at the micro-level of the ruler and extending outwards to the ruler’s subjects. While centrifugally directed moral purification may be an effective way to fortify oneself against potential enemies, these statements about accommodating conquered subjects sit uneasily with Kauṭilya’s comments elsewhere in the text, where he advises the ruler to extend the varṇāśramadharma system to all four corners of the earth (AŚ 13.4.62). The first and most plausible way of addressing this incongruity in Kauṭilya’s position is to conclude that the more brahmanically conservative and orthodox suggestion about extending the varṇāśramadharma system is an interpolation of a later redactor (McClish 2009: 199). However, one could theoretically reconcile these apparently contradictory positions by positing a more realist-oriented position that accounts for a plurality of customs and traditions, and a more idealistic position that looks to impose an ideal system on to a potentially unreceptive populace. The extant Arthaśāstra could support a minimally pluralist position in so far as a ruler maintains a general division of labour between something resembling the four varṇas: a wise, educated class of people responsible for maintaining sacred customs; a class of warriors/soldiers and rulers responsible for defending a polity, or those who must get their hands dirty by employing coercion and punishment (daṇḍanīti); a productive class of labourers, farmers and merchants responsible for cultivating the material goods and wealth of a polity; and a class of people responsible for serving these other groups and fulfilling any remaining yet necessary social or economic functions, especially menial functions, so that each group could effectively engage in its respective activities and responsibilities. In this sense, the realist and idealist aspects could coexist if allowances were made for local versions and customary applications of something like the varṇāśramadharma system. Historical and authorial issues aside, we can plausibly conclude that Kauṭilya’s political thought exposes a realistic view on the need to accommodate the complexity of human behaviour as it manifests in the form of various customs existing across geographical locales.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed at familiarising the reader with the most significant realist components in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra. I have argued for the centrality of particular metaphors and their underlying logic, especially the significance of embodiment, ascetic purification and centrifugal power. Kauṭilya’s realism begins with the simple reality that a ruler is an embodied being, and as such he is susceptible to a variety of vices that threaten political order and stability. With the proper training, a ruler cultivates a wide variety of virtues and gains mastery over the senses, thus conquering vices that serve as internal, micro-level enemies. This allows the ruler to choose effective

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ministers and interact with them in deft fashion. Choosing good ministers is crucial because they help the ruler operate the numerous day-to-day operations necessary for running a state. These operations include a pervasive system of surveillance and harsh punishments aimed at combatting the subversive elements of society. The covert nature of these activities exhibits a number of realist assumptions about power and how to apply it effectively in order to enhance a state’s self-interest. Kauṭilya’s international realism exhibits many of the principles we see operating in the domestic sphere. This includes the logic of centrifugal force, which radiates outwards and pits political bodies against one another. The system of surveillance, espionage and assassination must also be applied at the foreign level in order to prevent outside, centripetal forces from gaining potential power over a home state. In turn, any given state or political body is confronted with a number of natural enemies and allies, each of which seeks to advance its self-interests at the cost of others. Therefore, this is not a system based on the possibility of perpetual peace but rather a complex, interlocking system of auto-tensions that entwines each political body in international struggles to stave off domination and expand one’s political boundaries. In sum, Kauṭilya’s realism amounts to a totalising web of tightly controlled socio-economic and political relations at the macro-level, which aim to mirror his desired level of purity and control at the micro-level of the ruler and the ruler’s closest advisors. One implication of Kauṭilya’s position for international relations in the twenty-first century follows. Kauṭilya suggests that auto-tensions pervade international relations partly because political bodies assume self-possessed identities that often manifest a desire for self-mastery, which can trickle into foreign affairs. Political expansionism, including a desire for empire abroad, can centrifugally extend from a desire for domestic mastery by small, powerful groups or single individuals in positions of authority. According to Kauṭilya, this is a natural phenomenon and would hold true, regardless of historical period and geographical locale. Kauṭilyan realism thus suggests that a state become aware of this phenomenon so that it might operate more efficiently and effectively in a competitive, self-interested environment of international relations. A related yet disturbing idea the Arthaśāstra raises is that success in advancing national self-interests at the global level depends on the success of a homegrown realism that purifies and domesticates its would-be citizens, turning them into docile yet loyal subjects. This point highlights a particularly troubling implication of Kauṭilya’s realism: namely, the impossibility of ever achieving international peace in an age of increasingly global interests and predicaments that transcend the interests of any single nation.

Notes 1. Verbal and nominal forms derived from this verb root appear twenty-two times in the text, and most imply efforts to establish greater stability by clearing away obstacles to effective rule. 2. On the relationship between ritual self-discipline and an embodied human condition as it applies in the Vedic tradition, see Lubin (2010: 263–74). 3. For a detailed analysis of non-aggression pacts and strategic partnerships, see McClish (2016).

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Bibliography Ali, D. (2007), ‘Courtly manners and lineage formation in early medieval India’, Social Scientist, vol. 35, no. 9/10, pp. 3–21. Blackburn, S. (ed.) (1996), Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lubin, T. (2010), ‘Ritual self-discipline as a response to the human condition: Towards a semiotics of ritual indices’, in A. Michaels (ed.), Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, Volume 1: Grammars and Morphologies of Ritual Practices in Asia, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 263–74. McClish, Mark, (2009), Political Brahmanism and the State: A Compositional History of the Arthaśāstra, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. McClish, M. (2016), ‘Non-aggression pacts and strategic partnerships in Kautilyan foreign policy’, in A. Gupta, P. K. Gautam and S. Mishra (eds), Indigenous Historical Knowledge: Kauṭilya and his Vocabulary, Part 3, New Delhi: Pentagon Press. McClish, Mark, and Patrick Olivelle (2012), The Arthaśāstra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft, Indianapolis: Hackett. Olivelle, Patrick (2013), King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, New York: Oxford University Press.

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11 Livy Raison d’état? Paradoxes of political realism in Livy’s exemplarity Ayelet Haimson Lushkov

Chapter Overview

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his chapter explores Livy’s use of exemplarity and literary form as a means of inserting political realist behaviour into the fabric of Livy’s history. In particular, the exempla chosen – the execution of adult sons by consular fathers – show that the conjunction of family and politics in Rome was never a straightforward encounter and was almost always charged by the foundational question of political realism: does the political have its own normativity or does it exist in analogy with other less formal types of power asymmetries? *

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Political Realism is not an intuitive label to assign to the Roman historian Livy, nor, more specifically, to the content or message of the thirty-five books that survive from his history of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita, or AUC). Indeed, it is only recently that Livy has begun to be taken seriously as a political thinker at all, despite the fact that his history is concerned primarily with politics and has explicit didactic aims.1 This move has come hand in hand with a greater recognition that Livy is, in fact, engaged in a systematic attempt to transform the lessons of the Roman past into something both salubrious and relevant for its troubled present, even if the question of what exactly that present constitutes remains fluid and difficult.2 That systematic attempt is best encapsulated under the rubric of ‘exemplarity’, adumbrated early in the preface of the history: This is especially improving and beneficial in the study of history: to contemplate examples of every kind of behaviour (omnis exempli documenta) set out clearly on a monument. From this you can choose for yourself and for your commonwealth which to imitate, and which, being foul from beginning to end, to avoid. (Livy, Praef. 10)3 Scholars continue to debate the precise workings of exemplarity, both in Livy and in Roman society, but there is general consensus both that exemplarity was a dominant cognitive paradigm and that it involved setting models for imitation or avoidance

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– exempla – as a way of inculcating a set of values, behaviours and other learned responses. These included, among other things, political norms: exempla taught Romans to abhor kingship, subject their desires to the greater good of the state, and expect certain kinds of conduct from certain offices – as well as the consequences when such conditions were not met. And because exempla were plural and multiple, the system itself reflected political ideologies and political change: as the republic transitioned into empire, so too did the emperor and his family increasingly become the focus of exemplary discourse. The emperor was the ultimate model for imitation, so the thinking went, because he had learned and embodied the most positive lessons of the glorious Roman past.4 Here too, however, lies the most obvious problem in seeing Livy as a political realist. Although exempla sometimes demonstrate isolated realist principles such as ‘might is right’, they generally fall foul of the principle of the autonomy of the political: because so many exempla in Livy either are political or are done by political people, the question of context and perspective prevents any clear division between what was political and what was not. We might say that, for the Romans (as, indeed, for anyone else), the personal was political, and vice versa, but that would bring us to the second obstacle, which is that, almost by definition, exempla translate abstract issues into a question of an individual’s morality. In a text and society that advocated ethical valuations and moral virtue, can we still find justification and practical uses for a modern political realist reading?5 That is the main question with which this chapter will grapple. Focusing on a small but semantically rich set of exempla, it asks to what extent can we parse out the strands of realism, ethics, and the political and personal that Livy so neatly entwines together. I will argue that this entanglement is, in fact, at the core of Livian political realism, such as it is, and gives the exemplary project in the AUC its explanatory power and efficacy. A word on method. My approach to political realism leans heavily on both paradox and context to explain how Livy’s political thinking works. My analysis in the following pages, however, is predominantly literary, in the sense that I look for the relationships between linguistic usage, rhetorical structures and thematic connections between individual episodes and across larger portions of the work. Ancient historians worked in ways that are, to some degree, still familiar to our own today, but recognising this continuity should not distract from the fact that the ancient project of history was also different in important ways from the academic pursuits of today’s scholars (Pitcher 2010: 5–24). Livy, and other historians like him, wrote to edify and entertain, and deployed in their works all the practices of literary art; their lessons, in other words, were in showing rather than in telling, a phenomenological difference that can run counter to modern academic sensibilities. How the ancient historians presented their material is therefore of paramount importance in understanding the lessons they wished to impart. Form, in this case, cannot be separated from function.6

Exemplarity and Narrative in Livy’s AUC The Ab Urbe Condita narrates the history of Rome from its mythical foundation to Livy’s own death in 17 ce.7 The work originally contained 142 books, of which only thirty-five (1–10, 21–45) survive, along with later (and usually unreliable) summaries of the later books.8 Even this fraction is nevertheless substantial enough to allow us to

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draw some conclusions about how the work was structured. We know, for instance, that Livy devoted more space per year as he came closer to the events of his own time, while the surviving books, all of which are from earlier in the history, cover much longer spans of time. Such vast amounts of time and material required a meticulous architecture to support any themes or messages the work and its author might wish to convey. Livy consequently structures his history on a number of organisational units, some of which, like the book, are more technical, while others, like the consular year, do more to conflate the political realities of Rome with the literary artifice of the AUC. Broadly speaking, the AUC is organised in three concentric levels. At the highest level, the work is divided into single books, pentads and decades – units of five or ten books, respectively – which contain the larger plot elements of Roman history. The regal period, for instance, which preceded the foundation of the republic, takes up the entire first book, with the new political order beginning in Book 2. The Second Punic War takes up a single decade (the third), while the expansionist wars in the east that follow it take up a fifteen-book unit. These divisions work to define sets of events as belonging together and as against other sets of events, to demarcate periods of historical, political or military development, and to illustrate structurally the concomitant expansion of the Roman empire and the Roman history that narrated that expansion.9 Below this macro-scale framework is another layer of organisation, which is the chronological unit of the consular year.10 The top executive officers of the Roman state were the two consuls, who entered office on 15 March until 153 bc, and on 1 January thereafter. The year took its name from the presiding consuls, such that what we call 49 bc was known to the Romans as the ‘year of the consulship of Julius Caesar and Calpurnius Bibulus’.11 The consular year was the bedrock of annalistic historiography, the genre in which Livy is writing, and whose method was the narration of Roman history year by year, as opposed to, say, units of four years (as in the Greek Olympiads), or by war (as in Sallust’s monograph on the war with Jugurtha, itself taking cues from Greek precedents like Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War). Perhaps more important than the consular year itself, however, was the annalistic division of the year into events at home, which were usually political and religious, and events abroad (domi militiaeque), which were usually military or diplomatic. The division was necessarily an artificial one, since Rome’s involvement abroad was not strictly extricable from what happened in the political arena at home, but it did reflect some political habits of the Romans. For example, because of the Roman fear of autocratic rule, the power of any office-holders (imperium) was heavily circumscribed while within the boundaries of Rome (the pomerium) by the citizens’ power of appeal and legal protections. Outside the pomerium, however, the same citizens now stood in a different relationship to the consul; because they were now soldiers and the consul now their general, consular imperium also included the power to execute without trial or appeal.12 Such executions were rare and their judicial status was contested then as it is now; this symbolic freight made them excellent candidates for embellishment and commemoration, and thereby also for becoming exempla. This is the third level of organisation in Livy’s narrative, that of episodic structure. Here, what matters most is content rather than structure, because it is the episodes and exempla of the AUC that furnish the substance of the history: what happened and who did it. It is here, too, that the

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majority of the ethical work is done, since it is exempla that teach the reader how to behave so as to embody the values and ethics of Roman society. The problem with the episodic composition, however, is that it is inherently atomising, reducing Roman history to a series of concatenated events, without necessarily situating them in their immediate local context. This approach is powerful in and of itself: it gives such exempla a timeless universality, and allows its application to people and times for whom the events themselves are no longer relevant. Structure, however, cannot be ignored. It matters, for instance, whether an execution is placed on the domi or militiae side of affairs, not only because of the legalistic issue of legitimacy and rights, but also because moving the event from one side to the other underscores the continuity of the political in the multiple spheres of Roman life. In this context, it might be noted, Livy is eating his cake and having it too, since the combination of annual and pentadic structures allows him both to conform to annalistic type and to cluster events within longer temporal or thematic units – an effect that requires the reader to acknowledge the complexity of context in any single event of Roman history. Seeing exempla as episodes within these broader narrative structures is, however, only one way of describing the way exempla can be read and understood.13 In particular, a more narrative-based way of reading keeps the emphasis on immediate context and audience response, but also opens a diachronic reading of the way exempla are received and develop over time. More crucially, narrative can also enable the creation of exempla in the round. It can do so by bringing together sets of similar events separated by time and situation, changing some variables at any one moment to explore the resulting effects; it can also do so within single episodes, where the exemplum is explored from a variety of perspectives and approaches, rather than (as in the atomising case) focusing on description of the single heroic act.14 The complex architecture of the AUC allows Livy ample resources to do just that. As such, exemplarity works to test certain situations in different contexts, posing questions familiar to political thinkers: what is permissible in the name of the state, what the political culture can tolerate, and how best to understand the shared values of the Roman state. How do these literary and formal problems relate to, and help us to think about, political realism in Livy? If we can take political realism to indicate a focus on explaining ‘the distinctive forces that shape real politics’ (Rossi and Sleat 2014: 689), we can immediately see that Livy’s narrative divisions begin by interrogating the question of ‘real politics’ as a category. While there is a legal and technical division between two spheres of Roman life – one that constitutes ‘politics’ in their root sense of the governance of a polis, and another that extends that activity into warfare and diplomacy – that division is highly permeable. Not only do the same actors perform in both arenas, but also the rewards and incentives for their actions flow freely between the two as well. Romans might go to war in self-defence, out of greed or out of an imperialistic drive, but the rewards they gained translated directly into political standing and capital. Further, because there was a considerable and sustained overlap in personnel, and because the Roman military was, anyway, an important engine of Roman cultural expansion, it is impossible to divorce the values, morals and circumstances of home from the way Romans behaved abroad. None of this, of course, is surprising in and of itself, but it does mean that the narrative structure of the AUC underscores the important fact that the political is autonomous only under some very strict definitions: some formal, some physical and some ideological.

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With that cultural and literary background in mind, in the next two sections I move to explore two famous exempla, both involving the execution of adult sons by their consular fathers. Faced with the betrayal or disobedience of their sons, Brutus and Manlius Torquatus put the defence of Rome and Roman values ahead of paternal affection. Both instances were listed by Machiavelli in Discorsi 3.1 as salubrious to the state, and in discussing how institutions can be kept alive only by ‘the exceptional ability of a single citizen, who courageously strives to enforce them against the power of those who fail to observe them’ (Machiavelli 1997). Machiavelli’s use of Livy in the Discorsi is idiosyncratic and does not usually equate to Livy’s own presentation of his work. Still, in this case, he hits on some pertinent issues. Both executioners claim to do their work in order to preserve Roman institutions, and in doing so both assimilate to the heroic type of the unus vir (‘one man’), the individual who saves the state.15 But this is only one side of the coin: the idea of coercion exercised by a single individual was a political anathema to the kingship-averse Romans, and unlike the other executions Machiavelli lists, the victims here are not just any criminals, but the executioner’s own sons, with all the legal, affective and ethical relationships that entails. In other words, what begins as an act of hard-nosed political realism turns out to involve genuine decision-making about matters outside the realm of politics proper. Here, again, we can see the fungible boundaries between the political and the non-political in action, determined in part by the topical circumstances of events, and in part by the fluid rhetorical constructions offered by participants. I suggest that this fungibility itself has something important to contribute to any reading of Livy as a political realist, precisely because it so easily shades into, and is expressed in terms of, personal and public morality. Before moving further, I want to underscore the fact that the question of how one orders personal and political ties was very much a live question in Livy’s own time, not least because he was himself writing through an emergent political change. Straddling the line between republic and empire, Livy began work on the AUC probably around the time of the rise of Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, and would continue until shortly after Augustus’ death. As the imperial family became entrenched at the heart of Roman politics, the separation of personal and political became increasingly untenable, a theme that the later historian Tacitus takes up with gusto. But even in the republic itself dynasticism was a problem, and every elite citizen aimed to ensure the political success of his family, especially that of his sons. The Metelli, one of Rome’s noble families, prided themselves on having a consul in every generation, while families could work in corporate ways to imprint themselves on the republic.16 On the other side of the coin, scholars have asked whether the Romans, like the Russians, loved their children too. Certainly, they sometimes make it difficult to answer in the affirmative: Roman law gave fathers the power of life and death over their children (though there is a question as to whether the practice extended to adult offspring), as well as the power to sell them into slavery up to three times for various infractions.17 How much this reflects real life is dubious, but even in caricature it suffices to show that fathers were not straightforward figures, at least by modern lights – even without the political overtones, fatherhood connoted not only affection but also authoritarian strictness of a particularly extreme kind.18 Concomitant to, but not identical with, the problematic signification of paternity is the question of how one could rank the various obligations in one’s world. Here,

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Cicero offers a useful guide (though again the question of historical correspondence is an open one): But if there is any contention and ranking, as to which offices should be attended to especially, first come homeland and parents, to whom we are obligated through the greatest benefits, and then children and the whole household, who look only to us and have no other recourse, then our kinsmen, with whom we live on good terms, who in most respects have the same fortune as us. (De officiis 1.58) Cicero’s formulation neatly orders a Roman man’s view of his world: first those to whom one is obligated, and then those who are obligated to that person, in descending order of magnitude of the obligation. It is worth noting that while this hierarchy goes some way towards explaining why and how Brutus was in the end able to execute his sons – they failed in their obligation towards both homeland and parents – it fails to delineate the type of obligation one incurs relative to either the political entity of the homeland or the personal entity of the family. Rather the opposite, it enmeshes the political realm within the personal obligations of any one person, casting it in its more familial guise of ‘homeland’ (patria) rather than its purely political aspect of ‘republic’ (res publica).

Adult Filicide from Brutus to Manlius Torquatus Roman history knew of two famous Brutuses, separated by seven centuries and related mythographically by blood and historically by compelling a fundamental regime change. For the younger and more famous of the two, the murderer of Caesar, the change was antithetical to his aims: rather than ushering back a resurgent republicanism, he instead enabled the rise of Octavian and of monarchic authoritarianism. For the elder Brutus, the Liberator, a different devastation was in store: although he succeeded in expelling the Tarquins from Rome and bringing an end to the monarchy, he quickly found resistance at home, chiefly at the hands of Rome’s noble youth, who resented being jostled out of their comfortable situations and cast into a brave new world. Resentment grew into conspiracy, and when things came to a head, it was discovered that none other than Brutus’ own sons were among the conspirators: The traitors were convicted and their punishment set, which was the more notable since the consulship assigned the office of exacting the punishment to a father over his own children. And the man who should have been removed [from the proceedings] were he a spectator, him fortune made the executioner. Youth of the noblest families stood tied to the pole; but the children of the consul drew everyone’s eyes, as if the others were of no consequence, and men did not pity them more for their punishment than for the crime by which they had merited it. (AUC, 2.5.5–6) Although Livy paints the scene as a spectacle – note the elaborate language of seeing, noting, spectating, marvelling and so forth – the crucial thing to notice about this description is the paradox at the heart of it: Brutus is not only present at but also presiding over the execution of his own sons. Further, the audience is acutely aware of the dramatic irony of the scene, and of the bad luck (fortuna) that drives someone whose

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public career has rocketed so high into the personal nadir of being betrayed by his own. Brutus had made his political fortune on the back of the suicide of Lucretia, who had been raped by the King’s son.19 Having now expelled the royal family from Rome, the price he pays is the life of his own sons. Indeed, perhaps the most pressing question to ask of this passage is the relationship of Brutus to Roman paradigms of kingship, or more specifically of the tyrannical autocracy he claimed to have overturned. After all, as the foundational figure of the republic, Brutus has significant symbolic weight: he is, whether he means to be or not, an exemplum of the very idea of republicanism, just as the Tarquins are made to stand for the very idea of monarchy. There are important consequences to this idea. A moral reading of the episode, which is encouraged by the audience’s emotive response to the spectacle,20 would now proceed to assign evaluative judgements to the political regime Brutus is meant to represent: is the new republic benevolent or cruel? Is it the kind of regime that demands of its participants the subjugation of all affective bonds in the service of the state, or is it the kind of regime where men and women are free to act without oppression from state agents? Livy does not offer clear answers, which is part and parcel of his procedure throughout. What matters more than any specific answers, however, is the structure of the question: a zero-sum confrontation between the personal and political commitments of the individual. Put in those terms, the question morphs quickly from a purely ethical to a realist one: is there room in the political arena for ethical motivations, and if so, of what kind and to what purpose? Further, Brutus’ execution of his sons engages directly with the four areas Rossi and Sleat have identified as formative for modern political realism: ideology, the relationship of ethics to politics, the priority of legitimacy over justice, and the nature of political judgement (Rossi and Sleat 2014: 689 and passim). The episode even unifies all four areas under a single, richly described action, with important implications for how the audience is to understand their relation to the state – all of this derives from the fundamental tension created by Livy’s exemplary construction. If the scene revolves around a foundational tension between the obligation of family and the obligation of republicanism, it also shows how difficult it is to parse the two out effectively. The difficulty is created in part because both the sons and the audience see family as figuring not only as a set of affective connections between parents and children, but in fact still as a political model. The audience watching the execution feels pity towards the noble youth on display, and although the executions meant a personal loss for all the families whose sons were involved, attention is naturally drawn to the consul’s sons, precisely because in betraying him they were seen to act against their own interest too. Precisely when their father has guaranteed not only freedom for Rome but also glory for their house, the sons choose to cast their lot with a wretched exile, albeit a former king. [I]n that very year they were of a mind to betray their liberated homeland, their father its liberator, the consulship born of the Junian house, the senators, plebs, and whatever belonged to Roman gods and men to a once haughty king, now a hostile exile. (Livy, 2.5.7) The fact that the former king is described in his past and present guise suggests that the audience is aware that the transformation of Rome into a republic is still an ongoing

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process, yet despite that they are already able to list the quintessential institutions and values that would come to define the Roman republic and its political culture: the class and political distinctions between senate and people, the office of the consulship, the importance of religion, aversion to monarchy and the duties of family. Livy thus can play on the verbal similarity of the words ‘homeland’ and ‘father’ (patria and patrem, recalling Cicero’s patria et parentes), as well as the fact that the word patres itself conflated public and private meanings: senators were regularly addressed as patres.21 More telling, however, is the view of the consulship as the product (indeed, almost intellectual property) of a specific family, since it is also the fact of being consul that imposes the role of executioner on the father. Brutus’ sons, too, spring from the domus Iunia (‘the House of Junius’); hence their father, conceived as the progenitor of the consulship, is faced with a choice between offspring. In choosing as he does, Brutus makes several important statements. First, he shows himself to be free of any monarchic or dynastic intent: he will not have sons to whom he might bequeath his new political fortunes. He further shows future generations the stoic reserve that republican men were supposed to display, even in the harshest circumstances, as well as the persistent preference of the interests of the state over the interests of the individual. Republican men in office, then, are supposed to be stern and unrelenting in the fulfilment of their duty, above the temptations of corruption, personal interests or paternal feeling. This is the doctrine of raison d’état in its most skeletal formulation. But Brutus is not alone here. We have already seen the audience’s response, but Livy also narrates the motivations of the sons to betray their father and the new regime. The idea that the good of the community encompasses and surpasses the good of the individual citizen is the underlying principle of the execution, as well as of the audience’s sorrow. This is, further, a uniquely republican notion: in a monarchy, where all power is monopolised by the king, crime and punishment are decided not solely by principles and laws but also by the king’s personal decision. It is therefore not surprising that the conspirators have a different view of the new regime, or that they explain their monarchical allegiance in entirely different terms. They prefer to live under a king than under a rule of law because laws are deaf and relentless (2.3.4, leges rem surdam, inexorabilem esse), whereas a king was a man, with whom his friends could have a complex relationship of grace and favour, as well as error and forgiveness.22 Just as they expected, the conspirators find that the new regime neither forgives nor forgets offences against it (2.3.3, irasci et ignoscere). The conspirators thus see the republican communality of interest between state and citizen as entirely exclusive of compassion and forgiveness: in other words, of any personal ethical considerations. Brutus, therefore, is easily seen as a representative figure of political realism in the AUC: focused entirely on the political, and relying on his own authority as the source of both legitimacy and political judgement. To leave it at that, however, is to ignore the full spectrum of views Livy is engaging here: Brutus is not, in important ways, the fulcrum of the episode. Instead, he is merely the catalyst for thinking, in this dramatic way, about the transition from monarchy to republic and its consequences, and about the choices involved therein, which are matters of political ideology as well as personal morality. That Brutus’ choice is seen as harsh, and that this severity is in turn redeemed

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to some extent by the audience’s pity, itself raises important questions about a society that prided itself (often hypocritically) on its superior moral compass. How much Livy’s own characters learn from the lessons of their past is one of the important themes of the AUC. Not only is the procedure important for inculcating in the reader the importance and efficacy of exemplarity as a didactic tool, but also it is an implicit lesson in Roman character. Romans in the AUC learn, change and adapt, while their enemies do not, and it is the marker of a wise Roman to know when exempla have outlived their usefulness (Chaplin 2000: 77 and passim). The AUC is therefore littered with concatenated sets of exempla, clusters of episodes all referring back, explicitly or implicitly, to the same set of earlier instances. Strikingly, however, the foundational exempla of the early republic, Brutus chief among them, have little explicit resonance in later episodes, despite the fact that adult filicide continues to be an important exemplary motif. Of these later inheritors, perhaps the most famous instance of adult filicide is the imperia Manliana, a case made poignant not only because once again we see a father overseeing the execution of his child, but also because the father had ample opportunity to avoid the execution altogether. Unlike Brutus, whose sons were found guilty of open treason, Manlius executes his son for defying a military order issued by the father himself in the field. As military commander, Manlius Sr had every right to execute any wayward soldier, and in this case his authority was compounded by the power of life and death fathers anyway had over their sons. The case was complicated by the fact that it happened outside Rome, by the fact that the son had broken rank in order to fight and win a duel against an enemy commander, and above all by the fact that the son was doing neither more nor less than what his own father had done a generation before. The Manlii were a duelling family, known for both their impetuous cruelty towards their offspring and their penchant for defeating enemies (specifically Gauls) in single combat. In other words, the situation was delicate and open to any number of interpretations. The father acts on his own accord, without direction or supervision from any external entities, and it is entirely open to him to interpret events in a positive light: his son a hero rather than a disgrace, the duel proof of family mettle rather than harbinger of societal collapse. In other words, while Brutus had little choice but to act under raison d’état, Manlius actively chooses to construct events so as to require it (the father here addresses his son): Since you, as far as you were able, weakened military discipline, on which the Roman state has relied to this day, and have led me to this necessity, that I must be forgetful either of the state or of myself, we should rather incur damages ourselves than have the state pay for our failings with such a great loss to itself. We shall be a grim but salutary example to the youth of future generations. (Livy 8.7.15–17) The crucial element here is that of choice – ‘I must be forgetful either of the state or of myself’ – and a choice that is cast differently than Brutus’ more straightforward choice of affection versus the public interest. Manlius Sr is openly proud of his son, not only because of the inborn love of fathers towards sons (ingenita caritas), but also because of the son’s valour, however misguided (specimen istud uirtutis). What he cannot abide is the abrogation of the consul’s orders, and of making an exception of

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his son simply because of their kinship. As such, he is upholding important republican values – military discipline and equality before the law – but in doing so, he is also choosing to ignore other facets of the situation. In other words, he is reading the situation as a political realist would: seeing a divide between what he feels as a father and his obligations as a consul, and asserting that the state’s interest not only supersedes all else but also requires a unique set of criteria, values and decisions. In forgetting himself and his family obligations, he upholds instead a vision of republican political virtue, which he extends to any sphere wherein he and his son interact as public officials rather than private individuals. As in the case of Brutus, the presence of filial affection does important work, not least the fact that it compels the father to make a choice. In Livian terms, the choice is exemplary, not only because of the decision itself, but also because it entails a division of two exemplary chains, one belonging to the traditions of the Manlian family itself, and the other to public codes of conduct and paternal severity, reaching back to Brutus.23 As it happens, the Manlian family is unique in having both – Manlius’ own father was a tyrant towards his children, and the nickname Imperiosus (‘someone who abuses his power’, or simply ‘bossy’) was carried in the family down the generations. Imperium, from which imperiosus derives, is an important word in the Roman political vocabulary, since it is the term for the executive power bestowed on Roman public officials. It is by virtue of his imperium that Manlius can do anything on behalf of the Roman people, including executing his son. In preferring imperium to affection, he is being a realist, but in so doing he becomes also imperiosus, conflating family and state traditions and thereby not nearly as forgetful of himself as he makes out. The political, in the end, is not nearly as autonomous as it seems.

Conclusion What, then, to make of political realism in Livy? Even in modern historiography, the term has a fraught and sometimes contradictory history, and Livy’s AUC goes some way towards explaining why. In as much as political realism explores ‘the sources of normativity appropriate for the political’, it must encounter elements outside the political itself, in relation to which any definition must then be made. More importantly, however, Livy’s exploration of political realism, such as it is, is very much a realism in the world and on the ground, in argument and contact with opposing or conflicting views, and producing tensions that must be resolved. Livy hardly ever shows us how these tensions resolve, and indeed they often proliferate across the history – this is one of the important lessons of the AUC as we have it.

Notes 1. Recent examples include Kapust (2011: 81–110), Haimson Lushkov (2015) and Vasaly (2015), contra, for example, Wiedemann (2005: 523), who recognises that Livy has an important contribution to make, but one insufficient to make him agree that Livy was a political thinker: ‘If political theory is absent from the surviving thirty-five books of Livy’s history . . . it was because creating a coherent narrative structure for his material was more important to Livy than political analysis.’

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2. For his life and relationship to Augustus and the Augustan project, see Syme (1959); Kraus (1994: 1–7), Sailor (2006); and Lowrie (2009: 157–8, 303–4). 3. All translations are my own. 4. The bibliography is large and growing. Good starting points are Chaplin (2000: 168–96); Kraus (2005) and Lowrie (2009). 5. By ‘modern political realism’ I mean the picture emerging from, inter alia, Rossi and Sleat (2014) and McQueen (forthcoming). For examples of classical realism in the classics, see Crane (1998) and Eckstein (2009). 6. For formal readings of historiography, see Woodman (1988); Kraus and Woodman (1997). The current state of affairs is captured by the essays collected in Marincola (2008) and Feldherr (2009); cf. Pitcher (2010). For politico-theoretical approaches, see Hammer (2008) and Kapust (2011). Gowing (2005) and Gallia (2012) analyse the reception of the republic under the empire as a literary and cultural topos, and especially as a centre of memory. 7. For Livy’s dates, see Luce (1965) and Burton (2000). The AUC properly began before the city was founded by Romulus and Remus, with the departure of Aeneas from the ruins of Troy, an event that, for many in antiquity, marked the transition from mythical to historical time (cf. Feeney 2008: 68–107). 8. For a sense of scale, consider that the extant material represents about 500,000 words and is less than a quarter of the whole work. 9. For a survey of the technique, see Kraus and Woodman (1997: 56–62). 10. This was not the only mechanism for civic time-keeping. For a full discussion of Roman time, see Feeney (2008: 138–215), and on its reflection in history-writing, see Rüpke (1990), Rich (2009) and Levene (1993). 11. The year was marked by heavy political turmoil and obstructionism, culminating in Bibulus withdrawing to his house to observe the omens, thereby rendering any political action invalid. In consequence, forum wits started referring to the year as the ‘consulship of Julius and Caesar’, to illustrate the ineffectiveness of Bibulus (Suetonius 2009: 20). 12. This is a simplification. For more on imperium and its limitations, see Staveley (1956: 90–119), Lintott (1999: 96–7), Brennan (2000: 12–20), Masi Doria (2000), Richardson (2008) and especially Beck (2011). 13. I have discussed these ideas in Haimson Lushkov (2015: 9–17). For exemplarity more broadly, see, in Roman political discourse, Hölkeskamp (2003 and 2010); in Livy, Jaeger (1997), Feldherr (1998), Chaplin (2000) and Langlands (2011); in Roman culture, Hölkeskamp (2003), Roller (2004) and Morgan (2007: 122–59); as mode of historical knowledge, Roller (2009) and Vlassopoulos (2009: xiv) on the use of historical narrative as ‘patterns in order to elucidate the present and future of modern communities’. 14. For this more atomising view, see Roller (2009). For a more fluid view, Chaplin (2000) and Haimson Lushkov (2015). Langlands (2011) treads a middle ground. 15. On the topos, see Santoro L’Hoir (1990) and Vasaly (2015). 16. On the Roman family (gens) and its corporate identity, see Smith (2006). 17. On the Roman family and ‘family feeling’, see Saller (1994), Dixon (1997), Roller (2001) and the essays collected in Rawson (2011). Patria potestas as a legal construct has been extensively studied: Crook (1967), Saller (1994) and Cantarella (2003) are good starting points, with Frier and McGinn (2004) and Gaughan (2010: 23–52) for legal cases. 18. On paternity as a political metaphor, specifically for the emperor, see Roller (2001: 233–47). 19. Brutus’ transformation from spectator to revolutionary is in Livy (1.59.3–4). On the story’s afterlife in European republicanism, see Matthes (2000). 20. On internal audiences as guides to the reader’s interpretation, see Feldherr (1998) and Levene (2006).

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21. On the Roman senate, see Lintott (1999: 65–84). 22. Livy (2.3.3): ‘Then, as they were seeking license, with the law made equal for all, they complained amongst themselves that the freedom of others was turned into their own slavery; that the king was a man, whom you could petition when there was need of law or of injury; there was place for favor, and for benefaction; he could grow angry and forgive, and he knew how to distinguish friend from foe.’ 23. Cf. the father’s own speech a generation earlier, and note the ritual asking of permission from the consul-general. Livy (7.10.3): ‘if you permit, I wish to show this beast that I am of that family who hurled a troop of Gauls from the Tarpeian rock’. Cf. Kraus (1998: 269–70).

Bibliography Beck, H. (2011), ‘Consular power and the Roman constitution: The case of imperium reconsidered’, in H. Beck, A. Duplá, M. Jehne and F. Pina Polo (eds), Consuls and Res Publica: Holding High Office in the Roman Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 77–96. Brennan, T. C. (2000), The Praetorship in the Roman Republic, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burton, P. (2000), ‘The last republican historian: A new date for the composition of Livy’s First Pentad’, Historia, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 429–46. Cantarella, E. (2003), ‘Fathers and sons in Rome’, The Classical World, vol. 96, pp. 281–98. Chaplin, J. (2000), Livy’s Exemplary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chaplin, J., and C. S. Kraus (eds) (2009), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Livy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crane, G. (1998), Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism, Berkeley: University of California Press. Crook, J. (1967), ‘Patria Potestas’, Classical Quarterly, vol. 17, pp. 113–22. Dixon, S. (1997), ‘Continuity and change in Roman social history: Retrieving “family feeling(s)” from Roman law and literature’, in M. Golden and P. Toohey (eds), Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 79–90. Dyck, A. (1996), A Commentary on Cicero’s De Officiis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eckstein, A. (2009), Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, Berkeley: University of California Press. Feeney, D. (2008), Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History, Berkeley: University of California Press. Feldherr, A. (1998), Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History, Berkeley: University of California Press. Feldherr, A. (ed.) (2009), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frier, B. W., and T. A. J. McGinn (2004), A Casebook on Roman Family Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallia, A. (2012), Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture, Politics, and History under the Principate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaughan, J. (2010), Murder was Not a Crime: Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic, Austin: University of Texas Press. Gowing, A. (2005), Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haimson Lushkov, A. (2015), Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic: Politics in Prose, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hammer, D. C. (2008), Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, Norman: Hammond Press. Hölkeskamp, K.-J. (2003), ‘Ikonen der Virtus: Exemplarische Helden(-taten) im monumentalen Gedächtnis der römischen Republik’, in A. Barzanò (ed.), Modelli eroici dall’antichità alla cultura europea, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, pp. 213–37. Hölkeskamp, K.-J. (2010), Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Jaeger, M. (1997), Livy’s Written Rome, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kapust, D. (2011), Republicanism, Rhetoric, and Roman Political Thought: Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraus, C. S. (1994), Livy: Ab Urbe Condita Book VI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraus, C. S. (1998), ‘Repetition and empire in the Ab Vrbe Condita’, in C. Foss and P. Knox (eds), Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, Stuttgart: de Gruyter, pp. 264–83. Kraus, C. S. (2005), ‘From exempla to exemplar? Writing history around the emperor in imperial Rome’, in J. Edmonsen, S. Mason and J. Rives (eds), Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–200. Kraus, C. S., and A. J. Woodman (1997), The Latin Historians, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langlands, R. (2011), ‘Roman exempla and situation ethics: Valerius Maximus and Cicero de Officiis’, Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 101, pp. 1–23. Levene, D. S. (1993), Religion in Livy, Leiden: Brill. Levene, D. S. (2006), ‘History, metahistory, and audience response in Livy 45’, Classical Antiquity, vol. 25, pp. 73–108. Lintott, A. (1999), The Constitution of the Roman Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowrie, M. (2009), Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luce, T. J. (1965), ‘The dating of Livy’s First Pentad’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 96, pp. 209–40. Macchiavelli, N. (1997), Discourses on Livy, trans. J. Bondanella, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McQueen, A. (forthcoming), ‘The case for kinship: Political realism and classical realism’, in Matt Sleat (ed.), Politics Recovered: Essays in Realist Political Thought, New York: Columbia University Press. Marincola, J. (2008), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley. Masi Doria, C. (2000), Spretum Imperium, Naples: Editoriale scientifica. Matthes, M. (2000), The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Morgan, T. (2007), Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitcher, L. (2010), Writing Ancient History: An Introduction to Classical Historiography, London: I. B. Tauris. Rawson, B. (2011), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley. Rich, J. (2009), ‘Structuring Roman history: The consular year and the Roman historical tradition’, in J. Chaplin and C. S. Kraus (eds), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Livy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 118–47. Richardson, J. (2008), The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roller, M. (2001), Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperor in Julio-Claudian Rome, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roller, M. (2004), ‘Exemplarity in Roman culture: The cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia’, Classical Philology, vol. 99, pp. 1–56.

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Roller, M. (2009), ‘The exemplary past in Roman historiography and culture’, in A. Feldherr (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–30. Rossi, E., and M. Sleat (2014), ‘Realism in normative political theory’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 689–701. Rüpke, J. (1990), Domi militiae: Die religiöse Konstruktion des Krieges in Rom, Stuttgart: de Gruyter. Sailor, D. (2006), ‘Dirty linen, fabrication, and the authorities of Livy and Augustus’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 136, pp. 329–88. Saller, R. (1994), Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santoro L’Hoir, F. (1990), ‘Heroic epithets and recurrent themes in Ab Urbe Condita’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 120, pp. 221–41. Smith, C. J. (2006), The Roman Clan: The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staveley, E. S. (1956), ‘The constitution of the Roman Republic (1940–1954)’, Historia, vol. 5, pp. 74–122. Suetonius (2009), Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World’s Classics), translated by Catharine Edwards, New York: Oxford University Press. Syme, R. (1959), ‘Livy and Augustus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 64, pp. 27–87. Vasaly, A. (2015), Livy’s Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in Early Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlassopoulos, K. (2009), Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiedemann, T. (2005), ‘Reflections of Roman political thought in Latin historical writing’, in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 517–31. Woodman, A. J. (1988), Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies, London: Taylor & Francis.

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12 Augustine of Hippo Political realism and the human heart Miles Hollingworth

Chapter Overview

I

n his CITY OF GOD – his most famous realist document – Augustine would contextualise and satirise the romance of Rome’s heroes and statesmen. These men had made Rome great by conquering the human passions of fear and selfishness, and it was said that, in doing so, they had encountered none of the spiritual impediments to virtue that the Christians call ‘sin’. Purebred strength of character had revealed the human soul to contain the resources of its own greatness. Against this certainty, Augustine would bring the hard psychology of homo economicus. He would argue that man is born rational and survivalist in relation to the fact of his banishment from Eden. I want, however, to take the opportunity of this volume to suggest a more expanded role for Augustine within realism and international relations. Realism says that human nature is empirically secure, so that one may choose next to be either realistic or romantic in reaction to its unvarying facts. With regard to peace in our times, I now want to use Augustine to ask: ‘What are these unvarying facts, exactly – and do they not perhaps extend beyond the usual fare of self-interest and maximisation to include also man’s fixation on social perfection and justice – the fixation which Augustine says is inexplicable, apart from our homesickness for Paradise, and which makes for the aspirational aspects of the human psyche?’ *

*

*

1. One of the chief reasons why Augustine is revered by realists today is because a great part of his conception of human nature was developed as an iconoclastic project – specifically to bring defeat on Rome’s vision of herself as the leaven of civilisation. In his City of God – his most famous realist document – he would contextualise and satirise the romance of her heroes and statesmen. These men had made Rome great by conquering the human passions of fear and selfishness, and it was said that, in doing so, they had encountered none of the spiritual impediments to virtue that the Christians called ‘sin’. Purebred strength of character had revealed the human soul to contain the resources of its own greatness, and salvation was a municipal concept, centred on the peace and perpetuation of the commonwealth.

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Against this certainty, Augustine would bring the hard psychology of homo economicus. He would argue that humans are born rational and survivalist in relation to the fact of their banishment from Eden. In one fell swoop he would dispossess the Romans of the metanarrative that they had so meticulously traced from Troy. This metanarrative had added the veneer of destiny to their project; it had allowed them to think of themselves as in the natural line of Homeric and Hellenic culture, and more, it had encouraged the idea of unfinished business in the East – the idea that they would take on Alexander the Great’s mission to reconcile the old antagonisms of West and East in a new universal citizenship. Against this general momentum, Augustine would strike two decisive blows that would seal his place in realist lore. First, he would stand back and deliver the full force of modernity’s social scientific analysis of religion in politics. Traditional religion, he would effectively say, is whatever the modern anthropologist says it is. It is a forlorn (at worst, a cynical) enterprise made viable by certain weaknesses of human psychology. Individuals may use it personally and collectively to fool themselves into comfort and security, but far more spectacularly politics has historically used it to keep a body of subjects in thrall and control. Under the conditions of the Roman Empire, this political manipulation of religion achieved its shameless height. There is that cutting observation of Alfred North Whitehead’s, that, The cult of the Empire was the sort of religion which might be constructed to-day by the Law School of a University, laudably impressed by the notion that mere penal repression is not the way to avert a crime wave[!]. (Whitehead 1927: 31) Augustine’s words cut deeper still: [I]n most recent times, Caesar believed that Venus was his grandmother no less than Romulus in times gone by believed Mars to be his father. Someone will say: ‘Do you really believe all this?’ Of course I do not believe it. After all, Varro himself, our adversaries’ most learned man, comes close to admitting that these stories are false, even though he does not do so boldly and with confidence. He asserts, however, that it is advantageous for states if brave men believe, albeit falsely, that they are the offspring of the gods. For, in this case, the minds of men, borne up by the assurance that they are of divine stock, boldly undertake enterprises of great magnitude, carry them through all the more forcefully, and by their very confidence fulfil them with greater success. You see what a broad scope is opened up for falsehood by this statement of Varro’s, which I have expressed as well as I can in my own words. When lies even about the very gods are deemed to bring advantage to the citizens, we may infer from this that many beliefs now regarded as sacred and religious have been invented. (Augustine 2002: III, 3–4) Second, Augustine would retaliate on Rome’s imperious exercise of divine right with postmodernity’s understanding of justice. At a decisive moment in his City of God he would suddenly turn to the legend of Alexander the Great and the pirate, and draw (what was for the ancient world) a revolutionary conclusion. He would point out that in the godless conditions of the Earthly City, power is the only pragmatic fact, which makes it that relativism is really what morality looks like after power’s fiat – once the dust has settled and more reasonable explanations become preferable.

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Augustine’s argument was that no merely earthly politics could ever rise above the conditions of its making and claim the mantle of true justice: for true justice belonged to the Heavenly City of God. Earthly politics was an activity entirely described by the mechanics of human self-interest. What small redemption and peace it offered was to be attributed to the flickering lights of conscience or the laws of nature. To talk about justice in a state was technically, then, to talk about commonly agreed upon standards of behaviour – backed up, always, by corresponding penalties of transgression. And down here in the Earthly City, a people was entirely at liberty to decide upon those standards. Injustice, then, could mean being dealt with arbitrarily: that is, outside the agreed-upon standards for a particular jurisdiction. But what it could never be was a general-case label of reproach placed over one people by another. It could never be this because it had already been used in this way once and for ever by the Heavenly City over the Earthly City. Augustine’s infamous reminder of this – and of the conditions of earthly politics – was his use of the Hangman as the emblem of civic life.1 Here, then, is Augustine’s rendition of the legend of Alexander the Great and the pirate. Notice how he prefaces it with the qualifier ‘Justice removed’. Here he is indicating what I have just described: that for him, any accurate and helpful discussion of politics must begin with this act of calibration, whereby the aspiration to true justice is forbidden to the Earthly City and removed to the reign of the saints in the Heavenly City. Now, says, Augustine we can talk straight: Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? What are bands of robbers themselves but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is governed by the authority of a ruler; it is bound together by a pact of association; and the loot is divided according to an agreed law. If, by the constant addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size that it acquires territory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, it assumes the name of kingdom more openly. For this name is now manifestly conferred upon it not by the removal of greed but by the addition of impunity. It was a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.’ (Augustine 2002: IV, 4) With this, we have the classic double punch that has certified Augustine’s contribution to the realist project. In the first instance: nation-states are not spiritual entities, destined to an appointed end. They do not reach back into history from eternity, to work with cunning in the affairs of men. They are not the private vehicles of impersonal gods – and nor, for that matter, are they the public vehicles of private men – though time and again this has happened. Nation-states cannot produce categorical imperatives to action, and the ethical discourses to which they give rise should rather respect the Newtonian, and consequentialist, restrictions of time and space. Again, we are left to note the discrepancy between Augustine’s strict ontology of the nationstate and the wishful thinking that has time and again tried to stretch and morph it in the directions of ethical monism and utopianism.2 And it takes us into remembering that this discrepancy is, of itself, realism in action. It is realism in action because it all adds up to saying that if nation-states are, in reality, none of the above, then what

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they must actually be like is people. If they cannot trace noble genealogies back to the gods, then they must be just like us: that is, mortal. And if they are mortal like us, then they must look out from the present to the unknown future in the same fearful way that we do. And what we know about human psychology tells us that this will correspondingly make the issue of ‘power’ – its ownership and exercise – into the chief strategic gaming piece. Just as in all things which you see done throughout the provinces, whatever the Emperor wills goes forth from the inner part of his palace throughout the whole Roman Empire. How great commotion is caused at one bidding by the Emperor as he sits in his palace! He but has to move his lips, when he speaks: then the whole province is moved, at what he has spoken being executed. (Expositions on the Psalms: CXLVIII, 2) In the second instance, the political language that nation-states habitually make use of cannot be considered to be the disclosure of any prior moral order – any prior moral order in relation to which a nation-state could successfully plot to conform itself. Here Augustine is at his most insistent and belligerent because on this point he is really citing what he takes to be the direction of the flow of moral information between the Heavenly City and the Earthly City, and how he understands this direction of flow to be absolutely irreversible. Classical virtue ethics had assumed that the language patterns of traditional morality could be read off as the real and final guides to the optimal management of earthly affairs. What philosophers had come to call the business of human flourishing was essentially a matter of acknowledging one’s less than optimal starting point and then taking the necessary steps to correct it, for any coherent statement about virtue was understood to be a statement about the real-world foundations of truth. This, in turn, explained why classical, Olympian religion took the form of an exaggerated projection of human affairs on to the canvas of the heavens. The gods could surpass mere humans in terms of their superpowers and their ability to dally in and out of temporality, but ultimately that same lust for meddling was sufficient to betray them as nothing more than fantasy figures – the psychologies and appetites of humans writ large. Augustine had famously been on to this in a flash as a young man,3 then later in the City of God he would give full voice and drama to this satire. Religion, he would write, is ridiculous; it is the timeworn story of men making fools of other men. The world we inhabit goes around in exactly the way that reality teaches us it does, and the facts of life and death really are the school of humankind. Moreover, it is this very universal education that makes it possible for the pirates of the world to make their devastating rejoinders to the emperors of the world. In fact, the only thing that hinders us in seeing it all as clearly as this are those ‘language patterns of traditional morality’. Here is what Augustine would mean: emperors and statesmen have not found it expedient, in the main, to talk as though their campaigns and ambitions were personal crusades of pride and transient glory. They have found it far better to utilise the vocabulary that mysteriously seems to exist, preformed, in the mind of every human. For this vocabulary has nothing whatsoever to do with the grim reality of life in the Earthly City. It seems quite untouched by it, and certainly it could never have been composed as a series of reflections on man’s fallen condition. Augustine says it comes supernaturally

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from the Heavenly City, borne into us by a gift of grace, because without it we would not have a hope down here.4 And because this means that it is the language of the Heavenly City’s happiness, or, more precisely, our distant memory of Eden’s happiness, it is very definitely not the language of ‘personal crusades of pride and transient glory’. It is the opposite of that. It is the language of peace eternal, backed up by the corresponding promise that there is a place in which all personal destinies could be coordinated for its end. It turns out, in fact, to be the very language that an enlightened politics has always chosen to cloak itself over with. But it is a borrowed, or stolen, language. If politics had to fall back on a language of its own making – that is to say, a language developed exclusively from within the priorities of the struggle for life – it would have to be something Machiavellian, or Hobbesian, or Darwinian, or worse.5 It would be descriptive of the processes by which men compete for a scarcity of resources. It would not be normative, or caring, or hopeful.

2. I want to be clear about where these reflections on Augustine’s realism have left us for this chapter. I have in effect been saying that Augustine’s classical version of the perspective is an offshoot – or what economists call a ‘free external’ – of his Christian evangelism. It is a negative construction, built by the positive energy of that evangelism. That positive energy was poured by Augustine into a theology of discipleship that depicted a Pilgrim City of predestinated believers, sojourning through this veil of tears, and it was as he sought for new and varied ways to corral and encourage his readers along that journey that he found and honed his realist voice. He found it as he spoke against the chief temptation that the Pilgrim City must face: this (to use Paul’s language) is the temptation to be conformed to the ‘rudiments of the world’.6 This world, to the mature Augustine, would become a corporation – a bedevilling corporation, intent on peddling us false happiness in all its myriad varieties. Realism, to him, became realism about this. But of course the evangelising bishop was not to be Augustine’s only starring role in history. He was also thrust into being the de facto commentator and theorist on his troubled portion of late antiquity. As the barbarians closed in on Africa Proconsularis, and his own city of Hippo Regius, he would get to see at first hand what happens when the old certainties of life collapse and people are made to live within touching distance of their own mortality. It can make even the staunchest symbols of political continuity, the Hangman and his lieutenants, turn existential and perplexed. As his beloved Africa teetered before the barbarians, Augustine would be thrust into his second starring role in history. Not the evangelising bishop, but the Field Commander issuing his thundering, Churchillian reminders of life’s immediate priorities. There is a well-known letter written by Augustine in the midst of these troubles to Count Boniface, General and Governor of Africa. It sums up this second Augustine. Boniface’s pressing duty at the time was to organise and run the defences of the Province against the Vandals, by then licking their lips and peering in from neighbouring Spain. Boniface was a God-fearing and deeply spiritual man, not altogether made up in his mind about the compatibility of his military activities and his Christian faith. When his wife suddenly died, he seemed to lose his nerve altogether. He met with Augustine and Augustine’s close friend and fellow bishop, Alypius, at a place called Tubunae.

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He had determined to abandon the world and to follow their example and enter into the monastic life. Africa had always bred a fervent Christianity, steeped in the martyrdom of St Cyprian, and now, thanks in large part to Augustine and his pioneering interpretation of monasticism, this same energy had been able to flow into the ‘white martyrdom’ of the consecrated life. Boniface must have fully expected for his idea to meet with joy and congratulations in Augustine and Alypius. But it did not! Instead he met with a bracing précis of what has since been called Augustine’s ‘just war theory’, though we note that to claim that Augustine ever held such a theory is as troublesome as to claim for him an overall theory of society, church and state; we are dealing, here again, with a ‘negative construction’. To say that war occupies a natural place in the cycle of life was only something that came as naturally to Augustine as it had to Aristotle7 and Cicero8 before him. It was what came next that has gone down in history as the Augustinian twist (and has remained subject to so much misunderstanding and machinating). Disbarred by his Christianity from following the ancient convention (perfected by the Stoics) of including the Divine as well as the mortal within that ‘cycle of life’, Augustine placed that whole wheel within another wheel; and then he made that outer wheel turn the inner wheel according to its wishes. That outer wheel and its wishes were, of course, God’s infinite and unfathomable wisdom. Crucially for Augustine, this knowledge of the wheel within the wheel did not reach back and invalidate all the classical ethical wisdom that had preceded it. It did not equip the Christian in the public square with anything extra. Augustine would remain adamant to the end that no man can know the will of God across its eternal span9; and not knowing it, all men must therefore abide by the natural and positive laws of their time and place, and not afflict themselves with predestination’s anxieties. However, what the wheel within the wheel did do was to allow all of that good sense and practice to flow on to a supernatural conclusion. Peace, which had always stood unqualified and unqualifiable as the summit of civic ambition – like the philosopher’s wisdom, a thing to be desired in itself – was now rendered mercenary in relation to the higher purposes of the outer wheel. In language that could now be well adapted to a military man like Boniface, Augustine was able to redepict the longstanding mission objectives of ‘just warfare’ as really the much to be desired preconditions of the Pilgrim City’s life on earth: You were then desirous to abandon all the public business in which you were engaged, and to withdraw into sacred retirement, and live like the servants of God who have embraced a monastic life. And what was it that prevented you from acting according to these desires? Was it not that you were influenced by considering, on our representation of the matter, how much service the work which then occupied you might render to the churches of Christ if you pursued it with this single aim, that they, protected from all disturbance by barbarian hordes, might live ‘a quiet and peaceable life’, as the apostle says, ‘in all godliness and honesty’ [1 Tim. 2: 2]; resolving at the same time for your own part to seek no more from this world than would suffice for the support of yourself and those dependent on you, wearing as your girdle the cincture of a perfectly chaste self-restraint, and having underneath the accoutrements of the soldier the surer and stronger defence of spiritual armour.10

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This second Augustine seems so clearly to be speaking political realism’s language of limited objectives that a return to Augustine the evangelising bishop can, by this stage, appear to be a retrograde step. For we cannot fail to notice that Boniface is effectively presenting Augustine with a preview of the kind of international idealism that would kick off in Augustine’s name in the centuries following his death – the socalled ‘political Augustinianism’ of the middle ages – and that Augustine is emphatically rejecting it. Political Augustinianism would end up as a papal theory of world government, or a Christian utopia, profiting from the logical supremacy of spirituals over temporals in the medieval mind; but whilst it is true that Augustine’s ontology of these two spheres made them unequal to an unprecedented degree, and really did supply the papal plenitude of power with the radical distinction it needed, the ontology was only ever designed by him to serve as an awesome admonition to Christians like Boniface, deeply active in the civic life. The danger to Christianity could not come from politics, for like Saints Paul, Ambrose and John Chrysostom before him, Augustine accepted politics’ natural right to exist. No, for Augustine, the danger to Christianity could come only from Christians themselves, insufficiently disillusioned with this world and forgetful, as I put it above, of the direction of the flow of moral information between the Heavenly and Earthly cities. By wanting to lay down his sword and become a monk, Boniface was directly in the line of this supreme danger: a danger constructed out of his good will and sincerity, and sweetened with romance, but a danger none the less. Let us be clear on the sequence of Augustine’s reasoning. He began with the fact that Boniface was one of politics’ chosen and established agents, and from there he moved to the conclusion that, as such, Boniface was not allowed, all of a sudden, to supersede politics’ natural right with a spiritual imperative of his own. He was not because that would be tantamount to preaching moral information back from the Earthly to the Heavenly City – and that, says Augustine, is never allowed. A world of monks gradually replacing a world of soldiers is not the triumph that Christianity must seek. In fact, to seek it incurs the same heresy that Pelagianism was to exhibit. Christianity has already triumphed in this world in Christ. No further triumphs are necessary or possible – and worse, their active pursuit threatens to render Christ superfluous. Here we enter the animating centre of Augustine’s thought. What Christianity really needs, he says, is (the limited objective of) a world of soldiers, the better to maintain the order and security in which the monks can flourish. Let us be clear, too, on the international situation that this second Augustine looked out on – and how far it satisfied conditions found millennia later, in doctrinal realism’s twentieth-century boom. The Christian Roman Empire had created a paradigm of civilisation and international order that was not available to, say, Thucydides, when he was investigating the perspective’s potential. Pagan powers of classical antiquity tended to pursue their enemies to destruction or subjugation, and in Rome’s case at least, ran empires that were politically and economically dependent upon conquest. Carthago delenda est. Athenian idealism in the golden age of the fifth century showed another trait of this mode (one that I alluded to at the start of this chapter): the purpose of civilisation was not to spread redemption to the ends of the earth, but rather to reward the daring and greatness of the best of men with a fitting testimony. ‘The whole earth is the tomb of famous men,’ declared Pericles.11 The rise of Christianity gradually changed

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this. Its economy of salvation created a working concept of a globalised and interconnected world, whilst its universalistic psychology of human nature broke down the class distinctions of old, prompted the Machiavellis of the world to seek the common denominators in history’s vivid examples, and ultimately paved the way for secular humanism’s reductionist approach to man. When Augustine looked with Boniface beyond the borders of the civilised world, he still saw anarchy, and anarchy’s imperative to prudent self-defence. But the anarchy of this uncivilised world was no longer ‘dark’ anarchy. Christianity had changed that. Anarchy in world affairs no longer signified unknown lands of barely human monsters.12 It no longer signified a ‘chaos’, from which anything might emerge.13 It signified instead a basic degree of familiarity and predictability, present wherever men might be imagined to live, and it described that familiarity and predictability through the longitudes and latitudes of homo economicus. Christianity helped anarchy to come to mean what it does today: the anarchy of the equal right to compete for life’s prizes. History knows no resting places and no plateaus. All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most of them eventually collapsed. Yet there is a margin between necessity and accident, in which the statesman, by perseverance and intuition, must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people. The statesman’s responsibility is to struggle against transitoriness and not to insist that he be paid in the coin of eternity. He may know that history is the foe of permanence, but no leader is entitled to resignation. He owes it to his people to strive, to create, and to resist the decay that besets all human institutions. (Kissinger 1979: 55) You could be mistaken for thinking that the above was yet another attempt of Augustine’s to revive Boniface’s flagging spirit, but it was not. It was, of course, a reflection by Henry Kissinger. I include it to demonstrate how seamlessly the second Augustine can be made to interchange with modern political realists on this level of ideas.

3. The question for political realism in our times is not whether the perspective can still offer value or appeal. It has never claimed more for itself than the mantle of common sense, and as such, its value and appeal will be continuing and endless. On the other hand, the world does change, and has undergone dramatic changes in its evolution into the twenty-first century. The question on which to end this chapter is whether Augustine’s realism can speak something pertinent into the world of today, its international relations and its goal of peace. And to be more precise: which Augustine should speak those words – the first Augustine or the more conventional, second Augustine? Realism says that human nature is empirically secure, so that one may choose next to be either realistic or romantic in reaction to its unvarying facts. And I have shown here how Augustine’s special focus on the Christian anthropology of man gave him unusually compelling access to those facts. But in the way that I have walked us through this material, I hope also to have enlarged the scope and meaning of this consensus. I think Augustine’s contribution to the realist canon today is to take us back over the tried and tested ground and to ask of it: ‘What are those unvarying facts, exactly – and do they not perhaps extend beyond the usual fare of

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self-interest and maximisation to include also man’s fixation on social perfection and justice – the fixation that Augustine says is inexplicable apart from (the borrowed, or stolen, language of14) our homesickness for Paradise?’ I suspect that the future of a more successful realism may require it to broaden its empirical base to accommodate these aspirational facts of the human psyche, and that Augustine and his doctrine of the two cities may be able to show it the way. Let me briefly sketch how. In just the same way that the discourse of international relations has been subject to the basic syntax of the ‘Westphalian presumption’,15 Augustine’s political realism has always been explored state-centrically. This is firmly in keeping with the suppressed premise to Western political thought generally, though it is a premise that I have never shared. This suppressed premise states that all political thinking wishing to be taken seriously must vector its conclusions on an actual – that is, on a worldly – scenario. In the case of Augustine, who never wrote anything remotely like Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan, this is immediately awkward. And naturally enough it was just as awkward for those in his own time who also sought out his wisdom on these matters. They, like most scholars since, tried to overcome this awkwardness by coaxing Augustine to comment on the hypothetical scenario of a just Christian society on earth.16 This was not the kind of Christian society that was already springing into life in late antiquity, but something truly pure and authentic – something physically modelled on the magnificent vision of the City of God that Augustine portrayed in his book of that name, possibly a Christian state under a Christian king or a theocracy under a pope – though in truth, it hasn’t really mattered. What has mattered is that Augustine’s political thought has been studied within this framework of the hypothetical, and to do that is always dangerous and misleading. Within the universe of theory, the hypothetical may have a touch more kudos and staying power than the fantastic, but up against hard reality they both come to the same thing. The hard reality is that there will never be a (perfectly) just Christian society on earth – and more, that this is what Augustine expressly preached, night and day. When I wrote my book The Pilgrim City back in 2010, I tried to make a new start by going back to the first Augustine, Augustine the evangelising bishop. I did this because it occurred to me that Augustine’s celebrated realism was by no means exhausted by his pessimistic pronouncements on human sinfulness – far from it. Considered across their whole, his writings revealed that there was a whole other trove of ‘unvarying facts’ in relation to which it was possible to be realistic. I have intimated what those are here, and in The Pilgrim City I really spelled them out. Man, the thinking, self-conscious animal that he is, is fated to discover, generation upon generation, that he has no natural place in the world. All the rest of the fauna, flora and minerals do. Instinct or geologic law sees to that. But man is stricken from the moment of his age of reason with a freight of intuitions that he has customarily identified with his heart. During the course of this chapter, I have used the term ‘language’ rather than intuitions. Because this language is a moral language, it agitates him and goads him to find a true and safe depository for it. And as Aristotle pointed out, man has only one way to go about this. First, he founds a family, then a tribe, then a city, then an empire and then, finally17 – well, that last has forever been the difficulty, that last step, for it would seem that to return this language to its source – to its true and safe depository – would require the evolution of earthly politics into some perfect, supernatural, Heavenly state of justice.

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This freighted human heart was always Augustine’s special subject. The term cor inquietum (‘restless heart’) was the central motif of his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions. And consequently, he always felt confident that Christian thought could pick up where Aristotle and secular thought had left off. Man is a political animal: yes, indeed! But now here was Augustine saying that he is a political animal only because he has inside him, already, a pilgrim heart. This was political thought’s final step and missing link, and it came straight from the bishop’s pen. Like Aristotle, Augustine had taught that the naturalism of politics is truly enough teleological – it is a sequence of officia necessitatum (‘offices done to necessities’). However, while it was implicit in Aristotle and the classical tradition that these necessities had generated the language of politics, so that if one day they could be eradicated, that language would have to become meaningless, wither and die, Augustine was able to overcome this problem through his teaching that traditional morality is an unmerited grace. The secret source of all human love turns out to be a God Who is unanticipated in any earthly necessity: You [Lord] reconcile the quarrelling: oh, that it were here at last, that eternal peace of Jerusalem, where none shall disagree! For all these are offices done to necessities. Take away the wretched; there will be an end to works of mercy. The works of mercy will be at an end: shall the ardour of charity then be quenched? I say that it is with a truer touch of love that you love the happy man, to whom there is no good office you can do; purer is that love, and far more unalloyed. For if you have done a kindness to the wretched, perchance you come to desire to lift up yourself over against him, and wish him to be subject to you – you who have done the kindness to him. He was in need, you bestowed; and you might seem to yourself greater because you bestowed, than he who was bestowed upon. No: wish him rather your equal, that you both may be under the One Lord, on whom nothing can be bestowed.18 This idea, that God pipes the moral content of the good life directly into human hearts, was always destined for a leading career in a Christian Europe. But as that context started finally to fade, new secular bases for the good life were sought. C. S. Lewis was fighting against this fade in his book The Abolition of Man in 1943, and in 2011 A. C. Grayling’s The Good Book was meant to have signalled secular humanism’s consummate triumph. But as Augustine would have said, you cannot redeem the Earthly City. Or more disarmingly, perhaps, you cannot improve it because, if all of secular humanism’s romancing of society and the state could win out, then, yes, by its logic we would have a truly good life here on earth, and the Heavenly City would be rendered superfluous. As the novelist Anthony Burgess once put it: We tend to Augustinianism when we are disgusted with our own selfishness, to Pelagianism when we seem to have behaved well. . . . None of us are sure how free we really are. (Burgess 1985: 57)

Conclusion In my opinion, the essence of Augustinianism in relation to political thought and international relations is a profound respect and admiration for the Earthly City’s finely tuned machinery. God has outsourced its daily maintenance to hell’s engineers. They

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are professionals and do an outstanding job. God has done this so that the Earthly City will continue to give us compelling reasons not to live for ourselves or for it, but for Him. The proof of the Earthly City’s outstandingly hellish maintenance is the way that it recalibrates itself periodically, whenever the human race has become too uppity. We seem to be going through one of those recalibrations right now. Just the other day it seemed as if we were in the flush of post-Christianity. An international order based on Western values and the intellectual brotherhood of man seemed a real possibility. But now international events seem to be conspiring to remind us that that key political concept of citizenship may never truly have been state-centric, or rights-centric, at all, but something closer to what Augustine originally described on behalf of his Pilgrim City: a wild and unquantifiable attitude of heart. If it was post-Christianity only the other day, then we already seem to be living in post-Secularity now – or post-post-Christianity. Increasingly, international relations theorists are going to have to accommodate themselves to the reality that humanity’s romantic language of selfhood, place, belonging and hope invokes a satisfaction that no politics can provide. And what will Augustine’s political realism be able to contribute to this situation? I think it will be on hand to remind us that the otherworldly provenance of (Western) politics’ lexicon should never be taken as an excuse for excessive, fundamentalist behaviour, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Generals should not rush to become monks. The sinful origin of politics does not mean that politics needs to be rounded on, purified and reconstructed. Quite the opposite, in fact: the machine of politics needs to be protected, cared for and oiled. But if this is, as I have put it, a negative teaching, what is its payoff? The positive voice of Augustine’s political realism is to remind us that no human being can love a machine. Yes, there is an art to politics, and an excellence; and truly enough, it is said that nation-states are the creations of human hands. But it is idolatry for humankind to worship its own creations – or (if you do not care for the Christian message behind that) think of it as being self-destructive of the human spirit in action. In both cases I want to leave the last words on the irony of it all to Augustine: How much more discriminating than fearful men are mice and serpents, and other animals of such sort, who do not respect the idols of the heathens, when they do not detect in their human forms actual human lives? For this reason, we see them all the time building nests in them; and unless they are deterred by human movements, they can find for themselves no safer habitations! This results in the madness that a man will move himself to frighten off a nesting animal from his god – yes, a service for the selfsame god who cannot perform this basic act of self defence on its own part because it will never move!19

Notes 1. See On Order (II, 4, 12) and City of God (XIX, 6). 2. The fact that Augustine denied the Ciceronian title res publica (commonwealth) to nonChristian nation-states has always begged the question of where he ranked his own, newly Christian, Roman Empire – especially given how fondly he could talk of Christian emperors such as Constantine and Theodosius. In his later years, he was not shy, either, about meeting the Donatist schism with the full force of the imperial laws against heretics. Could the justice required of a true commonwealth ever be found, then, in the polity of a godly

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3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

miles hollingworth people on earth? I have recently answered this question in the negative. The predicate ‘true justice’ belongs to the Heavenly City. The Christian Empire that Augustine benefitted from was – and will always be – a ‘free hit’. For more, see Hollingworth (2015a: 25–32). See Confessiones (I, 16, 25). At Expositions on the Psalms (CXXXIV, 22), Augustine clearly explains the supernatural sense in which this is an unlearned language: ‘How many farms and desert places now come in to us? No one can tell how numerously they come in; and they come in because they would believe. We say to them, “What will you?” They answer, “To know the glory of God.” Believe me when I tell you that we wonder and rejoice at such a claim of these rustic people. They come I know not whither, roused up by I know not whom. But I shouldn’t truly say, “I know not by whom”, because of course I know exactly by whom it is. I know because He says, “No one can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” [John 6: 44]. They come suddenly from the woods, the desert, the most distant and lofty mountains: all to the Church. And many of them, no, nearly all of them hold this language, so that we see it is true that God teaches them within.’ See, for example, Expositions on the Psalms (LXIV, 6): ‘Every man finds himself born into a place; and he goes on to learn his tongue, and to become habituated to the manners and life of that same land or region or city.’ See Col. 2: 8. See his Politics (1256b). See his De officiis (I, 11–13). His famous formulation was Si cepisti non est Deus ‘If you have understood him, he is not God’ (Sermons, LII, 16). Letters (CCXX, 3). See Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Speech (43). Although good historians such as Tacitus were always free to reject this fantasy, and did so. See, for instance, his Germania (46): ‘All our further accounts are intermixed with fable; as, that the Hellusii and Oxionae have human faces, with the bodies and limbs of wild beasts. These unauthenticated reports I shall leave untouched.’ See Hesiod, Theogony (116). I have recently discussed the fugitive status of this language in some detail. See Hollingworth (2015b). See Thomas (2000: 819). A good example of this is the correspondence between Augustine and Macedonius, the imperial Vicar of Africa (Letters, 152 and 153). See Aristotle (Politics, 1252a). Homilies on the First Letter of John, V (author’s translation). Expositions on the Psalms (CXV, 5).

Bibliography Aristotle (1974), The Politics of Aristotle, translated by Ernest Barker, New York: Oxford University Press. Augustine (2002), City of God, ed. and translated by R. W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [All other English translations of Augustine are from (last accessed 17 May 2018).] Burgess, Anthony (1985), 1985, London: Arrow. Cicero (2008), De officiis, Oxford World’s Classics, translated by P. G. Walsh, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Grayling, A. C. (2011), The Good Book, London: Bloomsbury. Hesiod (2007), Theogony: Works and Days, Loeb Classical Library No. 57N, translated by Glenn W. Most, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hollingworth, Miles (2010), The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought, London and: New York: Bloomsbury. Hollingworth, Miles (2015a), ‘The peace of Babylon (and what it censors): St. Augustine of Hippo’s City of God’, in Geoff Kemp (ed.), Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 25–32. Hollingworth, Miles (2015b), ‘Political wisdom and the City of God: St. Augustine of Hippo’, in Kyriakos N. Demetriou and Antis Loizides (eds), Scientific Statesmanship, Governance, and the History of Political Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 56–72. Kissinger, Henry (1979), The White House Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lewis, C. S. (2009) [1943], The Abolition of Man, New York: HarperOne. Thomas, Scott M. (2000), ‘Taking religious and cultural pluralism seriously: The global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international society’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 815–41. Thucydides (1972), History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by M. I. Finley, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics. Whitehead, A. N. (1927), Religion in the Making, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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13 Niccolò Machiavelli The first realist of modernity Markus Fischer

Chapter Overview

M

achiavelli was the first political realist of modernity. To organise his various ideas about human nature, principalities, republics and foreign affairs into a rigorously deductive order is the purpose of this chapter. Human beings desire selfpreservation, glory, domination and wealth. The mind inflames these desires to form limitless ambition. Ambition and fear of the other generate conflict in the natural condition of licence. To impose political order, men of virtù must commit immoral deeds, which are excused by their good consequences. In republics, citizens govern themselves through laws and institutions, based on good customs that need to be periodically refreshed by fear-inducing punishments. At root, Machiavelli’s republic is an organised licence, whereby citizens pursue their ambitions in foreign wars of aggression, so that they collectively generate a far greater amount of glory, dominion and wealth than they could have attained individually by attacking each other. Since a state cannot avoid war by having just enough power to deter but not so much as to pose a threat to others, who then attack from fear, wars of conquest need to be initiated when one has the advantage. The foreign condition of licence is a struggle for imperial domination. *

*

*

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of the major figures in the history of Western political thought. Born in Renaissance Florence, he ably served the short-lived Florentine republic in diplomacy and military affairs. When the Medici princes returned to power in 1512, Machiavelli retired to private life and began his career as a writer. His works were widely condemned for their immoral advice, but also avidly studied by actual rulers and modern philosophers.

Political Realism Machiavelli was a political realist. Political realism is the tradition of thought that seeks to understand political life as it is rather than as it ought to be. Originating with the Sophists of ancient Greece, it asserts that the reality of politics consists of conflict between actors who pursue their self-interests without regard for morality and whose relations are shaped by power. It contrasts this ‘realistic’ approach with the Western

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virtue tradition from Socrates onwards, which believes in the possibility of succeeding in politics while consistently acting in an ethical manner. It was this contrast that Machiavelli had in mind when he opposed his realistic pursuit of the ‘effectual truth’ to the ‘imagined republics and principalities’ of others: I depart from the orders of others. But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth. (Machiavelli 1998: 61) Machiavelli continues this realist manifesto with infamous advice: It is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not to use it according to necessity. (Machiavelli 1998: 61) The reality of political life is such that rulers cannot act ethically all the time if they are to preserve themselves and maintain order among the ruled. Hence, virtue ethics is largely incompatible with politics.

Human Nature Machiavelli expressed his realism in a political theory that grounds its propositions in a rather complex set of assumptions of human nature. The key to understanding these assumptions is to grasp Machiavelli’s distinction between what is constant and necessary, on the one hand, and what is variable and contingent, on the other. Where Machiavelli makes this distinction explicit, he contrasts what exists by ‘nature’ to what happens by ‘accident’. For instance, princes have their qualities ‘either by nature or by accident’ (Machiavelli 1992: 1155). Human nature thus has two parts: constant and necessary properties that we can call first nature or simply nature, and variable and contingent attributes that we can term second nature. Machiavelli firmly believed in the constancy of first nature across historical periods: ‘Whoever considers present and ancient things easily knows that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same humours, and there always have been’ (Machiavelli 1996: 83). The desires that characterise this human nature have selfish aims: self-preservation, glory, honour, domination, wealth and sexual pleasure. While the desires indicate to human beings the ends they pursue, the mind (mente), through its faculties of imagination (imaginazione, fantasia), ingenuity (ingegno) and memory (memoria), suggests the means to attain them, for ‘each man conducts himself according to his ingenuity and imagination’ (Machiavelli 1992: 1083). While mind indicate the means to attain one’s ends, spirit (animo, spirito) gives people the energy to act. For instance, a prince ‘needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him’ (Machiavelli 1998: 70).

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This ability to change, however, is starkly limited by a person’s mix of humours (umori), the four bodily fluids of blood, choler, phlegm and black bile, which, according to traditional medicine, give people the corresponding temperaments of being sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. According to Renaissance astrology – in which Machiavelli was a believer (Parel 1992) – people receive their humours at birth and retain them for life. The resulting fixity of temperament gives people a personal mode of proceeding (modo del procedere), from which they cannot deviate. A preponderantly choleric man, for instance, always acts rashly and violently. People’s success in attaining their ambition thus depends on whether their constant mode of proceeding is in accord with the changing qualities of the times (qualità de’ tempi), which are occultly determined by Fortune (fortuna), the astrological personification of chance. In Machiavelli’s words, ‘the humours that make you act, so far as they conform with [Fortune’s] doings, are the causes of your good and your ill’ (Machiavelli 1992: 978), and ‘the cause of the bad and of the good fortune of men is the matching of the mode of one’s proceeding with the times’ (Machiavelli 1996: 239). Machiavelli also applies the concept of the humours to civic bodies, claiming in particular that in every city there are two humours, the people (il populo) and the great (i grandi). What differentiates these two groups is that ‘the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people’ (Machiavelli 1998: 39). While real enough in particular situations, this differentiation is at bottom only apparent, for the people readily feel the desire for domination once they are free from oppression: ‘It was not enough for the Roman plebs to secure itself against the nobles . . . for having obtained that, it began at once to engage in combat through ambition’ (Machiavelli 1996: 76). In other words, the common people’s seeming moderation of seeking only security and freedom from oppression results from their situation, not from their nature. With regard to their desires, all human beings have the same nature. In addition to serving the desires, the mind also makes them grow without limit. Imagination recombines memories of past gratifications to novel images of delight, while ingenuity devises schemes to attain them. Imagination also enables people to foresee the possibility that their future needs might not be met; prompted by the resulting anxiety, ingenuity then suggests that, to forestall such an outcome, they should acquire as many means of satisfaction as soon as possible. Machiavelli captures the result of these expansions of the desires with the concept of ambition (ambizione). Ambition is inherently without limit because imagination can always expand the desires further, once a certain level of satisfaction has been attained: ‘men ascend from one ambition to another’ (Machiavelli 1996: 95), for they ‘are never satisfied and, having gotten one thing, do not content themselves with that but desire something else’ (Machiavelli 1988: 159). The variable and contingent attributes of human beings that are theoretically significant in Machiavelli’s thought are habits or customs. Individuals become loyal subjects of princes when they have been accustomed to being ruled by their blood line for several generations. For instance, ‘it is natural for Florentine citizens to honour [the house of Medici] . . . [since they] have followed this habit for sixty years’ (Machiavelli 1992: 25). People become law-abiding citizens of republics when they have been habituated to their laws and orders, for ‘laws have need of good customs so as to be observed’ (Machiavelli

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1996: 49). Good customs are formed by coercion at the hands of an autocratic ruler. At first, people perform a behaviour because their minds calculate that it is preferable to punishment. As these calculations are repeated, they gradually become unconscious and turn into unthinking imitation of previous behaviour, thereby forming a habit. In Machiavelli’s words, individuals become ‘accustomed to the blood line of their prince’ when ‘in the antiquity and continuity of the dominion the memories and causes of innovations’ – that is, the acts of violence committed by a new prince – ‘are extinguished’ (Machiavelli 1998: 6).

Licence, Fortune and Virtù Human beings who are not restrained by political order exist in a condition of licence: ‘No ordered government was there, but rather a certain ambitious license’ (Machiavelli 1996: 98), for ‘where choice abounds and one can make use of license, at once everything is full of confusion and disorder’ (Machiavelli 1996: 15). Since this licence arises from ambitious nature, it may be considered a natural condition, akin to and foreshadowing the state of nature conceived by Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes 1994: 74–8). The natural condition of licence is replete with violent conflict that arises from two causes. First, human beings use violence to attain goods that others possess or seek as well. In other words, conflict arises from the pursuit of the selfish ends of security, glory, wealth and sexual pleasure. Second, fearing that their lives and possessions may be taken by others, individuals find it rational to strike first to secure themselves and their things. ‘When men seek not to fear, they begin to make others fear; and the injury that they dispel from themselves, they put upon another, as if it were necessary to offend or to be offended’ (Machiavelli 1996: 95). This pre-emptive logic would later reappear in Hobbes’s thought under the concept of ‘anticipation’ (Hobbes 1994: 75). This natural condition of licence is grounded in the assumption that the world lacks an inherent ethical order and is ruled, instead, by Fortune, the occult, female personification of chance. ‘She disposes of time in her mode, she exalts us, she wrecks us, without piety, without law or reason,’ so that ‘nothing will or can ever be firm under the sun’ (Machiavelli 1992: 976–7, 967). Fortune creates accidents, which can either offer opportunities for successful action or disrupt people’s plans. To cope with Fortune’s contingency, human beings need to possess the quality of virtù, a combination of spirit and prudence, with the latter consisting of the mind’s ability ‘to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less bad as good’ (Machiavelli 1992: 91). As often suggested, the relationship between virtù and Fortune is central to Machiavelli’s thought because it represents the effort of men to impose order on a contingent world. Having likened Fortune to violent rivers, Machiavelli claims that she can be tamed by men of virtù: And although [the rivers] are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. It happens similar with fortune, which shows her power where virtue [virtù] has not been put in order to resist her. (Machiavelli 1998: 98)

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The order that needs to be created by human virtù to dam the rivers of Fortune is political order. Hence, virtù is the paramount quality that founders of cities must possess. ‘Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus and the like’ succeeded at imposing principalities because ‘their excellent virtue [virtù] enabled the opportunity [provided by Fortune] to be recognized’ and ‘new modes and orders’ to be introduced (Machiavelli 1998: 23).

The Generation of Political Order When a prince imposes political order on a licentious multitude, he creates a new principality. Since individuals living in licence act violently and deceitfully from their first natures, the new prince must be ruthless, for there is a ‘natural and ordinary necessity which requires that one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince, both with men-at-arms and with infinite other injuries’ (Machiavelli 1998: 8). Cesare Borgia’s pacification of the Romagna illustrates this necessity well: Once the duke had taken over Romagna, he found it had been commanded by impotent lords, who had been readier to despoil their subjects than to correct them. . . . Since that province was quite full of robberies, quarrels, and every other kind of insolence, he judged it necessary to give it good government, if he wanted to reduce it to peace and a kingly arm. So he put there Messer Remirro de Orco, a cruel and ready man, to whom he gave the fullest power. In a short time Remirro reduced it to peace and unity. (Machiavelli 1998: 29) For a republic to come into being, the prince needs to be driven out by freedom-loving subjects, who thereafter rule themselves in a civil way of life, pursuing their ambitions through laws rather than violence and creating institutions that determine where political authority resides and how it is to be exercised. In the Roman republic, for instance, there was the order of the government, or truly of the state, and afterwards the laws, which together with the magistrates checked the citizens. The order of the state was the authority of the people, of the Senate, of the tribunes, of the consuls; the mode of soliciting and creating the magistrates; and the mode of making the laws. (Machiavelli 1996: 49) In other words, authority in a civil way of life is institutionalised. Obedience is not owed to concrete persons but to holders of public office, who carry out laws that have been ratified by an assembly of citizens. Third, the laws and institutions of a civil way of life must be designed and carried out in such a way that every humour has a share in political authority, for ‘institutions . . . will always stand firm when everyone has a hand in them . . . and no rank of citizen, either through fear for itself or through ambition, has to desire innovation’ (Machiavelli 1992: 31).

The Reason of State The cruelties that princes need to inflict to create and maintain order among a licentious multitude imply that they must violate the common morality:

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This has to be understood: that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things for which men are held good [that is, the virtues], since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion. And so he needs . . . not [to] depart from the good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity. (Machiavelli 1998: 70) The same necessity not to practise the virtues holds for republics: Where one deliberates entirely on the safety of his fatherland, there ought not to enter any consideration of either just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or ignominious; indeed every other concern put aside, one ought to follow entirely the policy that saves its life and maintains its liberty. (Machiavelli 1996: 301) Pronouncements like these made Machiavelli’s name synonymous with that of the devil, for whom evil is the end. In reality, however, Machiavelli advises rulers to enter into evil neither for the sake of evil nor for the sake of personal aggrandisement, but for the imposition and maintenance of political order, which naturally benefits the subjects by keeping them and their possessions secure. Thus, cruelties ‘can be called well used (if it is permissible to speak well of evil) that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can’ (Machiavelli 1998: 37–8). Moreover, Machiavelli did not take this end to justify the means, as so often attributed to him, but merely to excuse them (Walzer 1973: 170, 175–6), for as he writes in a key passage, ‘when the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him’ (Machiavelli 1996: 29). This distinction matters because to justify a seemingly evil deed is to deny its evilness and declare it good, whereas merely to excuse it maintain its evilness while finding a reason to permit it none the less. In other words, Machiavelli embraced a consequentialist ethic, whereby the doing of immoral deeds is warranted by the beneficial consequences of political order. This kind of thinking is also known as the doctrine of the reason of state, which can be considered the ethical core of political realism: to create order and to maintain it for the common benefit, the state is permitted to violate the rules of morality. Medieval thought considered the need for entering into necessary evil to be exceptional (casualiter) and, somehow, reconcilable with the idea that the world was a cosmos consistently ordered for the good; Machiavelli, however, claimed in so many words that this need was natural and normal (normaliter) (Post 1964: 251, 306). This claim shocked Christendom because it held that no ruler could abstain from immoral deeds and therewith implied that the world was not the coherent whole that men had wanted to believe in since Plato. Since the good of political order rests in fundamental ways on the commission of evil deeds, human reality is deeply contradictory (Berlin 1972: 191–7). One can either be a good man or an effective ruler, but not both.

Domestic Conflict The imposition of political order alleviates the state of licence to a point where people can satisfy their desires to a significant extent. The prince who follows Machiavelli’s

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advice gains security, domination and glory, and allows his subjects to enjoy security, honour, wealth and women. The well-habituated citizens of a republic secure themselves through obeying its laws and the holders of public office. At the same time, however, the political order that provides these goods remains shot through with conflict because of the necessity by which human ambition asserts itself. To a political realist, the natural condition of licence seeps through the interstices of political order. This seepage is most evident in republics when ambition corrupts good customs, for customs exist only contingently as second nature, whereas ambition exists necessarily as first nature. For instance, the tyrannical rule of the Ten in ancient Rome shows how easily men are corrupted and make themselves assume a contrary [second] nature, however good and well brought up, considering how much the youths that Appius [the leader of the Ten] had chosen around him began to be friendly to the tyranny for the little utility that came to them from it, and how Quintus Fabius . . . though a very good man, blinded by a little ambition and persuaded by the malignity of Appius, changed his good customs to the worst, and became like him. (Machiavelli 1996: 90–1) To maintain good customs that sustain republics for any length of time, they must be periodically renewed by a ‘return toward the beginning’ (Machiavelli 1996: 209): that is, a return to the dread of punishment that initially made people obey the laws to which they subsequently became habituated. More precisely, habit-renewing fear needs to be instilled in regular intervals by the ‘excessive and notable’ executions of citizens who disobeyed the laws or conspired against the republic (Machiavelli 1996: 210). However, punitive returns to the beginning can forestall corruption only for so long, for, every so often, licentious deeds will go unpunished, and a few more citizens will lose their law-abiding habits. Hence, ‘because one cannot give a certain remedy for such disorders that arise in republics, it follows that it is impossible to order a perpetual republic, because its ruin is caused through a thousand unexpected ways’ (Machiavelli 1996: 257). Another inevitable source of domestic conflict is the perpetual strife between the humour of the great and the humour of the people: The grave and natural enmities that exist between the men of the people and the nobles, caused by the wish of the latter to command and the former not to obey, are the cause of all evils that arise in cities. For from this diversity of humours all other things that agitate republics take their nourishment. (Machiavelli 1988: 105) The conflict between the great and the people also occurs in principalities, giving the prince an opportunity to enhance his power by aligning himself with one humour against the other. According to Machiavelli, a prince should align himself with the people against the great, for the great, who are the prince’s natural rivals, are few and thus more easily controlled, and the people are more easily satisfied, for ‘whenever one does not take away either the property or honour from the generality of men, they live content and one has only to contend with the ambition of the few’ (Machiavelli 1998: 72). Finally, rulers have always to reckon with conspiracies to kill and overthrow them. The causes of conspiracies, and therewith of the conflict they bring about, are

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fourfold: the desire for vengeance for an injury received at the hand of the prince, such as injuries in ‘property, in blood, or in honour’; a ‘necessity [that] constrains you to do to the prince that which you see the prince would like to do to you’ – that is, strike pre-emptively in the face of imminent threat; ‘the desire to free the fatherland that has been seized by [a prince]’; and a sheer ‘greed for dominating’ – that is, for becoming prince oneself (Machiavelli 1996: 219, 226, 220, 222).

The Outward Deflection of Ambition There is a limit to how much human ambition can be satisfied inside a political order. In a principality, domination and glory are mostly enjoyed by princes. In republics, citizens can gain glory or, at least, a good reputation for proposing a good law, advising the assembly well, ably serving in public office or defending the civil way of life against usurpers. They can enjoy a limited amount of domination by serving in ruling positions and they can gain a measure of wealth. However, too much inequality in wealth, glory or domination undermines a civil way of life; thus, ‘those republics in which a political and uncorrupt way of life is maintained do not endure that any citizen of theirs either be or live in the usage of a gentleman; indeed, they maintain among themselves an even equality’ (Machiavelli 1996: 111). To satisfy ambitions that go beyond these limits, princes, subjects and citizens need to turn toward the foreign realm, which offers nearly endless opportunities for acquiring glory by excelling in battle or conquering empire, for savouring domination by subduing and ruling other peoples, and for amassing wealth by plundering rich cities and extracting tribute. This outward deflection of ambition finds an allegorical expression in Machiavelli’s poem ‘Of Ambition’: When a region lives unbridled by its nature, and then, by accident, is instructed and ordered by good laws, ambition uses against outside people that fury which to use inside neither the law nor the king consent; wherefore one’s own evil almost always ceases; but [ambition] is sure to keep disturbing the home of others, wherever her fury puts down the banner. (Machiavelli 1992: 985) Conversely, it is the ability to vent their ambition abroad that enables people to keep order at home by sparing their fellow subjects and citizens. This need to vent ambition abroad holds especially true for republics because they lack the coercive hand of a prince to keep people in line. As a result, republics are more aggressive in foreign affairs than principalities: ‘of all hard servitudes, that is hardest that submits you to a republic’ because the ‘end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body’ (Machiavelli 1996: 133). Hence, the deeper purpose of republican institutions is to organise the natural efforts of people at satisfying their ambition in such a way that they collectively generate a far greater amount of glory, dominion and wealth than they could have attained by proceeding individually. Instead of cancelling their efforts by fighting each other in a natural condition of licence, individuals are aggregated into a political order that enables them to combine their energies and jointly exploit those who have remained outside. It is in this sense that Machiavelli’s republic, which is his best regime, can be called a ‘well-ordered licence’: that is, a political order that organises people’s licentious impulses so that they can be gratified more effectively by a collective effort (Fischer

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2000: 145–7). Accordingly, when Machiavelli praises liberty and defines it as selfgovernment under laws, he really speaks of an institutionalised kind of licence that places its exploitative burden on foreigners. ‘It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for the free way of life, for it is seen through experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom’ (Machiavelli 1996: 129).

The Foreign Condition of Licence By nature, human beings live in a condition of licence. As princes impose order on groups of individuals, they enter into political orders wherein licence is suppressed to a large extent. Between these orders, licence continues unabated. Hence, the foreign realm is in a state of licence, akin to the anarchy of the realist theory of international relations. In the state of licence among individuals, the latter enter into conflict from two fundamental reasons: ambition and striking first from fear of others. In the foreign state of licence, these two causes of conflict reappear: ‘war is made on a republic for two reasons: one, to become master of it; the other, for fear lest it seize you’ (Machiavelli 1996: 22). Machiavelli’s explanation of war from ambition is straightforward: Cities use force against each other in order to satisfy the desires of princes and citizens for glory, domination and wealth. ‘The intention of whoever makes war through choice – or, in truth, ambition – is to acquire and to maintain the acquisition, and to proceed with so that it enriches . . . the country’ (Machiavelli 1996: 140). Machiavelli’s explanation of war from fear is innovative and involved. It begins with the assumption that the capabilities of states that are close enough to cause harm are threatening in themselves, regardless of the professed or surmised intentions of those who possess them; for, in the absence of central protection, we can never be certain that the others will not use their capabilities to our detriment, either presently or in the future. Thus, when the commercially minded magistrates of Florence wanted to cut military expenditures, arguing that ‘we are under the [French] king’s protection, and our enemies are extinguished, [Cesare Borgia] has no reason to attack us’, Machiavelli advised them that ‘such an opinion cannot be more temerarious, because every city, every state must consider as enemies all those who can hope to be able to occupy what is hers, and against whom she cannot defend herself’ (Machiavelli 1992: 12). When faced with such a threat from the capabilities of others, ingenuity and imagination suggest, at a minimum, acquiring military forces of such strength that would-be aggressors will think that the risks and costs of attacking outweigh the possible gains. In other words, the readiest way to secure oneself in the absence of central protection is a strategy of deterrence. In a piece of advice to the Florentine magistrate, Machiavelli makes the following case for deterrence: The remedy is to make the forces be in such order that [the French king] has to have respect for you in each of his decisions, as [he does] for the others of Italy, and not – by remaining disarmed – give spirit to someone powerful to demand you from the king as booty . . . but to act in a mode that he has to esteem you, and that others will not think of subjugating you. (Machiavelli 1992: 12)

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But deterrence is not quite enough. The reason lies with the fact that weapons acquired for deterrence can usually be used for aggression as well. Since one state can never be certain that the deterrence capability of another will not be used offensively, capabilities acquired for the sake of mere deterrence inherently create a threat to other states as well. In addition, since the latter states are likely to respond to this threat by strengthening their own capabilities in turn, there arises a spiral of arms build-up and perception of threat, which erupts into war as soon as one state believes that the likely cost of suffering an attack exceeds that of carrying out a pre-emptive strike. In Machiavelli’s words, ‘the fear of one power brought the growth of someone weak, and when that one had grown, he was to be feared, and being feared they sought to bring him down’ (Machiavelli 1988: 63). In short, the effort to gain security by deterrence generates insecurity as an unintended consequence. To cope with this problem, Machiavelli first enquires whether a state could avoid war by acquiring enough power to deter but not so much power as to pose a threat: I would well believe that to make a republic that would last for a long time, the mode would be to order it within like Sparta or like Venice; to settle it in a strong place of such power that nobody would believe he could crush it at once. On the other hand, it would not be so great as to be formidable to its neighbors; and so it could enjoy its state at length. (Machiavelli 1996: 22) Machiavelli’s mention of a ‘strong place’ suggests in particular that the best way to prevent one’s capabilities from provoking war is to make it physically impossible to use them offensively: for instance, by relying mostly on natural defences, such as mountains, rivers or oceans. However, having made this suggestion, Machiavelli immediately rejects it as a practical impossibility. The sheer contingency of politics makes it impossible to strike an exact balance between inviting aggression through weakness and provoking war through strength: If the thing could be held balanced in this mode, it would be the true political life and the true quiet of a city . . . [But] since one cannot, as I believe, balance this thing, nor maintain this middle way exactly, in ordering a republic there is need to think of the more honorable part and to order it so that if indeed necessity brings it to expand, it can conserve what it has seized. [Hence,] it is necessary to follow the Roman order [of acquiring empire]. (Machiavelli 1996: 23) Further, standing on the defensive only cannot truly secure a city. Given the contingency of warfare, a city needs to possess at least a margin of superiority to be reasonably secure; and such a margin requires the holding of territory that the enemy could otherwise use to extract resources or to stage its troops. And to acquire such a security belt is to acquire empire because there will always be another territory from which aggression could be launched against one. Hence, the empire advances until it is checked by a formidable foe. In addition, argues Machiavelli, if a city were fortunate enough to keep the peace by a strategy of deterrence, it would lose its military prowess or lapse into civil strife from want of external adversity:

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On the other hand, if heaven were so kind that [a republic] did not have to make war, from that would arise the idleness to make it either effeminate or divided; these two things together, or each by itself, would be the cause of its ruin. (Machiavelli 1996: 23) Finally, cities cannot avoid being drawn into the wars of others by staying neutral because neutrals make enemies of the losers, who could have needed their help, and appear easy prey to the winners: ‘he who stays neutral comes to be hated by him who loses, and depreciated by him who wins, like one who needs not be taken into account and is estimated to be a useless friend and a non-formidable enemy’ (Machiavelli 1992: 1184). The concrete inference that Machiavelli draws from his discussion is uncompromising: since wars of imperial expansion cannot be avoided, the advantage must be gained by beginning them on one’s own terms: The Romans, seeing inconveniences from afar, always found remedies for them and never allowed them to continue so as to escape a war, because they knew war may not be avoided but is deferred to the advantage of others. So they decided to make war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece in order not to have to do so in Italy. (Machiavelli 1998: 12–13) Overall, fear for preservation thus leads to the same outcome as ambition: the aggressive quest for empire. The foreign condition of licence is fundamentally a struggle for domination.

Conclusion As a man of the Renaissance, Machiavelli sought to recover the political life of antiquity. However, his realist commitment to the effectual truth of political order – as opposed to the imagination of it – turned him away from the virtue tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. Instead, he looked to ancient historians, such as Livy, Sallust and Polybius, to find out what really happened. In addition, he looked through a glass darkly because of what he had witnessed in Italian politics. As a result, he derived his political theory from two pessimistic premises. First, human beings are insatiably ambitious due to the inflammation of their desires by the mind, and they readily aggress against one another from ambition and mutual fear. In other words, Machiavelli replaced the ancient idea of human beings as they ought and could be if they developed their natural capacities for the virtues with an assumption of human beings as they really are. Gone also is the ancient, as well as Christian, idea that the world is a beneficial order that gives support to the human striving for the good. Rather, and this is the second premise, there is a fickle entity called Fortune who occultly makes contingency prevail in human affairs. But rather than despair over this unfortunate situation, Machiavelli called on men of virtù, those of prudence and spirit who know how to seize opportunities, to impose order on the natural condition of licence by entering into the necessary evils of violence and deceit, and excused their evil deeds by the good consequences that political order has for its subjects. The resulting principalities and republics fall far short of the ancient ideal of communities that realise justice and the other virtues.

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The reason for this shortfall is not only that princes as well as republican leaders continue to find it necessary to make use of the reason of state but also, more fundamentally, that Machiavelli’s political order aims at nothing more than satisfying the human desires for security, glory, domination and wealth. Indeed, his republic essentially institutionalises the ambitious strivings of human beings, so that they pursue them jointly by attacking, despoiling and lording it over foreigners rather than exhausting themselves in internecine strife. Machiavelli’s republic does not suppress licence; it organises it. This organisation of licence through laws and institutions is never fully effective because ambition tempts people to take advantage not only of foreigners but of fellow citizens as well. Further, Machiavelli’s idea of organised licence suffers from the flaw that ambition is insatiable, as he readily admits, and yet he teaches people to satisfy their ambitions as much as possible, thereby condemning them to everlasting discontent. To his credit, Machiavelli recognised this problem: Nature has created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything. So, since the desire is always greater than the power of acquiring, the result is discontent with what one possesses and a lack of satisfaction with it. (Machiavelli 1996: 78) But he could not find an enduring solution because his stunted assumptions about human nature do not allow for what the virtue tradition calls the goods of the soul – virtuous traits of character such as wisdom, justice, courage, moderation, generosity and the like. The difference between pursuing the goods of the soul and pursuing glory, power and wealth, which could also be called the goods of Fortune, is twofold. First, as we just heard from Machiavelli himself, people who have reached a certain level of power, glory and wealth are never satisfied because these things are merely means to the attainment of pleasures that pass. In contrast, one who has attained wisdom or courage rests content because these virtues are ends in themselves. Second, people who reach for the goods of the soul find that their possession by others enhances rather than diminishes their own enjoyment. For instance, people who seek justice and moderation enjoy the justice and moderation they find in others, and they become friends. In contrast, people who seek power, glory and wealth feel diminished by the power, glory and wealth of others, and they become rivals.

Bibliography Berlin, Isaiah (1972), ‘The originality of Machiavelli’, in Myron P. Gilmore (ed.), Studies on Machiavelli, Florence: Sansoni, pp. 147–206. Fischer, Markus (2000), Well-Ordered Licence: On the Unity of Machiavelli’s Thought, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Hobbes, Thomas (1994) [1651], Leviathan, Indianapolis: Hackett. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1988) [1525], Florentine Histories, translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1992), Tutte le opere, Florence: Sansoni. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1996) [ca. 1517], Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Machiavelli, Niccolò (1998) [1513], The Prince, 2nd edn, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò (2003) [1521], Art of War, translated by Christopher Lynch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parel, Anthony J. (1992), The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Post, Gaines (1964), Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael (1973), ‘Political action: The problem of dirty hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 160–80.

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14 William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Machiavellian universe Tim Spiekerman

Chapter Overview

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any of Shakespeare’s plays are dominated by the violent struggles of ambitious men for power. War, assassination, deception and moral licence are so common that Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince about fifty years before Shakespeare was born, proves a useful guide when thinking about his plays. Like Machiavelli, Shakespeare offers a forbiddingly realistic picture of how politics is likely to be practised, whether in England, Scotland or ancient Rome. Alongside the clash of interests, Shakespeare also depicts the moral and religious ideas that move both political actors and ordinary citizens or subjects. Politics, for Shakespeare, is rarely conducted in a moral way but that does not seem to affect our desire that it should be. *

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Modern literature tends to concentrate on private life, on matters of the heart and conscience. Shakespeare, like Homer and Virgil before him and Tolstoy after, belongs to an older literary tradition where public life is of central concern. The characters in his plays will thus often be political and military actors – kings and generals, diplomats and soldiers – and the settings battlefields and courts. This is not to say that Shakespeare ignores the private and domestic but the connection to politics is never far away: King Lear’s struggles with his family’s love and loyalty are sparked by his decision to relinquish the throne, Romeo and Juliet’s love is doomed because their families belong to rival Italian political factions, and Duke Prospero watches his daughter fall in love and marry on a magical island because his brother seized power from him in Milan. While the plots of Shakespeare’s plays are often either directly political or framed by political concerns, it is hard to say what his personal views are, mostly because he never speaks in his own voice. It might even be the case that Shakespeare is less interested in promoting a particular agenda or cause than he is in describing things the way they are. But in describing political matters the way they are, Shakespeare might be said to embrace a kind of realism. I mean this in a couple of different ways. First, his most overtly political plays are historically realistic, as he bases them on historical accounts. The English history plays, as well as Macbeth, are based on Holinshed’s Chronicles, the Roman plays on Plutarch’s Lives. Second, Shakespeare’s depiction of politics is realistic in the most obvious or basic way – politics, on his account, is a rough business. This seems to be true, no matter when and where a given play is set.

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Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince at the beginning of the same century in which Shakespeare wrote most of his plays, seems everywhere evident in the Shakespearean corpus. This need not mean that Shakespeare was himself a Machiavellian, but many of his characters certainly are,1 and the general political outlook is rather pessimistic. ‘The recurrent political tragedy portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays’, one critic observes, ‘is that somehow the evil characters push their way to the top of the political order, while the morally good and humane characters either fail to achieve rule, or, if they do, cannot maintain it properly’ (Cantor 1993: 37). As Weber put it hundreds of years later, politics is a unique sphere with its own special rules; it operates according to its own logic rather than our hopes (Weber 1977). Shakespeare seems to agree. In his dramas, morality usually takes a back seat to ambition, war is the rule rather than the exception, and idealistic hopes often prove to be utopian dreams. In what follows, I will discuss Shakespeare’s kinship with Machiavelli, who claimed to have a more realistic understanding of politics than pre-modern thinkers. The ‘effectual truth’ about politics, Machiavelli contends, is the skilful use of force and fraud in the service of ambition (Machiavelli 1985: Ch. 15). One might arrive at the same view, I will argue, by reading Shakespeare. In conclusion, I will offer some cautionary remarks about how Shakespeare’s political realism differs from more modern and optimistic varieties. While it would be going too far to suggest that Shakespeare has anything like a doctrine, he paints a fairly consistent picture of what we can hope and expect from politics, and what we cannot. While it is not certain that Shakespeare read Machiavelli, translations of his major political works were available and read by educated English people at the time he was writing, and Shakespeare refers directly to Machiavelli three times in his plays.2 He may even have borrowed the plot of Measure for Measure from the famous Cesare Borgia/Remirro de Orca story recounted in The Prince.3 But as I noted above, Shakespeare writes about politics in a recognisably Machiavellian way, as if he were exploring Machiavellian themes on the stage. Machiavelli is most famous for the bold and subversive way he talks about morality. He claims he is simply being realistic, noting that ‘he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation’. Princes, he concludes, must ‘learn to be able not to be good’: that is, they must ‘know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity’ (Machiavelli 1985: Chs 15 and 18). Most of the politicians Shakespeare portrays are realistic in just this way – they are somehow morally challenged – so the vexed relationship between politics and morality is regularly on Shakespeare’s mind. Since both Machiavelli and Shakespeare were writing at a time when the Church was extraordinarily powerful and Christian moral teaching respectable and pervasive, treating politics ‘realistically’ inevitably risked offending traditional moral sensibilities. If Machiavelli revels in this, Shakespeare is more circumspect, but both are aware of the stakes. As Weber puts it, ‘The genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love . . . .’ Machiavelli, Weber approvingly notes, knew politics might require the kind of moral compromise that would bar one from heaven, and praised those courageous and resolute enough to pursue such a course: ‘Machiavelli in a beautiful passage . . . of the History of Florence, has one of his heroes praise those citizens who deemed the greatness of their native city higher than the salvation of their souls’ (Weber 1977: 126). Machiavelli is famously blunt in explaining the nature of ‘moral compromise’. Should a prince acquire a new territory, for example, he ‘must have

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two concerns: one, that the blood line of their ancient prince be eliminated; the other, not to alter either their laws or their taxes’ (Machiavelli 1985: Ch. 3). Low taxes and thorough assassinations! Shakespeare’s dramatisation of such advice lacks the coolness of Machiavelli’s presentation, but among other things we learn in the intense play Macbeth is that Macbeth killed the King but was vanquished by his blood line. In the less read but more brutally direct King John, the illegitimate King decides he can retain power only by assassinating his twelve-year-old rival, Arthur: Good Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye On yon young boy: I’ll tell thee what, my friend, He is a very serpent in my way; And wheresoe’r this foot of mine doth tread He lies before me: dost thou understand me? (King John: III, ii, 69–73)4 In fact, assassination is rife in Shakespeare’s plays, and he often seems to support it (Julius Caesar) or at least to understand its necessity in particular situations (‘That John may stand, then, Arthur needs must fall’: III, 3, 139).5 In Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke deposes and executes the legitimate king, and Shakespeare seems to side with Henry over Richard.6 Once he becomes king, Henry IV finds himself at war with the Percys, who helped him seize the throne. Machiavelli explains the dilemma: ‘you cannot keep as friends those who have put you there because you cannot satisfy them in the mode they had presumed’ (Machiavelli 1985: Ch. 3). Those dissatisfied enough to revolt and expecting more than is possible as thanks will be a thorn in a new ruler’s side. The nobles who put Henry IV in power thus recognise that it is them or him. After two wars, it turns out to be him. Henry’s son and heir, Henry V, will fight a war with France in order to divert his family’s remaining noble opponents. If Machiavelli is perhaps best known for celebrating the necessity and effectiveness of brute force in politics, he puts equal or perhaps even greater emphasis on fraud. ‘Force alone’, he says, may not ever ‘be enough, but fraud alone will be found to be quite enough’ (Machiavelli 1996: II.13.1). One of the most shocking examples of the successful use of fraud in Shakespeare comes in Henry IV, Part Two. In the second war against the illegitimate usurper Henry IV, alluded to above, Prince John meets with the rebel army and promises, ‘by the honor of [his] blood’, that the King will address their grievances so long as both armies retreat and disband. When the rebels comply, John double-crosses them, pursuing the ‘scatt’red stray’ and capturing and executing their leaders (Henry IV, Part Two: IV, 2, 55; IV, 3, 120). Interestingly, Shakespeare provides no commentary on this scene; when news of John’s victory is relayed to the King, no mention is made of John’s treachery.7 In Antony and Cleopatra, the leaders of the Roman Empire (Octavius, Antony and Lepidas) are all on the rebel Pompey’s boat, negotiating their collective futures, when Pompey’s aide Menas takes him aside and asks, ‘Wilt thou be lord of the whole world?’ When Pompey responds, ‘How should that be?’ Menas explains his plan: These three world-sharers, these competitors, Are in thy vessel. Let me cut the cable; And when we are put off, fall to their throats. All there is thine. (The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra: II, 7, 60, 64, 72–4)

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Pompey wishes Menas had acted without asking him – ‘this thou should have done,/ And not have spoke on’t’ (II, 7, 75) – but is unable to order the assassinations himself. Octavius Caesar will eventually prevail over Pompey,8 as well as Lepidus and Antony. As these examples show, Shakespeare not only dramatises the same moral dilemmas that preoccupy Machiavelli, but also seems sympathetic to the ugly political necessities that Machiavelli stresses. He does not, it is true, celebrate John’s treachery or condemn Pompey’s honourable restraint,9 but he lets us know who wins and who loses, and why. Machiavelli tries to redefine virtue as political skill, which partly means re-evaluating particular virtues,10 but mostly means knowing when it is necessary to depart from traditional morality – and, equally crucially, when it is not – and how to cover one’s tracks and conceal one’s perfidy from the people.11 This a difficult skill to acquire and exercise consistently, as moral forces are stubbornly powerful; even bad guys suffer the pangs of conscience, often at exactly the wrong time.12 We must ‘learn how not to be good’ and that is not easy (Machiavelli 1985: Ch. 15, emphasis mine). Most generally, virtue is a kind of supreme control, which Machiavelli contrasts with fortune: that is, powers outside of our control. He likens fortune to a violent river overflowing its banks and notes that, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton or damaging. Among those powers outside of our control, Machiavelli is surely thinking of God, or belief in God. Fortune, he says, ‘shows her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her’, which suggests not only that fortune can be resisted but also that it is best understood as a lack of virtue (Machiavelli 1985: Ch. 25). In Macbeth and Julius Caesar, Shakespeare explores fortune’s power, in both cases suggesting that our belief in superhuman forces is more powerful – and more damaging – than those forces themselves. Macbeth’s ambition to rule Scotland is ignited by an odd meeting with three witches who predict his success. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth murders the sitting King, Duncan, but fails to move against his son, who escapes to England and eventually returns to claim the kingship for himself. Macbeth’s plans for taking and keeping power are inadequate because he thinks he is assured of success. When the witches prophesy that he will retain power unless some seemingly impossible conditions are met, Macbeth is satisfied that he is invulnerable. Still, he acts to defend himself, attempting to kill the family of a potential opponent (the son escapes) and raising an army to resist Malcolm and his English troops. Even though he appears to fall apart after the murder of Duncan and is later haunted by the ghost of a man he murdered, Macbeth, unlike his wife, does recover and attempts to provide for his own security. In showing us how powerful fortune can be – it can lead us to think things that are not true and do things we would not otherwise do – Shakespeare also shows us that we have no choice but to act on our own behalf. Macbeth is caught in between, believing that a happy future is foreordained, but realising too that he must act to bring it about and preserve it. This is not, to be sure, the lesson a viewer of Macbeth is most likely to

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take from the play, which seems more obviously about the dangers of supreme ambition and the power of conscience. But Shakespeare’s Macbeth overcomes his moral misgivings and the historical Macbeth, as Shakespeare well knew, ruled for nearly twenty years. Brutus and Cassius, who assassinate Julius Caesar in order to preserve the Roman republic, do not overcome their moral misgivings. Cassius is haunted by ominous bird signs and Brutus by what he thinks is Caesar’s ghost, both portending their ruin. Machiavelli suggests that such ‘false imaginations’ arise from a ‘stained conscience’ that ‘perturbs [one’s] spirit’ (1996: III.6.16).13 Each eventually commits suicide, convinced that superhuman forces – what Machiavelli calls fortune – are aligned against them. Their superstitious belief that they are doomed, rather than any military necessity, is what finally defeats them. As Montaigne says of the historical actors, ‘Cassius and Brutus demolished the last remnants of Roman liberty, of which they were the protectors, by the rash haste with which they killed themselves before the proper time and occasion’ (Montaigne 2003: 310).14 A third fundamental Machiavellian distinction, between the people and the great, also proves useful when thinking about Shakespeare’s political vision. Machiavelli holds that there is a permanent gulf between the people and the great, almost as if they belonged to different species: ‘[I]n every city these two diverse humors are found, which arises from this: that the people neither desire to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people’ (1985: Ch. 9, emphasis mine). The people just want to be left alone, but the great (or ambitious) want not only to rule but also to oppress them. The two classes or types of human beings thus have different interests: they want fundamentally different things. In addition to security, the people desire and expect their rulers to be more moral than they typically are or often can be. This may be due to the fact that the people, who are uninterested in ruling, do not have to think much about political necessity and so assume that politics can be practised with more delicacy and rectitude than is always possible. Whatever the cause, the people are less tolerant of departures from morality than the ambitious are,15 which means they will always be subject to the moral appeals of those vying to rule them. This is a prescription for constant instability, as those who lack power can always claim to be morally superior to those in charge. Because it lacks its own army, the Church is more reliant on moral appeals than others, and Shakespeare often depicts the political meddling of religious officials in just this manner. In King John, for example, the Pope’s emissary persuades the people of England that God wants their ruler replaced by convincing them that events in the sky he knows to be natural are the ‘tongues of heaven,/Plainly denouncing vengeance upon John’ (III, 3, 58–9). In Henry V, the leaders of the Church endorse Henry’s crooked claim to the French throne in exchange for land, lending moral authority to a cause they know to be suspect and so generating popular enthusiasm for war. The most optimistic reading of The Prince, to which I largely subscribe, holds that the interests of the people and their rulers are, or at least can be, compatible. Thus Machiavelli repeatedly emphasises that a ruler who benefits the people is most secure.16 Since the people just want to be left alone, and since there are a lot more of them, Machiavelli tries to persuade the ambitious to moderate their desires in order to stay in power. Mostly, this means departing from morality or offending the people only when

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it is strictly necessary, versus simply desirable.17 Rather shockingly, Machiavelli suggests that the people will be more offended by the confiscation of their property than by political killings, as ‘men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony’ (1985: Ch. 17). While Richard II murdered Henry Bolingbroke’s uncle, Bolingbroke makes Richard’s theft of his father’s estate the centrepiece of his campaign to depose him. Machiavelli’s optimism about the compatibility of popular and elite interests also arises out of his confidence that the ambitious can usually conceal their departures from morality, or explain them as necessary for the public good. ‘[M]en are so simple’, he says, ‘and so obedient to present necessities that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived’ (1985: Ch. 18).18 Shakespeare, in my view, is more pessimistic about any serious accommodation between the people and the ambitious, and more suspicious of the rational politics toward which Machiavelli points. Perhaps this is a matter of tone, as Machiavelli writes cheerfully about everything, even the most dreadful matters, while Shakespeare is more sombre. This is especially true in the English history plays, which catalogue an unremitting and violent struggle for power. But that is the case, in those plays and others, because Shakespeare consistently identifies the people and the great with contrary qualities that are deep-seated and persistent. He portrays the people as fickle, superstitious and easy to manipulate. Shakespeare seems especially critical of the mob, as is evident in the famous (for other reasons) line from Henry VI: ‘the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (Henry VI, Part II: IV, 2). Julius Caesar opens with the Tribunes attempting, with little success, to dissuade the people from celebrating Caesar’s military victory over a fellow Roman, an unprecedented betrayal of Roman tradition. Later, the people surround a man they think helped kill Caesar. ‘I am Cinna the poet!’ he says. ‘I am not Cinna the conspirator.’ ‘It is no matter,’ comes a voice from the crowd. ‘Tear him to pieces,’ says another (The Tragedy of Julius Caesar: III, 3, 28–33). Only a few minutes earlier, after listening to Brutus’ explanation that Caesar had to die in order to preserve republican freedom, people in the crowd had suggested making Brutus king. Machiavelli’s hope that the ambitious can moderate their behaviour also seems, on the evidence of Shakespeare’s plays, to be wishful thinking. Shakespeare dramatises the scene in which Julius Caesar, with Marc Antony’s help, tries to get the people to ask him to become king. Caesar already had sole power in Rome (the republic was never officially disbanded) and the love of the people, the senate and army, but vanity compelled him to seek an official title. Playing coy and pretending to be uninterested in the crown, Caesar is stunned (he actually faints) to find that the people do not want him to be king, preferring the illusion that he served at their pleasure. Later, he has the senate make him emperor, but according to Plutarch, ‘the most open and deadly hatred towards [Caesar] was produced by his passion for royal power’ (Plutarch 1919: 60). Brutus, he further suggests, might have prevailed over Caesar with simple patience, ‘suffering his power to wane and the fame of his successes to wither’ (Plutarch 1918: 8).19 Richard II seems unable to restrain himself from lavish spending on court favourites – ‘more hath he spent in peace’, a nobleman says, ‘than . . . [his predecessors] . . . in war’ – and is referred to by a gardener as ‘the wasteful king’ (The Tragedy of King Richard the Second: II, 1, 255; III, 4, 55). Henry V, as noted earlier, wages war with France in order to detract attention from his lack of a legitimate claim to the throne. Both Richard II and Henry V, in Shakespeare’s view, behave this way because they think they deserve to

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rule. Henry is a far better politician than Richard is, but he is no less humble and can match Richard in moralising sermons about his deservedness. As has been evident, in his depiction of politics Shakespeare always has ambition on his mind. For modern audiences, this is probably more foreign than familiar. In a democratic age, we reflexively assume that politicians are supposed to pursue our interests rather than their own. Of course, we often complain that ‘they’re all in it for themselves’ or ‘they only think of re-election’, which might indicate a kind of grudging acceptance of their nature or at least their common tendencies, but we still think of ourselves as ultimately in charge and expect politicians to acknowledge that they are our servants. That world has not yet arrived in Shakespeare’s time, though Machiavelli, as we saw above, instructs the ambitious to think of their own benefit in concert with the benefit of the people. The ‘ruler-centric’ view expressed in Shakespeare’s plays can be seen most readily in their titles: of his thirty-eight plays, more than half are named after rulers. The point of view is announced at the outset and the struggle to get or keep power forms the plot of many of Shakespeare’s play. That is to say, the question of who will rule – John or Arthur, Richard or Bolingbroke, Macbeth or Malcolm – often seems to be Shakespeare’s primary concern. When trying to explain the meaning and importance of non-elite actors in many of Shakespeare’s more political plays, critics often speak of ‘comic relief’, as if we need a break from the serious tension of the real plot. Machiavelli famously observes that ‘truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed’ (1985: Ch. 3). Shakespeare seems to agree with at least the first part of this statement, that ambition is natural and so ineradicable. Readers of his plays thus become accustomed to the ambitious contest for power, so much so that one is likely to think that that is what politics mostly is for Shakespeare. Shakespeare thus describes politics in a recognisably Machiavellian way, though he does not cheerfully recommend such behaviour, as Machiavelli does, but simply describes things as he and his sources see them. We can assume (or hope) that Shakespeare finds this all appalling, but such a reaction at least implies that things could be otherwise, and Shakespeare gives us little reason to think that is so. Perhaps, then, he just finds it depressing, as readers, at least, often do. In Julius Caesar, however, Shakespeare at least hints that things could be otherwise. In that play, he celebrates Marcus Brutus, a moral politician (‘the noblest Roman of them all’, V, 5, 68) who tries to preserve the Roman republic from descending into tyranny. Brutus fails, but Shakespeare suggests that the cause for which he fought, republican liberty, might have a future: ‘I shall have glory by this losing day/More than Octavius and Marc Antony/By this vile conquest shall attain unto’ (V, 5, 36–8). Earlier in the play, just after the republicans have killed Julius Caesar, Brutus asks, ‘How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,/That now on Pompey’s basis lies along/ No worthier than the dust?’ ‘So oft as shall be,’ Cassius responds, ‘So often shall the knot of us be called/The men that gave their country liberty’ (III, 1, 114–17). Nothing like these lines are to be found in Plutarch, and Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that the production of his play, where Caesar shall ‘bleed in sport’, can help keep the republican cause alive – even in a modern Europe dominated by monarchies. Thus it may not be the case that Shakespeare never reveals any political preferences, that he stands above the political fray but does not take sides. And if an idea that is defeated

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in one time can rise in another, politics is not simply a matter of ambitious men vying for power, but about principles and causes. Thought can move men to action. As the grandfather of realism, Machiavelli is mostly identified with the view that politics is the arena where force rules. And yet he gives as much, if not more, attention to the political power of thought, particularly moral and religious thought, which affects both rulers and ruled. Even the most savvy and worldly politicians can find themselves stricken by conscience, or given to trust, or worried about what a priest – or God himself – might think of their actions. And because the people are typically more moral and religious than their rulers, Machiavelli advises princes to conceal their departures from morality by pretending to be religious. In an infamous passage in The Prince, he even seems to recommend the persecution of religious minorities in order to satisfy the partisan fervour of the majority. King Ferdinand’s practice of ‘pious cruelty’ toward Muslims and Jews, Machiavelli notes, catapulted him from being a ‘weak king’ to ‘the first king among the Christians’ (1985: Ch. 21). While catering to the religious prejudice of one’s subjects can be very effective, Machiavelli at least hints that it is unnecessarily cruel. Earlier in The Prince, he recommends that harsh or cruel behaviour be swift and limited, and used only when strictly necessary.20 Persecution of heretics, to the contrary, can go on forever, like the tortures of Hell that Machiavelli is surely also thinking of. He ends the chapter on pious cruelty with a striking contrast, counselling a prince to, inspire his citizens to follow their pursuits quietly, in trade and in agriculture and in every other pursuit of men, so that one person does not fear to adorn his possessions for fear that they will be taken away from him, and another to open up a trade for fear of taxes. (1985: Ch. 21) Rulers can appeal to our religious zeal or they can appeal to our desire for calm and material wellbeing. Both can move us, and both can be effective, but the success of the latter and comparatively more decent appeal will probably depend on our view of priests and the God they serve. Peace and prosperity are easier to seek and enjoy when we are not being constantly reminded of eternal damnation. In an effort to turn the political temperature down, Machiavelli initiates the Enlightenment critique of religion that will dominate modern thought for the next several centuries.21 Shakespeare also seems interested in turning the temperature down. In King John and Henry V, as noted earlier, he exposes clerics as pious frauds who use their authority to advance their temporal political aims. Richard II tells the story of a king who learns too late that he is not divine: ‘For you have mistook me all this while./I live with bread like you, feel want,/Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus,/ How can you say to me, I am king?’ (III, 2, 171–7). Macbeth learns that he cannot depend on the prophecies of supernatural beings, and Prospero’s supposedly magic powers cannot prevent his exile. Julius Caesar ‘is superstitious grown of late’ (II, 1, 195), and on the eve of his assassination, one of the conspirators is terrified by a meteor shower, which he thinks a ‘portentous’ sign (I, 3, 31).22 After the killing, Brutus is haunted by Caesar’s ghost and Cassius becomes obsessed with bird signs. Like Machiavelli, Shakespeare seems to treat religion in political terms, showing us how it can be useful, and how harmful, to those seeking power. But in exposing the unbelief of ambitious priests and the superstition of political failures, it is

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not clear who exactly Shakespeare expects will notice. Not, it seems, the ordinary people the ambitious aspire to rule, and not, for that matter, many of the ambitious themselves. Machiavelli tries to teach rulers to cleanse themselves of moral and religious scruples, and to obey their interests by promoting the interests of the people. Shakespeare seems less sanguine about this project, which might be why he writes plays rather than how-to manuals for aspiring politicians.

Conclusion I have tried to show throughout that Shakespeare shares much of Machiavelli’s political worldview. Politics, on Shakespeare’s account, is a rather nasty business, filled with violence, intrigue, murder and betrayal. It is ‘a perpetual and restlesse desire for Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death’, to borrow a famous phrase from Hobbes. Hobbes attributes this restless desire to all human beings, though, like Machiavelli, he distinguishes those who take ‘pleasure in contemplating their own power in . . . acts of conquest’ from those who are ‘glad to be at ease in modest bounds’ (Hobbes 1985: Chs 11 and 13). Hobbes hopes to satisfy the modest, who want peace and security, by taming the ambitious. He does so by trying to deflate the moral and religious ideas that allow the ambitious to manipulate the people and which invariably make politics a dangerous and unstable arena. Only if enough of us become convinced that we live in a material world, that the satisfaction of bodily desires is all there is, can a stable, peaceful and rational politics emerge. In advising the ambitious to pretend to be religious, Machiavelli seems dubious about the prospects of Hobbes’s scientific project: dubious, that is, about the ability to disenchant the world so thoroughly.23 Like ambition, the power and allure of moral and religious ideas seem to both Machiavelli and Shakespeare to be permanent features of political life. We cannot wish or explain them away, for they are far more compelling and interesting to most than the material interests with which some modern thinkers hope we can replace them. The political realism of the American Founding Fathers is nicely captured in a line by James Madison: ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary’ (Madison 2003: 319). That we are not reliably good or able to control ourselves seems a depressing, if realistic, assessment. But the Founders’ pessimism about human nature is accompanied by a great optimism that we can temper and counter our defective tendencies through the prudent management of self-interest. Ambition can counteract ambition by dividing governmental power, and conflicting moral and religious ideas can be tempered by multiplying and so diluting their strength. Interests, in other words, can be asserted without harm, much as the pursuit of economic gain for oneself can benefit others. But the prudent management of interest, whether in politics or economics, or on the world stage, ultimately depends on our thinking of ourselves primarily as beings with material interests. Shakespeare just does not see things that way. I noted earlier that he would agree with Machiavelli’s contention that ‘it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire’, though I wondered about the rest of the sentence: ‘and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed’ (1985: Ch. 3). Bolingbroke, John, Macbeth, Caesar and Brutus, to name some of the Shakespearean political figures I have mentioned, are all blamed for their desire to acquire power. Politics, for Shakespeare, is always about making moral judgements; leaving that out of the picture would not be realistic.

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Notes 1. The Machiavelli scholar Harvey Mansfield, for example, refers to ‘Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Prince Hal’ (1966: 318). Harold Bloom says Ulysses (Troilus and Cressida) is ‘frankly a Machiavel’ (1998: 340). Aaron, Iago, Octavius, Richard III, Henry IV and Macbeth, to name a few others, are often called Machiavellian. 2. In Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 3; and The Merry Wives of Windsor. 3. Like Cesare Borgia in the Romagna, Duke Vincentio relies on a brutal hatchet-man to restore order to a lawless Vienna. Instead of executing him to please the people, however, he marries him off to a woman he had scorned. 4. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays will follow the Signet Classics editions. Line references will subsequently appear immediately after the quotations. 5. Arthur is supported by the Pope and the French, and so threatens England’s independence. 6. Queen Elizabeth refused to allow the deposition scene to be staged, convinced it was really about her: ‘I am Richard II, know thee not that?’ Quoted in Peter Ure’s introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard II (Ure 1989). 7. John’s elder brother Hal, who will inherit his father’s throne as Henry V, is not present at this battle. One wonders if he would have resisted such an act for fear it would taint his reputation. 8. As Julius Caesar prevailed over Pompey’s father. At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar uses a religious holiday to celebrate his recent victory in Spain over Pompey the Great’s sons. 9. Honour, Falstaff says in his most famous speech, is likely to get you killed: ‘What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air – a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday’ (The History of Henry IV, Part One V, 1, 135–6). 10. Liberality or generosity, for example, is usually a vice, as it eventually requires taxing the people to fund lavish royal gifts. Stinginess, since it spares the public purse, can be seen as a virtue. See Machiavelli (1985: Ch. 16). 11. Shakespeare’s Henry V is especially adept at this. See my treatment in Spiekerman (2001: Ch. 5). 12. After murdering their political rivals, King John and the Macbeths fall apart. On the eve of his battle with the French at Agincourt, the outnumbered Henry V worries that God might punish him for his father’s murder of King Richard II: ‘Not today, O Lord,/O, not today, think not upon the fault/My father made in compassing the crown!’ (The Life of Henry V IV, 1, 297–9). 13. Machiavelli is referring specifically here to the conspirators’ fear that Caesar has discovered their assassination plot, but the more general point – guilty people imagine all sorts of false things – is relevant to Brutus’ and Cassius’ behaviour after they kill Caesar. 14. See Spiekerman (2013a) for a longer discussion of the play. 15. As I have noted, the ambitious too are often subject to moral claims – they suffer the pangs of conscience – but less consistently. 16. See especially Machiavelli (1985: Ch. 9). 17. It is always desirable to punish one’s enemies and enrich oneself at others’ expense. It is rarely necessary, Machiavelli maintains (see 1985: Ch. 17). 18. Machiavelli advises imitating Pope Alexander, the best moral imposter he knows. 19. At Discourses I.33.4–5, Machiavelli recommends the same course. One should ‘temporize’ with powerful forces (like Julius Caesar) rather than confronting them head on when their strength is overwhelming. 20. Cruelties ‘can be called well used (if it is permissible to speak well of evil) that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can’ (1985: Ch. 8).

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21. Machiavelli criticises Christianity more deeply and directly in The Discourses (see, for example, I.12, II.2.2 and III.1.4) than he does in The Prince, though in both books Christianity is treated as an obstacle to sober and stable politics. 22. Cicero, who is not involved in the plot against Caesar, is delighted by the bright display: ‘Why, saw you anything more wonderful?’ In response to Casca’s fear, he says ‘men may construe things after their fashion,/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (I, 3, 14; 34–5). 23. ‘And truly there was never any orderer of extraordinary laws for a people who did not have recourse to God, because otherwise they would not have been accepted’ (1996: I.11.3). Rousseau quotes this sentence approvingly in his Social Contract (1978: II.7) and later says ‘a State has never been founded without religion serving as its base’ (IV.8).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold (1998), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York: Riverhead. Cantor, Paul (1993), ‘Shakespeare – “For all time”?’, Public Interest, Winter. Hobbes, Thomas (1985), Leviathan, ed. by C. B. Macpherson, London: Penguin. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1985), The Prince, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1996), Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Madison, James (2003), The Federalist Papers, ed. by Clinton Rossiter, New York: Signet Classics, no. 51, p. 319. Mansfield, Harvey C. (1966), Machiavelli’s Virtue, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montaigne, Michel de (2003), ‘Custom of the Isle of Cea’, in Complete Works, translated by Donald M. Frame, New York: Everyman’s Library. Plutarch (1918), ‘The life of Brutus’, in Parallel Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch (1919), ‘The life of Julius Caesar’, in Parallel Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1978), On the Social Contract, ed. by Roger D. Masters, translated by Judith R. Masters, New York: St Martin’s Press. Shakespeare, William (1998a), The History of Henry IV, Part One, ed. by Maynard Mack, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (1998b), The Life of Henry V, ed. by John Russel Brown, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (1998c), The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by Barbara Everett, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (1998d), The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, ed. by William and Barbara Rosen, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (1999), The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, ed. by Kenneth Muir, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (2002), Henry IV, Part Two, ed. by Norman N. Holland, New York: Signet Classics. Shakespeare, William (2004), The Life and Death of King John, ed. by S. Schoenbaum, New York: Signet Classics. Spiekerman, Tim (2001), Shakespeare’s Political Realism, Albany, NY: SUNY. Spiekerman, Tim (2013a), ‘The inevitable monarchy: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’, in Ann and Lee Ward (eds), Natural Right and Political Philosophy, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

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Spiekerman, Tim (2013a), ‘Hotspur and Falstaff v. the politicians: Shakespeare’s view of honor’, in Bernard J. Dobski and Dustin Gish (eds), Shakespeare and the Body Politic, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Ure, Peter (1989), ‘Introduction’, in W. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. by P. Ure, Arden edition, London: Routledge. Weber, Max (1977), ‘Politics as a vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and translated by H. H. Berth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press.

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15 Thomas Hobbes Lupine gods: Hobbes’s honourable political realism about global politics Kody W. Cooper

Chapter Overview

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homas Hobbes is widely regarded as a quintessential figure in the realist tradition. Many commentators understand Hobbes’s realism as coeval with a moral scepticism and legal positivism. This chapter offers an alternative interpretation: namely, that Hobbes espouses an honourable realism in global politics grounded in natural law. The chapter begins with an analysis of Hobbes’s adages that human beings are both godlike and wolflike to one another, and reconsiders Hobbes’s theory of international relations in light of this theme. Hobbes’s realism in international relations is shown to rest on the basis of a realistic philosophy, including a particular conception of human nature and God’s causal relation to the world. Hobbes’s natural law theory provides an independent source of moral principles for distinguishing between honourable and dishonourable power politics. Hobbes’s theory is illustrated by contrasting an ancient and a modern case of power politics. *

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Introduction It is well known that Hobbes is considered one of the major early modern progenitors of realism in international relations, and that the principal twentieth-century realists consider Hobbes as an influence. As Raymond Aron notes, Hobbesian realism about international relations is thought to flow from the logic of the global arena conceived of as a state of nature: Each political unit aspires to survive. Leaders and led are interested and eager to maintain the collectivity they constitute by virtue of history, race, or fortune. . . . We may say that in the state of nature, every entity, whether individual or political unit, makes security a primary objective. (Aron 2003: 72) Since no commonwealth has transferred its sovereignty to a global sovereign, the security of a people is always the charge of a particular commonwealth. From this, Aron contends, ‘national egoism’ logically follows (Aron 2003: 580). Political actors in the

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global arena always act from national self-interest. Hans Morgenthau would add, echoing a Hobbesian theme, that national self-interest is defined in terms of power (Morgenthau 1960: 5). Charles Beitz, who is critical of realism, also traces Hobbes’s influence in the realist tradition and understands these principles to be coeval with a moral scepticism in the global arena (Beitz 1979: 27). Does this mean that sovereigns cannot act from a sense of honour? Aron does not seem to deny this possibility but is quick to point out that each state remains the sole judge of what honour requires (Aron 2003: 580). Meanwhile, a number of alternative readings of Hobbes’s theory of international relations have arisen. Of particular interest is that some of Hobbes’s commentators have been critical of standard interpretations of Hobbes as a sceptical realist and have argued that moral principles can be independent reasons for action in the global arena.1 In what follows, I argue that Hobbes offers a philosophically–theologically realistic and honourable political realism about global politics, in which there are objective moral standards to judge the actions of states. Commentators have largely failed to give due weight to the realistic foundations of Hobbes’s realism as grounded in a particular, theologically rich conception of human nature and God’s causal relation to the world. Hobbes understands the latter to be an essential ground of the binding force of morality, including any moral principles that may bind in the global arena. Moreover, Hobbes offers us a politically realist conception of global politics, but one in which contending sovereigns have the capacity to act honourably, with respect to other peoples, not only their own. In this way, Hobbes checks a powerful strain of contemporary international relations theory, which tends to de-emphasise or eliminate ‘intangible’ considerations like honour and connected moralistic reasons for action.2

Two Adages Hobbes’s realism about global politics is, in the first pages of De Cive, presented as an interpretation of two adages: homo homini deus and homo homini lupus (Hobbes 1839a: 135). Hobbes agreed with Erasmus that these two sayings are true. Man to man is a god and man to man is a wolf. How could both of these apparently antithetical adages be true? Erasmus had explained that, for the ancients, the former adage derives from an understanding of the gods as benefactors of men. Thus, the ancients deified things that enriched human life, including grain, wine, heavenly bodies and helpful animals. But Erasmus notes that in the course of events, it is human persons more than inanimate objects and non-rational animals who act as great benefactors to other persons, especially in sudden, unexpected ways, to provide ‘unlooked-for salvation’ (Barker 2001: 38). Meanwhile, the latter adage, Erasmus suggests, is derived from the former. It warns against entrusting ourselves to unknown persons, to placing our fate in the hands of persons of unknown character. One might object to Erasmus’s explanation that sometimes salvation, even the most profound instances of salvation, comes from persons unknown. But Erasmus does not say anything more to reconcile these explanations. The story of the Good Samaritan is an obvious illustration of the paradox. Not only the robbers who assaulted the traveller, but also the priest and Levite who ignore his suffering and pass on the other side of the road act as wolves. On the part of the priest and Levite, the duty to love

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one’s neighbour was understood to extend to fellow countrymen and some aliens who had settled in Israel. This should have been sufficient to generate the major premise in a practical syllogism that would issue in action on the part of the priest and Levite. Yet, if the traveller appeared dead, the priest and Levite may have believed they had a countervailing duty not to touch a dead body, under Mosaic Law.3 Meanwhile, centuries of animosity between Samaritans and Jews following the Assyrian sack of Samaria in 721 bc – and subsequent assimilation by Northern Kingdom Israelites of various pagan peoples and beliefs to become the ‘Samaritans’ – meant that a Samaritan would hardly be expected to have any interaction with a Jew, much less act charitably toward a Jewish robbery victim (and vice versa).4 Here is ‘unlooked-for salvation’ in perhaps the least expected way, since it comes from a foreigner whose character the Jews would have reason to doubt: hence the apparent paradox. The ones who are ‘known’ to the victim as countrymen–neighbours in the story act the wolf, while the ‘unknown’ foreigner acts the god. Or, to put it in the terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, the Samaritan imitates God in his communication of good to the Other, in his act of giftlove. To act the wolf is the same as to fail in love, to fail to imitate God’s love. It would seem, moreover, that Christ’s teaching indicates the obligation to love one’s neighbour and transcends nations, borders, creed, ethnicity – indeed, all accidental features of human persons. Hobbes’s realism is apparent in how he interprets the two adages. Hobbes tells us that Homo homini deus is true of relationships among fellow citizens, while homo homini lupus is true of relationships between commonwealths. In other words, within the bounds of peace and fellow-feeling enjoyed by the citizens of a polity, persons do good to one another. Notably, Hobbes offers an explanation of homo homini deus in line with the Christian understanding. As he puts it: ‘In justice and charity, the virtues of peace, citizens show some likeness to God’ (De Cive: 4, emphasis mine). Yet, between commonwealths, also known as ‘artificial persons’ in Hobbesian parlance, it is otherwise, for ‘the wickedness of bad men compels the good too to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud, i.e. to the predatory nature of beasts’ (De Cive: Epistle Dedicatory, 4). Does Hobbes’s explanation of homo homini lupus subvert Christian orthodoxy? Did Christ not clearly teach that the obligation to love transcends the boundaries of polity? Is Hobbes harkening back to the normative provincialism of the ancient Israelites and heralding a new era of powerful, mutually distrustful nation-states, struggling for their national interests in an arena shorn of the bonds of justice, charity and honour? Or can Hobbes be read to be making a factive claim about the brutal reality of international politics as a version of the state of nature, an arena in which evildoers abound, whom the classical Christian just war theorists from Augustine to Aquinas and his successors believed must be resisted by the virtuous with violent force and deception (albeit within the limitations of just war principles)? If Hobbes’s position is closer to the latter, then Hobbes’s realism need not rule out in principle the possibility of supranational cooperation and abiding by just war principles, of acting honourably in the global arena. And yet, the condition of human nature, when combined with the urgency of the common good of the realm, would recommend a defensive posture of sovereigns in the global arena, including the capacity to act aggressively when necessary, since excellent statesmen understand that sometimes the best defence is a good offence.

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Hobbes and the Realistic Foundations of Political Realism In order to understand Hobbes’s teaching, we need to grasp the foundations of his understanding of politics. Hobbes’s natural law theory of morality and politics should be understood in continuity with ‘realistic’ political philosophy. Not to be confused with ‘realism’ about international relations, ‘realistic’ political philosophy is the idea that a sound theory of politics is built upon truths about the exterior world and human nature that one does not construct but which one discovers. The ‘classical’ tradition of political thought – from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – is exemplary of the realistic tradition so defined. While there is a kind of autonomy proper to political philosophy in Hobbes, his political teaching is not severable from (a) a particular moral conception of human nature as existing and knowable, and (b) a conception of God as existing and as causally related to the world in a specific way.5 It is therefore Hobbes’s ‘realistic’ approach that provides the ground for his ‘realism’ about the limits of domestic and global politics. Let us turn to considering Hobbes’s substantive teaching about human nature. Hobbes unabashedly affirms his realistic approach to politics: ‘The true and perspicuous explication of the elements of laws natural and politic . . . dependeth upon knowledge of what is humane nature.’6 Hobbes claimed to have discovered – and by introspection on our own inner lives, he invites us to discover – two most certain postulates of human nature: first, the postulate cupiditatis naturalis, whereby man demands private use of common things, and, second, the postulate rationis naturalis, which teaches man to avoid violent death or ‘flee contra-natural dissolution’ as the greatest natural evil.7 From these two postulates, Hobbes claims to demonstrate ‘by most evident connection’ his moral and civil doctrines. How is that? Human beings find that their fundamental powers are at cross-purposes. This is because cupidity is an insatiable impetus towards potentially infinite gain. As Hobbes puts it, by nature, human beings ‘scramble for every thing they covet, and would have all the world, if they could, to fear and obey them’ (EW, VII, 73). Meanwhile, reason grasps life as a desirable good, and violent death as an undesirable evil to be avoided. But cupidity unleashed on a massive scale generates deadly competition over scarce goods, which presents a direct threat to the goal of preservation. Thus, Hobbes’s famous portrayal of the state of nature as a condition that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ is said to be an ‘inference made from the passions’ – by which he means cupidity untamed by reason8: that is, the passions in so far as they do not cooperate with reason. This condition, Hobbes tells us, obtains in at least three situations that were empirically verifiable in his time: among the American Indians, in the condition of civil war, and in the global arena between sovereigns. In order to exit this condition, it is necessary for reason to tame the passions in line with the goal of preservation, which means performing acts required by, and framing one’s character according to, the dictates of reason: in other words, the laws of nature. Homo hominis deus, through incorporation into commonwealth. Practically reasonable persons judge that peace, in contradistinction to war, is constitutive of the good of life. They therefore agree to erect a commonwealth and authorise a sovereign with the four features necessary to deliver temporal salvation: the escape from the hell of anarchy. These features track the Aristotelian quartet of causes. First, the ‘matter’ or material cause of the commonwealth – the people – must be fit to incorporate, which

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means it must be sufficiently large. Second, the formal cause is a properly formulated covenantal formula. Covenanters must agree to authorise the sovereign to do whatever is necessary to secure the peace, and transfer their right of private judgement about the best means to secure the peace. Third, the ‘power’ of the commonwealth is undivided, which is the concomitant of the efficient cause, inasmuch as the sovereign’s power is coeval with the continued commitment of the citizenry to their authorisation through law-abidingness. Finally, the sovereign is empowered for the sake of securing the peace – the final cause – where peace is understood as security and endures so long as the sovereign acts for this end. The sovereign who procures the safety will legislate and enforce laws based on the natural law and will refrain from enactments and judgments contrary to it.9 Still, even under the best conditions, one where the laws of nature are practised by citizens under the head of a virtuous sovereign, human nature remains in a broken condition, with an irrefragable potential for evil – that is, breach of law – necessitating the sovereign to have all means at its disposal. Hobbes urges people to aver this teaching by observing the human potency for evil in their own empirical experience and honest introspection. Moreover, Hobbes would contend that the actual history of international conflict is powerful support for his understanding of human nature. But it might be charged that the passions Hobbes identifies in the state of nature are not really proper to natural man, but to civilised man, and that therefore Hobbes has not really identified the truth about human nature (Rousseau 1964: 102, 107). In other words, the manifestations of cupidity in competitiveness, aggressiveness, envy, vainglory and the like all presuppose a particular sort of social milieu. To this, Hobbes would reply that the state of nature is not to be identified with the condition of primitive man in the mists of time, but rather is a potential condition of actual persons here and now, in conditions void of law and order backed by an undivided sovereign. But, again, it might be replied: fine, perhaps human beings are as you say they are, here and now. But why are they destined always to be so? Can human beings not fundamentally change for the better? Are human beings not perfectible (Rousseau 1964: 114–15)? Moreover, are human suffering and evil not just accidents of history, which might be overcome by framing the right sorts of manmade institutions and/or sufficient technological prowess? I have articulated elsewhere how, properly understood, Hobbes channels the Augustinian teaching that postlapsarian man has the potentiality for evil sown into him, which is ineradicable apart from ‘salvation absolute’10 This is unavailable this side of heaven, even with the aid of a well-ordered state. It comes only after the Second Coming, the Resurrection and final judgement, ‘by the power and favor of Jesus Christ, who for that cause is called our Savior’ (L, 38.15, 310). Jesus’s favour is the ultimate expression of homo homini deus. This is Hobbes’s answer to the objection from perfectibility: man is not perfectible by human power alone. This, in short, is the philosophical–theological basis of Hobbes’s realism about human nature and the limits of politics.

Of Lupine Gods I have already suggested that it is a mistake to read Hobbes to affirm that the sovereign is absolute, willy-nilly, in its capacity to bind citizens to act or forbear. Rather, sovereign power is ordered to the common good of peace. Accordingly, covenanters reserve the inalienable right of self-defence, since securing the good of life is the raison

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d’être of commonwealth. Hence, there is a set of potential ordinances (legislative acts, judgements and so on) that are inconsistent with sovereignty.11 Another way to put this is that the sovereign is bound by the laws of nature. This is why Hobbes affirms homo homini deus as true of fellow citizens of commonwealth, and why he refers to the commonwealth as a Mortal God: it is a civil person of a particular sort – a truly representative artificial person – that brings salvation from the horrors of the state of nature.12 ‘In this way, the commonwealth the Mortal God displays a likeness to God by enforcing justice and the other virtues, just as covenanters imitate God’s fiat in his creation man in their creation of the Artificial Man’ (L, Introduction). But it is precisely in so far as the sovereign is bound by the natural law to protect the realm from external aggression that it also displays the characteristics of a wolf: in other words, ‘the predatory nature of a beast’. The Hobbesian sovereign would thus appear to be Janus-faced, a lupine god. Still, Hobbes complicates the picture in his discussion of natural law and the law of nations. Recall that in the state of nature, Hobbes tells us, violence and fraud are virtues. This claim fits with the eternal, immutable and universal force of the laws of nature because the precepts of natural law bind always in foro interno, but not always in foro externo. This is because the good that is basic to Hobbes’s axiology, the good of life and death-avoidance, is the object to be secured by the practical necessities requisite to secure that good, as identified in the laws of nature. This means that practically reasonable action (which is always law-abiding) can never require self-destructive acts. But the inerasable reality of cupidity entails that there is always a potential for persons to renege on promises and seek to prey upon on promisees. Thus, the laws of nature cannot bind always in foro externo, to the putting them into action, even though they always bind in conscience, to the intention to act upon them. They bind in foro externo precisely when a sovereign comes into being that can credibly threaten their breach with sanctions, a threat that alters the potential payoff of injustice. On my interpretation, the basic duty that always binds in foro interno and in foro externo in and out of the state of nature is that of self-preservation. In the anarchic condition, in which the horizontal ties among natural persons are dissolved, the vertical ties of man to God remain. God created and ordered man toward his proper good, assigning to him the ‘special motion he thought good’, which constitutes the ‘common laws of his creation’ and which man grasps by reason (EW, VII, 133; II, 209). I argue elsewhere how this can be understood as the expression of God’s irresistible power to bind, in the mode of God’s ordained power (Cooper forthcoming). Recall also that the state of nature empirically obtains among commonwealths in the global arena, where: Persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another, that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war. (L, 13.12, 78) The situation of natural persons in the state of nature – in which they are immutably and eternally bound in foro interno to the precepts of self-preservation – is parallel to that of sovereign persons in the arena of global politics. The duty of the sovereign that

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always binds both in foro interno and in foro externo vis-à-vis other commonwealths is the duty to preserve the realm. In this light, consider the following passage about the law of nations: Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law which is commonly called the law of nations, I need not say any thing in this place, because the law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing. And every sovereign hath the same right, in procuring the safety of his people, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own body. And the same law that dictateth to men that have no civil government, what they ought to do, and what to avoid in regard of one another, dictateth the same to commonwealths, that is, to the consciences of sovereign princes and sovereign assemblies, there being no court of natural justice but in the conscience only, where not man, but God reigneth, whose laws (such of them as oblige all mankind) in respect of God, as he is the author of nature, are natural, and in respect of the same God, as he is King of kings, are laws. (L, 30.30, 233) As in states of nature made of natural persons lacking the ties of commonwealth, the global arena is a space where the laws of nature bind in foro interno always, but not always in foro externo. What does this entail, practically speaking, for global politics? Does this mean that it is an amoral condition void of all moral obligation and honourable behaviour? Or, to put it in the words of Charles Beitz, has Hobbes produced ‘the strongest argument available for skepticism about international normative principles’ (Beitz 1979: 27)? This is a mistaken reading of Hobbes, for it turns out that, by agreement, some laws of nature can obtain in foro externo validity, since the ties of reciprocity can obtain in international agreements. But it is not merely agreement because there is a binding principle underlying promissory obligations. Hobbes’s catalogue of the laws of nature has an ‘easy sum’ in the golden rule (in both its positive and its negative formulations): do (not) unto others as you would (not) have them do unto you. From this precept can be derived a range of precepts, including the fifteenth law of nature: That all men that mediate peace be allowed safe conduct. For the law that commandeth peace, as the end, commandeth intercession, as the means; and to intercession the means is safe conduct. (L, 15.29, 98) This law of nature would ground diplomatic immunity and such diplomatic conventions as would be fitting to give this practical effect. As in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, diplomatic relations between states, including permanent diplomatic missions, obtains force ‘by mutual consent’.13 The idea is that states can advance their interests through diplomatic missions and they mutually agree to respect the immunity of diplomats. In the barest sense, each state enforces the provision by a kind of Mexican standoff, where the sending state threatens breach of immunity by the receiving state with the potential sanction of revoking immunity for those it has received from the partner state. Some sort of Mexican standoff is necessary to generate in foro externo obligations to comply with transnational agreements because it is necessary to protect states from

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making themselves easy prey to other states. It could be objected that this is not really acting from moral principle, but only from national self-interest or national egoism. As Beitz puts the objection, something does not count as a moral system of rules unless it includes the possibility that acting on them does not promote self-interest (Beitz 1979: 23). Hobbes would not frame the issue this way, which is suggestive of a post-Kantian outlook. He does not see an ethics of duty and a eudaimonist ethic as a strict either/ or. In Hobbes’s view – a view shared by the classical tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas – all persons necessarily act under the aspect of the good. Hobbes formulates the principle this way: ‘[A] necessity of nature maketh men to will and desire bonum sibi, that which is good for themselves, and to avoid that which is harmful’ (EW, IV, 83). And, like Aquinas, he believes that exceptionless moral norms and habits of character are both aspects of the moral life, and constitutive of happiness. Hobbes’s break from the tradition is in his thin theory of the good. Hobbes’s novelty is deriving traditional moral rules and virtues from the goods of preservation and peace, where peace is understood ‘thinly’ as security. The need for the Mexican standoff is due to cupidity, the inerasable potentiality for evil in man, in combination with the urgency and basicality of the good of life. Hobbes is not saying that all persons (natural and artificial) are, necessarily, incapable of acting from moral norms and virtues, from acting honourably. Consider the possibility of forging defence cooperatives in the focal cases of the state of nature. These groups fall short of the large size necessary for commonwealth but do provide a higher measure of security than flying solo. Since it takes only a couple of weak but guileful individuals to kill a strong individual, even strong individuals are attracted to joining defence cooperatives. In a cooperative made up of strong and weak members, the success of the cooperative seems to depend on the performance of the strong promisors, such that the security of the weak promisees stands in a dependency relationship to the strong promisors. But such an order of giving and receiving intrinsically depends upon trust amongst its members. Therefore, practically reasonable agents in the state of nature have a strong incentive to forge alliance only with people who have good reputations. ‘Good’ in this context is in the mode of what Hobbes calls the pulchrum, as in the ‘fair’ or ‘honourable’ person or object that promises some good. Honour in this sense is that which is ‘made honourable by nature’, as the effects of good qualities: ‘courage, magnanimity, strength, wisdom, and other abilities of body and mind’ (L, 28.19, 206–7). The honourable by nature, Hobbes suggests, is a ‘possession, action, or quality’ that is a sign of power, where power is understood as a present means toward some good (L, 10.37, 53). So far as is possible, one ought to form habits and perform actions that are honourable by nature because these are conducive to a good reputation in the state of nature. Analogously, commonwealths ought to perform acts conducive to an honourable reputation, for such a reputation conduces to the security of the realm. The criterion of honourableness in this sense will be the moral principles and virtues picked out by the laws of nature. In short, on my natural law interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of morality and politics, Hobbes’s view of honour is not as sharp a turning point as some scholars have argued.14 For Hobbes, it is the Foole who deems ‘successful wickedness’ to be virtuous. One cannot help but think of Machiavellian virtù, which celebrates cruelty and treachery

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‘well used’. But Hobbes denies that the Foole’s vision is either reasonable or just. The Foole relies upon accidental causality – including the ignorance of his allies – for the success of his double-cross. Of course, in Hobbes’s view, the victims of a Machiavellian double-crossing conqueror might ‘by plurality of voices, for fear of death, or bonds’ choose to authorise the actions of their new prince, thereby granting him a commonwealth by acquisition and all the rights of sovereignty (L, 20.1, 127). But this does not mean that all conquests are honourable. For example, Hobbes condemns the conquests of the Roman republic: But what a beast of prey was the Roman people; whilst with its conquering eagles it erected its proud trophies so far and wide over the world, bringing the Africans, the Asiatics, the Macedonians, and the Achaeans, with many other despoiled nations, into a specious bondage, with the pretence of preferring them to be denizens of Rome! (EW, II, i) Hence, Hobbes’s point about sovereigns being ultimately subject only to God in conscience does not rule out informed judgements about sovereigns’ acts in history. Moreover, Hobbes affirms a few sentences later that ‘good men’ act as wolves with right when they defend themselves from evil in the global arena. Thus, it seems that there is honourable and dishonourable lupinity. A prime example of dishonourable lupinity is acting from a desire for empire, the ultimate object of political gloryseekers, which Hobbes sees as rooted in untamed cupidity.

Honourable and Dishonourable Lupinity The discussion so far has suggested that on Hobbesian principles, the criterion of just war is chiefly a matter of intention. Those in the global arena act from a desire for glory and empire. According to classical just war theory there are a set of moral principles that must guide leaders in war, which are often divided into ius ad bellum and ius in bello. The desiderata of ius ad bellum, the justice of going to war, included just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, probability of success and last resort. Once these conditions were met, there were two principles that guided ius in bello, justice in war: discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination requires that leaders distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and proportionality requires that the good to be achieved in an action outweigh the foreseen evil consequences. There is not space here to explore in detail how a Hobbesian war doctrine may and may not align with each of the just war principles.15 Roughly speaking, inasmuch as the principles of just war are derivable from the easy sum, sovereigns animated by honourable lupinity will strive to abide by just war principles as much as possible, while taking the ultimate lodestar of moral action to be the security (common good) of the realm. Sovereigns animated with dishonourable lupinity are not concerned with these principles as bridles of cupidity. Still, even honourable lupinity will not consider itself as strictly bound by the just cause criterion as the classical just war theorists arguably did: namely, that war is justified only by a prior direct act of war against the state.

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Hobbes avers that in history ‘actions of honour and dishonour do appear plainly and distinctly, which are which’ (EW, VIII, vi). To conclude our discussion of Hobbes’s honourable realism, consider two cases of lupine aggression against a neutral state in history, one honourable and one not. The first example is an ancient one, recounted by Thucydides, whose work Hobbes translated and whom Hobbes praised as the greatest historian (EW, VIII, vii). As Thucydides recounts, in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War, an Athenian expedition embarked against the island of Melos to flex its naval might and extend the Athenian empire. According to Thucydides, the Melians had refused to join Athens, but had maintained a policy of neutrality prior to Athenian hostility. The Athenian argument begins by claiming that justice between actors is just a matter of power: ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ (Thucydides 1993: 5.89). To this, the Melians offer various arguments. They plead for a right to appeal to equity and justice in the argument, as a standard that binds strong and weak. On this basis they argue for the right of neutrality. They appeal to the Athenians’ interest, suggesting that the violation of their neutrality will incite declarations of war from them, out of fear of a similar fate. The Melians also argue they will have the favour of the gods because they are just people fighting injustice, and place hope in the help of the Spartans. To all of this, the Athenians reply that no landed neutral cities will be a threat, that the gods actually favour the Athenians, and that the Spartans will place expediency above honour. Of particular interest is the Athenian counterargument to the Melians’ invocation of divine aid. They argue that they have at least equal hope of divine favour, for they are imitating the gods, who ‘by a necessary law of their nature . . . rule wherever they can’ (5.105). In other words, the spark of cupidity, the covetous desire to rule the whole world – what Augustine called the libido dominandi – is praised by the Athenians as divinely sanctioned: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we have to do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. (5.105) Eventually, the Athenians would siege and sack the city, killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery. In Hobbes’s view, the Athenian arguments and actions count as vicious lupinity. It is an aggressiveness in which desire has given in to the lust for empire and vainglory, unbound by the basic requirement of the natural law to seek peace when it can be had, and the requirement to use aggressive tactics in war only to defend the peace and security of one’s realm from evil. Contrast a modern example of state aggression against a neutral state. The years following 1789 shook Europe to the core, as the French Revolution radiated from Paris. As Winston Churchill recounts, ‘it gave rise to a generation of warfare’ – the principal contenders being Britain and Napoleonic France (Churchill 1957: 217). The rise of Napoleon was meteoric – from Corsican, to Jacobin, to general – but these were just stepping stones for the Emperor, whose heart was ‘insatiable of power’ and was set on ‘nothing less than a conquest of the Orient after the fashion of Alexander the Great’ (Churchill 1957: 235, 256). Britain, ‘the nation of shopkeepers’, and its constitutional

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monarchy were on an existential collision course with this empire-seeker, who by 1802 had intentions to invade Britain. After the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 with the Russian Tsar Alexander I, Napoleon had reached the apex of his power and dominated all of Europe, with Russia as his ally (Churchill 1957: 254). Churchill vividly describes Britain’s situation: Only Brittania remained, unreconciled, unconquered, implacable. There she lay in her island, mistress of the seas and oceans, ruled by her proud aristocracy, facing this immense combination alone, sullen, fierce, and almost unperturbed. (Churchill 1957: 254) Britain’s rule of the sea was effectively noosing the continent, cutting off trade and transportation through a massive blockade. Seeking to break Britain’s maritime hegemony, Napoleon devised a scheme to seize the Danish fleet to break open passage into the Baltic Sea, which would pave the way for a joint French–Russian invasion of the British Isles. Churchill recounts the details of how the British government acted when they learned of this plan, and the fallout: The Cabinet acted with praiseworthy decision. Admiral Gambier was immediately ordered to enter the Baltic with twenty ships of the line and procure, by force if necessary, the surrender of the Danish Fleet. After a heavy action in the harbour of Copenhagen the Danes yielded to this humiliation. This act of aggression against a neutral state aroused a storm against the Government in Whig political and literary circles. (Churchill 1957: 255) Both Athens and Britain were sea powers who attacked neutral states – and the similarities end there. Athens did not need to sack Melos for its survival. Britannia faced extinction or annexation by an insatiable emperor and needed to stop Napoleon’s seizure of the Danish fleet. Moreover, the British offered generous terms of alliance, mutual defence and return of the navy after the war. It is true that the Danes had not directly attacked the British or allied themselves with her enemies (although it could be asked whether ‘neutrality’ was really morally indifferent in this contest). But, before the attack took place, Napoleon was already threatening the Danish minister, and if the Cabinet had not acted as it did, ‘the French would have been in possession of the Danish Navy within a few weeks’. Thus Churchill concludes that ‘events vindicated the promptitude and excused the violence of their action’ (Churchill 1957: 255). Notably, William Wilberforce, who was the conscientious Christian gadfly of British politics at the time, came to approve of the action.16 On Hobbesian principles, the action was an exercise in honourable lupinity because the British acted to thwart an evil aggressor with force and fraud, but with a paramount intention of a just peace, and with no intention to destroy and enslave the Danes. And indeed, since this was a crucial event that facilitated eventual British victory, it had the effect of preserving Danish autonomy in the long run from Napoleonic domination. In this way, a commonwealth might use lupine means ultimately to act as a god to others in the global arena, to effect justice and charity. On Hobbes’s terms, this was an example of political realism with honour and is vindicated by history.

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Notes 1. For two of the most powerful arguments in this vein, see Malcolm (2002) and Lloyd (2013). For a helpful summary of some important literature in this area, including a realist reply to Malcolm’s case, see Newey (2011). 2. For a discussion of this issue and the relevant international relations literature, see Ofek (2013). 3. Leviticus 21: 1–4, 10–11. 4. Cf. 2 Kings 17: 5–12; John 4: 9. 5. See Cooper (forthcoming). 6. Hobbes (1839b: 1) (hereinafter EW). 7. Dedicatory Epistle, in De Cive: The Latin Version, 75 and EW II, viii. 8. Leviathan (1994: 13.9–10, 76–7) (hereinafter, L). 9. My account of the conditions of the social contract is similar to that of Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf (1999: 149–52). However, my version differs in that I emphasise Hobbes’s use of the Aristotelian quartet of causes and reject positivist interpretations of Hobbes’s conception of civil law. 10. See Cooper (2013: 107–29). 11. Cf. L: 22.3, 156. 12. For an argument that the state’s salvific function is a sort of secular apocalypse that ushers in a secular version of the millennial kingdom, see McQueen (forthcoming). 13. Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Article 2, available at (last accessed 23 April 2017). 14. See Johnson (2009). 15. For a recent argument that Hobbes affirms non-combatant immunity, and therefore discrimination, see Lloyd (2013: 288–303). 16. ‘For my own part, after much (I trust impartial), reflection, I am convinced that under all the circumstances of the case, the Danish expedition was just’ (Robert Isaac Wilberforce 2013: 345).

Bibliography Aron, Raymond (2003), Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, introduction Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. Barker, William (ed.) (2001), The Adages of Erasmus, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beitz, Charles (1979), Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Churchill, Winston (1957), History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 3: The Age of Revolution, London: Cassell. Cooper, Kody W. (2013), ‘Reason and desire after the fall of man: A rereading of Hobbes’s Two Postulates of Human Nature’, Hobbes Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 107–29. Cooper, Kody W. (forthcoming), Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hobbes, Thomas (1839a), Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive, in Opera Philosophica, ed. by William Molesworth, vol. II, London: John Bohn. Hobbes, Thomas (1839b), English Works, ed. by W. Molesworth, vol. IV, London: John Bohn. Hobbes, Thomas (1994), Leviathan, ed. by Edwin Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Johnson, Laurie M. (2009), Thomas Hobbes: Turning Point for Honor, Lanham, MD: Lexington.

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Lloyd, S. A. (2013), ‘International relations, world government, and the ethics of war: A Hobbesian perspective’, in S. A. Lloyd (ed.), Hobbes Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 288–304. McQueen, Alison (forthcoming), Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, Noel (2002), ‘Hobbes’s theory of international relations’, in N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 432–57. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1960), Politics Among Nations, 3rd edn, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Newey, Glen (2011), ‘Leviathan and liberal moralism in international theory’, in R. Prokhovnik and G. Slomp (eds), International Theory After Hobbes: Analysis, Interpretation, and Orientation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ofek, Hillel (2013), ‘The honor motive in international relations’, Master’s Report, University of Texas at Austin. Pangle, Thomas L., and Peter J. Ahrensdorf (1999), Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1964), First and Second Discourses, ed. by Roger D. Masters, New York: St Martins. Thucydides (1993), History of the Peloponnesian War, in The Landmark Thucydides, ed. by Robert B. Strassler, New York: Free Press, 5.89. Wilberforce, Robert Isaac (2013), The Life of William Wilberforce, vol. 3, London: Forgotten Books.

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16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau From human innocence to the state of war: Rousseau’s theory of international relations Grace G. Roosevelt

Chapter Overview

U

nlike Hobbes, who depicted human beings as motivated by one primary, powerseeking instinct, Rousseau throughout his writings described human beings as motivated by two very different instincts, which he termed amour de soi and amourpropre. Amour de soi originates as an innocent instinct for self-preservation, while amour-propre arises as a socially stimulated instinct of competition and greed. Whether Rousseau is referring to an individual’s self-development, a sovereign state’s evolution or the dynamics of a whole system of independent states, the moral aim of strengthening amour de soi and forestalling or redirecting amour-propre is a consistent and coherent theme. After a brief overview of the ways that Rousseau’s psychological assumptions undergird his principles of political right within states, the following discussion turns to Rousseau’s writings on international relations. Crucial to Rousseau’s realism is his argument that enmity is more ‘natural’ in the international realm than it is among human beings because of the unlimited expansiveness of a state’s amourpropre. Rousseau’s psychological dualism points to two possible ways to get beyond the war system. In today’s ‘postmodern’ international context, however, where the sources of belligerence are more likely to be factions than states, Rousseau’s proposed prospects for peace may no longer be relevant. *

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Rousseau begins the First Part of his 1755 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality with a description of human nature in its most basic form. If human beings were stripped of all the customs and conventions imposed on them by centuries of civilised life, Rousseau tells us, what would remain are primitive beings that are strong and adaptable, self-sufficient and solitary, and – most important – motivated solely by the harmless instinct of amour de soi, or innocent self-love. This primary instinct of amour de soi, Rousseau explains in an endnote, ‘is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue’ (Rousseau 1992: 91). Without artificial objects or social comparisons to arouse his imagination, without competition or jealousy, primitive man would have few ideas, few passions, few fears;

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he would live in relative peace, for in this isolated state ‘his desires do not exceed his Physical needs’ (Rousseau 1992: 27). By the end of the Discourse, however, a very different image of human life has come to the fore. Having gradually come together by chance and accident to form families, then tribes, then whole nations; having developed new needs and new forms of aggression as a result of social competition and the division of labour; and finally, having contracted to form political bodies that merely reproduce de facto inequities of power and wealth, humankind is no longer free and at peace. Instead, what we are left with in the closing pages of the Discourse is the vision of a restless, insecure modern being, whose amour de soi has been almost entirely stifled by the competing instinct of amour-propre, or competitive self-love – ‘a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, [and] inspires in men all the harm they do to one another’ (Rousseau 1992: 91). At this point, greed, pride and a craving for domination have so taken over human beings that the natural self is hardly recognisable. Nor, Rousseau suggests at the end of the Discourse, have civilised peoples gained any real security in their political life, for the Bodies Politic, thus remaining in the state of Nature with relation to each other, soon experienced the inconveniences that had forced individuals to leave it; and among these great Bodies that state became even more fatal than it had previously been among the individuals of whom they were composed (Rousseau 1992: 55) While a nation-state may provide some semblance of internal law and order, in the international realm the relations among states come to resemble a Hobbesian anarchy. Anticipating his later assertion in On the Social Contract that war is not a relationship between human beings but a relationship between states, Rousseau proceeds to describe modern international relations as an ongoing state of war: Hence arose the National Wars, Battles, murders, and reprisals which make Nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honor of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellows; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why. . . . Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of the human Race into different Societies (Rousseau 1992: 55) Much of Rousseau’s writing over the next twenty years can be seen as advice on ways to prevent or at least delay the psychological triumph of amour-propre and the related political triumph of the state of war. The study of political theory often demonstrates that ideas about politics are based on assumptions concerning human nature; in Rousseau’s work, his basic psychological paradigm extends even to his writings on international relations. And his solutions to the problem of war are very similar to his prescriptions for individual wellbeing. In the final analysis, however, one must ask whether the solutions to the problem of war that Rousseau offers us are still viable in the twenty-first century, for in examining the relationship between Rousseau’s psychological and geopolitical principles, one can see that his hopes for peace ultimately

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rest on the possibility of limiting amour-propre and preserving and protecting amour de soi – a fragile form of human innocence that our postmodern world may have rendered obsolete. ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man,’ Rousseau famously asserts in the opening paragraph of his great educational treatise, Émile (Rousseau 1979: 37). He proceeds to advise mothers that they ‘[f]orm an enclosure around [their] child’s soul at an early date’ and he counsels them to ‘build [a] fence’ to protect their offspring from the busy highway nearby (Rousseau 1979: 38). What specifically is it in the child that ‘the fence’ is meant to protect? Clearly, it is Émile’s amour de soi – the original instinct of self-preservation that enables a human being to survive without hostility or aggression. Re-emphasising principles already laid out in his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau states that The source of our passions, the origin and the principle of all the others, the only one born with man and which never leaves him so long as he lives is [amour de soi] – a primitive, innate passion, which is anterior to every other, and of which all others are in a sense only modifications. Amour de soi, he asserts, ‘is always good and always in conformity with order’ (Rousseau 1979: 212–13). As a primary form of self-love, however, amour de soi inevitably comes under threat from amour-propre, the secondary, more egotistical form of self-love, as soon as the developing child becomes aware of his effects on others. As Rousseau states in Book IV, amour de soi is contented when our true needs are satisfied. ‘But amourpropre, which makes comparisons, is never content and never could be,’ since it prompts everyone to feel superior to everyone else, which is impossible. Thus what makes man essentially good is to have few needs and to compare himself little to others; what makes him essentially wicked is to have many needs and to depend very much on opinion. On the basis of this principle it is easy to see how all the passions of children and men can be directed to good or bad. (Rousseau 1979: 213–14) The aim of Émile’s early education, therefore, is to nurture the innocent instincts of amour de soi and to delay and sublimate the harmful instincts of amour-propre. Since amour-propre is activated by external stimuli, controlling the kinds of stimuli that confront the child becomes crucial. An early precaution will be to keep all items of luxury away from Émile’s protected sphere. Luxuries soften us; they prevent us from exercising and extending our own strengths and thereby make us relatively weak, dependent and envious of others. It is this envy and resentment that foster aggressiveness in the child, for, as Rousseau states with profound psychological acuity, ‘All wickedness comes from weakness’ (Rousseau 1979: 67). In order for him to develop his own strengths and integrity, Émile will also be sheltered from public opinion. Indeed, perhaps the most striking aspect of Émile’s education is his relative isolation. Removed from the inequities of city life, ignorant of conventional mores and commercial greed, never encouraged to compete with others and prevented from being tempted to dominate them, Émile’s natural amour de soi is allowed to develop and flourish.

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In his later life, Rousseau judged Émile to be his best book (Rousseau 1990: 210–11). Nevertheless, he recognised that childhood does not last, that most children are not given an education that nurtures their amour de soi, and that for modern humanity in general, adult life involves inevitable dependencies and resentments, rivalries and desires. ‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ is the opening assumption of Rousseau’s other great work, On the Social Contract: Principles of Political Right (Rousseau 1994: 131). Here Rousseau recognises that it is too late to choose to be a natural man; we can no longer live in primitive isolation and freedom. The ties that bind us have become habitual; our needs have already made us weak. Rousseau’s proposals for a new kind of social contract thus take ‘men as they are’: that is, as they are inevitably motivated by amour-propre (Rousseau 1994: 131). ‘I assume that men have reached the point where obstacles to their self-preservation in the state of nature prevail by their resistance over the forces each individual can use to maintain himself in that state’ (Rousseau 1994: 138). Given the inevitability of amour-propre that is aroused by social life, the question becomes: how to limit its effects, how to make the ‘chains’ legitimate (Rousseau 1994: 131). As a preface to his discussion of what true political legitimacy would look like, Rousseau includes in Book I, Chapter IV a brief discussion of the use of force as a source of political legitimacy. Pushing off against both Hobbes and Grotius, who had located defeat in war as a source of political right, Rousseau reiterates the argument anticipated in his Discourse on Inequality that war is a relationship among states, not something natural to human beings, and thus that the ‘rights’ of war are very limited. In terms that were later seen as sources of international law (Lassudrie-Duchène 1906: 330–92; Hofer 1916; Vaughan 1917; Patterson 1920), Rousseau asserts that, to be legitimate, war requires a formal declaration. Moreover, The end of war being the destruction of the enemy State, one has the right to kill its defenders as long as they are armed. But as soon as they lay down their arms and surrender, since they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, they become simply men once again, and one no longer has a right to their lives. (Rousseau 1994: 135–6) Having refuted previous theorists’ claims, Rousseau proceeds to argue that the only logical foundation for a legitimate political order is equality. In the Second Part of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau had drawn compelling pictures of the intimate connections between the origin of amour-propre and the origin of inequality. Inequality appeared with the first tribal competitions that put talent, beauty or eloquence on display; it became invidious with the development of the division of labour, private property, and a sophisticated society in which ‘to be and to seem to be became two altogether different things’ (Rousseau 1992: 51). One way, then, to limit the ravages of amour-propre would be to limit the jealousies and resentments aroused by inequality. This aim is evident in the opening chapters of the Social Contract. Describing the pact that gives legal identity to an associated people, Rousseau states, ‘first of all, since each one gives his entire self, the condition is equal for everyone, and since the condition is equal for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others’ (Rousseau 1994: 138). Later on, he insists more clearly on the importance of not only legal but also social equality:

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Rather than destroying natural equality, the fundamental compact on the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men . . . [a]lthough they may be unequal in force or in genius, they all become equal through convention and by right. (Rousseau 1994: 144) Equal dependence on the body politic as a whole, Rousseau is suggesting, can limit egoistic pride, brutal domination and the master/slave relationships that corrupt both slave and master. At the core of Rousseau’s political and educational writings, then, is a consistent moral agenda. In Émile, the overarching aim is to nurture and protect the young person’s amour de soi – the innocent self-love that every child is born with. In the Social Contract, where Rousseau is focusing on the adults whose amour-propre is already developed, he analyses the legal, geographic, historical and moral conditions that would foster equality and thereby enable human beings to live a more secure and balanced life. I have reviewed the underlying psychological principles of Rousseau’s Émile and Social Contract in order now to demonstrate that the same distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre that appears explicitly in his writings on education and on politics can be found implicitly in his writings on ‘The State of War’ and in his responses to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace. As in his more celebrated writings, Rousseau’s underlying aim in his international relations theory is to find ways to nurture the harmless instincts of amour de soi and to limit or redirect the destructive instincts of amour-propre. I will also suggest, however, that Rousseau’s proposals for strengthening amour de soi and limiting amour-propre in the international realm may no longer be applicable to the global conditions that have pertained since the end of the Cold War. In his early drafts of a manuscript that was probably intended to be entitled ‘Principles of the Rights of War’ but which until recently has been referred to as fragments on ‘The State of War’ (Roosevelt 1987: 225–32; Roosevelt 1990: 9–17; Bachofen et al. 2008: 21–9), Rousseau explains the origins of war in terms of the state’s natural propensity for power and domination. In the first section of the manuscript, Rousseau reiterates his anti-Hobbesian conviction that human nature itself is not the source of war. Addressing Hobbes’s assumptions directly, Rousseau asserts that primitive man is naturally peaceful and fearful; . . . all the passions that might make him brave perils and death are far from him in the state of nature. It is only after having made a society with some men that he decides to attack another one, and he does not become a soldier until after having become a citizen. (Rousseau 2005: 64) Once states are established, however, Rousseau argues that war between them becomes nearly inevitable. Pushing off from a description of the historical proliferation of state systems, Rousseau rhetorically asks why, if each one of these political bodies has a stable base, would they ever come into conflict? Should their own constitutions not keep them in peace? In answering these questions, Rousseau compares the constitution of a human being to a state. If one examines closely the way that political bodies are constituted, he says, while it may be true that theoretically each

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state could be self-sufficient, in fact, in their relations with each other, states are much more ‘intimate’ than individuals are, and this intimacy, or interdependency, makes them more naturally prone to war (Rousseau 2005: 67). In explaining such surprising claims, Rousseau uses terms that recall the distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre. Human beings, after all, have no necessary ties to their fellow beings; natural man can ‘exist in all possible vigor without their cooperation’ (Rousseau 2005: 67). In addition, the human organism has built-in limits that keep a human being’s amour-propre within certain bounds: a man’s faculties are limited, his lifespan is short, and even his stomach has certain constraints on its ability to expand. But a state, in contrast, is an artificial body and, as such, Rousseau argues, ‘has no fixed extent. . . . It can always expand, and yet it always feels itself to be weak as long as there are any other [states] stronger than it.’ Thus, even more than is true for the envious and insecure modern man who dominates the final pages of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, a state’s very identity is dependent upon its relations with others: ‘Its safety, its preservation, require it to make itself more powerful than all its neighbors’ (Rousseau 2005: 67). The inequality between human beings ‘has limits set down by nature’s hands, but the inequalities of societies can endlessly increase’. Moreover, the geographical fact that most states are contiguous with other states (except in the case of states like Corsica that happen to be islands) leads them ‘naturally’ to compare themselves with each other, and this very comparison engenders competition and the ever-present possibility of aggression and attack: Thus, since the size of the body politic is purely relative, it is forced constantly to compare itself in order to know itself; it depends on everything that surrounds it, and must take an interest in everything that happens there. . . . It becomes small or large, weak or strong, according to whether its neighbor extends or contracts and becomes stronger or weaker. Finally, by making its relationships more constant, its very solidarity gives a more certain effect to all its actions and makes all its quarrels more dangerous. (Rousseau 2005: 67) The mere fact of nation-states being in proximity with one another, Rousseau is suggesting here, makes international conflict inevitable, and even well-governed states tend naturally towards war. Rousseau’s analysis of the causes of armed conflict as lying within the whole ‘system’ of independent states has prompted Kenneth Waltz and others to see Rousseau as one of the sources of realism in international relations (Waltz 1959: 165–86; Hinsley 1963: 46–61; Hoffman 1963: 317–53). As Christine Jane Carter has argued, Rousseau can be said to have a realist view of international relations in that he assumes that there can be no essential harmony of interest among nations, and that war or the threat of war will inevitable remain indispensable to rulers . . . [and] even to well-governed states which still have their own particular interest. (Carter 1987: 210) Given the ‘natural’ state of war that persists among political bodies dominated by amour-propre, does Rousseau offer any hopes for getting beyond the war system?

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Although he makes it clear that peace between nations is even harder to achieve than security among individuals, Rousseau offers the modern world two possible paths to peace – each of which applies to a very different political context and both of which are analogous to his proposals for individual security and wellbeing. In the 1980s, both of Rousseau’s paths for getting beyond the war system seemed to provide viable alternatives to the frightening nuclear arms race that forty years of Cold War had brought upon us. In a post-Cold War world, however, Rousseau’s alternative routes to peace may have become wish-lists from another age. In his Constitutional Project for Corsica and in his Considerations on the Government of Poland, Rousseau argues that small, newly constituted states might remain at peace by deliberately cultivating their autonomy and independence, and by isolating themselves from their more corrupt and competitive neighbours. Just as Émile must develop his individual amour de soi in order to resist being corrupted by the competitiveness and materialism within his own society, so Corsica and the new Poland must develop a national amour de soi in order to resist being corrupted by the competitiveness of imperialism and international trade within Europe as a whole. Using a vocabulary of images and exhortations that is closely reminiscent of the psychological theories at the core of the Discourse on Inequality and Émile, Rousseau stresses that Corsica’s distance from the mainland is her greatest resource, and he counsels the Corsicans that ‘No one who depends on others, and lacks resources of his own, can ever be free. . . . Leave negotiations . . . to the [great] powers, and depend on yourselves only’ (Rousseau 1953: 280). Accordingly, he advises the Corsicans to devote their energies to agriculture, avoid international trade, and minimise their need for luxuries and money. Rousseau’s advice to the Poles is even more explicit. In Considerations on the Government of Poland, a book of recommendations that Rousseau wrote in 1772 at the request of Polish nationalists hoping to free their homeland from Russian rule, he again makes a case for civic autonomy. [E]stablish the Republic so firmly in the hearts of the Poles that she will maintain her existence there in spite of all the efforts of her oppressors. . . . [G]ive their souls a national physiognomy which will distinguish them from other peoples, which will prevent them from mixing, from feeling at ease with those peoples, from allying themselves with them. (Rousseau 1953: 167, 169) By nurturing a kind of collective amour de soi that is strong but non-aggressive, selfcentred but also self-reliant, the Poles could avoid becoming embroiled in the international rivalries that had victimised their nation for so long. Analogous to the luxury items that Rousseau fears would make Émile dependent, and therefore weak and needy, would be Polish academies, banks and mercenaries that would make Poland weak and needy. By resisting such temptations, he says, ‘I admit that, in following this path, you will not fill the news-sheets with the noise of your celebrations, negotiations, and exploits . . . and you will not be much talked about in Europe,’ but, he continues, ‘you will live in true prosperity, justice and liberty; no one will try to pick a quarrel with you’ (Rousseau 1953: 225). Rousseau’s advice is clear. In solitude it is easy for states, as well as individuals, to be strong and good, but once people develop needs

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and tastes that draw them into relations with others and that make them envious or dependent, innocence disappears. Thus one solution to the problem of war would be a kind of stoic isolationism, which would enable small, independent states to avoid contact with each other as much as possible, turn inward, and focus their energies on their own civic health and autarkic economic survival. Similar to Switzerland’s tradition of armed neutrality, such a system would contribute to peace by developing a ‘defense without threat’ (Fischer 1984: 30) that would avoid the dependencies and jealousies that provoke aggression: ‘Anyone who wants to be free ought not to want to be a conqueror,’ Rousseau asserts (Rousseau 1953: 237), repeating a principle that is at the core of his political and psychological theory. Seeing the vigorous strokes with which Rousseau paints a picture of small, independent republics like Poland and Corsica, it may at first seem puzzling to see him also eloquently suggesting a completely different path to peace in his ‘Summary’ (Extrait) and ‘Critique’ (Jugement) of a Project for Perpetual Peace, written by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. The Abbé de Saint Pierre was an idealistic but ineffectual reformer of the late seventeenth century, whose unpublished papers Rousseau’s friend and benefactor, Mme Dupin, gave to Rousseau to edit and revise. Among the papers was a lengthy and repetitious ‘Project for Perpetual Peace’. Most recent commentators on Rousseau’s responses to the Project have argued either that the ‘Summary’ was disingenuous (that is, that Rousseau took up the Project only to please Mme Dupin); or that the praise for the plan in the ‘Summary’ is completely negated by the more pessimistic evaluation of the plan in his posthumously published ‘Critique’ of the Project; or that the idea for a confederation for peace contradicts the stress on national sovereignty apparent in his other writings (Carter 1987: 121–41; Riley 1973: 5–17; Bachofen et al. 2008: 229–94; Kelly 2015: 331–45). In contrast to these critics, whose work I deeply respect, I continue to believe that although the vision of small, independent and self-sufficient states was dear to Rousseau’s heart, at some level he envisioned that the politics of the future would require a system of global security analogous to the one proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. In both the Project and in Émile, Rousseau states unequivocally that the prevalence of anarchy in the international realm must cause one to ask ‘whether the establishment of society accomplished too much or too little’ (Rousseau 2005: 28; Rousseau 1979: 466) – thus implying that we have gone either too far or not far enough in the development of our political institutions. Given that the amour-propre of states cannot be eliminated, how can it be curtailed? How might the effects of national amourpropre be limited? It is in response to this challenge, I would argue, that Rousseau agreed painstakingly to read, reread and edit for posterity the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s voluminous drafts of a Project for a Perpetual Peace in Europe. Why would Rousseau have taken on such an arduous task unless he saw the project’s long-term possibilities? Whether or not such a system can today still be considered a viable path to peace is another question. One important indication of the seriousness with which Rousseau took the Abbé’s proposal is the similarity between the conceptual vocabulary of the ‘Summary’ and that of Rousseau’s own Social Contract. Indeed, Rousseau himself hints at the similarity between the two works when he states at the beginning of his summary that the

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only way of getting beyond the continual conflicts that exist between sovereign states would be by means of ‘a form of confederative government, which, by uniting Peoples by bonds similar to those which unite individuals, equally subject both of them to the authority of Laws’ (Rousseau 2005: 28). Rousseau used the term ‘confederation’ in his article on Political Economy in the same sense that he later used ‘social pact’ or ‘association’ in the Social Contract; hence there is a conceptual kinship between the two works. Both the ‘Summary’ of the Project for Perpetual Peace and the final version of the Social Contract represent forms of political association that are instituted by deliberate acts of human will, that are maintained by equality and mutual dependence, and that are finally justified in terms of their ability to ensure human security. I have developed these parallels in full elsewhere (Roosevelt 1989: 130–4; Roosevelt 1990: 96–107). Here I will simply note the emphasis that both forms of association put on legal equality as the foundation of political legitimacy. In the ‘Summary’, Rousseau states that in order to form a confederation that would be durable, it would be necessary to put all its Members into such a mutual dependence that none might be in a position to resist all the others by itself, and that particular associations which could harm the great one would encounter sufficient obstacles to impede their execution. (Rousseau 2005: 36) Later on, where he is arguing that the sovereignty of the contracting princes would not be jeopardised by such a confederation, he develops this idea of equal dependence even further. By submitting themselves to the judgement of the assembly and by depriving themselves of ‘the dangerous power of seizing the property of someone else’, Rousseau argues, political leaders would only assure themselves of their real rights and renounce those that they do not have: ‘[One’s freedom] would be alienated in the hands of a master but it is strengthened in [the hands] of Associates’ (Rousseau 2005: 44). In the Social Contract, Rousseau makes an almost identical point: Finally, as each gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right one grants him over oneself, one gains the equivalent of everything one loses, and more force to preserve what one has. (Rousseau 1994: 139) In the international realm, as in the realm of domestic politics, legal equality is proposed as the most effective means of limiting amour-propre. Often, Rousseau has been criticised for the apparent contradictions, inconsistencies and paradoxes in his writings. Most of these inconsistencies disappear once one acknowledges Rousseau’s acute sensitivity to the historical and developmental contexts of the environment that he is addressing in his writings. To protect the amour de soi and freedom of the innocent child Émile, Rousseau recommends isolation, independence and stoic simplicity. For a freely associated group of well-intended citizens (or any self-conscious group of people) whose amour-propre has already been aroused, he recommends a carefully constituted social contract that will foster equality and enforce the general will. Parallel sets of aims inform Rousseau’s writings on interstate relations. A new or small nation-state like Poland or Corsica can remain ‘good’ so

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long as it is isolated and self-sufficient. But if geographical proximity, economic trade or military alliances have made interdependence inevitable, then, as Rousseau states convincingly in his ‘Summary’, Everyone sees that every society is formed by common interests; that every division is born from opposed interests; that since a thousand fortuitous events can change and modify both of them, [then] as soon as there is a society, a compulsory force is necessary which orders and concerts its members’ movements in order to give the common interests and reciprocal engagements the solidity they cannot have by themselves. (Rousseau 2005: 33) Given the prevalence of amour-propre in international life, Rousseau suggests in his ‘Summary’ of Saint-Pierre’s Project that to end the state of war that prevails among nation-states would require a form of collective security – a ‘compulsory force’ – that could enforce peace. Rousseau’s ‘Summary’ of Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace supports the Abbé’s whole-hearted endorsement of a European confederation. In his ‘Critique’ of the Project, however, Rousseau acknowledged that Europe’s ‘princes’ would never agree to it. This is not because a confederation for peace would threaten their rational self-interest. Indeed, as Christopher Kelly has pointed out in a recent article (Kelly 2015: 331–45), Rousseau emphasises that if they were to follow their rational selfinterest, political leaders would see that a confederation would protect their strength within their own states, as well as their self-interests abroad. A statesman following a policy of true realpolitik, Rousseau suggests, would wholeheartedly support the Abbé’s plan. The problem, however, is that most political leaders are not rational. Instead, they are guided by their passions, particularly the passion of amour-propre. Because of excessive amour-propre, Rousseau asserts, ‘the whole preoccupation of kings, or of those to whom they delegate their duties, centers on two sole objectives – extending their dominion abroad and rendering it more absolute at home’ (Rousseau 2005: 54). Rousseau ends his ‘Critique’ implying that the only way to unite Europe would be through some sort of forceful takeover or revolution, ‘and, on this principle, who among us would dare to state whether this European League is to be desired or to be feared?’ (Rousseau 2005: 60). Having examined Rousseau’s alternative paths to peace, let me now examine what relevance his vision has for the geopolitical situation that we find ourselves in now. As I have hinted above, it may be harder to draw useful lessons from Rousseau’s writings today than it was in the past two centuries. Rousseau’s analysis of the war system and his tentative proposals for getting beyond it rely on the possibility either of nurturing amour de soi or of limiting amour-propre. In today’s world, however, both of these possibilities seem to have vanished. As Torbjørn Knutsen has observed, the failure of the once non-aligned ‘Third World’ countries to resist the exploitation and domination of Western powers with their seductive consumer goods and double-edged trading practices makes clear the difficulty of remaining isolated in today’s interdependent economy (Knutsen 1994: 258). In the post-Cold War context, there are few areas of the globe that can remain walled off from the electronically propagated imagery of Western capitalist luxuries or from the capricious and unchecked forces of a

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global market. Dependency and envy now rule the planet; building a ‘fence’ to shelter national (or even personal) amour de soi seems to have become an impossibility. Nor is it possible to see much hope for limiting amour-propre. Here too, inexorable market forces, trade wars and weapons of unprecedented destructiveness have exacerbated the rivalries and interdependencies of peoples and nation-states. The division of labour within an increasingly interdependent world has caused a growing gap in the standard of living between the rich North and the poorer South; as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and ‘Summary’ of the Project for Perpetual Peace might have enabled one to predict, recent efforts to ‘free up’ international trade have resulted only in an increase in inequality among states. Since 1989 especially, political aims for peace have continually been submerged in the economic drive for freedom. Meanwhile, the mid-twentieth-century hopes that an effective United Nations might succeed in curtailing the amour-propre of both ‘princes’ and democratically elected leaders have been dashed to the ground by the failure of the superpowers to give such a body any coercive power or to make the structure of the organisation more egalitarian and democratic. Not only have recent developments in global communications and global capitalism called into question Rousseau’s assumptions about promoting peace, but also the explosive energies released by the end of the Cold War may call into question Rousseau’s principles concerning the nature of war. A glimpse of what the twenty-first century would bring appeared in a 21 May 1995 New York Times article entitled ‘Victims of a “Postmodern” War’ by Roger Cohen. Cohen described a surrealistic scene of a Sarajevan man, who has been made a paraplegic by a sniper’s shot, watching, from a hospital bed, a videotape of the shooting that maimed him. In the video, the victim is seen walking briskly across a street, crumpling into a fetal position as the shot is heard, and then being dragged away by a screaming bystander. Meanwhile, a United Nations peace-keeping soldier looks on, motionless. The article proceeds to state that the elements of this troubling collage (TV cameras waiting for action; ‘peace-keepers’ immobilised; civilians being maimed in a ‘safe area’) are elements of what some military analysts are now calling ‘postmodern’ or ‘future’ war. In this analysis, the ‘modern’ wars that dominated history for several centuries and culminated in the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima are disappearing. ‘They are being replaced by a new kind of conflict’, Cohen noted, ‘like that in Sarajevo, in which armies and peoples become indistinguishable,’ in which states are replaced by militias or other informal – often tribal – groupings, and which then become intractable because of the absence of ending the war through negotiation (Cohen 1995: A12; Moskos, Williams and Segal 2000). Since 9/11, the concept of war as a formal relationship between sovereign states has been blurred even further. Factionalism, not statism, now seems to be the most potent force at work in the world.

Conclusion Such an analysis confronts us with the possibility that the assumptions about the nature of war that Rousseau and others provided as a frame of reference since the dawn of modernity – that ‘war is not, therefore, a relation between man and man, but between State and State’ (Rousseau 1994: 135) – may no longer apply to postmodern

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wars. It may be that today’s conflicts resemble those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more than they do those of the more recent past, and that we are now moving closer to a world that would be more familiar to Hobbes than to Rousseau. Such a possibility suggests that the assumptions about human innocence that are at the heart of Rousseau’s worldview may gradually lose their meaning in the twenty-first century. Whether new standards of morality and legitimacy will come to take their place remains to be seen.

Bibliography Bachofen, Blaise and Celine Spector (dir.), and Bruno Bernardi and Gabriella Silvestrini (eds) (2008), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Principes du droit de la guerre: Ecrits sur la paix perpetuelle, Paris: Vrin. Carter, Christine Jane (1987), Rousseau and the Problem of War, New York: Garland. Cohen, Roger (1995), ‘Victims of a “Postmodern” War’, The New York Times, 21 May, p. A12. Fischer, Dietrich (1984), Preventing War in the Nuclear Age, London: Rowman & Allanheld. Hinsley, F. H. (1963), Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hofer, Cuno (1916), L’Influence de J.-J. Rousseau sur le droit de la guerre, Geneva: Georg. Hoffmann, Stanley (1963), ‘Rousseau on war and peace’, American Political Science Review, vol. 17, no. 2, June, pp. 317–53. Kelly, Christopher (2015), ‘Rousseau and the case for and against cosmopolitan humanitarianism’, in Andrea Radasanu (ed.), In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin, Lanham, MA: Lexington, pp. 331–45. Knutsen, Torbjørn L. (1994), ‘Re-reading Rousseau in the post-Cold War world’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 31, no. 3, August, p. 258. Lassudrie-Duchène, Georges (1906), Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le droit des gens, Paris: Imprimerie Henri Jouve. Moskos, Charles C., John Allen Williams and David R. Segal (2000), The Postmodern Military: Armed Forces after the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press. Patterson, Shirley (1920), L’État de guerre and projet de paix perpétuelle, New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Riley, Patrick (1973), ‘Rousseau as a theorist of national and international federalism’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, vol. 3, no. 1, Spring, pp. 5–17. Roosevelt, Grace G. (1987), ‘A reconstruction of Rousseau’s Fragments on the State of War’, History of Political Thought, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 225–232. Roosevelt, Grace G. (1989), ‘The role of Rousseau’s writings on war and peace in the evolution of the Social Contract’, in Guy Lafrance (ed.), Études sur le Contrat Social: Actes du colloque de Columbia, Pensée libre, no. 2, Ottawa: Association Nord-américaine des Études Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 130–4. Roosevelt, Grace G. (1990), Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1953) [1825 and 1782], Political Writings, ed. and translated by Frederick Watkins, Edinburgh: Nelson. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1979) [1762], Émile or On Education, ed. and translated by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1990) [1776], Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, vol. 1, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1992) [1755], Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, vol. 3, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1994) [1762]), On the Social Contract: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, vol. 4, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2005) [1761], ‘The state of war’ and ‘On the writings of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, translated by Christopher Kelly and Judith Bush, ed. by Christopher Kelly, vol. 11, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Vaughan, C. E. (1917), A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and the State of War, London: Constable. Waltz, Kenneth N. (1959), Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis, New York: Columbia University Press.

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17 Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche’s Dionysian political realism Paul E. Kirkland

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his chapter treats Nietzsche as a political realist whose realism includes a complex rather than reductionist account of political life and human aims. Nietzsche’s view of the multiplicity of drives animating human action shapes an agonistic vision of politics. He treats war as a fundamental condition and offers an analysis of the relationship between thought and practice that points to limits of theoretical regime design. Nietzsche’s view can be characterised as a Dionysian realism, as his view of politics, like that of tragic art, links the orderly and the unruly in their very opposition. Any degree of order within a political body emerges only in opposition to what it resists and this sense of resistance is vital to Nietzsche’s understanding of any sort of freedom. Accordingly, Nietzsche resists all efforts at supplying universal principles for politics and describes the impulse to do so among philosophers, political thinkers and political actors as unhealthy and tyrannical. His expectation of enduring plurality and contest yields both anti-revolutionary politics and an expectation of continued conflict. This chapter shows the link between Nietzsche’s claims about grand politics and limited politics, and their roots in his Dionysian view of impermanent forms and fundamental conflict. *

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Introduction Nietzsche’s realism is not based in the calculation of interests, nor is it oriented toward bringing a peaceful order. Indeed, Nietzsche sees conflict and war as an inevitable result of the complexity of humanity and the source of valuable human possibilities. While roughly Hobbesian and roughly Kantian positions are sometimes set as the opposing poles of theoretical possibilities for considering international relations, both are ultimately oriented by the goal of peace (Hobbes 1994: 96; Kant 1970: 104). Nietzsche rejects the notion that peace is either the interest or the duty of humanity. He embraces war as a condition of political and philosophical life. The inevitability and desirability of war as a generalised condition becomes quite subtle in his thought and it does not amount to a valorisation of perpetual bloody conflict. Indeed, Nietzsche’s thoughts on war, conflict and warlike qualities open a path to considering

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the complexity of human motives and aims, the place of political values other than peace, and thereby the conditions for ensuring genuine plurality. Political philosophy oriented by the goal of peace from Augustine to Kant remains, in Nietzsche’s view, rooted in ideals contrary to the nature of human life. For Nietzsche, the rejection of enmity involves the rejection of the reality of human conditions and must be viewed as the effort to establish exclusive universal domination. Nietzsche’s view on political matters is informed by his deeply tragic view of human affairs and the self-destructive tendencies involved in human aspirations. Rather than aligning his view with hopes to fulfil such aspirations or to eliminate them, Nietzsche shows us their tragic inevitability, providing a realism that does not leave a pessimistic view. As his view of tragedy does not simply yield sorrow but rather an affirmation of life, he presents a tragic view as one that would incorporate conflicts and embrace the reality and multiplicity of the conditions of human life. Nietzsche’s political realism, informed by his tragic sense, allows him to offer insights on the inevitability of conflict, the value of war, the advantages of agonistic politics, the enduring tension between thought and political action and the limits of regime design.

War and Resistance Nietzsche views conflict and war not only as enduring features of political life, but also as the source of virtues he attributes to his own work. While surely counselling against hopes to eliminate war and the possibility of war, Nietzsche clearly has more than the violent actions of armies at war in mind when he writes of a warlike nature and praises warlike virtues. He describes himself as ‘warlike by nature’ (EH, Wise 7).1 His warlike qualities find expression in the way in which he engages thoughts, claims and values, and he does so in a way that exhibits the advantages of the spirit of conflict. Not only does Nietzsche write that ‘attacking is one of my instincts’ (EH, Wise 7), but also he describes the character of genuine enmity in a way that shows a priority to contest over consensus: ‘Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy – perhaps that presupposes a strong nature; in any case, it belongs to every strong nature’ (EH, Wise 7). This capacity for enmity involves seeking genuine conflict rather than the comforts of victory. As it would embrace the conflict itself as a perpetual condition of strength, it acknowledges and even values the endurance of an external opponent. Continuing to describe the capacity for enmity, he writes, ‘It needs objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists’ (EH, Wise 7), and contrasts such quests with those of vengeance. The desire for genuine resistance is directly opposed to hopes for final victory, and it is for Nietzsche a sign of strength because it is a source of continued strength. This respect for one’s enemy and hope for the continued existence of opponents entails a kind of embrace of genuine plurality, for adequate resistance is found only in ‘opponents that are our equals’ (EH, Wise 7). Genuine equality in enmity implies the impossibility of final victory, leaving instead the enduring contest and resistance of those who hold each other’s limited positions in place. More than the warrior’s respect for the warlike virtues of other warriors, it would yield acknowledgement of the limitations of each particular position and value alternatives that emerge in resistance to it. This preference for plurality born of resistance would require a politics that was warlike and agonistic rather than peace-seeking and consensus-building.2

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Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism follows this preference for agonistic politics and brings the contribution of a tragic sense to light. By using his view of resistance to analyse freedom, Nietzsche depicts liberalism as a threat to freedom: ‘Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: Later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions’ (TI, Skirmishes 38). The elimination of obstacles characteristic of liberalism, Nietzsche argues, makes citizens weaker, cowardly and hedonistic. By eliminating political virtues, they limit the capacity to fight for freedom and thereby the capacity for any sort of meaningful freedom.3 By contrast, ‘Those same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way’ (TI, Skirmishes 38). Because freedom requires the capacity to sacrifice for freedom and resistance is the source of all strength, Nietzsche declares, ‘The highest type of free man should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome’ (TI, Skirmishes 38). By showing political victories to undermine their own attainments, Nietzsche exhibits a political realism rooted in the impossibility of complete success. As is the case for liberal freedom, any one-sided success will entail its own demise as it eliminates the resistance it requires. This tragic insight informs a realism that denies the possibility of institutional solutions and rejects a progressive understanding of political history. In Twilight of the Idols, he replaces the question of return and progress with that of ascent and descent. He mocks Rousseau’s inspiration of the French Revolution and declares Napoleon to be the exemplar of a ‘return to nature’ (TI, Skirmishes 48). Napoleon, one who plays with great tasks, is the true meaning of the French Revolution and the more complete return to nature than the egalitarian doctrines of the revolution. As he demonstrates in the tragic structure of liberalism, Nietzsche finds the commander and his warlike tasks to be the deepest meaning of a revolution that declares egalitarian goals. Yet, this does not leave Nietzsche to embrace a Napoleonic politics, as some have argued (Glenn 2001; Dombowsky 2014), for Nietzsche finds in Goethe the more complete example of realism and ascending nature. Goethe becomes Nietzsche’s towering case of both naturalness and genuine freedom. Rather than a modernity defined by its idealism (whether in doctrines culled from Rousseau, the spirit of the French Revolution, or Kantian morality), Nietzsche sees in Goethe one who ‘surrounded himself by limited horizons’ (TI, Skirmishes 49) and sought ‘totality’ not by flight into an ideal, but by fighting ‘the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will’ (TI, Skirmishes 49). The wholeness Nietzsche finds in Goethe appears through his manifold life and pursuits. Goethe provides Nietzsche with an example of self-creation by bringing the conflicting elements of human life into himself.4 It is worth noting that Goethe earns this high praise from Nietzsche because he does not remain one-sided but strives for totality by incorporating conflict into his own life. Declaring that ‘Goethe was a convinced realist, he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect’ (TI, Skirmishes 49), Nietzsche links realism with the affirmation of life (Reginster 2006; Kirkland 2009). Rather than a flight from perspective into the ideal, Goethe stands as an example of one who builds into himself the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives and possibilities for human life. For Nietzsche, Goethe’s marks a greater human possibility than even Napoleon because he embodies the realism of saying ‘yes’ to life and embodies the warring totality of a tragic spirit. Nietzsche characterises the spirit and the realism he finds in Goethe as ‘Dionysian’ (TI, Skirmishes 49), referring to his use of that name. He uses the designation of the

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Dionysian from his first book about tragedy (The Birth of Tragedy) and later claims it be one of that work’s great innovations. Where, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses Dionysus as the embodiment of the drive toward the dissolution of individuation (BT, 2), in later works he comes to use Dionysus to stand for the whole tragic sense of life affirmation (TI, Ancients 5), which he attributes to Goethe. Such yes-saying realism embraces a world of becoming, the emergence and decay of all forms. The larger sense of the Dionysian insists on viewing temporary forms in tension with their dissolution. Rather than leaving either nothingness or a primordial chaos as the alternative to order, opposition takes the place of the Dionysian wellspring from which all things come to be and into which all things pass away. Claims to completeness are necessarily misguided. Nietzsche accordingly points to the value of agonistic relations within regimes, and war (either open or implicit) as the fundamental relationship among regimes. Because of this priority, Nietzsche sets himself against all expectations of final peace, political or metaphysical. Nietzsche establishes his position as an opponent of peace, painting the goal of peace as rooted in the drive to domination and tyranny. Positioning himself in such a skirmish, Nietzsche writes, ‘Another triumph is our spiritualization of enmity (Fiendschaft)’ (TI, Morality 3). He contrasts his view of enmity with that of ‘the Church’, which would destroy all enemies and his own ability to find the value of enemies, and writes, ‘we, we immoralists and antiChristians, find our advantage in this, that the Church exists’ (TI, Morality 3). Nietzsche makes clear that the very condition of plurality is an embrace of enmity, rather than the hegemony of a single source of value. Competing cultures, political regimes and values maintain themselves in contest with one another rather than in the mere toleration that becomes its own hegemonic valuing. In his presentation of the two models of enmity, Nietzsche stakes out a position that would preserve the contest of opponents and thus the conditions of plurality. Rather than seeking the elimination of what he opposes, even as he describes it as antithetical to life, a persisting place for the institutions and values he opposes remains advantageous and perhaps necessary. He goes on to praise the ‘internal enemy’ along with external and political opposition, declaring ‘Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former times, “peace of soul”, the Christian desideratum’ (TI, Morality 3). He presents the ideal of ‘peace of soul’ as a misunderstanding that could have many explanations, ranging from exhaustion to laziness or the ‘emergence of certainty’ (TI, Morality 3). By connecting the aim of ‘peace of soul’ and hope for a ‘kingdom of God’ with the Church’s desire to destroy all enemies, Nietzsche reveals the aim of peace to be bound to tyrannical and destructive aims (Augustine 2004: 865–94). He frames the aim of peace as equivalent to the destruction of all human possibilities but one, and one hostile to life at that. The desire for peace comes to light as a desire for domination, what he earlier called ‘spiritual tyranny’ (HH, 237), and what we might now call ideological hegemony. Openness to human possibility and to genuine plurality requires, Nietzsche argues, the embrace of enmity, the expectation of the endurance of opponents, the recognition of the partiality of one’s own mode of valuing, and the willingness to assert that partiality in an appropriate and contesting manner. Nietzsche’s embrace of war and enmity are part of his opposition to tyrannical domination and ideological hegemony, and an effort to reveal the conditions of genuine plurality.

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The Limits of Political Design By praising enmity and revealing its alternative as tyranny, Nietzsche offers a political realism rooted in inevitable conflict and the inherent limitations of singular political positions, regimes or values. This realism also appears in his opposition to all hopes for the theoretical construction of political orders, and he combats the expectation that the realm of ideas is the place for the solution to political conflicts. By pointing to the cultural costs of the strong state, Nietzsche demonstrates the inevitable conflicts that prevent an entirely successful regime or order among states. His realism points toward a political moderation that eschews the expectation of theoretical solutions to political problems. Nietzsche’s thought resists the dominant mode of political theory that has sought to offer prescriptive designs for political orders and regulative ideals at which they might aim. Like the desire to eliminate all enemies, he portrays the desire for a single philosophical lawgiver as tyrannical, declaring the end of the time of such tyrants (HH, 261). Nietzsche argues that the most radically new departures in thinking are inconsistent with hopes for radical political change. Contrasting the ‘political and social visionaries’ who, as a result of ‘dangerous dreams’, demand the overthrow of all orders (HH, 463) with the ‘free-thinking’ who are ‘moderate in behavior’ (HH, 464), he rejects revolutionary politics while bringing to light tensions between thought and political action. By contrasting Voltaire’s moderation and Rousseau’s ‘passionate idiocies’ on this point, Nietzsche shows the problem of the attempt of philosophy to order political regimes. The ambition to construct states from ideas, yielding coordinated progress between political and cultural development, is a delusion, springing from the false hope that conflicting human goods can coincide. Along with this general tension between cultural flourishing and state strength, Nietzsche makes quite clear that ideas should not be expected to translate in any immediate way to new institutions or new political orders. He writes of this disjunction: New beliefs in an old house. The overthrow of beliefs is not immediately followed by the overthrow of institutions; rather, the new beliefs live for a long time in the now desolate and eerie house of their predecessors, which they themselves preserve, because of the housing shortage. (HH, 466) He reminds us that the political and institutional situation in which new ideas and beliefs emerge is a condition for their growth, but these conditions are not necessarily identical to the beliefs or even consistent with them. Radical thinking need not yield revolutionary politics, and new ideas do not produce a new state. In fact, the needs of politics and those of culture are at such variance that the effort to translate one into the other is harmful to both. He suggests that the most radical thinking would have a political effect, one clearly opposed to revolutionary politics and state construction. Nietzsche argues that ‘free-thinking, when it has become a quality of character – makes men moderate in behavior’ (HH, 464). Because revolutionary action is unwise, truly free thought will discourage revolutionary hopes; it is also dangerous, not only because it will have the opposite of intended effects or produce bloodshed, but also because the passions and upheaval of revolution threaten the freedom of the cultural realm where development is really possible. Through the tension between cultural

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flourishing and political strength, Nietzsche indicates inevitable obstacles to the construction of a wholly satisfactory political order. The analysis Nietzsche provides of the state’s dangerous tendency to subsume other realms owes its categories in part to the work of Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at Basel and long-term friend. Burckhardt’s presentation of the power of the state identifies it with force.5 The state’s ‘lust for power’ sets it in conflict with the realm of culture understood as an independent realm of freedom. Burckhardt’s treatment of the three powers presents the modern state as qualitatively different from other forms of political order. He explains that the ‘supremacy of the polis is . . . fundamentally different from the supreme power of the modern state’ (Burckhardt 1979: 127). Burckhardt identifies as a key to the conception of the distinctly modern state the idea that politics can conform to ‘completely theoretical political programs’ (Burckhardt 1979: 182). Both the Hobbesian desideratum of security against the chaos of war of all and the Rousseauian notion of the general will, in Burckhardt’s reading, serve to expand state power, centralise its authority and foster unattainable hopes. As political ideas have changed, ‘Then, step by step, there came into being the modern centralized state, dominating and determining culture, worshipped as a god and ruling like a sultan’ (Burckhardt 1979: 179). Burckhardt expects this process to continue, and he sees the idea of the modern state as a threat to all social freedom and all flourishing culture. The idea of the modern state, Burckhardt shows, is born in Renaissance Florence. From ‘the most modern state in the world’ (Burckhardt 1990: 65) comes the distinguishing feature of modern political thought: ‘The great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies, was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Machiavelli was not free from it’ (Burckhardt 1990: 71). The notion that a regime can be constructed, that a state can be a work of art, the idea that later fuels revolutionary politics and the effort to implement theoretical political programmes, and the centralisation of state power that accompanies it, constitute the great fallacy of modern political thought. Machiavelli becomes the central figure responsible for the false hope of constitutional design, ‘the greatest beyond all comparison’ of the ‘constitutional artists’ who ‘thought it possible to construct a state’ (Burckhardt 1990: 71). When he treats of the papacy, he sees in Borgia the possibility of one who ‘could have secularized the States of the Church’ and that possibility as ‘the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Machiavelli treats the great criminal’ (Burckhardt 1990: 88; Machiavelli 1998: 46–7; Guicciardini 1969: 165–9). A new mode of thinking prepares the way for the modern condition of dominant centralised state power. Burckhardt argues that the state will, step by step, increase its power and become more centralised, taking a form such that ‘no other mentality will have power over it for a very long time’ (Burckhardt 1990: 186). The prescriptions of modern political thought and the centralisation of state power will overwhelm the realm of culture so completely that it will not retain independence. Nietzsche assaults the dominance of the modern state and the ‘great modern fallacy’ that Burckhardt identifies. Using evidence from Thucydides and Plato, he looks to ancient examples to diagnose particularly acute modern problems. He claims of the Athenian polis that culture developed ‘despite the state’ in order to demonstrate that

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the antagonism between cultural flourishing and political strength has always been present. Associating Pericles’ Funeral Oration with the optimistic theories of his time, Nietzsche reminds his readers that Thucydides reveals Pericles’ optimism as a delusion in the ensuing plague (Thucydides 1989: 2.34–65). Nietzsche describes Thucydides’ account of Athens as a fiery sunset immediately preceding the nightfall of Athenian civilisation. He thereby rejects the claim of a necessary connection between Athenian politics and Athenian civilisation asserted by Thucydides’ Pericles, but also points out that the Athenian polis served culture indirectly ‘because in it an individual’s ambition was stimulated greatly, so that once he had come to the path of intellectual development, he pursued that, too, as far as it would go’ (HH, 474). The political situation was not irrelevant, nor was it successful. The permanent tension between the greatest intellectual ambitions and political ambitions comes fully to light in Athens and in the work of Thucydides. While rejecting the optimism that would expect to bring an intellectually guided political project to completion, Nietzsche also distances himself from the view of a radical opposition between the realm of thought and that of life. His anti-modernism is not best understood as nostalgic (Conway 2002), anti-political (Bergmann 1987) or uncritically retrograde (Warren 1991), but rather as rejection of modern politics and the understanding of ‘the state as a work art’ (Burckhardt 1990: 69–73). As the constructed state threatens to overrun all other goals, Nietzsche recognises the mutual threats between philosophy and politics. Where the state is so dominantly successful that it subsumes all realms, there is little room for independent thought. When philosophy tries to take the role of state-builder, it threatens the moderation that would limit the power of the state and thereby the future independence of thought. By contrast, Nietzsche offers a realism that would abandon hopes for theoretical political design and take counsel from authors like Thucydides.

Dionysian Realism In the closing section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche holds up Thucydides as a great model of realism, one he contrasts with Platonism and links with tragic affirmation. Describing Thucydides as ‘my recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism’, Nietzsche lauds his ‘unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality’ (EH, Ancients 2). Thucydides emerges as the great realist, by contrast with Plato, because he recognises a larger reality than what is subject to reason. We might say of him that, like Goethe, he incorporates into himself, and surely into his work, the conflicting elements of human life. Thucydides’ work involves war, of course, presenting actual Greek regimes in conflict with one another, and his material allows for a full presentation of the fundamental place of strife in human affairs. Nietzsche counsels that we ‘follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines’ (TI, Ancients 2). While a more complete analysis of Thucydides is beyond the scope of this chapter, a few words about Thucydides’ lauded place in the history of political realism are in order.6 Rather than simply attributing to Thucydides the Athenian thesis that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must’, Nietzsche finds Thucydides’ realism in the subtle relationship between the account of actions and speeches.7 The Athenian effort also includes elements of hopes that far

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surpass any narrow realist reading of the incident (Thucydides 1998: 5.105; Orwin 1997). As they insist that the Melians accept their view of political right, compare themselves to gods and display their own hubris, Thucydides sets the stage for their self-contradictory ambitions, embodied in Alcibiades (Thucydides 1998: 6.16–18, 2.65; Forde 1989). Their simultaneous hopes to believe in their own goodness and to transcend all limitations may be said to lead to a tragic conclusion. The hopes for immortality through their actions, together with their identification with constant motion, emerge as early as Pericles’ speeches (Thucydides 1998: 2.43). Between the lines, Thucydides shows the tragic character of the Athenian regime and perhaps of politics more generally. Nietzsche rejects the optimistic claims for the convergence of cultural flourishing and political strength seen in Pericles’ funeral oration, finding the reality of this conflict in Thucydides’ own presentation of the matter. By revealing these fundamental contradictions and displaying them as a source of self-destruction, Thucydides’ work takes on the character of tragedy, and thereby attains the ranks of those Nietzsche gives the highest praise for affirming life (see, for example, TI, Skirmishes 49; TI, Ancients 5). Celebrating Thucydides for his ‘factuality’, Nietzsche distinguishes him from those who would flee the world of the contingent and particular for a realm of pure thought, or those who would try to make politics a matter of pure principle. Thucydides gives an account of what he characterises as the greatest war, one he sees as exemplary; rather than sacrificing particularity to reveal universal lessons, he maintains a connection to factual particulars, offering a book ‘for all mankind’ that keeps its general lessons fully grounded in particular examples (Thucydides 1998: 1.22). Thucydides’ courage and realism emerge for Nietzsche in opposition to the Greek philosophers who are ‘decadents of Greek culture’ (TI, Ancients 3). Nietzsche ascribes to the ascendant Greeks an ‘audacious realism’ and an ‘agonistic instinct’ (TI, Ancients 3). As he praises the agonistic character of ancient Greek politics, Nietzsche continues to embrace the political suggestions of his early essay ‘Homer’s Contest’ (Acampora 1996; Hatab 1995).8 In treating the philosophers as decadents, Nietzsche portrays the philosophical enumeration of virtues as a function of their loss not a spring for their cultivation. Yet, Nietzsche’s analysis of the decadence of the philosophers provides a way for us to incorporate decadence and aspirations to transcendence into the broadest sort of realism. Contrasting decadent philosophy and agonistic politics, Nietzsche brings them into an agonistic relationship. He addresses the impulse of decadence in his own case, attributing both ascendant and decadent qualities to himself – ‘Apart from the fact that I am decadent, I am also the opposite’ – and claiming ‘a subtler sense of smell for ascent and decline’ because ‘I know both. I am both’ (EH, Wise 1, 2). Incorporating both the Socratic decadence and the affirmative spirit of Thucydides and the tragic poets, Nietzsche points to a possibility more comprehensive than Thucydides or Socrates: one that includes both affirmation and decadence. The hopes for flight into an ideal or the negative drive to stay out of political strife are as much a part of his comprehensive political realism as the embrace of the virtues of the warlike. Because Nietzsche does not think any of the drives that animate human life can simply be eliminated, his opposition to decadent drives takes the form of the warlike appreciation of enmity. Nietzsche ‘wages war’ against what he calls ‘the theologian’s

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instinct’ (A, 9), which he identifies with the effort to find something at odds with life in which to take respite, treating it as nihilism and contrary to life, and yet rooted in a form of life, an exhausted and decadent form of life. Christianity is the expression of this, but Nietzsche is as likely to find the ‘Christian’ approach in modern politics and morality. He attributes it to ‘Leibniz, Kant, and so-called German philosophy’ (A, 61), as well as ‘Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Saint-Simon’ (A, 54). Revolutionary politics and universal morality are clearly in the crosshairs of the war Nietzsche wages against the ‘theologian’s instinct’. Nietzsche proclaims that he has ‘dug up the theologian’s instinct everywhere’ and he characterises it as finding true ‘whatever is harmful to life’ (A, 9). None the less, like all drives, it wants power: ‘we need never doubt that what really happens at bottom: the will to the end, the nihilistic will, wants power’ (A, 9). The possibility of such a drive, one among the forces animating human beings, would eliminate the possibility of any analysis of power based on self-preservation from any narrow conception of self-interest. The quest for power among drives is complex, and as Nietzsche declares war on the instinct contrary to life, he none the less preserves its role in this combat, for none of the drives can be simply eliminated. They must be contested. In this spirit, he describes himself as a ‘tragic philosopher’, which he presents as ‘the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher’ (EH, BT, 3). Embracing a tragic spirit is neither the opposition that expects final reconciliation, nor pessimism. Yet, more than simply contrasting a realist or tragic position with a despairing or pessimistic one, Nietzsche establishes the tragic as the ‘extreme opposite’ of the pessimistic philosopher. A tragic stance is one of affirmation of life, along with all of its conflicts, and accordingly stands in opposition to the pessimistic spirit that would seek withdrawal from the world, as Nietzsche presents the core of pessimism, whether in its explicit Schopenhauerian version or the hidden form of Christianity and its derivative idealisms. Yet, Nietzsche is not simply a tragedian; he is a tragic philosopher who incorporates the decadence of the Greek philosophers and the affirmation of the tragic poets, seeking to eliminate neither the pessimism it opposes nor the affirmative spirit. In this enlarged sense, Nietzsche’s realism participates in what he calls Dionysian, ‘the affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of Dionysian philosophy: saying Yes to opposition and war’ (EH, BT, 3). In this Dionysian, tragic, affirmative mode, Nietzsche brings his embrace of war and conflict into the clearest light. He offers a realism that embraces ‘becoming’ and thus characterises itself as Dionysian: not mere destruction, but the embrace of what is temporary and exists only in its opposition.

Conclusion As a ‘tragic philosopher’, Nietzsche offers a Dionysian realism, which, instead of an effort to escape the tragic and agonistic world of the political into a pure and permanent realm, as do decadent philosophers, embraces the contest inherent in bringing tragedy and philosophy together. He thereby provides the deepest sort of realism because the very drive to escape, the drive to ideals, the drive to replace lost virtues with ideals, is part of the human condition. The reality of life’s conditions and the ideals of our highest aspirations clash, generating conflicts of their own. Instead of

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expecting a politics that operates more rationally once we are enlightened about interests, Nietzsche proffers a realism that would keep this great tension ever in view. Nietzsche’s Dionysian realism accordingly finds its highest exemplars not in any of the political figures that draw his fascination, but in those who can incorporate the sources of conflict into themselves, as do Goethe, Thucydides and the tragic poets. While those like Aeschylus, Thucydides, Goethe and Nietzsche’s narrative persona embody a full tragic affirmation encompassing conflict, such possibilities are rare. They represent for Nietzsche the fullest type of realism but, as he makes clear in treating the state, he does not expect such realism or incorporation to translate into a political synthesis or to resolve conflict on a political plane. Instead, he envisions political life as the continuing contest and conflict of oppositions. Regimes will be dedicated to different principles, and sometimes ideals, and the relations among them will not always include common grounds from which resolution of conflicts can be derived. In Nietzsche’s view, political orders are better conceived on an agonistic model wherein the play of competing forces, rather than any final ordering principle, gives them shape. Instead of political resolution, Nietzsche’s realism would counsel recognition of the inevitability of ongoing conflicts, the limitations of any ordering principle, and the contest of incommensurable aims characteristic of the human condition.

Notes 1. I have used the following standard abbreviations for citations of Nietzsche’s work (all citations refer to section number): A: The Antichrist; BT: The Birth of Tragedy; EH: Ecce Homo; HH: Human, All Too Human; and TI: Twilight of the Idols. For sections from EH, I have used the title abbreviation to indicate the sections of the book 2. See Acampora (2013) on the general role of contest in Nietzsche’s thought, the distinction between productive and destructive contest, and Nietzsche’s relation to the thought of productive opponents. Recent literature in political theory has seen a series of efforts to work out the parameters of agonistic democracy in contrast to models of consensus. See, for example, Connolly (1988), Connolly (2005), Connolly (2008), Honig (1993), Rancière (2004), Rancière (2010), Mouffe (2006) and Mouffe (2013). 3. Lawrence Hatab (1995) argues that an agonistic Nietzschean politics could operate within a liberal framework. Jeffrey Church (2015) has argued that Nietzsche’s early work provides the basis for a meritocratic understanding of Nietzsche’s cultural concern with exemplary individuals consistent with an alternative liberalism. 4. An extremely influential interpretation of Nietzsche offered by Nehamas (1985) presents self-creation as a core aim of Nietzsche’s thought. Rather than the demand to adopt a style, this passage on Goethe suggests that the incorporation of elements is crucial to genuine self-creation and that the creative task remains in an important relationship to nature. 5. Well before Max Weber uses force as the distinguishing character of the state (Weber 2004), Buckhardt writes, ‘force always comes first’, even if the human state is ‘in some way free’ and ‘based on conscious reciprocity’ (Burckhardt 1979: 63). 6. See also Kirkland (2010), Polansky (2015) and Bedford and Workman (2001). 7. See Doyle (1990) and Forde (1995). 8. On the possible contributions of Nietzschean agonistic politics to democracy, see Connolly (1991), Connolly (2005), Connolly (2008), Hatab (1995), Hatab (2014), Honig (1993), Owen (1995), Owen (2008), Siemens (2008) and Villa (2000).

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Bibliography Acampora, Christa Davis (1996), ‘Re/Introducing “Homer’s Contest”: A new translation with notes and commentary’, Nietzscheana, vol. 5. Acampora, Christa Davis (2013), Contesting Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Augustine (2004), City of God, Penguin Classics, translated by Henry Bettenson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bedford, David, and Thom Workman (2001), ‘The tragic reading of the Thucydidean tragedy’, Review of International Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 51–67. Bergmann, Peter (1987), Nietzsche: The Last Anti-Political German, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Burckhardt, Jacob (1979), Reflections on History, translated by M. D. Hottinger, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Burckhardt, Jacob (1990) [1860], The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, New York: Penguin. Church, Jeffrey (2015), Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, William (1988), Political Theory and Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press. Connolly, William (1991), Identity/Difference, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Connolly, William (1995), The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, William (2005), Pluralism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William (2008), ‘Nietzsche, democracy, and time’, in Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power, and Politics, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Connolly, William (2011), A World of Becoming, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William (2013), The Fragility of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conway, Daniel (2002), ‘Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche’s imperial ambitions’, in J. Golomb and R. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Detwiler, Bruce (1990), Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dombowsky, Don (2014), Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doyle, Michael W. (1990), ‘Thucydidean realism’, Review of International Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 223–37. Forde, Steven (1989), The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Ambition in Thucydides, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Forde, Steven (1995), ‘International realism and the science of politics: Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Neorealism’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 39, pp. 141–60. Glenn, Paul F. (2001), ‘Nietzsche’s Napoleon: The higher man as political actor’, The Review of Politics, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 129–58. Guicciardini, Francesco (1969), The History of Italy, translated by Sidney Alexander, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hatab, Lawrence (1995), A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, Chicago: Open Court. Hatab, Lawrence (2008), ‘Breaking the social contract’, in Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power, and Politics, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hatab, Lawrence (2014), ‘Nietzsche’s will to power and politics’, in Manuel Knolla and Barry Stocker (eds), Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, Berlin: de Gruyter. Hobbes, Thomas (1994) [1790], Leviathan, ed. by Edwin Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Honig, Bonnie (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel (1970), ‘Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch’, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kirkland, Paul (2009), Nietzsche’s Noble Aims, New York: Lexington. Kirkland, Paul (2010), ‘Nietzsche’s tragic realism’, The Review of Politics, vol. 72, no. 1. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1998), The Prince, translated by Harvey Mansfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2006), The Return of the Political, New York: Verso. Mouffe, Chantal (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, New York: Verso. Nehamas, Alexander (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) [1872], The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967ff.), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1977a) [1888], The Antichrist, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1977b) [1888], Twilight of the Idols, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989a) [1908], Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989b [1887]), On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996) [1876], Human, All Too Human, translated by Marion Faber, Lincoln, NB: Bison. Orwin, Cliff (1997), The Humanity of Thucydides, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Owen, David (1995), Nietzsche, Politics, Modernity, New York: Sage. Owen, David (2008), ‘Nietzsche, ethical agency, and the problem of democracy’, in Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power, and Politics, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Polansky, David (2015), ‘Nietzsche and Thucydidean realism’, The Review of Politics, vol. 77, pp. 425–48. Rancière, Jacques (2004), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques (2010), Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics, translated by Steven Corcoran, New York: Continuum. Reginster, Bernard (2006), The Affirmation of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Siemens, Herman (2008), ‘Yes, No, Maybe So . . . Nietzsche’s Equivocations on the Relation between Democracy and “Grosse Politik”’, in Nietzsche, Power, and Politics, ed. by Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 231–68. Siemens, Herman (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy (1870–1886)’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 38, pp. 20–37. Thucydides (1998), The Peloponnesian War, translated by Steven Lattimore, Indianapolis: Hackett. Villa, Dana (2000), ‘Democratizing the agon: Nietzsche, Arendt, and the agonistic tendency in recent political theory’, in Why Nietzsche Still, Berkeley: University of California Press. Warren, Mark (1991), Nietzsche and Political Thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weber, Max (2004) [1919], ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (eds), The Vocation Lectures, Indianapolis: Hackett.

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18 Max Weber Max Weber’s concept of political realism Christopher Adair-Toteff

Chapter Overview

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hroughout his life, Max Weber was strongly committed to a particular type of political realism. From his early student years until shortly before his death, he thought and wrote about the nature and purpose of politics. Weber never wrote a comprehensive doctrine of political realism; however, one can be constructed by examining a number of Weber’s major speeches. These include his early ‘Inaugural Lecture’, which he delivered at the university in Freiburg, as well as the two lectures that he later gave at the university in Munich. This ‘doctrine’ was fundamentally human and realistic, rather than otherworldly and idealistic. It was based upon an accurate assessment of the political issues and was intended to encompass most of the foreseeable consequences. And it was based upon three guiding principles regarding politics: true clarity, real responsibility and genuine passion. The first two ensured that politics was conducted seriously and soberly, while the third guaranteed that it was pursued forcefully and vigorously. Taken together, ‘Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik (The Nation-State and Economic Policy)’, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation)’ and ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’ reveal Weber as a first-rate thinker and political realist who was passionately committed to ensuring that Germany had its rightful place upon the world stage. *

*

*

Introduction Max Weber never considered himself to be a professional political philosopher; however, he possessed a conception of political thinking that was fundamentally realistic. This conception is revealed by his responses to two significant series of events in Germany: the political and economic problems that occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the political and economic upheaval that came with Germany’s humiliating loss in the war. These events provided Weber with the empirical foundations for his conception of political realism. Weber never developed this conception into a complete political theory, but one can be reconstructed from his early Inaugural Lecture and his later ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’ speech.

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Weber rejected the notion of ‘human nature’ but he clearly understood human interaction. As a result, Weber’s reconstructed political theory is based upon a number of realistic principles: first, do not be fooled by the illusions of universal peace and human happiness but recognise that struggle is unavoidable. Second, do not focus on the wants of a single class but consider the needs of all citizens. Third, do not be myopic and childish but be farsighted and mature. The mature politician will accept that politics is hard work and success cannot be decided by immediate factors. Instead, the mature politician will act responsibly and will base decisions on the role that his country will play in history. Weber was not a trained political theorist and the discipline of international relations did not yet exist, and what he calls political maturity is really his name for what is now referred to as political realism. Whether one chooses to call it political maturity as Weber did then or political realism as we do now, it is relevant for us today and will be for those who will confront the international problems of tomorrow.

Weber’s Early Political Thinking We know that Max Weber was interested in political issues from an early age. Not only was his father involved in German politics but also the Weber home was frequently a place where leading political thinkers gathered. More relevant, Weber investigated political issues in history while quite young – at thirteen he wrote a work on mass migration in Roman times (Kaube 2014: 53). At seventeen he was reading Heinrich von Treitschke’s multi-volume work on the history of Germany in the nineteenth century, and he wrote to his cousin Fritz Baumgarten it was pure enjoyment (Weber 1926: 29). It was only a few years later that Weber heard Treitschke’s lectures on politics. While he admired much of Treitschke’s political realism, he was concerned that he mixed his political commentary with his scientific investigations; even at this young age Weber believed that values and scholarship should be kept separate (Weber 1926: 175). Weber also objected to Treitschke’s inclination to make anti-Semitic remarks and although he also found fault with Treitschke’s tendency to promote virulent German nationalism, he tended to agree with Treitschke’s overall approach to politics. First, Weber would have agreed with Treitschke’s appropriation of Aristotle’s claim that all men are political animals (Treitschke 1897: 18–19, 23). Second, Weber would have concurred with Treitschke that ‘power is the principle of the state’, just as ‘faith is the principle of the Church’ and ‘love is the principle of the family’ (Treitschke 1897: 33, 37). Third, Weber would agree that the larger and more powerful the state is, the more responsibility it has to its people and to history (Treitschke 1897: 43). Fourth, Weber would have no difficulty endorsing Treitschke’s claim that humans are naturally inclined to struggle with each other (Treitschke 1897: 54, 60). Finally, Weber would naturally accede to Treitschke’s insistence that the state is not only concerned with the highest good but also with the furtherance of its citizens, thus the nature of the state is not only concerned with the ethical but also with power (63). What Weber learned from Treitschke helped form his responses to one of the greatest problems to confront Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century – the political and economic problems caused by Prussian landowners east of the Elbe. Weber was trained in jurisprudence and he viewed many problems through the lens of the law. However, Weber recognised early on that the law was not the only factor

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that determined both problems and their potential solutions. This is largely because Weber believed that many different values were often, if not always, in conflict (Turner and Factor 1984: 25, 70–1). A good case in point was Weber’s response to the conflict of values that was related to the agrarian questions in the east. The history of this problem can be briefly traced: from the mid-nineteenth century the Prussian landowning class, the Junker, were increasingly finding that they were losing money. This was caused by a number of different factors.1 One of these factors was economics: there was increasing agricultural competition from Russia to the east and the USA, whose lower grain prices forced down the price that the Junker could charge. Politically, Germany was undergoing rapid industrialisation and the Junker class was losing political power. Socially, because of these two forces, the Junker estates were compelled to increase the number of immigrant workers, especially from Poland. These replaced the German workers who were leaving the land in the east for work in the factories in the west. They were cheaper for the landowners to pay, but the increasing ‘Polonisation’ caused political, economic and cultural problems (Weber 1984a: 5–10; Weber 1984b: 1–8; see also Kaube 2014: 100–4). Weber became involved in this partially because he knew about this situation first-hand, having been stationed in and around Posen, but mostly because he was asked by the Verein für Socialpolitik (German Economic Association) to conduct the investigations into the rural labourers in the lands east of the Elbe river (Weber 1984b: 18, 23–8; Baumgarten 1964: 691; Kaube 2014: 119; Müller 2007: 43). It is evident from Weber’s writings that he drew political consequences from his empirical research. These are revealed in his work from 1892 entitled ‘“Privatenquȇte” über die Lage der Landarbeiter (Private Enquiry on the Situation of Rural Labourers)’, in which he warned against idealisation of the workers and asked whether the state would take the situation seriously enough. Questions of who is guilty or not are completely irrelevant; instead, what matters is the need to confront the problem directly (Weber 1984a: 77, 83, 85, 96, 99, 100–5). These are also indicated in a speech from the following years, ‘Die ländliche Arbeitsverfassung (The Rural Labour Constitution)’. He notes that the problem of the worker is not just an economic issue but also a major political one. That is why he was convinced that the increasing number of Polish workers was the ‘most dangerous enemy of our nationality’. He was concerned that people were underestimating the threat and said that Germany should be dealing with the problem with the same degree of strength as if an actual foreign army were threatening the eastern border. The issue was nothing less than Germany’s future (Weber 1993: 166, 174, 177, 184, 190–1, 196–7). Finally, many of these same political warnings are present in both versions of Weber’s 1894 essay, ‘Entwicklungstendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter (Developmental Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian Rural Labourers)’. Once again, Weber insists that this problem is not merely about the changing situation of the German landowners and workers; it is about Germany’s entire future (Weber 1984a: 370, 378, 394, 416, 421, 425, 457, 460–2). These interrelated themes of economics, politics and socialculture are themes that will recur throughout much of Weber’s life. The results of Weber’s investigations into the agrarian workers’ situation in Prussia helped him tremendously; not only did they raise his profile in the Verein, but also they helped Weber secure a full professorship at Freiburg (Weber 2008: 1–3). Weber was offered the chair of Nationalökonomie und Finanzwissenschaft (Political Economy

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and Finance) in the spring of 1894 and moved to Freiburg in the autumn. He gave his famous ‘Inaugural Lecture’ in May the following year (Weber 1984a: 536). Although the speech is often referred to as his ‘Freiburg Speech’ or as his ‘Inaugural Lecture’, it is important to keep its official title in mind because it reflects many of Weber’s key points. In ‘Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik (The Nation-State and Economic Policy)’ Weber touches on important issues in politics, economics and culture. The speech is, without doubt, critically important to understanding Weber’s conception of political realism. Wolfgang Mommsen insists that this speech was the most important document of Weber’s political thinking prior to the war. Mommsen first made this claim in 1959 and has consistently maintained it since then (Mommsen 1959: 40–1; Mommsen 2004: 38). Weber’s lecture caused a considerable stir when he gave it. And, when he published it, he added that it was not the agreement with what he said, but rather the disagreement it had provoked that prompted him to put it into print. Weber’s speech remains controversial for a number of reasons. It is controversial because it was clearly nationalistic and slightly racist. And it is controversial because critics and apologists alike suggested that in it Weber did not adhere to his major principle and that he mixed value judgements with scholarly analysis.2 Two points need to be made regarding this issue. First, Weber never said that one should avoid making value judgements; in fact, he always admitted that one could hardly avoid doing so. What he objected to was the intentional blurring of the thin line between them when one should make it clear when one has moved from the sphere of objective scholarship to the sphere of subjective values. Second, Weber explicitly states in the ‘Vorbemerkung’ to the speech that an inaugural lecture provides the opportunity for someone to give the ‘open representation and the justification of the personal’ and of one’s ‘“subjective” standpoints’ (Weber 1993: 543). Weber takes advantage of this opportunity and takes steps to ensure that his audience recognises when he moves from analysis to prescription. The speech can be divided into two sections: the first is a rather dry discussion of the economic conditions in the east while the second is, as Arnold Bergstraesser suggested, ‘eminently political’ (Bergstraesser 1957: 211).3 Weber says that the theme promises more than he could deliver and asks that his audience ‘follow him to the flat land of the Prussian Province of Westpreußen’ (Weber 1993: 545). He then proceeds to provide an overview of the social and economic situations in the region. He also discusses the various uses of the land and the different types of labourer (Weber 1993: 548–54). However, he also indicates at the outset that this choice of topic is not about some minor scholarly dispute; rather, it is about the ‘economic struggle for existence’. This theme of struggle is found throughout the lecture and it remains one of Weber’s most basic beliefs: that there is always the issue of ‘the rule (Herrschaft) of man over man’ (Lassman 2000: 83–4). The notion of ‘rule’, ‘domination’ or ‘authority’ is not particularly a concern for us here; what is important is that it is connected to Weber’s fundamental conviction that life is a struggle. Weber uses the word ‘struggle’ (‘Kampf’) and variations of it throughout the Inaugural Lecture.4 Since this is an economic struggle to the death, what is important is power (‘Macht’). Weber invokes it on almost every page (Weber 1993: 560, 560, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 570, 571, 572). Not to realise this is to fall for an illusion. Those who are inclined to believe in ‘primitive idealism’ are often to be found in the ‘stillness of the study’ (Weber 1993: 552). There is no peace in the eternal economic struggle; there

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can only be the ‘illusion of peace’, and anyone who believes in the ‘dream of peace and human happiness’ actually stands before the gates to Dante’s Hell: ‘lasciate ogni speranza’ (Weber 1993: 558–9, 572–3). It would, however, be a mistake to conclude from this that Weber held a view of power similar to that offered by Polemarchus and embraced by Thrasymachus: that ‘might makes right’ (Plato 1992: 10, 14). Instead, Weber follows Socrates to some extent in insisting that ‘might does not make right’ and that power cannot and must not be used indiscriminately. This is why Weber insists that what Germany needs is a class that is politically mature. In Weber’s view, political maturity is shown by the ability to avoid idealistic illusions and to confront political realities; it is a sense of ‘conscious self-control’ and the recognition of the need for ‘sober work’ (Weber 1993: 563, 674). And it must be not restricted to the needs of a single class or group but must recognise the needs of all of the people (Weber 1993: 563–6, 569). Finally, it is the recognition that the mature political leader understands that he has an obligation to history (Weber 1993: 571, 573). Weber was concerned that Germany lacked such mature politicians and he laid much of the blame on Bismarck and his policies. The result of these was that no class was trained to lead: not the nobles, not the proletariat and not the bourgeoisie. As Weber’s later speeches revealed, he was concerned that there was no one on Germany’s political horizon who might possess the necessary political maturity.

Weber’s War Experience and its Consequences Weber continued to teach at Freiburg and then he accepted the call to Heidelberg. Unfortunately, his mental and physical collapse made it impossible for him to continue his university functions. After years of recuperation he still did not feel that it was possible for him to resume his position, so after several attempts he was finally successful in persuading the government to permit him to resign his chair. He was finally well enough to resume writing and spent the time from 1904 to 1914 working on various studies, including the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the Russian Revolution of 1905, labour conditions in German factories, and the research for what would become known as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economics and Society). Like many other Germans, Weber initially greeted the outbreak of the war with enthusiasm. He was convinced that Germany was justified in fighting and hoped for a speedy end to the hostilities. However, his lengthy stint in a Heidelberg hospital during the autumn of 1914 made him acutely aware of the number and severity of the casualties and caused him to appreciate the huge costs for Germany and for the world. As the war moved into its second and third years, it became even more obvious to Weber that Germany was not going to win. As a result, he grew even more sober-minded about Germany’s political future in the world (Weber 1926: 525–43; Kaube 2014: 350–9; Weber 1984a: 153). In February 1916, Weber published a brief but rich piece entitled ‘Zwischen zwei Gesetzen (Between Two Laws)’. In the volume from the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe it takes up less than five pages, but in it he spells out clearly and fully the differences between two types of country and two political approaches (Weber 1984a: 95–9). As with many previous writings, as well as many later ones, Weber takes up the issue of Germany’s responsibility towards history (Weber 1984a: 95). Weber differentiates between smaller countries and larger ones, and makes it very clear that he is not just

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speaking about geographical size or population numbers. Instead, he distinguishes between countries that have less power and those who have more power. Again, he insists that the smaller countries are no less important but maintains that they have different responsibilities. As examples of the smaller countries Weber lists Denmark, Holland, Norway and Switzerland (Weber 1984a: 95). These countries do not have much power and as a consequence they do not have as many responsibilities. But Germany is fundamentally different: because it is a ‘world power’ it has many responsibilities, not just to its own citizens but also to the world. Weber allows that little states do not have much weight on the scales of history but insists that Germany does and with that comes more responsibility. Weber warns that one should not blithely poke something in the wheels of history and then try to walk away. Nor does he believe that one can sit around the tea table and pretend neutrality is the only answer. Regarding the second of these, Weber has in mind the Americans and the fact that, if they really were pacifists, then the matter would be different. But they are not real pacifists because they do not draw the consequences of their pacifism. However, there is no such middle ground; it is a simple either/or. Either one completely follows the dicta from the Sermon on the Mount, like Tolstoy, or one accepts that power is ‘diabolical’, as Jakob Burckhardt described it (Weber 1984a: 95). If a country takes up power, then it has the obligation to act responsibly, and for Weber that means recognising that it has an obligation to history. In other words, the ‘Weltmacht (world power)’ must face up to the ‘Forderung des Tages (demands of the day)’ (Weber 1984a: 98).5 The choice is simple: either one embraces the otherworldly ethics of the ‘God of Christianity’, or one accepts this world’s warring gods and values. Since a great country accepts that it has power, then it must act maturely on the world’s stage. Weber’s concern about America was well founded, for he was convinced that if Germany decided to engage in unlimited submarine warfare, then the USA would no longer stay out of the war. Wolfgang Mommsen details Weber’s concern in his Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik, as well as in the editorial comments to Weber’s article ‘Der verschärfte U-Boot-Krieg (Unrestricted Submarine Warfare)’ (Mommsen 1959: 241–51; Weber 1984a: 99–110). This article is obviously focused on a serious problem that occurred during the war but, as with many such writings, one can learn a great deal about Weber’s sense of political responsibility. First, there is Weber’s concern that too many people involved in this discussion were not being realistic; they were too quick to dismiss the claim that unlimited submarine warfare would induce the Americans to enter the war (Weber 1984a: 116, 121). Second, Weber believed that too many people were so focused on the specific problem that they were either unwilling or unable to consider other possible ramifications stemming from increased submarine warfare. These possible ramifications had little to do with the issue of warfare itself, but they did relate to Germany’s ability to bring in raw materials by ship. If Germany were to escalate the marine conflicts, then it was reasonable to expect its opponents would be far more inclined to attack German commercial ships (Weber 1984a: 120–1). Third, Weber was angered by the quick change of political opinion because it indicated a lack of seriousness and he was just as annoyed by facile claims about finding the ‘way to peace’, as if it were just some minor issue of what path to take (Weber 1984a: 122). What was needed was a ‘totally sober assessment’, a healthy regard for all possible consequences, and a real sense of responsibility (Weber 1984a: 118, 124).

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The final article that is important for understanding Weber’s political realism is the one he published at the end of 1916. Once again, he warns against the same attitudes and feelings that lead to a politics of vanity and a culture of hate (Weber 1984a: 164–5, 171, 181). He also warns about heated speeches (Weber 1984a: 170, 182–3). Weber admits that he has nothing against ‘hate and anger as such’ but insists that they have no place in ‘real politics’ (‘sachliche Politik’).6 What ‘real politics’ is, is a politics guided by reason and proportion; it is the politics of serious deeds and not foolish talk. It is ‘a politics of silent commerce’ (Weber 1984a: 165). It is also the realisation of who the real enemy is: one not based upon some historical myth or some contemporary prejudice (Weber 1984a: 171, 177). For Weber, Germany’s real enemy does not lie in the West, but rather in the East; it is not Germany or France, but Russia and Poland. He grants that he is regarded as an ‘enemy of Poland’ and admits that he has warned for years against the Polish practice of working for low wages, but he has never engaged in the ‘Pan German, crazily aggressive and inconsequential vocal politics against the Poles’ (Weber 1984a: 187). But he is warning against the Slavic danger, one that threatens not only German’s physical existence but also ‘our entire culture’ – and by that Weber means ‘world culture’ (Weber 1984a: 180). It is Germany’s responsibility as a world power to stop this threat, and as a ‘“Realpolitiker”’ a German must do so. It is Germany’s duty and destiny, and Germans must do so out of a sense of honour and responsibility to world history (Weber 1984a: 181, 190, 192–4). The war continued for almost two more years and each successive year provided Weber with further examples of the failure of vanity politics and ‘illusionary optimism’. Just as the Prussian situation in the 1890s helped Weber formulate his mature politics, the horrendous losses of the war prompted him to work harder to develop a more reasonable (and more successful) theory of political leadership.

Weber’s Later Political Realism Weber’s final and fullest discussion of what politics is and how it should be conducted is found in the speech that he gave in Munich on 28 January 1919. Entitled ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’, it should be regarded as the companion piece to his earlier speech ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation)’. Both speeches belonged to the four given in a lecture series called ‘Geistige Arbeit als Beruf (Mental Works as a Vocation)’ (Weber 1992: 59, 114). He was concerned that ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’ might not be well received and complained that he was unable to formulate the theme properly (Weber 2012: 403, 411). This helps explain why Weber began by warning that his audience was bound to find his speech disappointing. It is also because he often began speeches by claiming that what he will say will probably not meet the expectations of his audience (Weber 1992: 71). Weber begins by speaking of the state: he does not talk about it as an abstract entity or about its constitutional genesis; rather, he describes it simply in terms of force. Weber’s blunt realism must have shocked some of his audience, and what must have shocked them even more was his invocation of Trotsky’s dictum that ‘Every state is founded on force’ (Weber 1992: 158). Nor is Weber interested in beginning with any discussion of party politics; instead, he states as a matter of fact that ‘He who strives for politics, strives for power’ (Weber 1992: 159). Weber distinguishes between the

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non-political bureaucrat who follows his own ‘calling’ and the political person who is driven by party considerations (Weber 1992: 189). Weber then takes up the question of the real relationship between politics and ethics. Weber answers this question in a roundabout way, contrasting those who are totally uninterested in politics with those who are. To help clarify this, Weber provides his famous distinction between two types of ethics: ‘Gesinnungsethik’ (‘ethics of conviction’) and ‘Verantwortungsethik’ (‘ethics of responsibility’). The former bases all decisions on the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ with the recognition that one is never, ever, justified in returning violence with violence. Weber is adamant about the unconditionality of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and the absolute ethics of the Gospels. If one is subject to an evil attack, one must not return it with evil. If one is struck on the cheek, there is absolutely no other course but to turn the other cheek. Its absoluteness of principle means that there can be no concern about consequences. To underscore this, Weber quotes from Martin Luther: ‘the Christian does what is right and leaves the consequence to God’, and the more famous insistence, ‘ich kann nicht anders, hier stehe ich’ (‘I can do no other, here I stand’) (Weber 1992: 237, 250). Weber recognises that this type of ethical command is so stringent and so otherworldly that only a few are able to practise it. He lists Jesus, the Apostles and Saint Francis: in other words, one must be a holy person and as such ‘not from this world’ (Weber 1992: 234–5, 247).7 Weber respects these saintly, otherworldly types with their refusal to enter politics and their absolute rejection of force. Weber then moves on to discuss those who believe in politics and separates them into two groups. The first group contains people who, for various reasons, are not suited to politics but believe that they are entitled to be involved. Keep in mind the fact that Weber gave this speech just after war’s end and during the revolutionary events that occurred in Berlin, Munich and a few other cities. Weber made it abundantly clear in various letters that he thought the ‘revolution’ was a farce; he referred to it several times as a ‘carnival’ and accused the participants of ‘playing’ at it (Weber 2012: 294, 296, 307–8, 329, 356). Here, in ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’, Weber refers to it again as a ‘carnival’, led by ‘a pair of dictators of the street’. For many of these ‘revolutionaries’ this is a ‘frivolous intellectual game’ engaged in by political dilettantes (Weber 1992: 223, 227–8). These dilettantes believe that they are entitled to use force because they are guided by a ‘noble intention’ (‘edle Absicht’) (Weber 1992: 234). Instead, these are irresponsible political idealists, misguided journalists and crazy ‘warriors of faith’ (Weber 1992: 172, 192–6, 246).8 ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’ may be a critique of many political types, but it also contains Weber’s prescription for a real political leader. This prescription applies to the leader of the state but applies equally well to the political leader on the international stage. The real political leader has three characteristics: ‘Leidenschaft’, ‘Augenmaß’ and ‘Verantwortungsgefühl’. None of these three characteristics is easy to define and so Weber makes some effort to explain them. In ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation)’, Weber insists that the scholar must have a sense of ‘passion’ (‘Leidenschaft’) for his work; without a sense of enthusiasm, it is unlikely that the scholar will accomplish anything. Weber readily admits that scholarship is often a slow and tedious effort, but it still needs both dedication and that ‘manic’ something. Indeed, Weber insists that anything worth doing is worth doing only with ‘passion’.9 In ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’, Weber stresses the importance

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of ‘Leidenschaft’ but distinguishes this ‘true passion’ from what he refers to as ‘sterile excitement’ (Weber 1992: 249). Weber borrows the term from his friend Georg Simmel and they both use it to describe the worthless agitation that certain Russian intellectuals and most of the German ‘revolutionaries’ engage in (Weber 1992: 227). One gets the sense that Weber and Simmel would liken this to the noisy yapping of an easily excitable little dog. The second characteristic is ‘Augenmaß’: that is, ‘eye measurement’. What this implies is the ability to eye things correctly; Weber defines it as ‘the distance to things and people’ (Weber 1992: 227). What he means is the ability to stand back and gain the proper perspective. It is the complement to the first characteristic: whereas ‘Leidenschaft’ is ‘hot’, ‘Augenmaß’ is ‘cool’. Weber recognises the difficulty in having both but insists that the lack of distance is one of the ‘deadly sins’ of every politician (Weber 1992: 227–8). The lack of distance to one’s self is especially dangerous because it is ever present. This ‘deadly enemy’ is ‘vanity’ and it disrupts dedication to the matter at hand. This is the selfish desire to place oneself in the foreground, and it almost invariably leads to ‘lack of responsibility’ (Weber 1992: 228–9). With this, Weber comes to the final and perhaps most important of the three characteristics. ‘Verantwortungsgefühl’ is the feeling or sense of responsibility. Weber always links the possession of power with the notion of responsibility; those who lack power have no responsibility, but those who do possess power must accept it (Weber 1992: 218–20, 226). By responsibility, Weber means not only forecasting the possible results but also accepting them as well. Weber is under no illusion that a human can predict the future, but he does insist that people do have the capacity to figure out the possible (‘foreseeable’) consequences of an action. And, he insists that, unlike the ‘Gesinnungsethiker’, the ‘Verantwortungsethiker’ must honestly accept the results. Weber insists that the two different ethics are based upon two fundamentally different approaches: ‘Gesinnungsethisch’ is based upon the absolute principle of non-violence while the ‘Verantwortungsethisch’ is based upon power. While Weber insists that the two are based upon two completely different maxims, he admits that they do occasionally overlap (Weber 1992: 237). Those who are driven by power often have principles, and those with the absolute principle sometimes do take responsibility. What he objects to is those who claim to believe in the highest principle but are willingly to employ force to achieve their aims. Specifically, Weber has in mind those revolutionary socialists who, when faced with the choice between one more year of war and then revolution, or peace immediately but no revolution, do not hesitate to choose the former, even if they have no real assurance that this revolution will be good for anyone (Weber 1992: 239). For Weber, this world is the ‘world of realities’ and that means seeing things as they really are and not how one would like them to be (Weber 1992: 240). It is nice to think that good can come only from good and bad can come only from bad, but in reality, one often comes from the other. Weber insists that anyone ‘who does not see this is in fact politically a child’ (Weber 1992: 242). Those who seek salvation for their souls or for others should choose a path other than politics; politics means force and is one of the ‘diabolical powers’ (Weber 1992: 249). Those who cannot tolerate stupidity or baseness have no place in politics; only those who are certain that, when faced with these things, they can still say ‘Dennoch’ (‘nevertheless’) – only they have the ‘calling’ for politics.

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Conclusion Weber never believed that man had a special nature but he did always believe that conflict between people was natural. His recognition of the inevitability of conflict meant that he also realised that there could be no such thing as eternal peace. He saw conflict throughout his life but two long-term conflicts had a major impact on his thinking: the east Elbian agrarian conflict and the world war. He recognised that vanity, self-interest and even hubris played major roles in both; these historical conflicts prompted Weber to consider the issue of what could be done to minimise the tragic consequences of these conflicts. His answers, first formulated in his early Freiburg speech and then developed more fully in his later Munich lecture ‘Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation)’, provide a theoretical framework for the political realist. Like the local politician, the person engaged in the international arena must have three fundamental qualities: passion, cool distance and, above all, a sense of responsibility. Conflict can never be eliminated but the damage does not have to be so massive – if one adheres to what Weber thought of as political maturity or what we might refer to as political realism.

Notes 1. For a nuanced account of Weber’s preoccupation with the economic, political and social– cultural problems arising from the Junkers, see Torp (1998: especially 7–13, 100–1, 108). For a recent examination of the complex issues arising from the agrarian problems, see Adair-Toteff (2016). 2. See Mommsen (1959: 41). 3. In his scholarly works, Weber invariably begins with concepts but with his more political writings he often begins with dry facts. For examples of the former, see Weber (2008: 71–6, 163, 197–202); Weber (2009a: 72–6); Weber (2009b: 66–75). For examples of the latter, see Weber (1994: 71–4, 157–8). 4. Weber uses variations on this phrase, which signals how important he thinks this is: ‘economic death struggle’, ‘struggle for existence’, ‘struggle for power’ (Weber 1993: 545, 553, 558, 560, 565, 567, 573). 5. Weber will use this phrase again at the end of ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation)’. While he is speaking about the dedication that the scholar has to his work, his comments apply equally to the political leader. So too does his assertion that this is easy to do when he finds his ‘Daimon’ and holds on to the ‘threads of his life’ (Weber 1992: 111). 6. ‘Sachliche’ can mean ‘serious’, ‘objective’ or ‘practical’ and Weber often employs this term to contrast the mature type of politics with the childish type and its crazy talk and demagogic speeches. He says he has had enough of ‘the demagogy of these politicians of vanity’ (Weber 1984a: 168, 165). Weber reminds us that the first person to be called a demagogue was Pericles and not Cleon (see Adair-Toteff 2008). 7. In a letter from 13 November 1918, Weber made the same point about the unconditionality of this type of ethics. Either one follows the command never to do evil and one lives like Saint Francis or Saint Clara, or an Indian monk or certain Russians – in ‘Politik als Beruf’ he identifies certain characters from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Alternatively, one resists evil with force, in which case one is responsible for the outcomes (Weber 2012: 301; Weber 1992: 247). 8. Weber respected principled revolutionaries, such as August Bebel and Ernst Toller, but had nothing but disgust for revolutionary charlatans like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

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(Weber 2012: 221, 300, 304, 310, 698–9). When Weber wrote about the ‘pair of dictators of the street’, he ostensibly meant Liebknecht and Luxemburg (Weber 1992: 223, note 104). For a discussion of Weber’s relation to Toller, see Adair-Toteff (2007). 9. ‘Denn nichts ist für den Menschen als Menschen etwas Wert, was er nicht mit Leidenschaft tun kann’ (Weber 1992: 81–3).

Bibliography Adair-Toteff, Christopher (2007), ‘Max Weber and Ernst Toller: Realists or idealists?’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–17. Adair-Toteff, Christopher (2008), ‘Max Weber’s Pericles: The political demagogue’, Max Weber Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 147–62. Adair-Toteff, Christopher (2015), ‘Max Weber and the agrarian questions’, in Alan Sica (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Max Weber, London: Anthem. Adair-Toteff, Christopher (2016), Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Baumgarten, Hermann (1964), Max Weber: Werk und Person, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Bergstraesser, Arnold (1957), ‘Max Webers Antrittsvorlesung in Zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 5, no. 3, July, pp. 209–19. Kaube, Jürgen (2014), Max Weber: Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen, Berlin: Rowolt. Lassmann, Peter (2000), ‘The rule of man over man: Politics, power and legitimation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Max Weber, ed. by Stephen Turner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 83–98. Mommsen, Wolfgang (1959), Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik: 1890–1920, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Mommsen, Wolfgang (2004), Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik, 3rd edn, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Müller, H.-P. (2007), Max Weber: Eine Einführung in sein Werk, Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau. Nipperdey, Thomas (1998), Deutsche Geschichte: 1866–1918, vol. II. Machtstaat vor der Demokratie, Munich: C. H. Beck. Plato (1992), The Republic, translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Scaff, Lawrence (1989) [1984], ‘Weber before Weberian sociology’, in Reading Weber, ed. by Keith Tribe, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 15–41. Torp, Cornelius (1998), Max Weber und die preußischen Junker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Treitschke, Heinrich von (1897), Politik: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zur Berlin, vol. I, ed. by Max Cornelius, Leipzig: G. Hirzel. Treitschke, Heinrich von (1898), Politik: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zur Berlin, vol. II, ed. by Max Cornelius, Leipzig: G. Hirzel. Turner, Stephen P., and Regis A. Factor (1984), Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value: A Study of Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Turner, Stephen P., and Regis A. Factor (1994), Max Weber: Lawyer as Social Thinker, London: Routledge. Weber, Marianne (1926), Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Weber, Max (1984a), Zur Politik im Weltkrieg: Schriften und Reden 1914–1918, ed. by Wolfgang J. Mommsen with Gangolf Hübinger, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, section 15. Weber, Max (1984b), Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland: 1892, ed. by Martin Riesebrodt, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, section 3.

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Weber, Max (1988), Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands: Schriften und Reden 1918–1920, ed. by Wolfgang J. Mommsen with Wolfgang Schwentker, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, section 16. Weber, Max (1992), Wissenschaft als Beruf/Politik als Beruf, ed. by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter with Birgitt Morgenbrod, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, section 17. Weber, Max (1993), Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik: Schriften und Reden 1892–1899, ed. by Wolfgang J. Mommsen with Rita Aldenhoff, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, section 4. Weber, Max (1994), Briefe 1909–1910, ed. by M. R. Lepsius and W. J. Mommsen, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Weber, Max (2008), Agrarrecht, Agrargeschichte, Agrarpolitik: Vorlesungen 1894–1899, ed. by Rita Aldenhoff-Hübinger, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. III, section 5. Weber, Max (2009a), Arbeiterfrage und Arbeiterbewegung: Vorlesungen 1895–1898, ed. by Rita Aldenhoff-Hübinger with Silke Fehlemann, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. III, section 4. Weber, Max (2009b), Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik (Staatssoziologie) (Unvollendet. Mit- und Nachschriften 1920), ed. by Gangolf Hübinger with Andreas Terwey, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. III, section 7. Weber, Max (2011), Abriß der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Mit- und Nachschriften 1919/1920, ed. by Wolfgang Schluchter with Joachim Schröder, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. III, section 6. Weber, Max (2012), Briefe 1918–1920, ed. by Gerd Krumeich and M. Rainer Lepsius with Uta Hinz, Sybille Oßwald-Bargende and Manfred Schön, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. II, section 10.

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19 Walter Lippmann A ‘society realist’ reconciling humanity and power Alan Chong

Chapter Overview

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alter Lippmann’s particular brand of realism is grounded in the quest to steer human survival through the jungle of power politics in spite of the basic flaws of human nature. As such, Lippmann is a ‘realist’ to the extent that he acknowledges the overriding political impulses to attain power for self-aggrandisement but he is doing so in order to persuade statesmen to pursue sustainable foreign policies. In this regard, Lippmann’s prognoses always end up recommending states to embed their national interests in some form of due regard for their fellow nation-states and wider humanity. This tension between power politics and the preservation of humanity can be discerned by analysing his treatment of human nature, its religious fixation and its relationship with nationalism; the tensions between national interest and peaceful coexistence; and the difficulties of equipping public opinion for making an impact in foreign affairs. In short, Lippmann may well have served as America’s version of the ‘English School’ Realism. Through Lippmann’s pen, Realism has a conscience. *

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‘Lippmannist’ realism exhibits chameleonic traits. It straddles a concern for kindling the human spirit in a positive manner while also calling for a rational and reflective governmental discipline. When this tension is projected on to the plane of international relations, Walter Lippmann espouses the balance of power in tandem with a liberal international order to secure the national interest. In stretching Realist horizons, Lippmann is visibly concerned with the welfare and aspirations of the human being. Politics, following Aristotle and Plato – and, some might argue, Confucius and Mencius from Asia as well – should ultimately serve the human being. In this regard, Lippmann deserves the label of a ‘society realist’ for a number of reasons. First, his interpretation of human nature takes its reference from the relationship between the human being and God. The problem of the atomised, morally unmoored and potentially unhinged individual living in a web of modernity is represented as a condition that demands redemption. Second, power in all realms of politics must be clarified towards specified ends that are coherently argued and defensible across time. Third, nation-states, like individuals, are best assured of their sustainability and their delivery of the good life for their constituents if they are prepared to coexist peacefully

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with diversity in ideology. Finally, Lippmann espouses an eternal need to educate both political leaders and their followers for making good decisions and living with them afterwards. One can contrast these characteristics with the standard interpretations of contemporary Realists of the likes of Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz to sense a difference in approach. In Kenneth Waltz’s so-called first image analysis, the question of human nature is fudged in this pithy summary: ‘the evilness of men, or their improper behaviour, leads to war; individual goodness, if it could be universalized, would mean peace’ (Waltz 1959: 39). Based on this static reading of the nature of man, Waltz goes on to argue that: To control rapacious men requires more force than exhortation. Socio-political institutions, especially if the writer in question is this-world oriented, tend to move to the centre of the stage. The assumption of a fixed human nature, in terms of which all else must be understood, itself helps to shift attention away from human nature – because human nature, by the terms of the assumption, cannot be changed, whereas social–political institutions can be. (Waltz 1959: 41) This is precisely why one must study Lippmannist realism as an antidote to the Waltzian structural determinism that assigns ultimate causation to institutions qua states arrayed in terms of their power and interests. Waltz is not the philosopher of Realism in the fullest sense that Lippmann is. The latter articulates his realism from the potential of a malleable human nature. Lippmann’s writings suggest that to be a realist is not tantamount to embracing an ideology of instrumental callousness and pessimism towards world politics. This chapter, along with Lippmann’s entire corpus of works and his interpreters, is not meant to be a quick and easy guide to operationalising Realism for political leaders and bureaucrats. It is instead an invitation to reflect on the nature of ‘power politics’ and to reach Lippmann’s intended conclusion for his readers that man is trapped in systems of modernity that distort his full capacities for thinking of alternatives to war and acting on those alternatives. Realism is emphatically not to be measured merely by the yardstick of building political shock absorbers against hostile outsiders and thence reciprocating their hostility with war and other forms of violence. To distil Lippmannist realism, this chapter proposes to treat his contribution through four themes: human nature; nationalism; building international society for a pragmatic peace amongst ideologically diverse states; and the equipping of public opinion as a force in foreign policy. Finally, the conclusion will argue that Lippmannist realism will be invaluable in addressing twenty-first-century controversies involving relations between states as well as, more broadly, questions of global governance involving both sovereign, supra-sovereign and sub-sovereign actors, especially individuals. In these ways, Lippmann showcases a side of socially concerned realism few in the twentieth century have fully appreciated in the shadow of the two World Wars and the Cold War.

Human Nature As a Masters student in Philosophy at Harvard University between 1906 and 1910, and a reporter after that, seasoned with stints in between as a student leader and charity worker for the poor and homeless, Lippmann acquired multiple avenues of insights

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into human nature. As a result, the secondary literature that had grown up around Lippmann attributed to him assorted labels such as Progressivism, Pragmatism, Socialism and Platonism (Morrissette 1984; Steel 1980: Chs 2–5). One of his early biographers, Larry Adams, even attributed to him the trait of ideological adaptability to the burning issues of the day (Adams 1977). At various points in his career, he was an intellectual friend of American presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. At other points, he turned against the administration of the day in admonition of their unsustainable policies. This variegated intellectual trajectory, along with his obsession with Freudian psychoanalytics, has, in all probability, coloured and deepened his philosophical inquiry into the motivations of human nature (Soderlund 2005; Schuett 2010: 38–43; Imhoff 2012). Yet others are critical of his literary and intellectual capriciousness (Eulau 1956). This chapter chooses, however, to treat Lippmann as a more coherent thinker than others have believed it possible. The very opening statement of his first important book, published fresh out of Harvard while he was working as a journalist, testifies to some unchanging foundations of Lippmann’s beliefs: Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior righteousness of anybody. . . . In fact, before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one of the great American superstitions. (Lippmann 2006: 1) Instead, to navigate politics, one must fundamentally appraise the nature of man inductively and objectively. The human being is driven by impulses to desire or want all of the time. Lippmann chose, for instance, the illustration of how a man may be motivated to consume alcohol for a variety of reasons ranging from thirst, to depression, to the need for distraction from domestic troubles or joblessness (Lippmann 2006: 20). Historically, government has sought to cure the wayward impulses with laws that prohibit and put in place the institution of the police to administer those laws. Man’s negative impulses are kept in line by punishment or the threat of it. This is a very negative definition of existence. Over time, an extreme and unnatural condition arises from the climate of restriction. Man is lulled into a mechanical-like existence devoid of initiative and creative leadership. Problems are routinely solved within the matrix of the threat and the curb. This is not an admirable state of affairs. Neither is it sustainable for a government that desires to marginalise the mafia and other private forms of governance that operate above and below the law to pander directly to human cravings. Within the history of New York’s evolution as a city of settled migrants and naturalised Americans, Lippmann praised an unlikely source of alternative government within the impersonal jurisdiction of constitutional government – Tammany Hall, in all its underground brilliance in catering to people’s wants without the trappings of law, formality and constitutional strictures. Tammany Hall’s informal social networks1 both provided and supported candidates in New York’s local and statewide elections from the late 1700s up till the Second World War. Notwithstanding its ingrained practices of patrimonial politics, kickbacks and other corrupt exchanges between the needy and the politically entrepreneurial, Tammany Hall formed the basis of a Democratic political machine that no ambitious politician in the state could do without. In today’s

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political science parlance, this is termed variously as ‘society’, ‘grassroots politics’, ‘the 99%’, ‘sanctuary city’ or the alternative globalisation of the masses (Medina and Bidgood 2016). Lippmann’s purpose in graphically invoking Tammany Hall is to call attention to the need for government/politics to be pragmatically engaged with the impulses of the people they are supposed to be concerned about (Morrissette 1984: 42–3). Otherwise, the people will embrace alternative politics that respond to their needs, including pandering to their vices. Corrupt social and political circles constitute society for the marginalised, dispossessed and disillusioned. A true leader cum intellectual must therefore always be wary of the man in government who follows the habit of routine and contrives to mould the citizens under his oversight into the same. The frequent reference to precedents and the wisdom of past righteousness is a symptom of this face of governmental misreading of human nature. The habit of following precedent may lead down the path of blind alleys, making one the slave of repeating wrongs perpetrated in the past. This livelier ‘other face’ of human nature is the capacity to think afresh every time a problem occurs. This explains why Lippmann drew upon his philosophical acquaintance with Plato’s cave analogy. The ordinary citizens, qua followers of the routinised leadership of bureaucrats, mistake for reality the ‘shadows of the imagination’, since they are metaphorically chained by the prohibitions of constitutional government to look straight ahead at the proverbial walls of the cave, and at one another’s routinised lives, without being able to enjoy the freedom to turn their contemplative gaze toward the entrance of the cave where the true light emanates from (Diggins 2009: xxiii). In his second major work, A Preface to Morals (1929), Lippmann calls attention to the need to restore a new religiosity to counter the trappings of the modern absolute state. The whole notion of the modern state is both theoretically and actually absolute since it defines itself as a legitimate monopoly of force, and by extension of the administration of law and justice, the right to tax, punish, organise families and interfere with personal opinion (Lippmann 2009: 80). One might even label the state liberal and democratic, but it is so only in name. The modern man appears to have his impulses tamed and directed towards healthy pursuits compatible with stability. There is nothing wrong with the tame, routine-following man except that he has become less of a human being. He has no contemplation space within a universe of meanings, nor a universal moral reference point, except for the political authority of a mechanical state. Here Lippmann’s own colourful panegyric to a lost world of ideal liberal citizenship deserves quoting at length: For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere. There is no theory of the meaning and value of events which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to accept the events. There is no moral authority to which he must turn now, but there is coercion in opinions, fashions and fads. . . . They compel his body and his senses as ruthlessly as ever did king or priest. They do not compel his mind. (Lippmann 2009: 9) The arrival of the modern absolute state was conversely the story of the erosion of the Catholic Church’s civil power that was once vested in the blended political and religious institution of the Papacy. Secular political revolutions (that is, in

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1648, 1776, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1917) produced a popular sovereignty that vested the rights of the peoples in their worldly sovereigns purportedly representing their best interests. In response, the Papacy could proclaim its sovereignty only over the Word of God and other matters ecclesiastical. The modern absolute state had to fill its populations’ minds with a new creed – nationalism. This was to prove fissiparous for world politics. Not surprisingly, Lippmann offers us this familiar sketch of the birth of modern international relations as the relationship between nation-states acknowledging no authority higher than themselves: the dethronement of a universal Catholic Providence in favour, or through the default, of an absent universal religion, a series of contesting, jealous nationalisms prone to getting their way through combat.

Nationalism In Lippmann’s imagination, nationality or nationalism is at best a necessary ideological fiction for navigating the modern society of mankind that is comprised of innumerable ‘interdependent and interacting’ elements that do not take reference from Providence. In his polemic The Good Society, published in 1938 and reprinted twice in the middle of World War Two, Lippmann treated nationalism as a substitute for the God that both contemporary liberalism and fascist totalitarianism had banished. Nationalism was intended to be the social adhesive that solved the problem of social intimacy within the era of scientific, machine-like, bureaucratic logic. In Lippmann’s mind, a hypothetical family starting with the marital union of one couple, will produce children who will marry outside their lineage and produce grandchildren, and the latter will likewise produce further offspring in their marital turn. When society procreates on this scale, nationality forges a higher, transcendental plan of emotional connection across the multiplied lives. The latter are united by something propagandised to be more tangible than mere blood ties: The house, the street, the meadow and hill upon which he first opened his eyes, the reactions to family and strangers which remain as the types of his loves and hates, the earliest sounds which brought fear and pleasure – these are the stuff out of which nationality is made. . . . We huddle to the people with whom we played as children. . . . The alleys and the rookeries where we first met the world are transfigured in memory. They are us, more poignant than recent attachments, deeper than all later theories. Whatever conflicts with them breaks down. We cannot imagine anything to be right or worthy which these dumb affections do not sanction (Lippmann 1915: 60–1, emphasis mine) Through these down-to-earth phrases, Lippmann approves of the positive aspects of nationalism as a response to the alienation of modern life. But he emphatically notes that these are indeed dumb affections in the sense that nationalism often calls upon its adherents to suspend rational, critical thinking. As Lippmann interpreter Anwar Hussain Syed has observed, Lippmann had consistently treated nationalism as a mortal God and a sleeping giant not to be awoken lightly. Once aroused, it can douse the spirit of reason and induce mass psychosis for war (Syed 1963: 37). Lippmann distinguished two phases of nationalism in reference to European history. Pre-1870 nationalisms

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acted to unite the disparate warring peoples of Europe into nation-states satiated with their borders and newly embraced fraternities. The ‘tradition of Washington, Hamilton, Cavour and Bismarck’ was praiseworthy. After 1870, nationalism had been transformed into ‘the justifying principle of particularism’ (Lippmann 1944a: 133). Moreover, fascist totalitarianisms have honed their response to the problematique of modern social complexity into a fine art of melding nationalism with freedom. These regimes take nationalism to an extreme by ‘train[ing] their peoples to desire only what the state desires, to have no purposes but the official purposes, to feel free because they have become habituated to conform’ (Lippmann 1944a: 55). The individual becomes acculturated to life within regimentation. The soldier loses his sense of natural freedoms, half by training for obedience, half by induced acclimatisation to regimental culture, to live with ‘the strategy of the generals or the tactics of the officers’ (Lippmann 1944a: 55). In the hyper-energised nationalism that is fascism, the violence of the secret police, censorship and concentration camp is a necessary transition to a harmonious collective – the good society. The Second World War manifested this extreme under Mussolini and Hitler. Before these two, Lippmann was already appalled by the imperialism of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in 1917. In that year, Syed noted that Lippmann had been driven to the verge of denouncing all nationalism as an ideology of debased modernity, returning the world to an anarchy of petty rivalries and ancient hatreds (Syed 1963: 38–9). Mass populations and their equally deluded leaders were infected with the illusion that nationalism, yoked to a strong, exclusionary statehood, could solve all social, economic and political problems. Lippmann’s rumination under the clouds of the Second World War identified the problem to be the illusion of supremacy precipitated by the jingoism inherent in extreme nationalism. The pursuit of supremacy cannot be tempered by either international law or diplomatic compromise. In language reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli, Lippmann warned that when peace is attained between states vying for supremacy, it is no more than ‘an armed truce during which the warriors prepare for the next battle . . . [thus] there is a condition of continuing war with intervals in which there is no fighting’(Lippmann 1944a: 155). Amidst this gloom, Lippmann reminds his readers that the liberals in the nineteenth century had offered a solution to the nationalist thirst for supremacy: [T]he threat of total wars for supremacy was to be ended by liquidating the privileges that made supremacy valuable to those who possessed it and onerous to those who did not. The liberals had said, in effect, that men would cease to fight for political power when they became indifferent to it, and that they would become indifferent when its influence on their lives was negligible. This was how the religious wars had ended when men no longer believed that eternal salvation could be determined by the force of the secular arm. But in matters of income, of trade, property, and wages, the post-war generation believes fervently that earthly salvation can be determined by the secular arm. (Lippmann 1944a: 154–5) Clearly, by taking a leaf from the liberal playbook joined to his characteristic pragmatism, Lippmann begins to burnish his credentials as a ‘society realist’.

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International Society for a Pragmatic Peace: Advocating Expedient Toleration Lippmann’s ideas for securing a peace amongst nation-states acknowledging no world government is centred upon his appreciation of the problem of tolerating the sheer diversity of contending ideologies and values that guide governments. Like his contemporaries E. H. Carr and Alfred Zimmern across the Atlantic, the failure of the League of Nations experiment in the interwar years weighed on his intellect. Initially, in working with officials of the Woodrow Wilson administration, he sought to foster a culture of cooperative nationalism whereby governments practised peaceful international intercourse on the basis that diverse national interests acknowledged that their freedom of pursuit and manœuvre could be secured only by upholding some measure of unity in international relations (Syed 1963: 39). His indictment of the outcome of the Peace of Versailles was synonymous with his views on why the first experiment in producing a world parliament of sovereign states failed: [T]he policies of the great powers did not correspond with the postulates of the international system they had designed. This was revealed at once in the terms imposed upon the vanquished nations. The military and economic clauses of the treaties, and certain of the territorial provisions as well, were designed to keep them for at least a generation weak and disorganized, and in a status of moral inferiority. . . . But in imposing a Punic Peace, the Allied and associated powers demonstrated that they were no longer acting on the nineteenth-century principle of supremacy restricted in its exercise by the tenets of liberalism. (Lippmann 1944a: 153) In this regard, Lippmann acknowledged the relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s analogy of anarchy – ‘war of every man against every man’ – leaving states faced with value conflicts amongst one another no choice but to provide a negative peace through the balance of power (Lippmann 1955: 157). In the balancing of power, whether in domestic or international contexts, the ‘general rule’ was to avail oneself of the rivalry of others by manœuvring in such a way that one’s rivals oppose and deter one another. In such a situation, when the power of rivals ‘neutralises’ their hostility towards themselves and towards oneself, one can then ‘govern’ them as the holder of the balance. If a balance of power is achieved, there is an opening for a more civilised and stable condition of political life among states: In the measure that power is checked by power, that opposing powers are in balance, neither can prevail. Both are constrained within a common situation. In this condition, when the ponderable forces are in balance, neither being able or willing to exert decisive force, the imponderable means of reason become efficacious. Inter armis silent leges. In the clash of arms the laws are silent. We may add that in the truce of arms the laws are heard. (Lippmann 1955: 158) At this point, Lippmann advocates stabilising international relations on the basis of acknowledging differences among states while acknowledging that competition needs to be regulated amongst them, and where possible, states practise principles of peaceful coexistence through the piecemeal implementation of international law. Hence,

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this is where Versailles and the League failed: neither practised peaceful coexistence but instead codified the inequality of power. The League discriminated against the vanquished and small states. The victorious powers ‘distributed’ the colonial territories of the Central Alliance in balance-of-power fashion under the noble label of ‘trusteeship’ administered through the League of Nations. Despite his despair at the outcomes of the Great War (1914–18), Lippmann had, in fact, proposed in 1915 that institutions of ‘local internationalism’2 be created, whereby permanently convened and autonomous multinational civil service apparatuses oversee the necessary programmes of democratic schooling and administrative guidance in the territories that were to be brought up to the level of self-determining nation-states (Lippmann 1915: 133–5). The point is to depoliticise these liberated territories and their populations from great power machinations. This was, of course, the precursor of what, in the late twentieth century, the United Nations would conceptualise as peace-building missions in subSaharan Africa, former Yugoslavia and Cambodia. Interestingly, Lippmann sought his inspiration for local internationalism from a number of international conferences that have often been categorised as vehicles for balancing power amongst the reigning European empires: the Berlin Conference of 1885 on West Africa, the London Conference after the Balkan Wars of 1911–12, and the 1905 Algeciras conference on the fate of Morocco (Adams 1977: 92; Lippmann 1915: 130–49). It is quite clear that Lippmann was motivated by the need to forge a minimalist notion of society amongst sovereign nationalistic states. International relations will not allow the untrammelled pursuit of national interests amidst conditions of permanent war and preparation for it. The ‘armed truce’ may be tolerable, provided states learned practical habits of coexistence. These thoughts were crystallised in his opinions on American Cold War policy that originated at the close of the Second World War. Standing apart from the mainstream of policy thinking, Lippmann counselled Washington to repair the political breach with General Charles de Gaulle, notwithstanding the latter’s independence in attitude towards world affairs. Lippmann courted more controversy when he admonished Churchill for attempting to bargain with Stalin to allow pro-Western governments to surface in Warsaw and Athens, while conceding Romania, Bulgaria and large parts of Hungary and Yugoslavia to the USSR’s sphere of influence. Lippmann argued that, given Poland’s proximity to the USSR and the history of its borders since Versailles 1919, the Poles had to come to terms with Moscow and accept the latter’s more viable guarantee of their territorial integrity (Steel 1980: 414–15). Even during the first two decades of the Cold War, Lippmann steadfastly opposed containment against the Soviet Union, pitting him squarely against George Kennan’s dominance of American Cold War doctrines. In October 1958, Lippmann interviewed Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow and reported his encounter in this vein, clearly putting a Lippmannist imprint on his impressions: Communism, he [Khruschchev] said, is indeed a great danger to you as an ideology and as a doctrine, but it is not a danger to you as a military policy of the Soviet Government. The Communists do not want to shed their blood or the blood of others to extend their frontiers. And each country should defend itself against Communism within its borders, if it sees fit to do so. (This I took to be an echo of the talks he had had in the preceding days with the Egyptian Field Marshal about Nasser’s treatment of his local Communists.) . . .

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[On the question of disarmament and arms control,] why, he asked, do you begin with inspection and controls? Why do you not begin by taking seriously our offer of a treaty of friendship and nonaggression? I said we wanted some tangible evidence that an agreement would be carried out. He replied that the Soviet Union could not agree to inspection and control until confidence, which is now lacking, has been established. You want control first, he said, we want confidence first. Suppose, he argued, that you and another man start to make friends, and the first thing your new friend says to you is: give me the key to your house. You would think it impudent of him, and when the United States asks for keys to our [Soviet] house, we say ‘go to the devil’. Here he looked at my wife and apologized for using such language. Your demand for the keys to our house is the way you might talk to a weak and dependent country, not to the Soviet Union. It makes us suspicious that you want the keys of our house before you will sign a treaty of friendship. This, he continued, is ‘elementary’, that a treaty of friendship must come before inspection and control. (Lippmann 1959: 22, 29–30) One might argue that Lippmann was taken in by Soviet propaganda, but the purpose of setting out this long quotation is to reveal Lippmann’s thinking on pacifying violence in international politics. Evidently, Lippmann nurtures a thin version of international society as desirable for peace amongst states: a mutual respect for differences in values, honouring Westphalian premises of insulating domestic political turbulence from international relationships, and dealing with others of different governing systems on the basis of live and let live. Getting one’s national interest and international peace achieved through war is redundant and reckless if the gap with the Other is merely one of value relativity. In his rumination on US War Aims in 1944, Lippmann even boldly suggested that the peaceful coexistence amongst macro-communities of nation-states should ideally be based on ‘the historic civilized communities’ distinguished by race, language, ideology and religion (Lippmann 1944b: 52–7). In this regard, there could be a Russian Orbit, a Chinese Orbit and an Atlantic Community. Through the concrete form of the Atlantic Community, Lippmann also envisioned the ideal scheme of thick international society, where liberalism triumphed everywhere as a national standard of governance. The Atlantic Community that was forged through World War Two’s Anglo-American alliance, sired by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, ought to serve as a bedrock of a new world order (Lippmann 1952: 36–8). In this version of thick international society, Washington and London ought to have consolidated their alliance as an ideological platform with which to attract the rest of Europe, freshly liberated from Hitler’s Festung Europa, along with newly decolonised states in the non-West to build a peaceful world order. Lippmann lamented the fact that Secretary of State Cordell Hull imposed his neo-Wilsonian influence on the direction of postwar policy to the detriment of the Atlantic Community serving as the primary fount of soft power to challenge Stalin’s ambitions across the globe. Instead, the onset of the Cold War through a series of confrontational events in Iran, Greece, Indochina, Germany and Korea forced the Americans to revive the Atlantic Community in the form of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Lippmann 1952: 39–43). Throughout the rest of the Cold War, Lippmann was constantly insinuating that the contest with the USSR would be won on non-material grounds: that is, on the battlefield of ideological provenance. He noted as

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early as 1952 that the advent of the Soviet atomic bomb and its rapid military build-up in long-range weaponry would inexorably erode US superiority in strategic bombers and missiles. Even massive US foreign aid to its non-Western allies and neutrals failed to stem pro-communist sentiments and anti-Americanism from taking root. Lippmann was bitterly critical of the ultimately abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, since it fanned even more anti-Americanism and cemented the Castro regime’s heroic defiance of American imperialism. These ‘gifts’ to communist propaganda could be undone only by an American government behaving in a fashion that showed that American attempts to build the good society at home were exactly what they wished to proselytise to the rest of the uncommitted nation-states (Syed 1963: 67–8). In today’s foreign policy parlance, this becomes the soft power of communitarian attraction. It is all derived from good governance at home being demonstrated to the rest of the world for their emulation. On that basis, Lippmann believed that war would become unthinkable within the Atlantic Community, but the members of this thick liberal community might have to coordinate their defensive military policies against the possibility of armed overthrow by its active opponents such as the USSR. In this sense, the other rational Lippmannist prognosis is to revert to a thinner conception of international society to coexist with radically incommensurate ideologies insulated by the institutions of national sovereignty (Lippmann 1944b: 42–57). To remedy the frequent failure of liberal democracies to educate their citizens for the capricious tides of world affairs, Lippmann called for the practice and inculcation of empathy.

Public Opinion and its Education for Life in International Society Long before Lippmann was regarded as a philosopher of international politics, he had already been respected as a profound critic of public opinion as a force for guiding the national interest within international society. The standard reading of Lippmann argues that he was deeply ambivalent about public opinion: it was necessary to consult public opinion and thence to endeavour to exclude it from the making of foreign policy (Eulau 1956: 439–51). The public must be intimately involved in the democratic method of government in the domestic realm but it ought not to be treated as a diligent and astute part of managing foreign affairs (Syed 1963: 274). An important key to understanding this irony in Lippmann’s thought lies in his ‘geometry’ of interpreting reality in his classic work Public Opinion: The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action. It is like a play suggested to the actors by their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the real lives of the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. (Lippmann 1960: 16–17) Within this triangular socio-psychological trap, the citizen – let’s label him ‘Average Joe’, as a shorthand – has to be equipped to make significant exertions to relate the basic fundamentals of pre-existing international order, as well as his socially grounded

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principles, to observable reality. There ought to be no rush to condemn or exonerate on the basis of whim. In order to elucidate this point, Lippmann peppered his book Public Opinion with many examples from the 1910s and 1920s, whereby the American public and its representatives in Congress misread foreign affairs either by superimposing their prejudiced reflexes upon the event or by recommending decisions in haste. Foreign affairs, qua international relations among states of diverse ideologies, qua international society, requires nimbleness in explanation, intellectual perspicacity in reflection, a practised scepticism in appraising ‘facts’, and an appreciation for the consequences of policy for the long term. The media, dubbed ‘the press’ in Lippmann’s writings, are not entirely to blame for the difficulties faced by public opinion in apprehending international politics. It is more of a structural problem. Lippmann illustrates it in a writing style reminiscent of what most graduate students of political science would term discourse analysis and structural critique through process tracing: A few words must often stand for a whole succession of acts, thoughts, feelings and consequences. We read: Washington, Dec. 23 [1921/1922?] – A statement charging Japanese military authorities with deeds more ‘frightful and barbarous’ than anything ever alleged to have occurred in Belgium during the [First World] war was issued here today by the Korean Commission, based, the Commission said, on authentic reports received by it from Manchuria. Here eyewitnesses, their accuracy unknown, report to the makers of ‘authentic reports’; they in turn transmit these to a commission five thousand miles away. It prepares a statement, probably much too long for publication, from which a correspondent culls an item of print three and a half inches long. The meaning has to be telescoped in such a way as to permit the reader to judge how much weight to give to the news. (Lippmann 1960: 65–6) In this regard, the only way for Average Joe to act as an intelligent player in foreign policy is to pick up the tools of the social scientist. As the outsider to the policy-making process, Average Joe can capitalise on two things. First, he can trade his political voice for this or that policy by taking the politician and bureaucrat to task by scrutinising their adherence to procedure. And this is the second skill he can avail himself of: The outsider can perhaps judge whether the groups interested in the decision were properly heard, whether the ballot, if there was one, was honestly taken, and perhaps whether the result was honestly accepted. He can watch the procedure when the news indicates that there is something to watch. He can raise a question as to whether the procedure itself is right, if its normal results conflict with his idea of a good life. (Lippmann 1960: 400–1) Lippmann, however, cautioned that Average Joe should never allow foreign policy decisions to pass without scrutiny. The training of Average Joe lay within the discipline of political science. The latter ought to school its students cum citizens in the habit of scrutinising both the news and the professional journalists who claim to supply the truths as they see it. Therein lies the true meaning of exerting a conscientious and informed public opinion on foreign affairs.

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Reading Lippmann for the Twenty-First Century: Ideology/ Religion Returns to International Relations Lippmannist realism is clearly not as accessible as a party manifesto. It is a philosophical realism that reveals its wisdom only after one ponders the bases of human nature, nationalism, and the meaning of acting responsibly within an earthly society of sovereign nation-states. Lippmann exhibited deep scepticism towards the foreign policy public towards his sunset years, but he has left us with his thoughts on what an International Relations-savvy public should be and can be. Politicians will always want the moral majority on their side – whether in democracies or dictatorships – and this is where Lippmann’s ‘society realist’ assumes the shape of Average Joe’s Public Opinion. These disparate elements will almost certainly drift in and out of syllabi in universities, military colleges and think-tanks as random accessories to the contemporary ‘giants of realism’ of the likes of Morgenthau, Waltz and possibly Mearsheimer, unless one reappraises Lippmannist realism as a provocative call for returning the consideration of ideology/religion to the study of International Relations as we know it. The bequeathed principles of Westphalia should not mean that the rest of the world has turned its back decisively on the need for mankind to fill its political belief systems with a substitute Providence. Lippmann points out that nationalism has its finite limits as a secular replacement of God. The emergence of rabid anti-modern and anti-Western ideologies, in the form of Taliban Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and its ilk, DAESH/ISIS and other millenarian state-subverting movements, testifies to the need to address International Relations by tackling the place of human yearning for a spiritual anchor (Schuett 2010). The liberal and humanist in Lippmann will certainly condemn the apocalyptic strategies of violence pursued by fundamentalist religious terrorism. Yet Lippmannist realism will also call on the intellectual to examine why and how nation-states need to promise some version of spiritual fulfilment to their citizens. The principal worry should be focused on why the younger generations are tuning in to radical preaching in sound bites on YouTube and blogs. Lippmannist international society therefore premises its stability on integrating human nature at all levels from interpersonal relations, to nationalism, and on to relations between states and their constituted citizens.

Notes 1. The political invasiveness of Tammany Hall’s grassroots social services was partially but vividly portrayed in the 2002 Hollywood film Gangs of New York, starring Daniel DayLewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. 2. This pithy phrase was coined by Adams in his interpretation of Lippmann’s Stakes of Diplomacy in his biography of the man (Adams 1977: 92). See also Syed’s parallel explanation of this point (Syed 1963: 90–2).

Bibliography Adams, L. L. (1977), Walter Lippmann, Boston: Twayne. Eulau, H. (1956), ‘From public opinion to public philosophy: Walter Lippmann’s classic reexamined’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 15, pp. 439–51. Diggins, J. P. (2009) [1929], ‘Introduction’, in W. Lippmann, Preface to Morals, New Brunswick: Transaction, pp. ix–liii.

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Imhoff, S. (2012), ‘My sons have defeated me: Walter Lippmann, Felix Adler, and secular moral authority’, The Journal of Religion, vol. 92, pp. 536–50. Lippmann, W. (1915), The Stakes of Diplomacy, New York: Henry Holt. Lippmann, W. (1944a), The Good Society, London: George Allen and Unwin. Lippmann, W. (1944b), US War Aims, London: Hamish Hamilton. Lippmann, W. (1952), Isolation and Alliances: An American Speaks to the British, Boston: Little, Brown. Lippmann, W. (1955), Essays in the Public Philosophy, Boston: Little, Brown. Lippmann, W. (1959), The Communist World and Ours, Boston: Little, Brown. Lippmann, W. (1960) [1922], Public Opinion, New York: Macmillan. Lippmann, W. (2006) [1913], A Preface to Politics, New York: Mitchell Kennerley. Reprinted as the Gutenberg Project eBook #20125. Lippmann, W. (2009) [1929], A Preface to Morals, 6th edn, New Brunswick: Transaction. Medina, J., and J. Bidgood (2016), ‘Cities vow to fight Trump on immigration, even if they lose millions’, The New York Times, 27 November, available at (last accessed 8 December 2016). Morrissette, A. L. (1984), Walter Lippmann: Architect of Crisis, PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, USA, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International. Schuett, R. (2010), Political Realism, Freud and Human Nature in International Relations: The Resurrection of Realist Man, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Soderlund, G. (2005), ‘Rethinking a curricular icon: The institutional and ideological foundations of Walter Lippmann’, The Communication Review, vol. 8, pp. 307–27. Steel, R. (1980), Walter Lippmann and the American Century, London: Bodley Head. Syed, A. H. (1963), Walter Lippmann’s Philosophy of International Politics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Waltz, K. N. (1959), Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis, New York: Columbia University Press.

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20 Reinhold Niebuhr The continuing relevance of his Christian realism Menno R. Kamminga

Chapter Overview

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wentieth-century American theologian–philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr is a key figure within the realist tradition. Niebuhr has had a great impact on realist thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, E. H. Carr and Kenneth Waltz, and on political leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Drawing on a view of human nature as characterised by sin as well as love and justice, Niebuhr argued that order, security and justice require balanced power and humbly responsible action. The present chapter suggests that Niebuhr’s ‘Christian realism’ is uniquely relevant for twenty-first-century international relations. Firstly, Niebuhr’s interrelated view of human nature, society and international relations is broadly reconstructed as one of ‘not so moral man’, ‘less moral communities’ and ‘still less moral international relations’. Next, the implications of Niebuhr’s perspective for war and peace as classic-realist security issues are discussed by highlighting his ‘ethical realism’ and ‘irony-sensible’ view of American history. Finally, it is argued that Niebuhr’s realism can make a critical contribution to the understanding and addressing not only of contemporary classic security issues, but also of ‘newer’ security-related issues such as humanitarian intervention, climate change and energy security. Thus, Niebuhr’s anti-utopianism, anti-materialism and notions such as irony, hope and fear signify that political realism is at least as relevant to our times as it has ever been. *

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Introduction The importance of American Protestant theologian–philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) for political realism is profound. Put briefly, Niebuhr’s sober view of human nature made him argue that order, security and justice require balanced rather than concentrated power and humbly responsible instead of utopianist political action (Waltz 1986: 341; Amstutz 2007). Well recognised is Niebuhr’s influence on ‘classical’ realists such as Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and E. H. Carr (Thompson 1955; Rice 2013). Less appreciated is Niebuhr’s significance for the work

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of renowned ‘structural’ realist Kenneth Waltz (Kamminga 2012). The early Waltz praised Niebuhr for his ‘many words of wisdom on problems of international politics’ and for ‘[criticising] utopians . . . with frequency and telling effect’ (1959: 20). But even as a ‘scientific’ neorealist that stressed the causal importance of anarchy for international politics, Waltz acknowledged Niebuhr’s influence behind his own antihegemonic position, explaining: ‘I distrust hegemonic power, whoever may wield it, because it is so easily misused’ (1986: 341). Arguably, Niebuhr’s key contribution to the realist tradition concerns ‘the presuppositions of the whole frame of reference that underlies [it]’ (Veldhuis 1975: 3). Significantly, political leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have called Niebuhr a major intellectual influence. Interviewed as a candidate for US President, Obama called Niebuhr ‘one of my favorite philosophers’, learning from him that ‘there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction’ (Brooks 2007). Boosted by Obama’s acknowledgement, a ‘Niebuhr revival’ has occurred since the early 2000s (Crouter 2010; Horwitz 2016). Niebuhr’s ‘Christian’ realism maintains that the diagnosis of the human predicament is to be found in Christian doctrine rather than other worldviews (Veldhuis 1975: 106). For Niebuhr, it is because of the reality of ‘original sin’ that the world cannot be utopian (before God’s love has finally triumphed in history). ‘[T]he Christian faith holds that human nature contains both self-regarding and social impulses and that the former is stronger than the latter. This assumption is the basis of Christian realism’ (Niebuhr 1965: 39). Acknowledging man as created in God’s image, Niebuhr did underline the normative significance of those ‘social impulses’: humans should humbly obey ‘the moral imperative to do good’ (Crouter 2010: 49). Thus, Niebuhr’s modestly optimistic faith in reconciliation, charity and political morality kept him from overstressing power and violence (Elshtain 2010: 52, 56–7; Fox 1985: 202; Cherniss 2016: 75). Politics cannot create full justice due to the strong ‘self-regarding impulses’, but differences between more and less social justice, between more and less egoism, may still mean ‘differences between sickness and health, between misery and happiness’ (Niebuhr 1941: 234). Although his political thought was theology-rooted (Merkley 1975; Gilkey 2001; Crouter 2010; Erwin 2013), Niebuhr aimed to reach a wide audience by advocating moral prudence rather than Christian purity (Coll 1999; Crouter 2010: 110; Patterson 2015: 30; Cherniss 2016) and by utilising the empirical value of ‘original sin’ (cf. Niebuhr 1965: 24). Niebuhr believed that ‘[t]his doctrine asserts the obvious fact that all men are persistently inclined to regard themselves more highly and are [unwarrantedly] assiduously concerned with their own interests’ (1952: 17, emphasis mine). Indeed, Niebuhr’s views of human nature and politics have been appreciated by religious and secular thinkers alike (cf. Crouter 2010: 115). As Langdon Gilkey explains, Niebuhr ‘may not persuade a young mind that there is a God who gives meaning to our history’, yet ‘will persuade that mind that history so understood is very close to the history we all continue to experience each day’ (2001: xii). Arguably, Niebuhr has given the realist a compelling lens through which to consider the possibilities and limits of political action meaningfully.

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The present chapter aims to show the relevance of Niebuhr’s realism for addressing the dynamics of twenty-first-century international relations. I will start by reconstructing his Christian realism along a classic, relevant three-level model that includes human nature, society and international relations (Waltz 1959; Patterson 2015: 31) as one of: 1. ‘not so moral man’, 2. ‘less moral communities’ (Niebuhr 1965: 22; Crouter 2010: 48) 3. ‘still less moral international relations’. Next, I outline the implications of Niebuhr’s realism for war and peace, the classic security issues with which realists have been most concerned.1 Finally, I argue that Niebuhr’s realism can make a critical contribution to the understanding and addressing of contemporary classic security issues, but also of ‘newer’ security-related issues such as humanitarian intervention, climate change and energy security. Thus, Niebuhr remains practically valuable for his analysis of ‘reality’ from a human nature view that is not purely bio-psychological and as dark as that of other realists, but stresses man’s capacity to take responsibility in all humility, while avoiding liberal theory’s optimism about the political action-guiding force of ethical principles. While offering no independent defence of Niebuhr’s realism, I submit that it still ‘works’, even though modern secular discourse omits the notion of sin.

Man: Not So Moral Against the utopian optimism about human nature as expressed by liberals and Marxists in mid-century debates about a conflict-free world, Niebuhr highlighted greediness and lust for power as expressions of man’s sinfulness (Craig 2003: 33). But his Christianbased view of human nature is richer than this. The ‘Christian view of man’, Niebuhr observes, includes three features: a ‘monist’ body–soul unity as biblically based on the goodness of creation; man as made in the image of God, thus to be understood primarily from his capacity to love others rather than from his rational faculties or relation to nature; and man as sinner, rebel against God. While the Christian faith sees the good in man first, it locates evil at the human core: in the will. Evil, Niebuhr stresses, is not the inevitable consequence of man’s finiteness or the outcome of his involvement in nature. Sin occurs because man rejects his ‘creatureliness’, pretending to be more than he is. Also, man cannot dismiss sin as merely a matter of physical necessity. As man’s true essence is free self-determination, and love the ultimate law man should meet, his sin is self-chosen as the wrong, selfdestructive use of his freedom. Since the law of love is violated when man seeks to make not God but himself the basis of his life, his sin is spiritual, not carnal. For Niebuhr, without the presuppositions of the Christian faith the root of sin cannot be found in man himself. Paradoxically, the Christian view claims a higher stature for man and takes his evil more seriously than other anthropologies do. It questions evil’s specific causes, but also how these could have arisen (Niebuhr 1941: 12–18, cf. 161–220). Following Augustine, ‘the first great [Western] “realist”’ (Niebuhr 1954: 115), Niebuhr stresses the reality of man’s sin heavily. Broadly, the evil of sin is the dominant concern for one’s self-interest, self-pride and search for power out of a basic sense of fear,

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insecurity, vulnerability and anxiety (Niebuhr 1941: 190–255; Niebuhr 1932). That sin is non-deterministic has serious behavioural implications: since the Christian doctrine of original sin accepts ‘that man’s self-love and self-centredness are inevitable [but in a non-natural way]’, it can, and should, insist on ‘man’s responsibility for sin’ (Niebuhr 1941: 279). Also, sin is universal: it is present in the evil ‘out there’ but also in all our initiatives, no matter how well meant, to deal with evil. Niebuhr, then, criticised ‘liberal Christians’ who ‘know that love is the final norm for man’ but ‘fall into sentimentality because they fail to measure the power and persistence of self-love’ (1954: 138). For Niebuhr, sin has basic meaning, explanatory power and normative relevance. But Niebuhr, as a realist, was critical of Augustine, and of other realists too, concerning the implications of man’s sinful nature for political rule. Believing that it is unjust for some men to rule over other men as co-rational creatures, Augustine ‘[avoided] the later error of the absolute sanctification of government’ but ‘[failed] to recognize the difference between legitimate and illegitimate . . . subordination of man to man’, Niebuhr noted (1954: 123, cf. 120). Augustine’s realism is ‘excessive’ for being unable to ‘distinguish between government and slavery, both of which were supposedly . . . a consequence of, and remedy for, sin’, and to ‘do justice to the sense of justice in the constitution of the Roman Empire’ or other political systems (Niebuhr 1954: 121). And Hobbes and Luther, whose ‘pessimism’ made them endorse state power unreservedly, ‘were not realistic enough’, Niebuhr felt; they saw ‘the dangers of anarchy in the egotism of the citizens’ but overlooked ‘the dangers of tyranny in the selfishness of the ruler’ and ‘the consequent necessity of placing checks upon the ruler’s self-will’ (1954: 121). Niebuhr’s view of man made him value democracy highly, more so than co-realist Morgenthau. Seeing all men biologically as equally lustful for power and therefore all politics as equally dominated by irrational urges, Morgenthau could not regard any form of politics as superior. By contrast, Niebuhr (1944) saw all humans as sinful yet believed that some, the higher law-seeking ‘children of light’, could overcome sin partially by responsibly carrying politics towards a higher state of justice (Craig 2003: 56). As Niebuhr put it in what became his trademark line, ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’ (1944: xi). Importantly, democracy puts ‘checks upon the power of the ruler and administrator and thus prevent[s] it from becoming vexatious’ (Niebuhr 1944: xiv).

Society: Less Moral The Christian faith, Niebuhr maintained, applies to individuals but also to societies. He offered two different arguments for this. First, theologically, the Christian gospel foresees an ideal universal community (Niebuhr 1959: 91). The Hebrew prophets already challenged the bond between God and nation, and Jesus himself rejected nationalistic particularism (Niebuhr 1941: 227–8; Niebuhr 1943: 43–4). The apostle ‘Paul, the champion of Christian universalism . . . proclaimed that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free . . . in Christ”’ (Niebuhr 1959: 91). This universal eschatological vision is negatively relevant as ‘a source of criticism for all the kingdoms of the world’ (Niebuhr 1959: 92). Second, historically, it is a ‘fact’ that Christianity became ‘relevant to the empire of the Caesars . . . as a support of its

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authority’ (Niebuhr 1959: 92). The empire ‘equated Christian universalism with its own quasi-universalism, and it quieted the [early] Christian fear of idolatry . . . by presenting the Christian emperor as a servant of the true God’ (Niebuhr 1959: 93). Having been employed in the service of power, the Christian faith cannot credibly avoid involvement with human communities as they exist. In reality, a human cannot but live in a political community. Deliberating the societal implications of his view of man, Niebuhr discovered that, compared to individuals, groups – especially nations – are considerably less susceptible to human nature’s positive aspects and much more vulnerable to its negative ones. Collective egoism is even harder to overcome than individual egoism. Niebuhr offered a threefold explanation for this ‘relative immorality of collectivities’ (Veldhuis 1975: 49). First, ‘group pride’ possesses the coercive power to make individuals ‘bow to its pretensions and . . . acquiesce in its claims of authority’ (Niebuhr 1941: 221). Second, a group’s pretensions and claims are more excessive than those of individuals: ‘The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centred and more ruthless’ (Niebuhr 1941: 221–2). Third, the national state expresses collective egoism most consistently, as smaller groups lack the size and larger units the concreteness and durability to command man’s highest loyalty (Niebuhr 1932: 48; Niebuhr 1941: 222). The national state has the authority to generate fear and respect: ‘the state gives the collective impulses of the nation such instruments of power, and presents the imagination of individuals with such obvious symbols of its discrete collective identity’ (Niebuhr 1941: 222). Niebuhr’s valuation of the national state was deeply negative: ‘Sinful pride and idolatrous pretension are . . . an inevitable concomitant of the cohesion of large political groups’ (Niebuhr 1941: 223). The sin of ‘collective pride’, Niebuhr noted, is ‘most fruitful of . . . objective social and historical evil’ and ‘a more pregnant source of injustice and conflict than purely individual pride’ (1941: 226). But this evil is most clearly exemplified in the national state with its particularly strong unity, well-defined membership and stable central authority (Veldhuis 1975: 47). National life goes beyond the individual’s striving for survival by culminating in ‘the “spiritual” character of national pride’ (Niebuhr 1941: 224). ‘The nation pretends to be God,’ and therefore demands unconditional loyalty (Niebuhr 1941: 225). Even the morality of individuals with exceptionally Christian goodwill will be supportive of the egoistic national state, as pure universal benevolence is impossible in a sinful world (Niebuhr 1932: 75). Sadly, since ‘[t]he unqualified character of [national loyalty] is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint’, ‘the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations’ (Niebuhr 1932: 91). Niebuhr’s Christian-rooted, consistent disapprobation of the national state made his realism morally different from that of his younger contemporaries Morgenthau and Kennan. Holding that national self-interest is repulsive as a moral ideal (Thompson 1955; Fox 1985: 297), Niebuhr could not accept Morgenthau’s ‘moral principle of national survival’ (Morgenthau 1973: 10). Niebuhr’s realism accepted that ‘the force of collective self-interest is so great, that national policy must be based upon it’, but also maintained that, since ‘the moral obligation of the individual transcends his particular community’, ‘[l]oyalty to the community is . . . tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the community’ (Niebuhr 1952: 36–7). And although Niebuhr endorsed Kennan’s postwar critique of American ‘legalistic–moralistic’ foreign policy as having undesirable consequences, he rejected Kennan’s solution of making ‘national

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interest’ the yardstick of American diplomacy (Kennan 1951). Regarding such a fixation on American interests as an unjustified indifference toward others’ interests, Niebuhr advocated ‘a concern for both the self and the other in which the self, whether individual or collective, preserves a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind”’ (1952: 148). Acknowledging the relative qualities of human institutions under imperfect historical conditions, Niebuhr doubly relativised his condemnation of the national state. First, national states should not simply be deemed equally bad. ‘While all . . . nations . . . [are] involved in the sin of pride’, we should ‘recognize differences in the degree of pride and self-will expressed by . . . nations’ (Niebuhr 1941: 233). Second, we should differentiate between good and bad ways of governing nations. For Niebuhr, in the public domain of groups and conflicting interests under conditions of sin, justice, as derived from and motivated by the ultimate norm of love, is the main norm. Democracy is superior to totalitarianism because it offers the best way to restrain the egoism and will-to-power of groups as well as individuals. If these exploit fellow citizens in weaker positions because their sin urges them somehow to prefer the fulfilment of their own interests, the solution is to minimise power inequalities within the state (Niebuhr 1954: 94–101; Niebuhr 1941: 233–4; Niebuhr 1944).

International Relations: Still Less Moral Niebuhr saw international relations as different from domestic politics, viewing interactions between states under anarchy as inevitably more conflictual and even less moral than interactions between intrastate groups (Niebuhr 1932: 16, 85, 110–11; Craig 2003: 36). Being concerned with theology and morality as well as empirical reality, Niebuhr left the systematic study of (national) interest and power to his followers (Thompson 1955: 187). Yet his Christian realist understanding of international relations offered an upbeat for more theoretically oriented realists. Niebuhr argued that the sin-based egoism of nations has seriously negative implications for international relations. Although the norms of love and justice apply internationally as well as domestically (cf. Thompson 1955: 182–3), ‘[t]he will-to-power of competing national groups is the cause of the international anarchy which the moral sense of mankind has thus far vainly striven to overcome’ (Niebuhr 1932: 18–19). Because the scope of applying moral norms to international relations is narrow due to national self-interest being the primary guide for governments, crucial internationally is how much power a national state has (Veldhuis 1975: 50, 123–4). As Niebuhr explains: ‘Only a forgiving love . . . is adequate to heal the animosities between nations. But that degree of love is an impossibility for nations’ (Niebuhr 1948: 139; cf. Niebuhr 1954: 127–30). Even justice, albeit involving the compromise of love with politics’ darker elements (Thompson 1955: 183), is hardly attainable, if at all, in international relations. A key problem for international justice is the absence of central government. Without a global authority that could compel nations to modify their self-seeking, conflict regulation is much more difficult internationally than it already is between groups within the state. In so far as international order and justice do exist, it is due to a balance of power, which, however, may always slide into conflict and anarchy (Veldhuis 1975: 50). Now Niebuhr saw balance of power as the prerequisite

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for at least some justice: ‘All political justice is achieved by coercing the anarchy of collective self-interest into some kind of decent order by the most attainable balance of power’ (1940: 104). However, ‘the principle of government . . . stands upon a higher plane’ because government prevents balance of power from lapsing into anarchy and is ‘a more conscious effort to arrive at justice’, despite its moral ambiguity for being tempted to restrict freedom and community for order (Niebuhr 1943: 276–8; quotations 276). Moreover, in an anarchic domain characterised by interstate relations, there can be no democratic governance. In Niebuhrian terminology: while states’ inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary, their egoistic lack of capacity for justice makes democracy impossible. Presumably, Niebuhr would have been sceptical about the modern political–philosophical attempt to develop ethically adequate standards of global justice. In international relations, power and passion dominate reason. Niebuhr did not propagate the creation of a democratic world government as the key route towards international justice. He saw world government, certainly a democratic one, as illusory because the shared standards necessary for effective global institutions were lacking. A world government is unattainable because governments are not created by constitutional fiat and, even more seriously, have only limited efficacy in integrating a community rooted in ‘organic’ factors such as common ethnicity, history (of joint struggle against a common enemy), language, culture and religion. Importantly, the shared convictions on issues of justice that political cohesion requires are lacking globally (Niebuhr 1954: 24–38, 119; Niebuhr 1952: 136; Niebuhr 1959: 266). Most basically, since sin distorts all human enterprises, political action immodestly directed at grand projects is bound to fail (Niebuhr 1952: 72; Niebuhr 1959: 287–99; Amstutz 2007: 26, 30; Patterson 2015: 32). With national egoism as unjust and without the prospect of world government, a key question for Niebuhr was if the global involvement of the USA as major power could be justified. Again, Niebuhr could not articulate a ‘national interest’: making the American nation, or any nation, the ultimate end of politics would be sinful. His answer, then, referred to America’s instrumental, non-basic, significance: the American state is to be valued for its power to secure the moral good of democratic civilisation against the Soviet Union’s expansionism (Craig 2003: 75–6). However, Niebuhr qualified his defence of US engagement by warning Americans about the hubristic faith that their values and ideas are universal and their nation serves providential goals (Bacevich 2008: 7; Lieven 2010: 174–5; cf. Niebuhr 1952). As power corrupts, the danger of misused American power is serious (cf. Horwitz 2016: 121–2). Remarkably, Niebuhr added: ‘The economic interdependence of the world places us under the obligation, and gives us the possibility, of enlarging the human community so that the principle of order and justice will govern the international as well as the national community’ (1943: 295). Not only ‘the incitement of hope’ but also ‘the lash of fear’ trigger this ‘new and compelling task’ of overcoming anarchy and organising balanced power-based leadership towards a better future for the globe (Niebuhr 1943: 295). As Robin Lovin observes, ‘Niebuhr . . . recognized the historical contingency of the [existing] system itself [as God’s order can never be identified with any specific form of social organization]’ (2005: 468). Considering his strong emphasis on the role of sin in all human endeavours, one should not think, however, that Niebuhr (1943: 295–6) was idealistic about creating new, more just ways of organising global politics.

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War and Peace In line with his realism as reconstructed hitherto, Niebuhr’s approach to war and peace was more practical than theoretical, concerned with political responsibility rather than philosophical–ethical rigour. Niebuhr felt that we should not be unduly optimistic about man’s rational faculties, which cannot really explain why we actually lack a permanently peaceful world. In Niebuhr’s view, man’s original sin is the basic cause of war (Waltz 1959: 20–41). Thus, the sin-rooted egoism of nations in an international environment without democratic government breeds war, especially when no balance of power exists. For Niebuhr, the question then became how to deal with the injustice of war, so that more peace, a goal of great importance, could occur. Any moral answer, he believed, should resist ‘the . . . error of the moral relativists who deny every validity of general norms’; war, after all, concerns ‘the very life and death of civilizations and cultures’ (Niebuhr 1941: 301). However, he did not seek a complete theory that included final principles of justice. All historical norms will be too corrupt to be definitive, albeit equality, liberty and order are useful regulative principles (Niebuhr 1943: 256–66; Niebuhr 1941: 301). And since reason itself may be tainted by sin, reliance on moral principles can provide only a proximate guide to action (Amstutz 2007: 25). Nevertheless, Niebuhr, while pragmatic, was no pragmatist: he appreciated pragmatists’ understanding of ‘the irrelevance of fixed and detailed norms’ but criticised them for not understanding ‘that love must take the place as the final norm for these inadequate norms’ (1954: 138). Pacifist ethics could not offer an adequate answer for Niebuhr, as he came to believe that the politically active, responsible Christian cannot always exclude the use of violence in a sinful world (Niebuhr 1932; Fox 1985: 137). Niebuhr acknowledged the enduring relevance of Jesus’s own ethics of non-violence: resorting to violence inevitably burdens us with guilt. Nevertheless, he maintained that pacifism was inapplicable to real political situations. After all, Jesus’s non-resistance failed historically by ending on the Cross. Pacifism is utopianist for assuming that men are as perfect as God intended them to be; but, imbued with sin, they cannot be so regarded in reality. Pacifism, then, cannot offer moral guidance to leaders who must protect the lives of an entire group of citizens and preserve the (relative) good (Merkley 1975: 121–2; Craig 2003: 40–1; cf. Obama 2009). Indeed, those who advocate political non-violence at all times ‘are vulnerable to giving sanctuary to evil’ (Carlson 2010: 193). Niebuhr found just war theory problematic too because its reliance on rational reflection and systematic–ethical standards collides with a world dominated by power and collective egoism (Veldhuis 1975: 109–25). Niebuhr appreciated Catholic just war theory for not leaving ‘the Christian without any standards by which he might judge the relative justice of his nation’s cause’; surely ‘[n]ot all wars are equally just and not all contestants are equally right. Distinctions must be made’ (1941: 300). But it is false to assume the possibility of ‘obvious distinctions between “justice” and “injustice”, between “defence” and “aggression”’ (Niebuhr 1941: 300, emphasis mine). Indeed, ‘passions and interests’ affect our judgements when making distinctions, ‘so that even the most obvious case of aggression can be made to appear a necessity of defence’; and even a war judged ‘wholly defensive’ from an impartial perspective ‘cannot be waged with completely good conscience’ due to memories of earlier aggression by current defenders (Niebuhr 1941: 300). Niebuhr,

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then, acknowledged just war theory’s contribution to making relative distinctions in politics, yet maintained that it put ‘[u]ndue confidence in human reason’ (1941: 298) and ignored the depth of human evil. His scepticism concerned the just war ‘checklist’, particularly its notions of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention and just wartime conduct (Patterson 2015: 35–7; Carlson 2010: 188). What Niebuhr himself proposed was an ‘ethos’ (Cherniss 2016) of ‘ethical realism’ that, as John Carlson puts it, aims to enlighten ‘the coterminous yet sometimes conflicting claims of justice and order and how their relationship might guide and inform the use of military force. . . . [It] appreciates how military force highlights connections (or exacerbates tensions) between justice and order’ (2010: 187). Also in war and peace, Niebuhr insisted on treating justice as provisional, partial, historical, contingent and secondary to the standard of love (Carlson 2010: 188–90). Niebuhr’s ethical realism, then, embodied his pragmatically rather than dogmatically Christian outlook. As Mark Amstutz (2007: 26) specifies, typical of Niebuhr’s political and war ethics are the priority of power, the moral limits of political action, the need for public humility, and the call for responsible (albeit imperfect) action. Finally, from his Christian angle, Niebuhr (1952) selected the concept of ‘irony’ to interpret postwar US foreign policy as a contribution to peace and justice. Irony occurs when virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue . . . strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation . . . security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it . . . wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits. (Niebuhr 1952: viii) An ironic situation differs from a ‘pathetic’ one in that ‘the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it’; it differs from ‘tragedy’ in that ‘the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution’ (Niebuhr 1952: viii). ‘Our age’, Niebuhr subsequently argued, is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history. Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of [international] responsibility . . . only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb. (Niebuhr 1952: 2) This irony is amplified by an influential idealism, with its extremes of power-renouncing non-interventionism and power-celebrating imperialism, which could only result in still less security. Proper dissolution of this situation requires that America realises its hidden vanities and pretensions, and shows sincere remorse (Niebuhr 1952: viii).

Niebuhr’s Realism in the Twenty-First Century Were he alive, Niebuhr would presumably have felt his Christian realism to be as relevant to twenty-first-century developments as to earlier ones. His realism entailed ‘[paying] attention to what was really happening’ (Lovin 2005: 470; cf. Bacevich 2008: 7; Veldhuis 1975: 4–5). Niebuhr himself encountered two World Wars and the subsequent bipolar

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nuclear stability; Niebuhrians today have reason to reflect on security-relevant realities such as aggression, military intervention, climate change and energy. Their deliberations will obviously be moral, yet avoid preoccupation with theoretically precise but practically inert principles as in modern, post-Rawlsian political liberalism (cf. Cherniss 2016). Rather, Niebuhrians will adopt a consistently sin-based, anti-utopianist viewpoint that highlights a realistic awareness of the predominance of collective self-interest and power, displays irony–sensibility and stresses the need for humbly responsible action. Beyond this basic attitude, they will tolerate a diversity of non-cynical and non-moralistic opinions about concrete measures. Policy consensus among Niebuhrians cannot always be guaranteed (cf. Elshtain 2010: 55). Thus, Niebuhrian realism will maintain maxims such as ‘do not expect too much’ (Waltz 1959: 33), ‘do not aim for too much’, ‘scrutinise your motives’ and ‘allow reasonable plurality’. The distinct relevance of a Niebuhrian approach to war and peace is suggested by the 2003 Iraq War debate. First, Niebuhrian realism would analyse this war differently from just war theory. As Carlson argues, the Iraq War raised doubts about assuming obvious distinctions: between the justice of overthrowing a brutal tyranny and the injustice of sectarian violence that followed, or between the aggression Saddam’s Iraq made against other countries and the ‘preemptive self-defense’ of the US, which . . . was perceived widely as aggression. (Carlson 2010: 196) Second, a Niebuhrian assessment of the Bush administration’s case for war would differ from that of those critics whose arguments were intolerantly ‘steeped in a form of moralist perfectionism’ (Carlson 2010: 198). Third, Niebuhrian realism would disagree with the rationalist, amoral positions of neorealists such as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Kenneth Waltz, who rejected the war for not being in the American national interest. A Niebuhrian might have supported the war if democratic civilisation were at stake or international stability endangered. Nevertheless, she would have found insufficient reason to believe that such was actually the case – also because of the administration’s false claims, overstated non-political moral causes, and lack of patience and modesty (cf. Carlson 2010: 198). Thus, although Niebuhrian realism rejects ‘demonization of the Bush Administration’ (Elshtain 2010: 55), it would criticise the war as overambitious and blinded by moralism: a utopianist misuse of hegemonic power. Niebuhr’s thought may also illuminate our understanding of humanitarian intervention as an issue of broad security interest. In his, often dubbed ‘Niebuhrian’, 2009 Nobel Prize speech, President Obama declared: ‘I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later’ (2009). Yet we may doubt whether such an endorsement of humanitarian intervention is consistent with Niebuhrian anti-utopianism, which foresees unintended, undesirable consequences of even well-meant interventions in foreign societies. Indeed, Obama’s plea was more typical of the just war theory he also defended than of Niebuhrian ethical realism. From a Niebuhrian perspective, even when humanitarian interventions have just causes, they will have immodest aims (even tending to pursue regime change rather than protection of civilians); encourage the violent, sinful action of rebels or terrorists; and be susceptible to self-sin, with cases selected on the

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basis of self-interest as well as humanitarian necessity. Thus, it seems unlikely that, for example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) 2011 Libya intervention could stand up to Niebuhrian scrutiny (against Brooks 2011). Since Niebuhr’s realism, through its defence of humility and modesty, intended to address ‘materialism’ besides ‘imperialism’ (Niebuhr 1952: 7, 112–15, 120), it is also relevant to the ‘current’, related realities of climate change and energy insecurity. Niebuhr could never have heard of ‘climate change’, which became known during the 1980s. Today, we know with virtual certainty that it is caused primarily by carbon dioxide emissions resulting from burning fossil fuels, with the USA as the leading polluter historically (Kamminga 2011). Still, Niebuhr showed critical awareness about the human inclination to exploit nature beyond the requirements of subsistence and the fulfilment of ‘human needs’ towards the satisfaction of ‘human wants’ (1932: 1). He complained about America’s ever-growing economy, which stimulated Americans to consume as much as they might desire. He criticised ‘a culture which makes “living standards” the final norm of the good life’ (Niebuhr 1952: 57). And he disliked the American ‘culture soft and vulgar, equating joy with happiness and happiness with comfort’ (quoted in Bacevich 2008: 9). This, Niebuhr felt, could not continue forever: there are limits to be humbly accepted (1952: 43–64). As Anatol Lieven, who also notes the climate relevance of Niebuhr’s thought, writes, Niebuhr ‘was austerely hostile to the American – or modern – idea that wealth and material development equates with spiritual merit’ (2010: 174). Whereas liberal political theory has reacted to the climate issue by elaborating theories of ‘climate (in)justice’, a more practical, Niebuhrian response could invoke concepts such as sin, responsibility, humility, modesty and irony (cf. Kamminga 2011). Niebuhr’s thought helps to diagnose climate change – a huge threat to American, as well as global, security – by regarding it as a quintessential example of irony, if not sin. Climate change is rooted in a well-intentioned American inventive effort to exploit fossil fuels for American and global welfare achievement. However, this effort, with its hope and ideals, has also resulted in bad national and global consequences for nature and humanity. Crucially, it has done so in a way that should not be regarded as pathetic or tragic but as within the limits of responsibility related to a rather blind pride about the American way of life. Indeed, climate change, embedded in an American (and Western) materialism criticised by Niebuhr, might symbolise the ultimate ‘irony of American history’, in which China and other developing countries have come to figure as enormous polluters due to a global spread of American-like oil dependence and consumerism. Concerning overcoming the American (and Western) blindness and dissolving the irony involved, Obama’s acknowledgement of the need for action, the historical responsibility of the developed countries to take the lead, and the unsustainability of the American way of fossil energy use was arguably more rhetorical than practical overall. Interestingly, former President Carter may serve as a Niebuhrian example for his attitude of moral renewal and critical self-awareness during the 1979 energy crisis, as Andrew Bacevich (2008: 15–66) has suggested. Jeopardising his 1980 re-election, Carter claimed that the risky American dependence on energy resulted from a deeper problem: its idea of freedom as grounded in the infinite quest for more while exalting narrow self-interest. For Carter as Niebuhr enthusiast, true freedom meant living according to permanent, non-materialist, values. Treating dependence on energy and

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foreign oil as test-case, he called upon Americans to conserve: avoid unnecessary trips (and aircraft use), use carpools or public transport whenever possible, park your car one extra day per week, obey the speed limit and lower your thermostat. ‘Sacrifices’ like these would help to purify the environmental ‘sinner’. Thus, from a Niebuhrian perspective, Carter-like moral calls may make people see themselves in full light. Such appeals cannot guarantee success but do address the ‘relative morality of individuals’ and stay realistically within the maxims formulated earlier. While a Niebuhrian ‘obligation’ and ‘possibility’ of transnational climate action also exist, it is easy to be naive about what such action could accomplish. Over two decades of frustrating attempts by ‘egoistic’ states have produced an Obama-supported 2015 Paris Agreement that, albeit hailed as ‘historic’, features non-binding commitments and lack of enforcement mechanisms, and faces current US President Donald Trump’s resistance. Internationally, ‘hope’ and ‘fear’, stressed by Niebuhr, remain our drives for the ‘compelling task’ of fighting climate change.

Note 1. My streamlined–systematic reconstruction of Niebuhr’s thought omits historical developments and intricacies. For more historical approaches, see Craig (2003); Fox (1985); Erwin (2013).

Bibliography Amstutz, M. R. (2007), ‘The Bush Doctrine: A Niebuhrian assessment’, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 25–33. Bacevich, A. (2008), The Limits of Power, New York: Metropolitan. Brooks, D. (2007), ‘Obama, gospel and verse’, The New York Times, 26 April, available at (last accessed 15 September 2016). Brooks, D. (2011), ‘The defection track’, The New York Times, 31 March, available at (last accessed 15 September 2016). Carlson, J. D. (2010), ‘Reinhold Niebuhr and the use of force’, in R. Harries and S. Platten (eds), Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 183–201. Cherniss, J. L. (2016), ‘A tempered liberalism: Political ethics and ethos in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought’, The Review of Politics, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 59–90. Coll, A. R. (1999), ‘Normative prudence as a tradition of statecraft’, in J. H. Rosenthal (ed.), Ethics and International Affairs, Washington: Georgetown University Press, pp. 75–100. Craig, C. (2003), Glimmer of a New Leviathan, New York: Columbia University Press. Crouter, R. (2010), Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith, New York: Oxford University Press. Elshtain, J. B. (2010), ‘Niebuhr’s “nature of man” and Christian realism’, in R. Harries and S. Platten (eds), Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 42–57. Erwin, S. R. (2013), The Theological Vision of Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘The Irony of American History’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fox, R. W. (1985), Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, New York: Pantheon. Gilkey, L. (2001), On Niebuhr: A Theological Study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Horwitz, R. B. (2016), ‘The revival of Reinhold Niebuhr: A foreign policy fable’, Public Culture, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 113–38. Kamminga, M. R. (2011), ‘Standing in the shadows of Niebuhr: U.S. President Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism’, Philica.com, article 243. Kamminga, M. R. (2012), ‘Structure and sin: The Niebuhrian roots of Waltz’s neorealist theory of international politics’, Philica.com, article 335. Kennan, G. F. (1951), American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lieven, A. (2010), ‘Realism and progress: Niebuhr’s thought and contemporary challenges’, in R. Harries and S. Platten (eds), Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 169–82. Lovin, R. W. (2005), ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Impact and implications’, Political Theology, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 459–71. Merkley, P. (1975), Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Account, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Morgenthau, H. J. (1973) [1948], Politics among Nations, New York: Knopf. Niebuhr, R. (1932), Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York: Scribner’s. Niebuhr, R. (1940), Christianity and Power Politics, New York: Scribner’s. Niebuhr, R. (1941, 1943), The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, 2 vols, London: Nisbet. Niebuhr, R. (1944), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense, New York: Scribner’s. Niebuhr, R. (1948) [1935], An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, London: SCM Press. Niebuhr, R. (1952), The Irony of American History, New York: Scribner’s. Niebuhr, R. (1954), Christian Realism and Political Problems, London: Faber & Faber. Niebuhr, R. (1959), The Structure of Nations and Empires, New York: Scribner’s. Niebuhr, R. (1965), Man’s Nature and his Communities, New York: Scribner’s. Obama, B. (2009), ‘Remarks by the President at the acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize’, available at (last accessed 15 September 2016). Patterson, E. (2015), ‘The enduring value of Christian realism’, Philosophia Reformata, vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 27–39. Rice, D. F. (2013), Reinhold Niebuhr and his Circle of Influence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, K. W. (1955), ‘Beyond national interest: A critical evaluation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theory of international politics’, The Review of Politics, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 167–88. Veldhuis, R. (1975), Realism versus Utopianism?, Assen: Van Gorcum. Waltz, K. N. (1959), Man, the State and War, New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1986), ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A response to my critics’, in R. O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 322–45.

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21 E. H. Carr A dialectics of utopia and reality Konstantinos Kostagiannis

Chapter Overview

E

. H. Carr is often considered as one of the founding fathers of modern realism. Carr’s brand of realism, unlike that of other classical realists, is not based on specific anthropological assumptions. As such, the key foundation of Carr’s realism does not lie with pre-determined conceptions of human nature or societal structures. It is rather his dialectics of power and morality that form the basis for a theory of international relations that is both flexible and progressive. This dialectical scheme also lay at the heart of Carr’s efforts to identify paths through which peaceful change could be achieved. Carr placed great emphasis on the balance between power and morality as the foundation of any stable international order. At the same time, he emphasised the need for a compromise between the interests of the ‘haves’ and those of the ‘have nots’. Carr often got his prescriptions wrong. At the same time, however, his dialectical scheme offered a way to engage with problems of modern international politics that was distinctively forward-looking. It is this progressive element of his theory of international relations that underpins the continued relevance of Carr’s approach to international relations into the twenty-first century. *

*

*

Introduction By the time E. H. Carr was appointed to the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth in 1936, he was no stranger to international politics, since he had already been working for the Foreign Office for two decades (Porter 2000: 36). It was from this newly assumed position that he launched his broadside against utopianism, starting with his inaugural lecture (Carr 1936) and culminating in the writing of his most influential work on international politics, The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The impact of the book was such, according to Booth, that to be labelled ‘utopian’ thereafter came to amount to a ‘professional kiss of death’ (Booth 1991: 531). For a long period, thus, Carr was best known for his decisive contribution in winning the ‘first great debate’ for realism. This grand narrative, however, has been recently challenged by revisionist accounts which exposed it as a rather simplistic representation of the debates that occurred during the interwar period. Such accounts have established that there was no such a thing as a

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sustained exchange between clearly defined ‘realist’ and ‘utopian/idealist’ schools in the 1930s and early 1940s which was decisively won by the former (Wilson 1998; Ashworth 2002). This challenge of traditional interpretations of Carr’s impact on the discipline, however, did not diminish interest in his work. As Cox notes in his preface to the latest edition of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, there has been sustained interest in Carr for the past few years (Cox 2016: ix–xxi). The fact that Carr came to occupy such a central place in the realist canon becomes even more noteworthy if one considers that his interest in international relations as a field of enquiry was not sustained for much longer than a decade. After 1945 Carr was already shifting his attention to the history of the Soviet Union as well as to ‘the nature of history and the relation of the past to the present’ (Carr 2000: xx–xxi). In the years that followed, Carr became increasingly sceptical of whether international relations even qualified as a separate discipline. Of his role in ‘starting this business’, he would confess in a letter to Stanley Hoffmann, he did not know whether he was ‘particularly proud’ (Haslam 1999: 251–3). Cox is thus correct to observe that Carr, ‘having made his mark, took no further direct part in the debate he had ignited’ (Cox 2000: 2). This is not to suggest that his mode of thought changed significantly. His work as a historian of the Soviet Union was no less attentive to the realities of power than his previous engagement with international politics (Duke 1993; Smith 2017a, 2017b). Indeed, several critics complained about what they saw as an endeavour in historiography which failed to condemn the moral shortcomings of the Soviet system, and which sided too readily with the ‘big battalions’ (Haslam 1999: 201–4). The present chapter explores Carr’s theory of international politics, its foundations and its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. In the first part, I make some preliminary remarks about Carr’s approach and identify key characteristics that underpin his understanding of international relations. Those characteristics are central to his theoretical dialectics of power and morality, the identification of morality as the weaker part of the dialectics, and the fact that Carr’s realism represented a blend of power and morality that was geared towards achieving progressive change. Based on this dialectical background I then proceed to discuss Carr’s views about human beings and political societies. The following section discusses Carr’s efforts to address the question of peace, initially through moderate adjustment and then through the radical transformation of the international system. Finally, I discuss the continuing relevance of Carr’s realism in the twenty-first century.

The Dialectical Foundations of Carr’s Theory of International Relations The analysis that follows in this chapter is based on some important preliminary observations about Carr’s approach. The first observation is that Carr’s theory is founded upon a dialectical scheme which he employed consistently. The argument in The Twenty Years’ Crisis unfolds in such a way that politics emerges as the meeting point of the irreconcilable forces of utopia and reality, or morality and power. Carr uses realism to dismantle the utopian edifice but then turns his attention to exposing the sterility of realism itself. For Carr, then, political life is inseparable from the dialectics of utopia and reality, and sound political thought must strive to attain an uneasy

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compromise between the two (Carr 2001: 84–96). This dialectical element of Carr’s thought is often overlooked by subsequent authors, usually realists themselves, who tend to identify him as an unqualified realist (Booth 1991: 531; Dunne 2000: 225–8) but has hardly gone unnoticed. Some of the most perceptive early commentators of Carr paid ample attention to his dialectics, whether they approached his work critically (Morgenthau 1948; Johnston 1967; Bull 1969) or under a more favourable light (Evans 1975). Recent scholarship has also displayed a keen interest in Carr’s dialectics (Howe 1994; Jones 1998; Dunne 2000; Molloy 2003, 2006). The dialectical scheme that Carr employed to approach international politics has two main characteristics. First, it is a rather eclectic construct which borrowed from, but operated differently to, the progressive Hegelian or Marxian dialectics. In Carr’s dialectics, synthesis is to be found in the balance between realism and utopianism, and such a balance is always going to be precarious. The relationship between the two opposing poles is therefore in constant flux, making his dialectical scheme a nonteleological one (Molloy 2006: 56–7; Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 231). Second, it must be noted that the relationship between the two dialectical opposites of power and morality is not an equal one. Power, for Carr, is inseparable from politics. Whilst it would be unsatisfactory, he claimed, to try to define politics ‘exclusively in terms of power, it is safe to say that power is always an essential element of politics’ (Carr 2001: 97). Morality, the other pole of his dialectics, also has an important role to play in politics and Carr is dismissive of the crude realism which tends to disregard this role. To ignore the role of morality, he claimed, is as dangerous as ignoring power (Carr 2001: 91–6, 135–55). And yet, morality emerges as the weakest part of Carr’s dialectics as it remains conditioned by power. ‘Any international moral order’, he maintained, ‘must rest on some hegemony of power’ (Carr 2001: 151). Morality, thus, is inseparable from politics and moderates power but remains, ultimately, the weak part of the equation (Rich 2000: 212; Molloy 2006: 57; Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 231; Molloy 2014: 459–63). What follows from this brief exposition of his dialectical scheme is that Carr, in so far as his own usage of the term ‘realism’ is concerned, was not a realist. Consistent realism is, as Carr made sure to state repeatedly, as certain to fail as unqualified utopianism. The weapons of realism are at a stage necessary to dismantle the utopian edifice and reveal its foundations, but realism’s sterility leads to a dead-end since it precludes purposeful political action (Carr 2001: 10, 12–21, 84–96). Sound political thought is to be found in the meeting point of reality and utopia. As soon, then, as a utopian construct lies in ruins, a new utopia needs to be built in its place: a utopia which will also eventually collapse through the same tools of realism (Carr 2001: 87). Carr thus introduces a second type of realism, one that is diluted with a healthy dose of utopianism, which he sees in a much more positive light (Jones 1998: 53–4; Molloy 2013: 261–3). It is in the company of great realists of the past or ‘those realists with an ideal’ (Jones 1998: 54), like Machiavelli and Marx, that Carr seeks to place his own realism. His, consequently, unlike the undiluted realism he castigated in his Twenty Years’ Crisis, can rather more fittingly be described as a ‘utopian realism’ (Howe 1994). This blend of utopianism and realism, with an eye always fixed to the future, is what makes Carr’s realism a distinctively progressive theory of international politics. The belief in progress is palpable in Carr’s writings that delved into the nature of history (Carr 1962, 1987). Critics have claimed that Carr’s confident belief in progress

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represented an effort to escape from the relativistic implications of the realist side of his theory (Johnston 1967; Jenkins 2000: 312). ‘Having discovered his God in history,’ Johnston claimed, ‘he must now show that God to be benevolent . . . he must show history to be progressive’ (Johnston 1967: 879). Regardless of his motivations for doing so, Carr indeed never renounced the optimism with which he concluded What is History? (Carr 2000: xxi). Whilst considering the situation of Western societies in 1980 to be one of ‘decline and decay’, he refused to resign himself to pessimism. The belief that ‘new forces and movements, whose shape we cannot yet guess’ and which ‘are germinating beneath the surface’, he admitted to be his own ‘unverifiable Utopia’ (Carr 2000: xxi). This notion of progress is open-ended and non-teleological, defined as movement ‘towards purposes which are felt to be worthy’ (Carr 1962: 117). Carr’s dialectics of power and morality, and the emphasis on the purposeful character of political thought, are geared towards achieving, always precariously and tentatively, such progress. Carr was not alone in employing a realism that embraced an agenda of progressive reform both domestically and internationally. As Scheuerman has demonstrated, he can be included in a broader category of intellectuals who were left-leaning and influenced by German political thought and who can be collectively described as ‘progressive realists’ (Scheuerman 2011: 1–13).

Human Beings and Political Society Carr’s views about the nature of human beings and societies are closely interlinked with this dialectical framework and as such display remarkable flexibility. Classical realism is usually associated with assumptions about the rooting of a lust for power in human nature. Starting, however, with Herz’s formulation of the security dilemma as a sociological rather than anthropological condition, the focus of realists shifted away from human nature. The transition to structural realism, with its emphasis on international anarchy, led to what Schuett aptly describes as the ‘death of human nature’ in contemporary realism (Schuett 2010: 23–6). Given this apparently clear-cut transition, it would be expected that Carr, as one of the first twentieth-century realists, could fit comfortably in the same camp as Morgenthau or Niebuhr. Carr’s case, however, presents some difficulties that defy easy classification. The problem with Carr is that he never offered an extensive exposition of his assumptions about human nature in the same way that other classical realists did. He did not seem particularly interested in approaching human nature as an analytical concept (Johnson 2013: 233). Consequently, such assumptions must be inferred from the few traces that are present in various parts of his work. It is no surprise, then, that Carr’s brand of realism is sometimes considered to be devoid of any assumptions about human nature (Schuett 2010: 35). Jones for example, claims that Carr, owing to his similarities with Mannheim and his sociology of knowledge, ought to be ‘sharply distinguished’ from other classical realists and their emphasis on the continuity of the human condition (Jones 1997: 240). As I will show subsequently, this claim is, in the main, correct but needs to be qualified somewhat. Carr employs a conception of human nature, albeit one that is more flexible than that of other classical realists. Probably the most systematic discussion of Carr’s views on human nature is to be found in the few pages of The Twenty Years’ Crisis that are dedicated to the nature of politics. There, he identifies self-assertion and altruism as the two ‘conflicting aspects

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of human nature’ that are the essential building blocks of ‘every political society’ (Carr 2001: 92). Those two aspects of human nature are clearly presented in a manner consistent with the broader scheme of dialectics between power and morality that Carr employed (Molloy 2006: 57; Chong 2007: 620–1; Schuett 2010: 38) and are repeated in his later New Society (Carr 1962). It would be fallacious, Carr maintained, to try to separate politics from either self-assertion or altruism. As such, any effort to understand politics as the exclusive domain of power is as misguided as any effort to understand it as entirely divorced from it. The abstraction of homo politicus as someone ‘who pursues nothing but power’ is therefore rather misleading for Carr (Carr 2001: 92). This intimate relation between the dialectics of power and morality, and his conception of human nature is discussed at length by Johnson in his attentive reading of this aspect of Carr’s work. It is in the realist part of the equation, Johnson argues, that the ‘deterministic, causal elements in politics’ are to be found (Johnson 2013: 235). Given that, for realism, all politics is always going to be power politics, and since Carr did not attribute the quest for power to either divine agency or anarchy, there must be ‘a relatively invariant human nature’ which is held responsible for this outcome (Johnson 2013: 236). Carr might be employing a notion of human nature in his dialectics, but such a notion is not one that leads necessarily to pessimistic conclusions. He certainly was not persuaded by approaches which tended to exaggerate the evil facets of human nature. ‘It has become fashionable among some writers’, he complained, ‘to dwell with almost sadistic pleasure on the fact of original sin,’ before going on to insist that this was only a partial truth which neglected the capacity of human beings for great achievements (Carr 1962: 111). He furthermore allowed for a conception of human nature that is flexible. It ought to be understood, he claimed, as ‘a historical phenomenon’ which varies in time and space and is shaped in different fashion by different social conditions (Carr 1987: 32–3). To summarise, Carr offers an account of human nature which, whilst encapsulating the ‘bare minimum of empirical observation about how societies operate diachronically’, is unfixed and allows for considerable flexibility (Kostagiannis 2013: 833). Carr’s understanding of the nature of human societies is similarly characterised by considerable flexibility and follows closely his conception of human nature. ‘Man’, he proclaimed following Aristotle, ‘has always lived in groups’ (Carr 2001: 91). For Carr, it is meaningless to study the individual as an abstraction in clear separation from society, as such an individual never existed. From the moment of birth, ‘the world gets to work on us and transforms us from merely biological into social units’ (Carr 1987: 31). As mentioned already, all political societies are a blend of the two essential traits of human social behaviour namely self-assertion and altruism. What distinguishes political societies from other types is that participation in them is not voluntary and as such coercion is exercised regularly (Carr 2001: 91–2). But apart from that general observation, little else is fixed in Carr’s conception of political society. For example, both the state and the nation are, for Carr, historically contingent forms of political society (Carr 2001: 91; Carr 1945: 39). One thing that seemed to remain constant for Carr, however, at least for the foreseeable future, was the fragmentation of the world into a multitude of such societies or ‘group units’. He cautioned, for example, that ‘there is some evidence’ that there are some limits to the size political units can reach before they trigger ‘disintegrating tendencies’ (Carr 2001: 212). Even when

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contemplating ways to transcend the nation-state, Carr thought that regional units were a more realistic alternative to the world-state in a world that ‘gravitates towards several competing centres of power’ (Carr 1945: 45).

‘Conditions of Peace’: From Appeasement to a Functional Blueprint for European Integration Carr’s efforts to address the question of peace also grew naturally out of the dialectical scheme he employed. The common denominator of his advocacy of appeasement in the 1930s and his proposals for a radical transformation of the international system through functionalism in the 1940s was his attempt to identify the workable balance between power and morality in any given situation. Throughout the 1930s, Carr focused on prescribing policies that would lead to what he considered as the necessary revision of the punitive Treaty of Versailles. As a young diplomat participating in the British delegation to the peace conference, Carr was ‘outraged by French intransigence and by unfairness to the Germans’, as he later recalled (Carr 2000: xvi). He would later recall this initial indignation with the terms of the treaty, which was by no means peculiar to Carr, when encountering the increasingly assertive Germany of the 1930s (Carr 2000: xix). Even before leaving the Foreign Office for Aberystwyth, then, Carr was quite vocal about accommodating Germany. Carr criticised the postwar settlement whilst writing under a pseudonym in January 1933, and his resolve to publicise his support of appeasement further might have contributed to his decision to resign from the Foreign Office (Haslam 1999: 58–60). It is in such a context that he set out to write The Twenty Years’ Crisis, a book which, at least to some of his commentators, was written not so much to contemplate the nature of international relations but rather to persuade his audience about his preferred policies (Jones 1998: 46–65). After exposing the inadequacy of both utopianism and consistent realism, Carr moved on to present his prescription for attaining a balance between the two in achieving peaceful change. Carr’s discussion is founded upon the belief that change in the international system occurs, regardless of the wishes of the satiated powers. Drawing a parallel with domestic politics, he claimed that trying to cling desperately to the status quo is bound to ‘end in war as surely as rigid conservatism will end in revolution’ (Carr 2001: 201). What is needed, he claimed, is a keen awareness on behalf of the ‘haves’ of the changing realities of power and an ensuing willingness to make concessions to the ‘have-nots’. This, the realist element of peaceful change, represents the almost mechanical adjustments to the changing equilibrium of power (Carr 2001: 192–9). This unavoidable consideration of power needs to be complemented by the element of morality. The latter is based on a ‘certain measure of common feeling as to what is just and reasonable in their mutual relations, a spirit of give and take’ that can form the basis of a minimum set of values shared by both sides (Carr 2001: 199–202). In terms of the debates of the 1930s, the policy implications vis-à-vis the revisionist power of the period par excellence, Germany, were quite straightforward. In a much-discussed passage that he controversially removed from the second edition of the book, Carr heralded the Munich agreement as a successful example of peaceful

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change (Cox 2001: lxxii–lxxxii). Carr’s advocacy of appeasement was consistent with his ethics of adjustment and based upon a ‘clinically detached analysis of power within the system’ (Molloy 2013: 267, 265–8). The problem with such a policy was, however, that its success was predicated on the assumption that Hitler was indeed appeaseable. This is not to suggest that those behind the policy were as naive as is often assumed. At the time of the Munich agreement, Chamberlain had to face not only the hostility of the dominions and of public opinion to another European war, but also the fact that the rearmament of France and Britain was expected to reach war readiness only in 1939 (Ashworth 2014: 184–97). Carr alluded to a similar logic when claiming, in a second book that he published in 1939, that British unpreparedness up to 1938 made appeasement the only practical option (Carr 1939: 176; Molloy 2013: 270). There was, none the less, certainly an element of underestimation in Carr’s thought regarding the magnitude of the threat posed by Hitler (Molloy 2014: 471). As he would later admit, Carr’s reflexes on the matter were rather blunted by his preoccupation with the horrors of the purges in the Soviet Union, which led him to neglect the situation in Germany (Carr 2001: xviii–xix).1 Appeasement failed to produce the peaceful change that Carr hoped for and the Second World War broke out. During the war Carr produced two further works on international relations: Conditions of Peace, which he had already begun in 1940, appeared in early 1942, and Nationalism and After in 1945 (Haslam 1999: 95–118; Carr 1942; Carr 1945). The publication of Conditions of Peace signalled a crucial transition in Carr’s ideas about achieving peace. Carr shifted his focus away from the previously advocated ethics of adjustment, designed to preserve the prewar order, towards the radical ethics of transformation once this order had collapsed (Molloy 2014: 472–8).2 The first task Carr set out to complete was to comprehend the nature of the – still ongoing – war. He insisted that the war should be understood not merely as a conflict between European nationstates, but also as part of a revolutionary process which stemmed from a crisis so serious that it reached the ‘deepest roots of our civilization’ (Carr 1942: 3–5). This crisis, which, for Carr, was essentially a moral crisis, was multi-faceted and was brought about by the bankruptcy of the moral edifice of the nineteenth century. Carr identified three main manifestations of this moral crisis: a crisis of liberal democracy, a crisis of self-determination, and finally a crisis of laissez-faire economics (Carr 1942: 14–101). The problem was not that those principles were wrong per se. In fact, they served the societies that had given rise to them relatively well. The problem rose from the failure to realise that societies had since moved on, and that those principles needed to be redefined to match the changed underlying realities better. The important issue, thus, for Carr was how to construct a new moral order or – as his brand of realism would have it – how to achieve a new compromise between power and morality (Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 233–5). Unsurprisingly, for someone who repeatedly emphasised the purposeful character of political thought, Carr’s attention then turned to offering ‘a vision of systemic transformation’, which would be ‘brought about through the operation of power, towards some newly defined moral end’ (Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 235). The new moral ends which Carr tried to identify were in large part focused on domestic politics (Molloy 2014: 477). The ‘new faith’, he proclaimed, should appeal to the ‘little man’, address the economic crisis and especially unemployment and inequality, and reverse the nineteenth-century tendency to prioritise rights over obligations to achieve

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social cohesion (Carr 1942: 117–22). At the international level, what Carr deemed essential was the readjustment of the hitherto held belief that self-determination was inseparable from nationalism, and as such could be reserved only for nations (Carr 1942: 38–47). For Carr, this conflation between self-determination and nationalism was the result of the universalisation of Western European experience and had negative implications when applied outside of this original context. The assumption that nations – like individuals – should enjoy natural rights such as freedom and equality was morally dubious, as it led to the violation of said rights for individuals, especially within several of the newly independent states in the wake of World War I (Carr 1945: 38–43). The problem with nationalism was further exacerbated due to what Carr saw as the decreasing capacity of the nation-state to address the needs of its population for economic welfare and security (Carr 1942: 53–60; Carr 1945: 37). Consequently, like other realists of the same period, Carr saw the nation-state as experiencing an acute moral crisis as well as political and economic decline, and sought to contemplate ways to transcend it (Scheuerman 2011: 4066). Carr’s blueprint for postwar reconstruction was one that focused on challenging the notion that the nation-state is somehow ‘the sole rightful sovereign repository of political power and the ultimate constituent unit of world organization’ (Carr 1945: 39). The needs of modern societies could be effectively addressed only by larger units of military and economic organisation. Those multinational units would, in such a project, coexist with nations, the latter surviving as ‘administrative and cultural units’ (Carr 1945: 59). This is not to imply that the newly established units would receive the same type of authorities and enjoy the same loyalties that used to define nation-states. This would merely lead to a replication of the problems of nationalism on a larger, and potentially even more destructive scale (Carr 1945: 53). The aim would rather be to create a set of authorities which would address different practical issues based on the principles of functional organisation (Carr 1945: 46–8). Based on such principles, Carr offered a detailed blueprint of postwar European reconstruction, which comprised a set of functional agencies under the supervision of an envisaged European Planning Authority (Carr 1942: 236–75).3 Carr’s ideas about functional integration as a way of transcending the nation-state bear a remarkable resemblance to David Mitrany’s functionalism and were probably influenced to some extent by the latter (Scheuerman 2011: 76–81; Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 238–9). At the same time, however, Carr’s functionalism had a strong territorial element, as he was more concerned with regional integration, which he considered more realistic (Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2013: 238–9).

Carr’s Contemporary Relevance In this final part, I discuss what insights for the twenty-first century we can possibly draw from Carr’s work, almost a century after his worldview started to form (Cox 2010: 525) and several decades since his last engagement with international politics. The question I seek to answer is essentially the same one that Jones posed in 1998: at the present juncture, which debates and ideas, he asked, are ‘of more than antiquarian interest’ (Jones 1998: 15)? Such a question is all the more important if one takes into account the fact that Carr ‘turned out to be such a poor prophet in his own day’ (Jones 1998: 18). Indeed, Carr was always ‘willing to diagnose’ and probably a bit ‘too eager

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to prescribe’ (Haslam 2000: 26). The result was that he often got his prescriptions as well as his predictions wrong. The policy of appeasement, which he advocated in the 1930s, was already bankrupt by the time The Twenty Years’ Crisis was in print. Liberalism and nationalism proved way more resilient than Carr had thought, and the Soviet Union, which he spent so much time studying, collapsed only a few years after his death (Cox 2010: 532). Carr’s continuing relevance, however, is not to be found in the policies he supported or his specific predictions. What still resonates with our world, as Jones aptly put it, are the questions that Carr asked, as well as his proposed method (Jones 1998: 21). The sociology of knowledge, which Carr employed as the realist extreme of his dialectics, can still be relied on to unmask the conditionality of purported absolutes. This is the first step in creating self-awareness with the satisfied powers who benefit more from any given international order. Any such order will always, for Carr, be founded upon some hegemony of power but must also involve some amount of ‘give and take’ to be rendered tolerable ‘to the other members of the world community’ (Carr 2001: 151–2). This tension between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, which was so prominent in Carr’s attempts to prescribe peaceful change through accommodation in the 1930s, retreated backstage for the duration of the Cold War. When Bull critically revisited Carr’s classic work in the late 1960s and tried to evaluate which of its aspects were of continuing relevance, he noted that this tension was still present but qualitatively different in the context of the Cold War. Unlike Europe during the interbellum, he claimed, the main conflict of the time was not one between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ but one between ‘haves’. The two superpowers, as the leading ‘haves’ in their respective camps, faced no potential combination of dissatisfied powers which could possibly challenge their supremacy (Bull 1969: 634–6). With the end of the Cold War and the advent of what some scholars described as the ‘unipolar moment’, it seemed, at least for a while, that the distance between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ would remain too big for the latter seriously to contemplate challenging the international order.4 The same claim, however, cannot be made with the same amount of certainty for the twenty-first century. There has been a vivid debate in the past few years about the potential decline of the USA and the rise of other powers, especially China, that might challenge the predominant position of the West in the distant or not-so-distant future (Cox 2012). My aim here is not to resolve this debate, but to examine what insights from Carr can be of potential usefulness if such a power shift materialises. For some prominent contemporary realists, the rise of China can lead only to security competition, as it will inevitably reach out for regional hegemony (Mearsheimer 2010). In such a scenario, Carr’s ideas about peaceful change and an accommodation between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ might provide fruitful ground for approaching the problem in a less fatalistic way. Any compromise will be uneasy and precarious but the effort to contemplate it is, I believe, preferable to the resigned anticipation of an unavoidable conflict. Such an anticipation might as well become a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus aggravate the situation, as Cox correctly cautioned (Cox 2012: 381). Another benefit of turning to Carr is his intriguing analysis of crisis and of potential ways out of it once the previous order can no longer be merely managed and collapses. Carr’s pragmatism allowed him to approach a crisis as a moment of opportunity for the exploration of hitherto unthinkable options in a progressive direction

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(Molloy 2014: 477). The wave of liberal triumphalism which followed the end of the Cold War has now receded, and we currently find ourselves amidst a crisis in the liberal world order which has some similarities to the one Carr experienced in the wake of the First World War (Cox 2010: 525). This is not of course to suggest that the crisis of liberalism today is as acute as that of the interbellum or that we should turn to Carr’s own prescriptions for solutions. We can, however, be inspired by his willingness to challenge certainties and to reveal their conditional character, and by his attempt to identify workable compromises between morality and utopia.

Conclusion Carr often got his predictions and his prescriptions wrong and his answers ‘might not be fashionable any longer’ (Cox 2010: 533). The point of engaging with his work is, however, not to identify ready-made solutions for contemporary issues. Carr never believed that the past can hold such solutions. What it can – and does – hold are ‘those critical insights’ which can illuminate the emergence of present conditions (Carr 1962: 18). Carr’s mode of thought and his way of dissecting problems and looking for the ideal balance between power and morality to solve them are, I believe, part of its enduring legacy rather than a weakness. The dialectics of power and morality he espoused offer the distinct possibility for an analysis of international politics that is progressively minded and forward-looking.

Notes 1. The intimate connection between realism and appeasement was already in place before Carr set out to write The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The two were so closely interlinked, in the eyes of British scholars and public alike, that in the first two decades after the war, identification with ‘realism’ was avoided, even by thinkers who would otherwise have matched the label (Hall 2012: 29–47). 2. The difference between his later works and The Twenty Years’ Crisis was such that it led Whittle Johnston to claim that Carr was, in fact, employing two distinct theories of international relations which he failed to reconcile (Johnston 1967). See also the excellent response to Johnston’s claim by Evans (1975). 3. This aspect of Carr’s thought is discussed more extensively in Kenealy and Kostagiannis (2013: 235–40). 4. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a comprehensive account of whether the USA is indeed enjoying a unipolar moment. The term was popularised in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War by Krauthammer (1990) and challenged by Layne soon thereafter (1993). Smith offers an overview of the first years of the debate (Smith 2002: 171–3).

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Jones, C. (1998), E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kenealy, D., and K. Kostagiannis (2013), ‘Realist visions of European Union: E H Carr and integration’, Millennium, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 221–46. Kostagiannis, K. (2013), ‘Mind the gap between nationalism and international relations: Power and the nation-state in E H Carr’s realism’, International Politics, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 830–45. Krauthammer, C. (1990), ‘The unipolar moment’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 23–33. Layne, C. (1993), ‘The unipolar illusion: Why new great powers will rise’, International Security, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 5–51. Mearsheimer, J. J. (2010), The gathering storm: China’s challenge to US power in Asia’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 381–96. Molloy, S. (2003), ‘Dialectics and transformation: Exploring the international theory of E H Carr’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 279–306. Molloy, S. (2006), The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Molloy, S. (2013), ‘Spinoza, Carr, and the ethics of The Twenty Years’ Crisis’, Review of International Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 251–71. Molloy, S. (2014), ‘Pragmatism, realism and the ethics of crisis and transformation in international relations’, International Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 454–89. Morgenthau, H. (1948), ‘The political science of E H Carr’, World Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 127–34. Porter, B. (2000), ‘E. H. Carr – The Aberystwyth years, 1936–47’, in M. Cox (ed.), E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 36–67. Rich, P. (2000), ‘E H Carr and the quest for moral revolution in international relations’, in M. Cox (ed.), E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 198–216. Scheuerman, W. E. (2011), The Realist Case for Global Reform, Cambridge: Polity Press. Schuett, R. (2010), ‘Classical realism, Freud and human nature in international relations’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 21–46. Smith, K. (2017a), ‘A reassessment of E H Carr and the realist tradition: Britain, German–Soviet Relations and neoclassical realism’, International Politics, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 89–103. Smith, K. (2017b), ‘The realism that did not speak its name: E. H. Carr’s diplomatic histories of The Twenty Years’ Crisis’, Review of International Studies (advance online publication), pp. 1–19, available at (last accessed 31 May 2018). Smith, S. (2002), ‘The end of the unipolar moment? September 11 and the future of world order’, International Relations, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 171–83. Wilson, P. (1998), ‘The myth of the “first great debate”’, Review of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 1–16.

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22 Leo Strauss Humanity and political realism Robert Howse

Chapter Overview

A

round the time of the Iraq War, a number of books and articles emerged attributing the foreign policy outlook of the George W. Bush Administration to neoconservatives inspired by the émigré German–Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss was thought to be the intellectual source for a foreign policy vision animated by a moralistic quest to impose US values on the rest of the world, if necessary by military force; Strauss, and his neocon disciples, such as William Kristol were seen as arch-enemies of constraints on US unilateralism through law or multilateral institutions. A different and contrary view of Strauss has emerged in the work of a range of scholars, some of whom can be placed on the ‘isolationist right’1; Strauss is seen as a realist rather than a moralist in foreign policy, and perhaps an adherent to political realism as such.2 *

*

*

Introduction Thomas West, a third-generation Straussian, has claimed, on the basis of a number of statements by Strauss about the attitude of classical political philosophy toward foreign policy, that Strauss’s foreign policy doctrine was: ‘leave other nations alone, except where one’s security is at risk’ (West 2012: 262). Applying this doctrine to the Iraq War, West has suggested that it would not have been justifiable in Strauss’s eyes. According to West, Strauss endorses the classical philosophers’ view (as Strauss understands it) that survival and independence are the only goals of foreign policy. Such a view is clearly compatible with the classic realism of, for example, Hans Morgenthau. Andras Lánczi claims that Strauss was a ‘political realist’, citing as evidence the fact that he wrote extensively on thinkers strongly associated with realism, including Xenophon, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Spinoza, his opposition to ideological politics, and his endorsement of ‘the conflictual character of man’s life’ (Lánczi 2015: 176–9). Eno Trimcev refers to Strauss’s ‘realist’ view of political regimes as characterised by the predominant powers in the regime rather than the formal law of the constitution. Trimcev suggests: [Strauss’s] concept of regime is a supremely realist one, rather than a legalistic ideal; it is the network of social forces and power relations holding a community together. It implies that legal institutions may not reflect the power dynamics in the community. (Trimcev 2017: 52)

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Jerry Muller sees the young Strauss as arguing that the Zionist movement should take a realist rather than moralist approach to politics: For Zionism to succeed as a political movement, . . . it needed to develop a sober, realistic view of politics. That meant avoiding multiple snares: an irrational faith in Orthodox Judaism, an unwarranted faith in liberal humanitarianism, and the unholy combination of the two that he saw as characteristic of ‘cultural Zionism’. And it meant eschewing the propensity of so many Jews to substitute moralistic judgment for realistic analysis of human motivation and behavior. (Muller 2010: 99) Finally, Peter Ahrensdorf, a fourth-generation Straussian, suggests that realism may express the theoretical truth about human conduct and international relations but that it does not take account fully of how powerful the illusion or hope for morality in international politics is among non-rational ordinary people; a hyper-realistic form of realism will give moral illusions and hopes their due in influencing actual policy outcomes, even if fully rational actors would operate strictly according to realist premises in a world where all the relevant actors are rational (Ahrensdorf 1997). While Ahrensdorf stops short of attributing this kind of ‘esoteric’ realism to Strauss himself (he states it instead in the name of Thucydides as read by Straussians), Ahrensdorf’s position does suggest a way of reconciling the apparent realist and idealist strands in Strauss’s treatment of politics and international relations. My own view of Strauss’s relation to realism is different from all these positions and has been elaborated in, especially, the chapters on Machiavelli and Thucydides in my 2014 book Leo Strauss Man of Peace (Howse 2014).

Man of Peace (But Not Pacifist) Strauss viewed it as desirable that, where possible, international relations be governed by morality and law, and oriented toward peace and the avoidance of conflict. At the same time, he saw conflict and the possibility of war as inherent in human nature, and eschewed the ideal that international law and institutions or a world state could ever simply overcome or subdue those aspects of human nature that lead to power struggles and even war (see, generally, Howse 2014). Strauss observed in his seminar on the great Dutch international jurist Hugo Grotius, ‘it is a great question . . . whether there is something deeper in man which leads to [war]’, something deeper such as ‘the element of danger . . . and sacrifice, and the kind of enthusiasm which men have more for this kind of thing than for others’ – in other words, as Strauss colourfully puts it, ‘the war against poverty does not arouse the kind of enthusiasm as a war against Japan does’ (Strauss 1964: lecture XIV, 22) Yet Strauss does not endorse this outlook as a normative stance, à la Carl Schmitt; indeed, in a clear swipe at Schmitt he speaks of the ‘delusions’ of ‘critics of modern democracy’ based on nostalgia for aristocratic wars that are merely imagined to have been noble and gentlemanly in their conduct. Writing during the Cold War, Strauss tended to emphasise that the margin of opportunity for morality and law to order international relations was very narrow, but, in the present context, that was because of the communists’ refusal to submit the means they used to achieve the project of a world communist society to any moral or legal constraints (Strauss 1978: 4–6). Earlier, in a lecture delivered in New York

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in the midst of World War Two, Strauss articulated the mission of Churchill and the Anglo-Saxon nations as the defence of human freedom, not the protection of national sovereignty: ‘The existence of civil liberties all over the world depends on Anglo-Saxon preponderance’ (Strauss 2007a: 518); ‘the cause which Churchill’s policy is meant to defend’ is that of a civilisation that would not exist without the tradition of political philosophy as founded by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (Strauss 2007a: 527). In the 1950s, Strauss presented the struggle against Soviet communism not only as a struggle for survival and independence against a powerful enemy but also as a moral struggle against a degraded and degrading ideology, a civilisational battle and not just a traditional great power contest for dominance (Strauss 1953: 1–3). Indeed, Strauss was willing to countenance an increased risk of nuclear war in order to stand up to Soviet communism for the sake of freedom and civilisation, even going so far as to state: ‘the American people as a strong, virile, and free people will prefer to perish rather than to surrender [to Soviet Communism]’.3 In his seminar on Hugo Grotius, Strauss is clearly open to humanitarian intervention, the use of force on grounds of moral and legal justice to respond to atrocities by foreign governments on their own territory (even though he expresses awareness that this justification for the use of force carries a high risk of abuse) (Strauss 1964: lecture IX, 16); here again we see that Strauss’s actual stance is at odds with the national-interest realism attributed to him by Thomas West.

Realism and Moralism At the same time, defining realism is a complex semantic and contextual exercise. As Legro and Moravcsik explain, contemporary versions of realism seem to allow for what classic realists most wanted to eschew: the idea that not just power relations or material resources but also ideas, ideologies, rhetoric, law and institutions all shape in various ways state interests, and therefore actual outcomes in international politics. Legro and Moravcsik suggest, the malleable realist rubric now encompasses nearly the entire universe of international relations theory (including current liberal, epistemic, and institutionalist theories) and excludes only a few intellectual scarecrows (such as outright irrationality, widespread self-abnegating altruism, slavish commitment to ideology, complete harmony of state interests or a world state). (Legro and Moravcsik 1999) One could view Strauss’s understanding of international relations as a kind of what Legro and Moravcsik call ‘minimal realism’, a position that gives a considerable weight to power political necessities and eschews utopian projects such as the world state, but nevertheless sees an important role for ideas and moral an