In realist theories of international relations, human nature is standardly classified as one of the three causes of war. In Kenneth Waltz’s famous tripartite distinction, human nature’s propensity to evil is catalogue... more abstractIn realist theories of international relations, human nature is standardly classified as one of the three causes of war. In Kenneth Waltz’s famous tripartite distinction, human nature’s propensity to evil is catalogued as a first-image cause of war. However, Waltz himself seems to quickly dismiss first-image explanations of war as scientifically unreliable due to human nature’s complexity and inscrutability. Customarily, human nature explanations of conflict are criticised for resting on metaphysical assumptions and apriori pessimism. This paper argues that standard realist conceptions about the inherent evilness of human nature or, equally, reductionist sociobiological accounts of its hard-wired conflict-proneness are impoverished secularised versions of Christian anthropological assumptions grounded on the doctrine of original sin. Itself a widely contested dogma, in its Augustinian formulation original sin was linked to a soteriological perspective, that is, a defence of its status as a corollary to the doctrine that all human beings are equally in need of salvation in Christ. However, its use was never entirely disconnected from purposes of theodicy and Christian apologetics striving to reconcile the coexistence of a benevolent and omnipotent God with the existence of evil and suffering in the world. It is this latter legacy -associated with the explanation of suffering and evil in the world but stripped of its eschatological content- that pervades secularist theorisations of human nature. Prominent part in this semantic transfiguration is played by a post-Augustinian understanding of human nature as the repository of passions, drives and vices that need to be tamed by an imposing human will representing the source of human personhood. As a result natural human emotions and passions such as pain and suffering or the human condition itself, finitude and mortality, were seen as evil or punishment resulting from sin. With the eclipse of the eschatological dimension, human nature was gradually reduced to its physical, naturalistic aspects, equated with aggressive drives and eventually autonomised as a causal explanation of conflict and human suffering. Initially conceived as a meditation on the paradox of evil and human responsibility, original sin ended up signifying man’s inherent wickedness. This paper argues that even though the doctrine’s ambiguity permitted its naturalisation, the paradox at its heart reveals the structure of hope within human experience. International Relations will only hold impoverished notions of the role of human nature in international politics should it go on neglecting the complexity of a doctrine that was far from offering a reductionist vision of the human condition.

International Relations, History of Ideas, Sociobiology, Augustine, Political Theology, and 4 more

International Relations, Ontology, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Ontology, and 3 more

Gnosticism, International Relations, Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and 3 more

This article situates H. Morgenthau’s thought in the context of post-foundationalist theorisations of the difference between politics and the political. In doing so, it shows how Morgenthau’s sophisticated realism ref... more abstractThis article situates H. Morgenthau’s thought in the context of post-foundationalist theorisations of the difference between politics and the political. In doing so, it shows how Morgenthau’s sophisticated realism refused to circumscribe the antagonistic dimension of politics and introduced the study of international politics as a struggle with negativity, temporality and contingency in the wake of the crisis of foundationalism in late modernity. Morgenthau’s tarrying with the negative is primarily revealed in his irresolvable tragic oscillation between Nietzschean scepticism and Kantian moralism. Nevertheless, due to its antinomic premises, Morgenthau’s tragic vision of politics can still be viewed as stopping a step short of its full-blown critical potential. It is not the purpose of this article, however, to award or withhold credentials of criticality but to recast Morgenthau’s theory of the political as an instructive, albeit inconclusive, attempt at a post-foundational political ontology. This may, eventually, serve a purpose far broader than restoring classical realism’s latent reflexivity; it may prompt an argument about the conditions and challenges involved in practising international theory as a constant critique of depoliticisation.

International Relations, Political Theory, Political Ontology, Hans Morgenthau, and Realism

This article revisits the early realist understanding of tragedy in international relations in order to highlight its debt to continental philosophical thought and tragic theology. Far from sharing a view of tragedy a... more abstractThis article revisits the early realist understanding of tragedy in international relations in order to highlight its debt to continental philosophical thought and tragic theology. Far from sharing a view of tragedy as objective externality, early realists engaged with the existential conditions that make up the paradoxical structure of experience: human beings’ constant albeit frustrated striving to make the world intelligible and ascribe meaning to their actions. The upshot of this article is that early classical realists, such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, entertained a view of tragedy as a necessary fiction, that is, a fabricated but real condition that is inextricably linked with the constitution of subjectivity and human agency. This paradoxical view of tragedy as an ‘enabling obstacle’ that contests the idea of tragic destiny as inescapable determinism finds its roots in the continental philosophical and theological background of their thought but is more consistently exhibited in Niebuhr’s theological anthropology.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Tragedy (Philosophy), Hans Morgenthau, Tragedy, and Agonistic and Tragic Modes of Political Theory

This article is principally concerned with the way some sophisticated critical approaches in International Relations (IR) tend to compromise their critical edge in their engagement with the self/other problematique. C... more abstractThis article is principally concerned with the way some sophisticated critical approaches in International Relations (IR) tend to compromise their critical edge in their engagement with the self/other problematique. Critical approaches that understand critique as total non-violence towards, or unreflective affirmation of, alterity risk falling back into precritical paths. That is, either a particularistic, assimilative universalism with pretensions of true universality or a radical incommensurability and the impossibility of communication with the other. This is what this article understands as the paradox of the politics of critique. Instead, what is more important than seeking a final overcoming or dismissal of the self/other opposition is to gain the insight that it is the perpetual striving to preserve the tension and ambivalence between self and other that rescues both critique's authority and function.(Online publication May 21 2010)

International Relations, Political Philosophy, International Relations Theory, Political Theory, Political Theology, and 4 more

Political Philosophy, Poststructuralism, Jean-Luc Nancy, International Ethics, Émmanuel Lévinas, and 5 more

Political Philosophy, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, History of Ideas, Political Theory, Early Modern History, and 1 more